What Suffering Teaches Us About Healing – An Interview With Kimberly Stokka Merendino

Kimberly Stokka Merendino, PhD, is a psychotherapist, writer, speaker, and nonprofit founder whose work explores what it means to remain fully alive through grief, uncertainty, caregiving, relationships, and life’s unexpected transitions. In this interview, she reflects on what more than two decades as a therapist and her own journey from clinician to caregiver have taught her about suffering, healing, enoughness, presence, and the quiet wisdom of ordinary life.

Kimberly Stokka Merendino, Therapist Author & Nonprofit Founder

How has your understanding of healing changed as you have moved between the roles of therapist, caregiver, writer, and nonprofit founder?

I used to think about healing primarily as movement toward resolution. As a therapist, you are often helping people understand what happened, develop healthier patterns, repair relationships, or learn ways to cope with what cannot be changed.

Then I became a caregiver, and healing became much less tidy. When my husband was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma, there was no insight that could remove the uncertainty. There was no therapeutic intervention that could guarantee the outcome I desperately wanted. I began to understand healing less as fixing and more as learning how to remain present to life as it actually is.

Writing has deepened that understanding, and founding PaRC Place has expanded it further. Sometimes healing means recovery. Sometimes it means acceptance, accompaniment, grieving, resting, or simply feeling safe enough not to hold everything together.

I no longer think healing always means becoming who we were before something happened. Sometimes healing is discovering who we can become because we lived through it.

After more than 25 years as a therapist, what has lived experience taught you about suffering that clinical training could not?

Clinical training taught me a great deal about grief, trauma, relationships, family systems, and resilience. What it could not teach me was what uncertainty feels like at three o’clock in the morning when the person you love is seriously ill.

When my husband was diagnosed with stage IV lymphoma, everything I understood intellectually became emotional. I learned how exhausting it is to live without answers. I learned that people can be grateful and terrified at the same time. I learned that strength is often much quieter than we imagine.

Most importantly, I learned that people in pain do not always need someone to make meaning of their experience. Sometimes they need someone willing to stay beside them while there is no meaning yet.

That changed me as a therapist. I am probably less interested now in finding the perfect thing to say and much more interested in helping people feel less alone.

Suffering taught me that presence is not the consolation prize when we cannot fix something. Very often, presence is the gift.

Where do you see people adding unnecessary suffering to pain that is already difficult enough?

Life gives us plenty of pain that we do not choose: illness, loss, rejection, disappointment, aging, uncertainty, and change.

Then we often add another layer. We tell ourselves we should be handling it better. We compare our grief to someone else’s. We believe we should already know the answer. We replay conversations, try to control outcomes, criticize ourselves for being tired, or decide that another person’s response determines our worth.

That second layer is what fascinates me. Pain might say, “This relationship ended.” Unnecessary suffering says, “It ended because I wasn’t enough, and I will never be loved again.” Pain says, “I don’t know what will happen." Unnecessary suffering insists, “I have to figure this out right now.”

We cannot eliminate the first kind of pain. I am not sure we would want to, much of it is part of loving and being human. But we can become more curious about the suffering we add. Sometimes freedom begins by asking, “What am I carrying that this moment never asked me to carry?”

What do families facing a child’s life-limiting condition need that the traditional healthcare system often struggles to provide?

Families need excellent medical care, of course, but they also need something medicine alone cannot provide–a place where the entire family is seen.

When a child has a life-limiting condition, the diagnosis does not happen only to the child. It changes the rhythm of an entire household. Parents become caregivers and medical advocates. Siblings adapt around appointments and emergencies. Ordinary family life can begin to revolve around illness.

Families need respite without guilt. They need emotional and spiritual support. They need people who understand anticipatory grief. They need opportunities to include siblings. They need environments where their child is recognized as a child first, not simply as a diagnosis.

They also need permission to experience joy while living with something terribly difficult. That is part of the vision behind PaRC Place and Hayley House, the first home we plan to build. We want to create care that asks not only, “What does this child medically require?” but also, “What does this family need in order to continue being a family?”

Those are different questions, and both matter. As you have developed the vision for Hayley House, what have you learned about supporting caregivers without losing sight of the family as a whole?

One of the most important things I have learned is that caregiving rarely belongs to one person, even when one person carries most of the responsibility.

Illness enters a family system. Everyone adjusts around it. The primary caregiver may be physically exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed, but partners, siblings, grandparents, and other family members are also experiencing their own versions of uncertainty, fear, grief, and change.

That means supporting caregivers cannot simply mean telling them to practice better self-care. Sometimes the problem is not that a caregiver has forgotten to take a bath or go for a walk. The problem is that the family is carrying an enormous amount of responsibility with too little support.

Respite matters because it gives families room to remember who they are beyond caregiving. The goal is not simply to help someone endure more. Sometimes the most compassionate intervention is making sure they don't have to carry so much in the first place.

When someone is caught in perfectionism or constant striving, what helps them recognize that their worth is not tied to achievement?

I think the first step is noticing how often we move the finish line. We tell ourselves we will finally feel settled when we finish the degree, get the promotion, lose the weight, raise successful children, earn enough money, help enough people, or accomplish whatever happens to sit next on the list.

Then we arrive, and almost immediately create another finish line. For much of my own life, I quietly believed I was moving toward enough. Enough education. Enough experience. Enough accomplishment. Eventually, I began asking a different question, "What if enough was never something I needed to achieve?"

That does not mean giving up ambition or growth. I still love learning, creating, building, and contributing. The difference is that those things no longer have to determine my worth. They can become expressions of a life that is already enough.

That distinction changes everything. We can still grow without treating the person we are today as a problem that needs to be solved.

How can people become more present in ordinary life without needing a crisis to show them what matters?

I wish I could say we always learn this before the crisis. Often we do not. A serious illness has a way of making ordinary things suddenly feel sacred: drinking coffee together, sitting on the porch, hearing someone laugh from another room, waking up beside someone you love. But we do not have to wait for tragedy to begin paying attention.

Presence is often much smaller than people imagine. It may mean leaving your phone in another room while you have dinner. Sitting outside for ten minutes without accomplishing anything. Noticing the light through a window. Listening to someone without preparing your response.

Last Tuesday, I spent an ordinary day with my family. We talked, ate together, laughed, and simply spent time in one another's company. Nothing extraordinary happened. That was precisely the point.

Life is happening while we are waiting for something important to happen. The practice is not creating more meaningful moments. It is becoming available to the ones already here.

You describe yourself as a “student of ordinary life.” What has ordinary life taught you about joy and enoughness?

Ordinary life has taught me that joy is much less dramatic than I once imagined. It is rarely fireworks. More often, it is coffee in a favorite mug. A dog asleep nearby. Dinner with people I love. Light coming through the trees. A conversation that lasts longer than expected. Someone reaching for my hand.

For years, I think I treated ordinary life as the space between important events. I was moving toward the next milestone, accomplishment, trip, celebration, or goal.

Now I wonder whether I had it backward. Perhaps the milestones are punctuation marks. The ordinary days are the story.

Enoughness has become similar for me. It is not the moment when everything is complete, and nothing more is required. I do not think that moment exists.

Enough is recognizing that this imperfect, unfinished life is still worthy of being fully inhabited. The older I get, the less interested I am in waiting for extraordinary circumstances before allowing myself to experience an extraordinary amount of gratitude.

What would you encourage someone to lay down today if they want to live with more presence, connection, and hope?

I would invite them to lay down one impossible job. Maybe it is making everyone happy. Maybe it is earning your worth.

Maybe it is controlling something that was never yours to control. Maybe it is rescuing everyone you love, never disappointing anyone, knowing what comes next, or carrying an old version of yourself because someone else is more comfortable with who you used to be.

We accumulate these impossible jobs quietly. Eventually, we can mistake them for responsibilities. They are not. Ask yourself, “What am I carrying because I genuinely value it, and what am I carrying because I am afraid of what will happen if I put it down?”

Those answers can be very different. Laying something down does not mean we stop caring. Often it allows us to care more freely. Life will bring enough weight of its own. We do not need to manufacture more.

Sometimes hope begins not by adding something new to our lives, but by finally releasing something we were never meant to carry.

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