The Wisdom of the Feelings We're Taught to Avoid

Most of the people who come to see me are very good at managing their feelings. That is often part of the problem.

Somewhere early, many of us learned that grief is something to get over, that fear is weakness (particularly for men), that despair is a malfunction to be corrected with the right mindset or supplement. These clients are competent. They cope. And underneath the coping is a thick layer of their life they have never been allowed, or allowed themselves, to actually feel.

I know this from the inside. I was the child who became the one who handled things — the steady one, the capable one. It took me a long time to understand the cost of that. Being the person who manages everything is a way of being needed, but it is not the same as being close to anyone, and it is not the same as being well. The grief lives right there, in the competence. Years ago, my therapist suggested I read Miriam Greenspan's Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, and I've returned to it time and again, and recommend it to clients. It's not grief, fear, and despair that harm us. It's our refusal to feel them. The avoidance is the pathology. When we treat these emotions as enemies — numbing them, medicating them, positive-thinking our way around them — they do not disappear. They go underground and come back as anxiety, depression, addiction, a low hum of disconnection from our own lives. We are living in an age that gives us plenty of reasons for these feelings to emerge and a billion ways to avoid them — scrolling, alcohol, drugs, sex, Netflix, and on and on.

My clients always choke a bit when I say, "Yes, those are your misery stabilizers. They keep the emotion and it's depth at bay, so you just prolong misery, which can turn into depression or addiction."

What I find most eye opening is Greenspan's refusal of the easy version of hope. The book does not suggest we feel grateful instead of grief-stricken. It suggests something slower and more honest: that if we can stay with grief long enough, without fleeing it, it tends to open into something — tenderness, gratitude, a clearer sense of what matters. Fear, fully felt rather than acted on, can sharpen into aliveness. Despair, met instead of denied, can settle into a more durable faith in life. None of this is a shortcut. You do not get to the other side by skipping the middle. That is the part most self-help leaves out, and it is the part that makes this book trustworthy for me.

We must through, not around. This matters more than almost anything else I do. A lot of my work is with men who were trained from boyhood to convert every soft feeling into either silence, anger or sex. The high-level women who come to me also display fewer emotions to stay in control. Neither is helpful to partnership.

Many partners arrive fluent in control and illiterate in grief. Couples come in stuck in the same patterns for years, and underneath the pattern is almost always a feeling neither person has been able to let themselves have, let alone show the other. A lot of my work is about giving my clients permission to feel what they have been managing, and staying with them while they do.

There is a distinction I hold onto in all of this, and Healing Through the Dark Emotions name it clearly: resilience is not the same as health. A person can be remarkably adapted — high-functioning, accomplished, the one everyone relies on — and still be entirely cut off from their own inner life. Adaptation can be a survival strategy that quietly costs you the thing you were trying to protect. The dark emotions, felt rather than fled, are often the way back.

This is not light reading. The feelings we are most afraid of are the ones with that often most to teach. This book, and I ask something of you. Sit with the feeling. It usually knows where it is going.