Letter 7: Pain
Although this letter is about pain, I want to give you a song of affirmations. You are loved!
Hello fellow reader,
I hope you’re trying your best and pushing through!
We are in part 2: Spring, the first letter of this section is Pain. Each time I post a new letter, I always get relieved that I am one step closer to finishing this series. I’ve become more consistent with my blog, I will be graduating soon so i’ll have more time on my hands. Finally, I am graduating, it took me a while to get here. I can’t help but not want to leave, I became apart of a small community here at my college, made some great memories and connections that have meaning behind them. It’s a bittersweet feeling, though when I went to drop off some transcripts at a university, I can tell that I was ready to go to my next destination.
Yesterday, I was at Philosophy Club with some professors and another student. We talked about a blog by Maria Popova. She writes about a philosopher Iris Murdoch from the the 1900s. Murdoch wrote a book called The Sovereignty of Good, which is about the art of beauty and nature that should be considered to step outside ourselves which includes moral beauty— to walk with humility and nonjudgmental curiosity. It seems hard since we are now judging her statement on how this coincides with people being propelled by their own ideas of the Good. We didn’t get far since it’s only one hour and we talked for the most part. From what I gather is that not everyone has indifferently many beautiful lives. It seems a little too arrogant and optimistic, coming from someone that tries to see the beauty in everything.
Key word: Indifferently, it seems like we are talking about the beauty of time? Some people live a life where they can’t catch a break, life keeps hitting them with problems that sometimes were not caused by them. Some are more privileged than their neighbor. Murdoch defines beauty as “‘an occasion for unselfing’” when we read this, we were trying to think about what it means to be selfish or selfless. For me, I said that depending on your heart, in order to do something for yourself, there is always a sacrifice between you or the other person. As Alphonse Eric from Fullmetal Alchemist says about equivalent exchange, “That all things do come at a price, that there's an end and a way, that the pain we work through did have a reward, and that anyone who's determined and perseveres will get something of value in return, even if it's not what they're expecting.”
Do we make decisions based on our ego, worries, self-absorption and desires? If an ‘occasion of unselfing’ is supposed to dissolve my self-focus and allow to perceive the world with clarity, openness and humility than I can say that this world is getting worse and we are put in a position to maintain the Goodness of this earth. There is so much pain and some people pass away from it.
How can someone change their consciousness? People don’t want to focus in the now because if they do, they can see the problem they are trying to avoid. Maybe the question is how can we remain optimistic and think outside our ego?
I wanted to bring in Murdoch’s philosophy about the ‘occasion of unselfing’ into this letter which is about pain and how it corresponds with the clients that Mary Pipher treated.
Letter 7: “Pain” alongside Iris Murdoch’s idea of unselfing helped me see emotional healing in a new perspective. Both writers, though working in different fields, describe a similar transformation: the moment when a person steps outside the tight circle of their own fear, ego, or self‑protection and begins to see reality with clearer, more compassionate eyes. As I moved through Pipher’s stories of Francesca, and SueAnn, Murdoch’s belief that moral and emotional growth begins when something—beauty, truth, or another person’s presence—“draws us out of ourselves”. Pain, in Pipher’s view, becomes one of those occasions for unselfing.
Pipher opens the letter by acknowledging that pain is universal, but she also insists that it is deeply personal. She writes that suffering “asks us to stop and listen”, and that line stayed with me. Pain forces a pause. It interrupts the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can handle. Murdoch would say that this interruption is morally significant because it breaks the ego’s grip. When we stop running from pain, we begin to see our lives more truthfully. That is the heart of unselfing: the shift from self‑absorption to honest attention.
Francesca’s experience shows another dimension of unselfing. She tries to outrun grief by staying constantly busy, insisting she is fine. I recognized myself in her—how easy it is to fill every moment so we don’t have to feel what hurts. But Pipher gently guides her toward stillness, and in that stillness, Francesca finally allows herself to grieve. This is unselfing because she stops centering the image of herself as the strong, capable one and instead attends to the truth of her emotional landscape. Murdoch often uses beauty as the catalyst for unselfing, like her example of the kestrel that pulls someone out of their self‑pity. For Francesca, the catalyst is grief itself. Pain becomes the kestrel—unexpected, unwelcome, but clarifying.
SueAnn’s story adds a relational layer to this comparison. She arrives in therapy full of resentment toward her husband, seeing him only through the lens of her own hurt since he decided to kill himself. As she talks, she remembers moments of tenderness between them. Pipher helps her widen her view, and SueAnn begins to see her husband as a full human being rather than the villain in her narrative. Murdoch would call this a “truthful vision” of another person. It is unselfing because SueAnn steps outside her wounded perspective that she isn’t to blame for her husbands death, he is responsible for his choices. She realized that sharing her feelings made them easier to bare. This doesn’t erase her pain, but it changes the way she holds it.
What struck me most is how both writers use nature as a metaphor for this process. Murdoch’s kestrel is a literal moment of beauty that interrupts self‑absorption. Pipher uses nature symbolically—storms, seasons, rivers—to remind clients that pain is part of the human cycle. She writes that suffering is “as natural as winter”. These metaphors invite clients to see themselves within a larger landscape, loosening the ego’s grip. Nature becomes a teacher of unselfing, showing us that we are not the center of everything, and that our pain, while real, is not the whole story.
Reflecting on these two thinkers together helped me understand pain not just as something to endure, but as something that can open us. Pipher shows how therapy creates the conditions for unselfing—through empathy, honesty, and the courage to face what hurts. Murdoch gives the philosophical language for why these moments matter. Together, they suggest that healing begins when we stop clinging to our defensive narratives and allow ourselves to see clearly: our emotions, our relationships, and the world around us. Pain, in this sense, becomes not just a burden but an invitation—an occasion for unselfing that leads us toward clarity, compassion, and a more grounded sense of self.
