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….”