Have you ever asked yourself the question: why is there so much suffering in the world?
It’s a tough question to understand because suffering doesn’t seem natural, but the good news is that we are designed to overcome it. We are stronger than we think.
One of the hardest things to deal with in life is watching someone close to you suffer from an illness. It’s especially hard if you’re a parent.
Although I’ve thankfully never had the experience of being a parent to a suffering child, I’ve had close loved ones go through that pain. It’s this time in life that either makes or breaks you. You have to be strong — not just for you, but also for them.
That doesn’t mean you should discourage their vulnerability. You still need to embrace it, and there is a delicate balance in doing so.
But it’s also important to be there to support your loved one and let them know they are not a victim. If they fall into that victim mentality, it’s game over. They begin to lose their character in their illness.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson dove into this topic with me in part two of our discussion and told me what it was like watching his child suffer from a debilitating illness. He talks about the lessons he learned as a professional as well as a father. We discuss how his entire family was affected and how he was able to teach his daughter to stay strong and vulnerable.
Who Is Dr. Jordan Peterson?
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of the million-plus-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos which has been a number one bestseller across the world and is translated into 40 languages.
This year, Dr. Peterson published his third book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. The lectures and debates he shares on YouTube have also become popular, garnering millions of views. His popularity began to really take off in the late 2010s for his view on cultural and political issues.
Loving In Spite of Fragility
One of the hardest catastrophes Dr. Peterson had to walk through in life was taking care of his daughter who was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of two. She had 40 affected joints, and the disease manifested when she was six years old. When she was 16, her hip disintegrated, so she had to have that replaced, and then her ankle disintegrated, and she had to have that replaced too.
She endured two years of absolute excruciating pain, and Dr. Peterson and his wife were running around trying to find the answers to this problem. They had to find the source that was causing the disease to continue to affect more joints.
Dr. Peterson explains that when something like that happens to your family, the time frame of your life plans need to shrink considerably. Instead of thinking about his five or ten-year plan, he was just thinking about how to get through the month, the week, or the day.
“By the time she got really ill, my relationship with my wife was pretty well put together, and my relationship with my son who’s younger than her was also well put together. So he was an absolute trooper because, for a lot of his teenage life, there was a huge amount of focus on the suffering of his sister.” — Dr. Jordan Peterson
This idea of being strong for the other person is one that Dr. Peterson really believes in. It’s a theme in his books, which is loving someone despite their fragility or vulnerability — and not just despite of, but because of their fragility, because that’s the price you pay to be in a relationship with them.
“They wouldn’t be who they were if they weren’t fragile and limited in their particular way. You can’t have the people you love without them also being prone to pain, destruction, and vulnerability.” –Dr. Jordan Peterson
So what’s the antidote? Teach them — in this case, your children — to be strong. Don’t protect them from the world — expose them to the world at the appropriate times, and then maybe they can become strong enough to transcend the pain and suffering.
“I’ve learned being a clinical psychologist for a long time, that you have all of these problems to contend with, but at the end of the day, they’re not your problems and they are not going away right now.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
Dr. Peterson explained that if he and his wife had deteriorated as a consequence of their daughter’s condition, that it would have been horrible for her because she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family.
“That’s one of the terrible things about having a very bad illness—not only does it do you in, but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you. I think that might even be worse. You have a moral obligation not to let it tear you down because then it’s on them. And you think, well, how can you remain healthy and strong in the face of the terrible suffering of someone who’s close to you? It’s like, well, do you want to suffer? That’s it, the alternative is worse.” — Dr. Jordan Peterson
So Dr. Peterson and his family decided to be strong, confront the disease head on, and commit to taking care of one another. They refused to fall into the depths of a victim mentality. An important distinction to make here is that in doing so, they were not in denial of the issues at hand, they just didn’t let their circumstances overtake them.
“We also told her many, many times — and we’re very careful about this — do not use your illness as an excuse. As soon as you do that, you can’t tell the difference between the illness and your character.” – Dr. Peterson
I like that Dr. Peterson and his wife made this distinction with their daughter. They took good care of her while also not enabling her to make her disease into a life-long crutch. She could still be empowered and independent in spite of her situation.
Caring For Yourself, Caring For Your Community
It took three years of taking things out of her diet to discover that his daughter’s rheumatoid arthritis was spurred on by an allergy to almost every type of food except for meat, salt, and water. Since she has been on that diet, her symptoms have gotten exponentially better. Dr. Peterson and his wife have also adopted this diet because they both also have autoimmune disorders.
Now, as an adult, his daughter is healthy, has had a child, and is able to live her life with her symptoms under control. As a family, they made it through to the other side of the catastrophe.
One big thing Dr. Peterson learned from that experience is that by taking care of yourself and your family, you are then able to take care of your community, your city, and greater populations. In fact, it’s our responsibility to do so.
“You need to take care of your family. You need to take care of your community. And if you don’t do that, then there’ll be hell to pay. And it’s on you. It’s on each of us. It’s hard for people to grasp that because they don’t want to. First of all, maybe because they don’t want the responsibility, but then they don’t get any meaning. Then they suffer. Then they get bitter. That’s not good. So it’s like, which of these are you going to pick? But it’s also salutary to people because it’s useful for everyone to know that if you don’t live up to your potential, that you leave a hole in the fabric of being, and it’s filled by something approximating hell, and unless that’s what you want, then you shouldn’t be doing that.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
Dr. Peterson explained to me that this sense of responsibility has been his North Star during all of the public attention that he has received in the last few years about his books, lectures, and interviews. His words have been taken out of context, and he was attacked for things he didn’t even say. He says that ties into his biggest fear, which is doing something careless that creates serious cascading consequences for the rest of his life.
“That’s what happens. You throw yourself into the fray. People try to localize you. And they do that by saying, ‘Well maybe you’re this or maybe you’re that.’ Well yeah, but maybe I’m not, too. I already had 250 hours of lectures up on YouTube at the point, and people tried to find evidence of me saying the things they accused me of and found nothing.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
The helpful information Dr. Peterson shares with audiences — sometimes rooms of 3,000 people at a time — is how he is using his purpose to help impact the world.
“There’s a great hunger for information that is practical and useful and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves. There’s a great hunger for that. Some of the information is experimental, some of it biological, some of it from the domains of neuroscience, and a lot of it from great clinicians.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
He has done about 50 of these lectures in 45 cities and counting. He uses these lectures as an opportunity to have a detailed and engaged discussion with the audience about how we might proceed forward individually and collectively so that we can make things consciously better.
“It’s a moral obligation to make things better in this world, and it’s attached to our individual meanings in life. As a sovereign citizen, you have the responsibility for the integrity of the state resting on your shoulders. It’s something that if you don’t take seriously, then the state shakes, and that’s not good. And so I’m trying to convey that to people.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
This ties into the first part of our discussion on responsibility and meaning and how those two things are intricately entwined. There is so much wisdom there, so definitely check it out.
I always ask my interviewees about the three truths they live by. Here are Dr. Peterson’s three:
- Don’t say things that make you weak.
- Lift your eyes on the horizon and aim on the highest star that you can contemplate.
- Put your family in order.
Why You Should Listen to This Dr. Jordan Peterson Podcast Episode Right Now…
If you found value in what Dr. Peterson and I talked about today, please tag Dr. Peterson and me, @lewishowes, on Instagram with your key takeaways. Please also go to Apple Podcasts, give it a five-star rating, and don’t forget to subscribe!
I always ask my guests about their definition of greatness at the end of each interview and Dr. Peterson gave a profound response. In the midst of all the suffering we experience while we are here on earth, there is an antidote — truth.
“Well, greatness is what reveals itself. When you attempt to carefully articulate and live out what you believe to be true, it just happens because there isn’t anything more powerful than truth, right? That’s the antidote to suffering — truth.” – Dr. Jordan Peterson
Again, “Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility, but through greatness of mind.” Those were famous words by Aristotle.
What an incredible story of overcoming calamity and coming out stronger. This inspired me, and I hope you resonated with this message.
If you’re ready to learn how to build more meaning into your life, make sure to listen to the full episode with Dr. Peterson on The School of Greatness!
To Greatness,
Some Questions I Ask:
- What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome? (5:16)
- How does mapping out your time play into the self authoring program? (9:09)
- Did your daughter feel responsible for causing all of the pain? (13:18)
- Is there anything that you wish you had done differently with your children? (21:22)
- Did you ever doubt yourself, in terms of your ability? (26:56)
- What’s your biggest fear now? (35:18)
In this episode, you will learn:
- How to emotionally navigate seeing your child suffer (7:42)
- How to focus on your career at the same time as dealing with a loved one’s illness (11:03)
- What Jordan taught his daughter at an early age about her illness (16:06)
- How Dr. Peterson feels about his daughter’s experience (23:48)
- How his daughter’s health affected his career (30:27)
- Dr. Peterson’s plan moving forward (40:22)
- Plus much more…
Connect with:
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
