The central question of my latest book, Shh...it Happens: So What? Reflections on How to Live with Hardships in Life is: How do we go on when life refuses to grant us peace? Some pain lingers like an old debt; some wounds never fully heal. Perhaps wisdom lies not in overcoming, but in learning to carry what cannot be undone.

Pain Isn’t Meant to Teach Us Anything

I’m not sure how this idea could serve as a therapeutic tool. But through my work with Holocaust survivors, and others who have endured severe trauma, this perspective has gradually become something I deeply believe in.

Shh...it happens is often all we can say when life falls apart, and when we recognize that some things defy response. There is no clever comeback to death, no simple answer to betrayal, no quick fix for what breaks us. Shit happens—and not just once, but again and again, in forms both visible and hidden, personal and global, trivial and devastating. No one is immune. No life is spared from it.

Our culture doesn’t like that. It wants action and solutions. There’s a constant stream of advice: stay strong, be positive, find the silver lining. But what if we can’t? What if we’re not ready to move on, let go, or come to terms with it? What if all we can do is sit with it?

This is not a call for despair. It’s a call for honesty.

For decades, I’ve sat with people in pain—clients, friends, family, and myself. I’ve witnessed how quickly we rush to make sense of the senseless. We reach for explanations, spiritual frameworks, psychological theories, anything to tame the chaos. We want to believe that suffering has a purpose. That it fits into some larger arc of redemption.

But what if it doesn’t? What if some pain isn’t meant to teach us anything? What if the most human, most courageous thing we can do is to stay with the discomfort, without turning it into something else?

That’s the heart of what I’ve come to call a “so what?” philosophy. Not as resignation, and certainly not as indifference. It’s not a shrug—it’s an act of quiet resistance. A refusal to force meaning where there is none. A willingness to sit in the shadow of what has happened and say: This is real. I don’t understand it. But I’m still here.

Lessons from Experts in Survival

We are meaning-making creatures, but not everything in life offers us meaning. Some events simply are: A child dies. A diagnosis lands. A future dissolves. No explanation makes it right. There’s only the living with it.

And in that living, there’s something else—not healing, perhaps, but presence. A kind of dignity that doesn’t come from overcoming pain, but from carrying it honestly.

The “so what?” stance is not about dismissing what matters. It’s about letting go of the pressure to be wise, composed, or productive in the face of grief or absurdity. It’s about recognizing that we don’t have to justify our sadness or spin our suffering into virtue. We can just sit with it. Let it be part of our story without needing it to be the whole story—or the final word.

There is no clean arc to follow. No perfect lesson to extract. There are only fragments—of reflection, of feeling, of thought—offered here as a kind of companionship. No system. No stages. Just a shared recognition that life gets messy, and sometimes the best we can do is to pause, to breathe, and to say quietly: So what?

Because that’s where we begin again—not by solving the pain, but by making space for it.

While working at The Israeli Center for Mental Health and Social Support for Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation (AMCHA)—a treatment center for Holocaust survivors and their families—I was granted a unique opportunity to learn from the very experts of survival. These were individuals who had endured the unimaginable, who had lived through horrors that seemed to defy the capacity of the human spirit to endure. It was, in many ways, a privilege—a rare chance to ask the question I had long pondered: How did they do it? How did they manage to survive the unspeakable, to continue living in the face of such loss, such devastation? What I learned, however, was that survival did not come without its own unrelenting cost.

The survivors I encountered—each with their own story, and their own scars—made every effort to continue their lives without being constantly haunted by the atrocities of the past. And yet, the memories had a way of returning, uninvited and unavoidable. They surfaced with all their accompanying emotions—grief, anger, fear—relentless in their return, like waves crashing against the shores of their minds. These memories could not be erased; they lingered, embedded deeply, despite all efforts to forget them.

Most survivors, however, showed an unusual degree of psychic strength, overcoming the effects of their harrowing experiences, their losses, and their exile. Yet, there was a minority, a clinical minority, whose wounds—those invisible scars—remained raw, continuing to affect them for years, even decades, after the war. The weight of those emotional scars lingered beyond what anyone might have expected. I tried to capture these findings, these complex realities, in my 2009 book, Holocaust Trauma—a humble attempt to summarize what I had witnessed, and what I had come to understand.

Perhaps the most telling description of endurance during the war happened during the death marches of the Holocaust. Prisoners were forced to march from one camp to another under brutal conditions, knowing that those who fell behind—too weak or too exhausted—would be shot on the spot. Every step they took was an act of defiance against a fate that seemed inevitable. The advice to “take one step at a time” finds its most literal and harrowing expression here. It’s a mantra we often hear when life feels unbearable: “Take it one day at a time.” It urges us to confront today’s pain, today’s hardship, without being consumed by the unknowable weight of tomorrow.

These aren’t stories with happy endings. They don’t offer neat resolutions or triumphs to celebrate. They are about enduring the unendurable—about surviving not because there is light at the end of the tunnel, but because continuing is the only option left.

I used to visit an elderly woman who had survived the Holocaust and once asked her gently, “And how are you today, dear?”

“Oh, you know,” she replied, her voice tinged with weariness. “Ups and downs, as always.” She paused. “I had hoped to put it all behind me, to find some peace. But it seems the past refuses to let go. It haunts my dreams, a persistent shadow.”

Her words, simple yet profound, laid bare the depth of her emotional turmoil. I had heard her recount her experiences during the war countless times, and there was no need to articulate what weighed on her mind. The past, an unrelenting burden, had etched itself into her being—a scar that even time could not heal. And yet, we must continue to live with what cannot be changed, carrying the weight of the scars as we navigate forward. It’s not about fixing or erasing the pain but learning to coexist with it.

Some shit doesn’t pass. It lingers, not as trauma in the clinical sense, but as residue. A faint tension in the body. A change in tone. A silence that settles into the corners of a room. We move on, but something in us stays behind.

We learn to live with this residue, not by resolving it, but by tolerating its presence. That doesn’t mean being passive. It means not turning away.

There’s a common belief that pain must be processed, worked through, or healed. And sometimes that’s true. But more often, we simply carry it better. We learn to contain what cannot be erased.

Containment isn’t control. It’s not about suppressing emotion. It’s about holding what’s there, without being overwhelmed by it. Like sitting with someone crying—not trying to stop them, not analyzing—just staying present. That’s what we do with our own pain, too.

To “come to terms” with suffering doesn’t mean to conquer it. It means to walk alongside it, to acknowledge its presence without letting it consume us. Perhaps then, we may slowly release our futile struggle to control the uncontrollable and begin to find peace in the messiness of life. As painful as it is to admit, this struggle isn’t separate from life. It is life. Suffering forces us to confront something deeper: who we are, how we endure, and the meaning we choose to create in the shadow of the unbearable. Some people rebuild. Some collapse. Most of us do something in between. We adapt. We patch. We find new ways to carry the same weight.

That’s what I mean by recycling shit—not transforming suffering into something beautiful, but giving it a new function. Letting it fertilize something else, even if we never asked for it.

Pain leaves a mark. But it also leaves material. Emotional scraps, memories, truths we didn’t want but now can’t ignore. If we’re lucky, we find a way to use them. That doesn’t mean we’re grateful for the suffering. It means we don’t waste it.

Some people make art. Others grow more tender. Some become fierce protectors of others who suffer. Some just endure—and that’s enough. Repurposing doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be as quiet as waking up and doing the dishes.

I’ve seen people repurpose pain into humor, into music, into silence, into stubborn survival. Not because they’re brave, but because the alternative was to fall apart. Pain, when recycled, becomes part of who we are—not a scar to hide, but a seam in the story.

There is no promise here. No redemption arc. Just a reminder: pain changes us. And in that change, something new may form—not because the shit was good, but because we lived through it.

Recycling is not erasing. It’s carrying forward what cannot be undone, in a way that no longer poisons everything it touches. It’s not transformation. It’s a continuation.

The Contained Mess

We often speak of recovery as if it were a return, but most of us don’t return. We don’t go back to who we were before the shit happened. That version of us is gone. What we do instead is re-cover—layer over the wounds, stitch the fabric of life back together, however unevenly.

This is the heart of what I’ve come to believe: we don’t get over things. We don’t transcend. We carry, adapt, and make space. We contain, not in the clinical sense, not in the tight management of emotions, but in the old sense of the word: to hold. We become the container for the life we didn’t ask for. We hold the brokenness, the anger, the absurdity, the beauty. Sometimes it leaks. Sometimes it’s too much. But somehow, we stay upright.

For me, writing has been an exercise in containment. I’ve tried to reflect, not resolve. To stay with the mess long enough to see what it might become. And yet I wonder whether the act of writing is its own attempt at control—a way of taming the chaos with sentences.

Maybe this, too, is part of my own shit.

Still, I believe in the value of sitting with it. In not turning away. In saying, even when no answers come, I am here. This happened. I’m still breathing.

The world doesn’t need more advice. It needs more truth and more people willing to say: I don’t know what to do with this pain. But I’m willing to hold it.

That’s where these reflections end. Not with clarity or healing. With a container of shit, and the quiet hope that it holds.

This essay is a condensed version of the full book: Shh...it Happens: So What? Reflections on How to Live with Hardships in Life. The full version explores each of these ideas in depth, with stories, personal examples, cultural reflections, and philosophical insights. It’s not a manual, but a companion. A place to pause, to reflect, and to feel less alone in the shit we all face.   


File under: The Art of Psychotherapy, Musings and Reflections