Status Updates From Healing through the Dark Em...

“When we hurt, we think of therapy, not community involvement, political action, or spiritual service. It takes a prolonged period of economic decline, a community wide tragedy in our midst, such as a war, to remind us we are all emotionally interconnected.”

“Fear Beliefs Inventory”

“Affect tolerance”

“Almost any fear or phobia that you could name, at its core, gets down to these six.
Fear of:
- Pain
- Loss
- Death
- Vulnerability
- Isolation
- Chaos”

“When we are afraid of feeling fear, when we are unconscious of its hold on us, when we avoid it, then we can’t use it or move through it. We become frozen in the fear of fear and we’re more likely to end up one of the phobics of panic sufferers. The word fear, like anger, is global and undiscriminating. It would help matters if we have more words with more nuanced distinctions.”

“See the demon of despair and greet it, ‘hello darkness my old friend.’ Be with it, but don’t indulge it. Read about it, speak about it, dream about it. Write down your dreams. Don’t fight it. Fighting it only wastes your energy….”

“While contemporary books on emotional intelligence advise you to distract yourself from your bad mood, I would say the opposite.”

On the other hand, she makes many great arguments for why it’s important to lean into the discomfort of “negative feelings” (vs. being afraid of them, pushing them down, using avoidance behaviors, etc.)

Reflections so far: I know that spirituality can arguably be a component of building resilience, but I was still surprised by how often different religious texts are referenced and interwoven into these stories. I also feel a bit cautious of interpreting some of the more Freudian-inspired interpretations of therapy and the author’s stance against psychiatric drugs.

“When we are most vulnerable we are most alive, most open to all dimensions of existence. In our venerability is our power.”

“A sense of living a life that cannot be listened to.”

Learning through first person narrative storytelling 💡‼️

“Emotion phobia”

“When I call them dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome, or pathological. I mean that, as a culture, we have kept these emotions in the dark - shameful, secret, and unseen. As a result, we tend, for the most part, to shun them. But the emotions that we reject and suppress can become dark in an altogether different sense. Like a rich fertile soil from which unexpected flowers can bloom.”