Events in our lives serve lessons. Lessons serve truths. And each truth that we will submit to changes us into a human being more whole than we were prior to the event.
What we suffer over in life is lessons we have yet to learn. When we are in pain, it's because a lesson has been refused.
For example, let's say you're talking to somebody and you see that you can't stop from saying something cruel. In the split second you see that you can't stop yourself from making that cruel comment, you have a flash of painful understanding that you weren't what you imagined yourself to be prior to the event. Then up comes resistance to that painful truth, meaning everything in you finds a way to justify what you've just said instead of recognizing that you had mistaken yourself to be something you are not. In that moment of instantaneous recognition of the truth of yourself is the lesson riding in on the back of the event.
When we can accept that we have been shown something about ourselves that we did not know was true prior to the arrival of the event -- and we know now is true -- then we acknowledge that we (of ourselves) cannot effect change in that moment. We can only agree to be changed. We yield ourselves to the Truth: "Not my will, but Thy will be done." And we either allow the Light that showed us ourselves as we are to do the work of turning that pain into the transcendence of itself because it frees the self that was in the grip of it, or we go right back through the same loop again -- fighting to save ourselves, struggling to change someone else -- all the time wrestling with the world, hoping to make it so it won't be so painful.
Learn to see what you've been given to see (about yourself) as the gift that it is: surrender yourself to change.