This is why, for so many people, a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems. Once this has happened, the last thing they want is to become free of them; that would mean loss of self. There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

Isn’t that the point, after all? To get to be a person and yet not to be lost in the head? To be liberated from lifelong identification with what life has endowed us with, good or bad? What more could a person wish for?