The Systems That Sustain Our Suffering

There’s always that moment.  Something shifts—your partner leaves, your colleague disappoints you, your child says the thing that cracks your heart a little. And suddenly your fingers are hovering over the keyboard, crafting the kind of email that feels like it might bring clarity, closure, or at least some control. But it never does.

I have a client who, in these moments, always, inevitably, all too often unsatisfactorily, turns to the keyboard to express her frustration, sadness, and anger.

Let’s call her Anahit.

Anahit is a talented CEO in the later stages of her career. Born in Armenia, she came to the U.S. with his family in the early ’90s, shortly after the country’s independence, carrying both opportunity and inherited trauma. Her mother had a gift for imagining catastrophe. She prepared him for a world of sudden loss, betrayal, and scarcity. She learned to protect herself with hyper-vigilance and sharp intellect—tools that helped her succeed in tech leadership but often left colleagues feeling picked apart.

Anahit, nearing sixty, is sharp, seasoned, and secretly weary. A lifetime spent building a reputation, a life, a business—and still, the old ache lingers. Not just exhaustion from long hours, but from carrying emotional labor that was never hers alone to carry. The labor of being the one who holds it all together. Of always hoping it might turn out differently this time.

When her last trusted partner says he’s stepping away, Anahit doesn’t just feel let down. She feels exposed. Fooled. And what does she do?

She writes.

Not poetry. Not a note to herself (which is a practical way to process personal feelings and make sense of anger before involving someone else). She writes an email. A long one. And one she’ll come to regret writing later.

It’s composed, professional. Even generous. But between the lines—resentment. A trembling kind of grief. The pain of not being seen. The fear of not being enough, after all.

I’ve seen this email before.  I’ve written versions of them myself. And, far too often, I’ve coached others through the aftermath of venting rants. Such emails never help.

The reason is simple: it’s not the failure of the medium. It’s about the system inside us that insisted it be written in the first place. The old mental circuitry that pleads, “If I can just explain myself well enough, I’ll be understood. I’ll feel loved, safe, and that I belong. And most importantly, I won’t be abandoned again.”

The emotional software—what I once called in Reboot an “old subroutine”—that whispers, “prove your worth, and maybe you won’t be left.” Wasting our energy, our lives.

But these old subroutines rarely update themselves. They live in us, powered by childhood needs unmet, by the hollow of absent elders, by secrets unspoken in the generations before us. In Reunion, I termed the consequences of such woundings ‘negative spaces in our psyches.’

And in such spaces, our hungry ghosts are born.

In Buddhist psychology, hungry ghosts are restless beings with insatiable appetites—creatures with tiny mouths and swollen bellies who cannot ever be filled. We, too, develop these psychic hungers when the nurturing we need goes missing—especially the kind that comes from attuned, present elders.

They echo through us as ‘hungry ghosts,’ driving us to seek resolution where resolution cannot be found. And they surface most desperately when we feel unseen, unloved, or abandoned—moments when, as Richard Rohr writes, “We ache for the father who never quite arrived.”

What appears to be obsession or overreaction—like Anahit’s compulsive need to explain, prove, or assert—can often be traced to this inner void: the yearning for affirmation that never came. They drive the email that will never heal.

What Anahit wants isn’t to be right; it’s to be loved. To be seen. To be told: You are not alone. To hear the voice of an elder say, “This pain makes sense. And you are still whole.”

But the inbox can’t offer that. It was never meant to. Only presence can.  Presence, silence, and rituals of grief and reflection can fill those negative spaces and make the hungry ghosts rest.

When we trade real presence for written performance, we think we’re protecting ourselves. But too often, we’re just perpetuating the very wound we long to transcend.

Anahit’s email isn’t wrong.  It’s just misdirected.

What she needs is not a masterful takedown, not proof she was the better partner.  What she needs is something most of us never received when it mattered—a quiet hand on the shoulder. A knowing nod. A presence that doesn’t flinch. So, she sends the email. And then wonders why nothing feels better.

This isn’t an indictment. It’s a mirror. A reminder.

That growing up—in life and leadership—isn’t about never hurting. It’s about recognizing the internal systems we use to avoid the hurt…and gently choosing not to follow them, again and again.

The real moment of power is not in the send button. It’s in the pause. In the willingness to feel the ache behind the anger. The grief behind the blame. The child behind the mask.

This is where our redemption begins. Not with an email, but with the courage to meet ourselves exactly where we are.