Self Created Suffering?

I often wonder how much of our suffering is simply created by our own fear. Do we sometimes in a sense choose our own suffering? Are our thoughts and actions keeping us stuck in a place of suffering? What are we gaining from constantly worrying, being fearful or being in pain? Do we think suffering somehow serves us or others? Are we in a sense creating our own little drama filled with suffering and pain?

I've heard the saying pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. What does that really mean? From my understanding that means that we will encounter many difficult, even painful situations on this journey we call life. It's what we do with those situations and the feelings associated with them that determines weather we suffer or how long we suffer.

Do we seek to hang on to the pain reliving it over and over again, or do we seek to find ways to experience it and then let it go?

Do we sometimes actually create pain and suffering that really isn't necessary at all by creating little scenarios or dramas in our mind about how things could be or should be or used to be? How much of what we are experiencing is really ocurring and how much of it is just created by thoughts of what could be or memories of what has been?

It seems that many times we create our own painful situations through our fear of what could happen or a memory of what has happened. We sometimes project our own fears onto others and inject that fear into situations where no fear needs to enter in.

Let's say you had a terrible accident while riding a horse as a child. Now every horse you see feels like a danger to you. You don't want to go near horses. You are projecting your fear of that one horse on to all other horses. Now let's say you have a child and your child grows up and wants to ride a horse, you can't let your child ride that horse because when you rode that one horse you nearly died. You are stuck in that memory and are projecting that situation onto the current situation. Your fear is running you. Now let's say your child is old enough to make their own choices and they decide to ride the horse. You become so worried that you become physically ill, you are sure that something bad will happen because when you rode that one horse, you almost died. They may ride the horse and do fine, but each time they ride you are irrationally fearful. You are creating drama that doesn't exist. Yes, the horse could be a danger, yes your child could get hurt, but there is also a chance your child will never be hurt while riding a horse. You are stuck holding on to that old situation and projecting it into any other situation that you encounter where there is a horse involved.

How do we stop creating our own suffering? It seems the key is to remind our self that that was then and this is NOW. What happened to you once does not have to happen again, it does not have to happen to others, may never happen to others and is not some sort of pattern for everything that will happen to you and everyone else.

The other key seems to be in facing the feelings of situations head on and then releasing them so that we are not stuck reliving them over and over again every time something reminds us of the past. Don't be afraid of those feelings and hide from them, but allow ourselves to experience them fully and work through them so that we can see that life does indeed go on and bad situations don't have to be repeated over and over again.

It's as if we need to fully embrace what hurts us so deeply or causes us great fear and suffering so that we can then fully let it go and stop letting the fear and suffering run our lives. Clinging to our fear and our suffering really serves no purpose other than to hold us back from living the full and happy lives we deserve.