Healing Through the Dark Emotions

A revisit of Miriam Greenspan's landmark book

I had it in mind this week to write the “there is no such thing as selective numbing” essay, and as such, I started looking through the book where I was sure I had read that statement or something like it. The image I remember is that of a volume knob, a single controller that turns everything up or down, on or off. If you can’t feel into your grief and fear, you can’t feel into your joy, either.

A long look through this wonderful book has yielded no such image or statement, and I am left to believe that I made it up as a shorthand for explaining some of Greenspan’s larger points about our cultural “emotion-phobia,” and the dissociative habits in which we increasingly engage to avoid feeling.

Nonetheless, looking through this book again was an absolute delight, and while I’ve not been able to assemble the essay I wanted to yet, I thought I’d share a few quotations I found myself copying out. On a difficult morning earlier this week, I found the exercise of going through this text to be strangely healing. I remembered, for the first time in a while, the warmth and aliveness of poring through a good book in depth. (Last night, I also started re-reading David Abram’s monumental The Spell of the Sensuous, and had a similar reaction.)

I’ll attempt to construct the essay I meant to for next week, but for now, here’s some Miriam Greenspan, from her 2003 book (so please forgive some of the terminology), Healing Through the Dark Emotions.

A culture that insists on labeling suffering as pathology, that is ashamed of suffering as a sign of failure or inadequacy, a culture bent on the quick fix for emotional pain, inevitably ends up denying both the social and spiritual dimensions of our sorrows. (p. 7)

It is in our families that we first learn to distrust our feelings and to be shamed by them….When shaming and ignoring emotion don’t work, there’s always the direct threat of punishment. Punishment for visible suffering is particularly visited on boys, but girls too learn to silence themselves. By and large, girls learn to suffer in silence, boys to deny that they are suffering at all. (p. 18)

[I]n milder form, dissociation is routine; we all dissociate in small ways on a daily basis. Ours is a dissociative culture—a culture that separates body from mind, body from spirit, feeling from thinking. This kind of dissociation is a special requirement of maculinity in patriarchy. (emphasis mine, p. 21)

Grief, fear, and despair are primary human emotions. Without them, we would be less than human, and less likely to survive. Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our hearts. Grieving our losses allows us to heal and renew our spirits. Fear alerts us to protect our survival, extending beyond our instinct for self-preservation to our concern for others. Despair asks us to find meaning in the midst of apparent chaos or meaninglessness. Making meaning out of suffering is the basis of the human capacity to survive evil and transcend it. (p. 45)

The Latin root of the word emotion is movere, meaning “to move.” Emotions are energies that move us—to feel, to express our feelings, to act. Emotional energy is neither positive nor negative. It is just energy. Only our attitude toward these emotions and what we do with the energy can be called “positive” or “negative.” (p. 50)

[U]nconsciously suppressing the dark emotions takes its toll in psychic numbing. A silent plague of our era, psychic numbing was first described by the distinguished psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his study of survivors of concentration camps and Hiroshima. The inability to feel anything at all, the compartmentalization of feeling and knowing, the death-in-life quality he saw in survivors—these have become fairly common contemporary mental states, in less extreme form. Psychic numbing is a way of coping with trauma—and in an age of ecocide, when the earth itself is not safe, we are all to some degree traumatized. Psychic numbing is also what happens when we banish the dark emotions for an extended period of time. When we numb certain feelings over and over again, the habit of numbing generalizes, and eventually the capacity for feeling itself is crippled. We end up feeling deadened to life itself. (p. 58)

It is not the dark emotions that hurt us but our negative attitudes, unskillful ways of coping, and emotion-phobic reactions to them…through family conditioning and religious teachings, and in the culture as a whole, we are schooled to endure, deny, bypass, avenge, and escape painful emotions.” p. 58