The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring.
Susan Cain
The Place You Care
Topic: Overcoming Adversity
Remember the linguistic origins of the word yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet.
Susan Cain, born in 1968, is an American writer and speaker recognized for her work on introversion and personality psychology. She grew up in Lawrence, Nassau County, New York, as the youngest of three children. Cain attended Princeton University, earning an A.B. in English in 1989 with a thesis on T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, and later obtained a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1993. She practiced law at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton for seven years before shifting to negotiation consulting. Despite professional success, she found the corporate world at odds with her natural disposition and eventually left to focus on writing and research.
Cain’s 2012 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, examined the cultural bias toward extroversion and the overlooked strengths of introverts. Her TED talk on the topic reached a global audience, sparking conversations on education, leadership, and workplace design. In 2015, she co-founded Quiet Revolution to support introverts in schools, workplaces, and beyond. She later expanded on these ideas in Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverts (2016), which focused on children and teens. Her work has influenced leadership training and corporate culture, encouraging environments where different personality types can thrive.
In 2022, Cain published Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, exploring how embracing sadness and imperfection can lead to a deeper appreciation of beauty and connection. Through her writing and speaking, she has contributed to a broader understanding of personality differences and emotional depth. Cain’s work continues to shape discussions on how individuals and institutions can better support a range of temperaments and perspectives.
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
Cain, Susan. Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Crown, 2022, p. 45.
Susan Cain
Theme: Adversity
About This Susan Cain Quotation [Commentary]
Susan Cain invites readers to see suffering as a reflection of care, stating, “The place you suffer is the place you care.” Rather than something to escape, pain reveals deep investment in what matters. Cain encourages leaning into this discomfort, recognizing that longing and sorrow arise from caring. Instead of avoiding suffering, she suggests that “the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring,” framing adversity as an opportunity to engage more fully with what is meaningful.
She acknowledges the instinct to withdraw from pain, yet warns against “ward[ing] off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet.” Avoidance may provide temporary relief, but it can also dull one’s ability to experience joy. In Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, Cain explores how sorrow and beauty are intertwined, arguing that accepting pain can deepen emotional awareness rather than diminish it.
Her words encourage a shift in perspective, seeing suffering not as something to resist but as a way to deepen connection and purpose. Instead of numbing pain, she suggests meeting it with care, allowing it to reveal what is most valued. Through this lens, adversity is not merely to be endured but engaged with fully, offering insight into the depth of human experience.
Additional Susan Cain Quotations
“Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.”
―Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
“the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.”
―Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
“I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.”
―Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
“The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.”
―Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
“We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.”
―Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.
About the Etymology of the Word “Longing”
“Like, the word longing itself, the etymology of it literally means to reach for, you know, to grow longer and to reach for. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re creative. And I do want to hasten to say that … You don’t need to compose a symphony that people are going to be listening to hundreds of years later. You don’t have to build the rocket to Mars in order to express that fundamental human creativity. You could be sitting at home and drawing a picture or baking a pie. It doesn’t really matter. Like, all these different actions are expressions of our longing and of our better nature.”
―Susan Cain, Why bittersweet emotions underscore life’s beauty TED with Whitney Pennington Rodgers (March 2022).
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