Catmull is honest and human in acknowledging that failure hurts. Embracing failure is far easier to say than to actually put into practice! “To disentangle the good and bad parts of failure,” he says, “we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.” He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.

Even though nearly everyone engages in these negative behaviors at some time, I think it’s worth defining them to clarify the strategies they employ.

CRITICISM — Making disapproving judgments. Often this is a way to show that the other person’s pain is their fault, which relieves us of an obligation to help.

CONTEMPT — To despise or dishonor; to question someone’s honesty or integrity. This is usually used to deny the pain or undermine its validity. We don’t have to share what doesn’t exist.

DEFENSIVENESS — Putting up barriers to avoid a challenge or criticism; disagreeing over circumstances or facts. Like criticism, this is usually used to deny fault or personal responsibility and thus our obligation to help.

STONEWALLING — Delaying or blocking by refusing to answer questions or by giving evasive replies. In other words, when all else fails, we simply ignore what we don’t want to see or deal with.

Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness. A complex becomes pathological only when we think we have not got it

At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.