"If you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery
and only suffering from inescapable misery, 
maybe you can handle that."   -jbp







Maybe you could if you could differentiate with some certainty what's self-imposed and what's simply inescapable. And that's not obvious, especially to someone in misery. It's also not obvious that self-imposed misery is escapable in this life given the fact we're flawed creatures stranded in a place where inescapable suffering exists as a foundational principle of existence. One has to be able to "think straight" to sort out such things but this might be precluded by the stress, pain, and unavoidable warped perception produced by being in misery. 

Then there's the prospect of handling inescapable misery because you're "only" suffering from that. "Only" minimizes without supporting reason. The fact of being inescapable by itself has nothing to do with minimizing something. Death is inescapable so should we minimize its effect on us merely on that evidence? But let's consider "maybe you can handle that." Maybe that's like saying a mountain exists so maybe you can climb it. Sight unseen, that would be difficult to know. Is the mountain Mount Baker or Mount Everest? And yet the inescapable misery mountain is even more elusive and insidious. This is a mountain whose scope is never fully seen or understood, and worse of all, it's a mountain whose shape and size can change moment to moment with impediments compounding in unpredictable ways. 

To tell someone they should be able handle that situation sounds like heaping upon them another form of self-imposed misery. The pressure and expectation that some forms of misery should be "do-able" merely because they are of a certain type, regardless of their scope, might create colossal performance anxiety such that if one doesn't have self-imposed misery before, being told that inescapable misery should be "do-able" would self-impose some fast.

If there really isn't any difference between you and your experience as Jung postulated, then the experience of one's inescapable misery becomes you. In a phenomenological way, how then could one ever avoid self-imposed misery? It seems quite possible that self-imposed misery is yet another form of inescapable misery. Whether or not either can be "handled" seems purely situational and specific to the makeup of the individual. The devil's always in the details.