The Value of Dark Emotions

By Mimi Walker

April 6, 2003

I was sorry I had to miss the Reader's Theater meeting last week, since we were away Sunday. But we have been having something of a Reader's Theatre with our families over the Internet. Our families have been sending us the war related e-mails that they get and we have been sending our to them.

Sharing e-mail stories used to be a happy, enjoyable way of communicating with loved one's over distance and time. But now it has become a difficult deeply emotional process. There are no more "isn't that cute" "that one is so funny" stories being shared. Now the darker side of human existence is the topic of discussion. Now what is right and what is wrong is being asked and debated.

Another part of my life has changed too. I wake up each morning at 6:00 and turn on the news to catch the latest weather report before sending my kids off to school—with or without jackets, depending on what I am told. I usually leave the TV on to hear what is happening in the world while I prepare lunches and sort clothes. What used to be a pleasant part of my day now leaves me with a feeling of sorrow. I am overwhelmed by the sadness of all that is going on and I am angry by being manipulated by the media, being told what is acceptable to feel and say.

So I find myself walking around with an ache in my gut. It's not a stomach ache, it is an emotional sensation that lodges itself in the center of my body, just above my stomach, but not exactly in my chest. It settles there, sets up tent and won’t move on. I have found no medicine to make it go away. The pills I take for nausea and indigestion have had no effect on this pain.

But life is serendipitous, even in such perilous times. While skimming the magazine aisle at Borders (an academic's idea of fun), I picked up something I had never noticed before, a Jewish magazine on culture and society called Tikkun. The name comes from the Hebrew phrase Tikkun olam that means “healing the world."

The lead article was titled “The Erotic and the Ethical." Certainly an eye-catching title! And it was a good article, but that is not where grace was leading. There was also in that magazine a short article by Miriam Greenspan, a psychotherapist and author, called “Healing through the Dark Emotions In an Age of Global Threat." I had found my medicine. I am sharing these thoughts with you because I suspect that I am not alone.

Your emotional pain may not lodge in your gut, but it will manifest somewhere, a nagging headache, knots in your shoulders and neck that won't be worked out with exercise, or when the experiences are really close to home, a constricting around your heart that makes you check your blood pressure a little more often.

Candace Pert is a doctor and medical researcher who was looking for the pathways from the brain to the other parts of the body that communicate emotion. What she found was that every cell in the body has receptors for the neuropeptides that carry emotional information. Our emotions are not experienced in the brain. They really are experienced directly throughout our bodies. We knew that in our bodies, our brains just don't want to believe they're not in control.

Not only do emotions live in our bodies; they are also contagious. Miriam Greenspan goes on to expand our understanding of emotions even further. She says, “We live in the world and the world lives in us. The…emotions our bodies carry are transpersonal energies housed in our flesh and rooted in our responses to the world—our responses to the inevitable pain of being alive and being humanly connected to others. We see our private feelings through the lens of our separateness. But when we widen the lens, it becomes clear that everything we feel is experienced within a larger system of emotional ecology.” I like the idea that there is an emotional as well as a physical ecosystem.

This view of emotion has helped me deal with the pain in my gut, and it has also helped me to connect with the scriptures we are reading today. I have always had trouble with Psalm 51, partly because I don't think of myself as a great sinner. I'm kind of a mediocre sinner.

The Psalm begins, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you alone have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgement. Indeed I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” I really don't like that part. I have a really nice mother and babies are so innocent, at least for the first week or so.

If I read this psalm from an individual point of view, I find I have a mental disconnect. I'm not like King David. I haven't slept with someone else's spouse and had anyone killed to get my way. I haven't slaughtered thousands of innocent people in tribal wars.

Now I get it. I have, because we have, because we live in the world and the world lives in us. Martin Luther King Jr said, “We are all interconnected in an inescapable web of mutuality." But this is too much to bear. I want to go back to believing that I am me and you are you. I don't want to believe that what happens in the world has anything to do with me. I want to go back to sending happy e-mail. And I want to get this pain out of my gut.

Our problem is not that we have painful emotions, but that we have been taught that we shouldn't. Steeped in the medical model, our culture labels suffering as pathology or as a sign of failure and inadequacy. Painful emotions are treated like an illness, an infection that needs to be eradicated as soon as possible. Suffering is viewed as a defect in our personality that must be changed if we want to be seen as mentally healthy. We are told that if we don't finish grieving in two weeks to a month there must be something wrong. And in churches we are taught that fear, despair or anger is a sign of sin or a lack of faith.

Greenspan suggests that it is our “inability to tolerate our grief, fear, and despair that is the source of what ails us" as a society. Suppressed grief devolves into depression, anxiety and addiction. Legitimate fear that we refuse to acknowledge turns into panic, phobias, prejudice and violence. Unconscious despair can lead to destructive acts to ones self or others.

But it is not the emotion itself that is dangerous; rather it is our unwillingness to tolerate it. Miriam Greenspan shares her story of communal pain as a child in a Displaced Person's camp after World War II. She says, “What my life has taught me is that the heart heals itself when we know how to listen to it….Each dark emotion has its own kind of wisdom, its own value and purpose,…each in it's own way calls us to transformation."

And the psalmist says, “You desire truth in the inward being; therefore, teach me wisdom in my secret heart." The wisdom is there; we just need to listen to what we have been given.

“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean, wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice." It's easy to read this as saying, “make all the bad stuff go away, so I can read happy e-mails again." But maybe being clean is not washing away all dark emotions but washing away the illusions, the false beliefs about our individual guilt or innocence.

I’ve never liked the idea of God crushing my bones, but now I understand that feeling crushed is the other side of feeling loved. Emotional suffering doesn't mean we are sick. It means we are alive; that we live in a damaged and damaging social environment; and that we are challenged to use our suffering for the purpose of transformation. “Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our hearts. Grief is a sacred, redemptive spiritual process that develops our empathy and compassion."

We grieve, we fear and we experience despair because we are vulnerable. But vulnerability does not only mean that we are open to being hurt. Being vulnerable means that we are open to anything that comes our way, both good and bad, both pain and pleasure, sorrow and love and intimacy and awe. Vulnerability is what we share as human beings: our openness to being affected by one another. Vulnerability is at the core of our interconnectedness. Maybe this is also the core of our relationship with God. Maybe it is the center of what it means to be created in the image of God.

When the psalmist said, "Against you alone have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight,” maybe this is what he was beginning to grasp. When we refuse to be vulnerable and feel the pain of others, we deny our connection to divinity. David acted as if he were not connected to the feelings of those who suffered, and in that he action denied his connection to God.

“Create in me a clean heart, Oh God, and put a new and right spirit within me”--a heart cleansed of the illusion of my separateness, a spirit that sees the world as it really is. “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing heart.” Joy is not the same as happy. It's more than happy. It is a deeper experience able to hold within it the fear and grief and despair of being interconnected with the rest of the world.

Rachel Naomi Remen is a doctor who lives with a chronic illness and teaches and counsels both patients and physicians. In her book "Kitchen Table Wisdom," she speaks of this kind of joy. She says, “Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable. When people begin to take such an attitude they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their sufferings have not caused them to reject life. As a friend with AIDS puts it, ‘I have let go of my preferences and am living with an intense awareness of the miracle of the moment.' Remen concludes, “From such people I have learned a new definition of the word joy. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live not holding back because life may not meet our expectations....Joy seems more closely related to "aliveness" than to happiness."

So, how do I move from the pain in my stomach that returns each time I see the news, to the joy the psalmist asks for? That brings us back to Lent and the gospel of John. John doesn't provide us with a scene from the garden of Gethsemene. The author of John has Jesus talking with a group of Jews and Greeks in Jerusalem. But Jesus expresses the same emotions. “Now My soul is troubled. And what should I say. Father save me from this hour?” God’s answer is no. The way of Jesus is not away from the pain, but through the pain.

Joanna Macy writes of the despair that settles in on those who work in the field of ecology as they face the enormity of the damage that is being done to the earth and all the species and populations of the world. Not surprisingly, her suggestions mirror those of Miriam Greenspan in dealing with the pain of our human interconnectedness.

First, like Jesus we need to affirm the value of despair and say no to the desire to run or accept the comfortable illusions the world offers us. We need to recognize the pain in our gut or back or heart as something that does not need to be medicated, but instead embraced. We have to be willing to live with it and listen to it. Then we need to speak it, write it, draw it, sing it, dance it; in whatever way possible, share it in community.

Finally, we need to act on it in whatever form is available to us: community service, political action, recycling, planting a garden, visiting the prisoner, praying for others who are despairing, acting for the sake of the world.

As we do these things we surrender to the process of being connected to the world. Knowing that our efforts are not going to solve the problem. We will wake up tomorrow to the news of more pain and sorrow. We suffer with the world and we are transformed into compassionate beings, followers of Jesus, the one who showed us the way of salvation by walking into the experience we now call Holy Week.