The starting point of our suffering | Docteur Martin Missmahl

The way we name events reveals our vision and our place in the world.

The Starting Point of Our Malaise

The starting point of our problems — and thus of our malaise — lies in how we name what happens to us. Our words express our vision, define our place in the world, and ultimately shape our destiny.

I therefore choose to rename this malaise: it is by no means a reaction to an external event, whether past or present. It is the advent of a deep felt sense, detached from incidental circumstances, which then manifests as disorders we call illnesses.

Malaise results from a focus specific to humans — and to humans alone — on what we interpret as an inexorable fall toward death. This is not an individual oddity: it is a universal human trait, absent from the rest of living beings.

Its origin is clear: our brain is programmed to keep searching for causes in the past. Philosophers see there a determinism by our past; physicists apply the “Big Bang” theory.

Whereas our malaise unfolds in the present. And that is the trap: by identifying with our brain — by searching as it does, elsewhere, behind us — we move away from the only place where malaise can be recognized and transformed.

To put an end to this malaise, life offers another vision. Each of us can find the tipping point, this permanent Big Bang within us, directly and immediately, in the beliefs maintained by the brain. This inner Big Bang is not a distant memory: it pulses here and now, in the present moment, within us.

In other words: there is no “cause” to hunt down, but an origin to recognize. And this origin is always present, intact, at the heart of our current experience. A collective mental program, inherited and maintained for millennia, keeps recreating this “inner Big Bang” at every instant — generating our malaise without our awareness. By becoming conscious of this dependence on anachronistic brain programming, we reclaim our path toward healing. This awareness fits in a few words: we can observe our brain in its anachronistic malfunction, and this distancing heals us despite our obvious shortcomings.

My therapeutic work is to accompany you in this recognition. The key is in you: I help you identify that moment when everything is replayed, through images, words and a form of listening that opens the way to welcoming what comes.

So I reaffirm what I said at the beginning: The starting point of our problems — and thus our malaise — lies in how we name what happens to us. Our words express our vision, define our place in the world, and ultimately shape our destiny. Now I can add: our choice of words happens here and now, in the present, even before an event becomes an “event,” a “circumstance,” an “illness.” Life has therefore provided an alternative vision!

Here is a metaphor to deepen this idea:

The Tree, the Chainsaw and the Gust: a Metaphor

Therapeutic work with a double edge

Human intervention — clean yet incomplete

Uprooting — brutal, liberating, definitive

While walking this summer in Killarney National Park in Ireland, I witnessed a troubling scene. Professional tree surgeons were methodically cutting damaged trees. They started at the top and moved down, section by section, to the base. The work was clean, impressive, efficient — almost therapeutic.

Yet a stump remained on the ground. Firmly anchored, its roots intact. And no one knew — or could — remove it. The centuries‑old forest prevented access for the machines that could grind down to the core. So it was left there, a dead root — invisible, yet stubbornly alive in its inertia.

Without this human intervention, however, a single gust could have sufficed to uproot the entire tree — and, in a crash of truth, free the soil. Free the memory.

All of us, from millennia‑old roots transmitted across generations, have grown a tree whose grafted, erroneous beliefs form the foliage. That tree is our persona: what we believe we are, what we show the world to be seen, recognized, loved. But one day the tree falls. And we are still standing. The mirror shatters — and something in us marvels at its nascent capacity to rebuild.

These roots in our inner life are not only wood and sap. They are memories, beliefs, and stories — often impoverished or distorted — handed down for generations. Like the roots of an old tree, they keep occupying the ground long after the trunk has fallen, continuing to feed deep down the idea that we are doomed to decline, to premature aging, to a world frozen in its fate.

Here the image meets another language: that of words, letters, and the stories we tell ourselves. When meaning is lost, only the hollow shell remains, shaping a world in its image — a world that looks like us, yet is merely the echo of our mistaken beliefs. It locks us in, as the roots of a dead tree keep limiting the life that could grow in its place.

That is the paradox: what we call “care” can sometimes block true liberation. Animated by sincere compassion, an intervention can derail that profound process once called catharsis — the turning point where, through terror and pity, a human being crosses their darkness to be reborn.

This is where compassion, the engine of the therapist, must rise: to go beyond the simple impulse to relieve, and reach a competent solidarity, born despite our limitations, through an openness to what escapes us.

Thus, liberation comes through life’s trials, when what held us collapses: the roots of the old world, the illusion of isolation, the feeling of being separate from everything and from others, the madness of human superiority — the starting point of the “beast within,” feeding on our malaise. This sequence — malaise → superiority — explains why this malaise could seem incurable and persist in our minds for millennia.

The film Que la bête meure illustrates the same dynamic in another form:

Postscript – “Que la bête meure”

Beneath the surface of a crime drama, Que la bête meure (Claude Chabrol, 1969) tells the obsessive quest of a father (Michel Duchaussoy) to find the driver who ran over his son and fled the scene. This path of revenge leads him to Paul Decourt (Jean Yanne), a brutal, cynical and deeply destructive man.

Yet behind the duel between two men, the film reveals a more intimate dynamic: as the father nears his target, he sinks into a confrontation with his own darkness — that part of himself that feeds hatred and justifies itself through endured pain. The hunt for the culprit becomes the mirror of a more intimate hunt: for our own inner “beast.” This beast feeds on malaise, then uses it to claim superiority and impose its vision on others. Now it becomes clear that the “inner beast” is nothing other than our brain, self‑appointed as master — not only of our personal fate, but of humanity’s fate as a whole.

True liberation is not about defeating an external enemy but about disarming this age‑old mechanism that turns pain into domination, and powerlessness into anger and destruction. As long as it remains alive within us, it perpetuates the cycle.

Ecclesiastes has said it for millennia:

“I said in my heart concerning the children of men, that God would test them, and that they themselves would see that they are but beasts. For what happens to the sons of men and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other; they all have the same breath, and man’s superiority over the beast is nothing; for all is vanity.”

This is not a devaluation but, on the contrary, a new dimension for humankind as we rejoin life in its global dimension: the recognition that we belong to the same ground, and that it is our illusion of singularity which — like the roots of a dead tree — must fall for another life to grow.

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