Have you ever played with one of those toy finger traps? 

You put a finger from each hand in opposite ends of a woven tube. When you try to pull your fingers out, the tube tightens. The harder you pull, the tighter you’re trapped. The way to freedom is simple but counterintuitive: push into it.

This metaphor came to my attention in a therapy workbook called Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. It proposes that attempting to avoid painful situations increases suffering and that the inverse, leaning into pain in appropriate ways, can lead to healing.

Decades before that workbook was published, Henri Nouwen explored a similar idea in regard to helping others in their pain:

“Consolation demands that we be cum solus [alone with] the lonely other, and with him or her exactly there where he or she is lonely and where he or she hurts and nowhere else. Consolation is … not the avoidance of pain, but, paradoxically, the deepening of a pain to a level where it can be shared.”

Henri Nouwen had learned this in part from Vincent van Gogh, who ​“consciously made the choice to stay close to the suffering of others,” as Carol Berry writes. (Carol is an artist and educator who attended a class Nouwen taught on van Gogh at Yale in the 1970s. She went on to write a book about the two men, which she discusses on the Renovaré Podcast this week.)

It’s normal to want to avoid pain. It’s human nature to want to fix someone who’s suffering. But when you look at the life of Nouwen and Van Gogh, and, more importantly, the life of Jesus, you see that the way to bring something good out of pain is often to lean into it.