“Know thyself.” — Delphic maxim

By Jane Sonnenschein · July 9, 2026

I used to think pain was simply pain.

When it comes, it feels messy and heavy. You may feel upset, irritated, angry, hurt, ashamed, or suddenly pierced by something someone says. But if someone asks you exactly why you feel this way, you may not be able to explain it.

Emotions rarely arrive one at a time. More often, they rush in as one tangled mass. You think you are reacting only to what has just happened, but what is really weighing on you may have been building for years.

Lately, I have realized that one of the greatest things writing does for me is help me take that tangled mass apart.

If I do not separate it into pieces, I am easily left with a few crude conclusions: I am too sensitive. I have a bad temper. Why am I doing this again? Why can’t I get over it? Is there something wrong with me?

But once I start writing and keep asking what lies underneath, I begin to see that pain never appears out of nowhere. It has material. It has a structure. It has a trigger. And it may also be trying to serve some psychological purpose.

The first time I became genuinely interested in Aristotle’s theory of the “Four Causes” was when I realized that it unexpectedly gave me a way to organize my own pain.

The Four Causes, of course, were never meant to be a psychological tool. Aristotle used them to explain why something becomes what it is. To understand something, he argued, we should not only ask what it is. We should also ask what it is made of, what form it takes, what brought it into being, and what purpose it serves.

Put simply, these are the material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause.

A cup makes this easy to understand.

The material cause of a cup is what it is made from—glass, ceramic, metal, or something else. Its formal cause is the structure that makes it a cup rather than simply a piece of material: it has an opening, a body, a base, and a form capable of holding liquid. Its efficient cause is whatever brought it into existence—the craftsperson, the machine, the manufacturing process. Its final cause is why it exists: to hold water, to drink from.

In the past, I might have read a theory like this and thought of it as nothing more than something from the history of philosophy.

But when I brought it into my own life, I suddenly realized that it could explain more than a cup.

It could also help me understand a piece of pain.

Take my relationship with my mother.

My mother and I are not completely unable to get along. Much of the time, we can talk normally. We talk about everyday life, relatives, what has happened in someone else’s family, and all kinds of ordinary things. Sometimes we talk for hours, and I do not find her annoying at all.

I also know that she needs someone to talk to. Many of the emotions, loneliness, and anxiety in her life need somewhere to go.

But the moment she enters another mode, something in me immediately hardens.

What kind of mode?

Complaining. Criticizing me. Telling me what is wrong with me. Saying I did not listen to her. Reminding me that I used her money. Speaking about me in a tone that feels like judgment.

At that moment, I am not simply annoyed.

My whole body and emotional system move into a defensive state. It feels as though I am no longer having one ordinary phone call. Instead, scenes from many years of being criticized, controlled, and humiliated have suddenly opened up again.

Without any framework for understanding this, I might simply say: I cannot stand it when my mother gets like this.

Or worse, I might start blaming myself.

Why am I so easily affected by her?

Why can’t I control my emotions again?

Am I just too sensitive?

But when I look at it through the Four Causes, things become much clearer.

What is the material cause of this pain?

It did not begin with this particular phone call. It is made from years of experience: being criticized, being denied, being expected to obey, being bound by money and a sense of indebtedness, being surrounded by my mother’s emotions, and repeatedly being pushed back into the position of “you are not good enough.”

These experiences are the material.

They are like individual threads lying scattered through memory. But once something triggers them, they quickly twist themselves into a knot.

What is the formal cause?

In other words, what kind of structure have all these materials eventually formed?

For me, perhaps it is this: the moment my mother enters a mode of criticism and complaint, I become defensive. I harden. I want to argue back. I want to escape. And it becomes very difficult for me to see her simply as an ordinary person who has said something wrong.

Because inside me, it is not about one sentence.

A familiar relationship structure has returned: she stands above me judging, while I stand below, enduring, explaining, defending myself.

What is the efficient cause?

The efficient cause is the specific thing that sets the reaction in motion.

It may be a certain sentence, a tone of voice, or a particular subject—money, for example, or “You didn’t listen to me back then,” or “Look at what has happened to you now.”

These things work like buttons. Once one is pressed, the entire old system starts running.

What is happening in the present may be small. But what it activates is not merely the emotion of this moment. It activates years of memory.

And what is the final cause?

This is where it becomes even more interesting.

When Aristotle spoke of final cause, he meant the purpose for which something exists. Applied to a psychological reaction, I can ask myself: What is this reaction of “hardening” actually trying to protect?

Is it simply a bad temper?

Or is it trying to protect me from being humiliated, swallowed up, or controlled again?

My defensiveness may not be graceful. It may not be appropriate every single time. But it is not meaningless.

At certain points in my life, it helped me preserve some kind of boundary. At the very least, it helped keep me from being completely pushed down.

Once I separate the pain in this way, it is no longer a single cloud of darkness.

It becomes something I can understand.

The same approach can also help me understand some of my husband’s reactions.

For example, his hands shake when he has to call a doctor.

For someone who has never had experiences like his, that may be difficult to understand. It is only a phone call, isn’t it? You are only trying to make an appointment.

But for someone who has been rejected again and again in similar situations, a phone call is no longer just a phone call.

The ringing tone, the waiting, the other person’s voice, the possibility of being turned away—all of it can activate tension in the body before anything has even happened.

If I look at this through the Four Causes, the material cause includes his past experiences of repeated rejection, the shame that developed when his sense of self-worth was very low, and the fear of being judged when asking for help.

The formal cause is a psychological structure that says: “Whenever I ask for help, I may be rejected or humiliated.”

The efficient cause is one specific phone call, one doctor’s appointment, one situation in which he has to express a need to someone outside himself.

And the final cause?

Perhaps his anxiety and avoidance are his body’s attempt to protect him from having to experience that pain of rejection again.

Another example is asking his mother for money.

On the surface, borrowing money is simply borrowing money. You are in financial difficulty, you do not have enough, so you ask a family member for help.

But for a particular person, it is often not that simple.

For my husband, asking his mother for money may not feel like merely saying, “Could you lend me some money?”

It may feel like stepping back into a scene of shame.

He may feel that he has failed again. That he has lowered himself again. That he has to let his mother see his helplessness. That once again he has to occupy the position of: “See? In the end, you still have to rely on me.”

The material cause of this pain lies in the long and complicated relationship between him and his mother, in the frustration and shame left by earlier attempts to ask for help, and in the way failure was magnified during periods when his sense of self-worth was very low.

The formal cause is the structure that says: “Asking for help means exposing failure. Asking for help means being judged.”

The efficient cause is the concrete moment in real life when money is needed and he has to ask.

The final cause may lie in his desire not to make the call, not to ask, not to enter that situation at all. In a way, he may be protecting himself from being swallowed by that feeling of shame again.

Once we look at things this way, we begin to see that many human reactions are not inexplicable at all.

A person who is afraid of making a phone call is not necessarily lazy.

A person who refuses to ask family for help is not necessarily being stubborn.

A person who immediately becomes defensive when hearing a certain tone in their mother’s voice does not necessarily have a bad temper.

A person who completely falls apart after failure does not necessarily have poor resilience.

Behind many reactions, there is material. There is a structure. There is a trigger. And there is something the reaction may be trying to protect.

This is the value of theory as a container.

Without a container, pain is simply pain.

It presses down on you, and all you can say is, “I feel terrible,” “I can’t take this,” or “I’m doing this again.”

But once you have a framework for examining it, pain can be separated into layers. It is no longer one enormous thing that cannot be handled. You can take it apart and look at it piece by piece.

I increasingly like this way of sorting through myself.

Not because it immediately solves the problem, but because it helps me stop passing crude judgments on myself.

In the past, whenever I was triggered, I thought I was terrible. When I procrastinated, I thought I was useless. When I became defensive, I thought I was immature. When I was in pain, I wondered why I still had not “gotten better.”

Now, I try to ask a few more questions instead.

What is this reaction made from?

What kind of pattern has it formed?

What triggered it?

What is it trying to protect?

Once those questions appear, the way I relate to myself begins to change.

This does not mean immediately indulging myself, nor does it mean saying that every reaction is reasonable.

It simply means I no longer reduce every problem to: “There is something wrong with me.”

I begin to see that a person’s behavior and emotions have a history. Many things do not appear out of nowhere, and they cannot be straightened out by a single piece of good advice.

They had material. They developed a structure. They served a function.

At some point in the past, they may even have helped that person survive.

Someone who becomes defensive very easily may have spent years genuinely being attacked.

Someone who finds it extremely difficult to ask for help may have learned that every request for help comes with a price of shame.

Someone who is terrified of failure may have learned that failure does not simply mean “I did something badly,” but “I, as a whole person, am being rejected.”

Someone who cannot get going during the day and refuses to go to sleep at night may not simply be lazy. Perhaps both their system for starting and their system for stopping are struggling.

When we look at people this way, we become less likely to dismiss an entire person with a single judgment.

Of course, seeing the cause does not mean the problem disappears.

Understanding why I become defensive does not mean I will never become defensive again.

Knowing why I am afraid to ask for help does not mean asking suddenly becomes easy.

Understanding why my mother triggers me does not mean every future phone call will be calm.

Human change is not that simple, especially when the things involved are tied to long experience, bodily reactions, and wounds formed in relationships.

But seeing still matters.

Before we can see what is happening, we can only be carried along by it.

Once we can see it, even if it still hurts, there is at least a little distance.

The next time I harden because of something my mother says, I may still feel hurt, but perhaps I can remind myself: this is not only about the sentence she just said. An old scene has been activated.

The next time my husband’s hands shake because he has to make a phone call, he may still feel anxious. But he can know: this does not mean I am useless. My body has simply remembered too many experiences of rejection.

The next time I make a mistake and immediately want to attack myself, perhaps I can stop for a moment and ask whether I have once again reached the conclusion “I am no good” far too quickly.

This is why writing matters so much to me.

Writing lets me take these questions out and separate them, layer by layer.

Thinking alone does not always do that. In my head, one thought leads to another, then jumps somewhere else, and in the end everything can remain a fog.

Writing forces me to make the material clear, the structure clear, the trigger clear, and the purpose clear.

It helps me find a little order inside confusion, and some understandable cause and effect inside pain.

Sometimes I think philosophy and psychology are useful not because they are profound or difficult, but because they can give the chaos of ordinary life a container.

Aristotle’s Four Causes once felt very far away from me.

But when I began using them to sort through my own pain, they suddenly came close.

They no longer explained only why an object becomes what it is. They could also help me understand why an emotion has taken its present form, why a reaction is so strong, and why a person can suddenly seem to become someone else in certain situations.

Pain does not come from nowhere.

It has material.

It has form.

It has an efficient cause.

It has a purpose.

And if a person can slowly begin to see these things, perhaps they will become less willing to hate themselves so easily.

They may begin to understand that the reactions they dislike in themselves are not necessarily flaws in their personality. They may also be defenses left behind by the past.

Pain that returns again and again does not necessarily mean they are beyond repair. It may be pointing toward old experiences that have never been understood.

Confusing emotions are not necessarily just a nuisance.

They may also be clues.

And writing is one way of following those clues backward.

We go back not because we want to remain in the past forever, but because we want to see more clearly: Why did I become the person I am today? And is it possible, from within these old structures, to slowly grow new ways of responding?

Perhaps this is what I now understand self-reflection to be.

Not turning myself into a perfect person.

But finally refusing to let pain exist only as a dark fog.

It can be named.

It can be taken apart.

It can be placed inside a container.

And little by little, it can be put somewhere new.

Where does a piece of pain come from?

It comes from experience, from relationships, from old wounds, from bodily reactions that are triggered again and again, and from the patterns we once developed in order to protect ourselves.

And when we are finally able to look at it in this way, it is no longer only pain.

It also begins to become an entrance into understanding ourselves.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 一段痛苦从哪里来？用亚里士多德的“四因说”整理自己

German version: Woher kommt ein Schmerz? Mit Aristoteles’ „Vier-Ursachen-Lehre“ Ordnung in mich selbst bringen