Accepting bleak emotions to feel a path to healing

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were given a gift. God, taking compassion on their loneliness and their exile, gave them tears to heal their grief. This Talmudic parable does not open Miriam Greenspan’s thoughtful and compelling book “Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair,” but it could, for it encapsulates her fundamental teaching that in the depth of our despair lies our healing. By calling the emotions “dark,” Greenspan does not mean that they are bad, only that our culture encourages us to suppress and shun them. In her view, there are no negative emotions, only human emotions and negative attitudes toward emotions that we can’t bear.

Greenspan is a psychotherapist who has helped create the relatively new field of women’s psychology. Her first book, “A New Approach to Women and Therapy,” argued that therapy, as conventionally conceived, must be transformed if it is to meet the needs of women. “Healing Through the Dark Emotions” is an equally radical and even more crucial book.

Greenspan begins by placing her subject in a world in crisis. “The images of grief, terror, and despair around the globe affect us all, whether we dwell on them or not,” she writes. “Random acts of terror; national, ethnic, religious and regional wars in which long-standing antagonisms erupt in horrific bouts of rageful vengeance; and the mounting violence of everyday life assault our sense of safety and erode our confidence in the world at this dawning of the twenty-first century.” Her book is divided into four parts: “Emotion-Phobia,” “Emotional Alchemy,” “Emotional Ecology” and “A Home Course in Emotional Alchemy.” The very names of these sections invite us to read them as koans.

Emotion-Phobia: Greenspan argues that to the extent that our culture encourages us to avoid emotion, we become strangers to our feelings, experience them as alien and fail to understand their language. Once we accept our emotions, we learn the art of vulnerability, without which dark emotions feed addictions, create victims and compel us to numb ourselves or be driven into states of depression and anger.

Emotional Alchemy: That emotions have the capacity to transform themselves is Greenspan’s central thesis. Emotional energy, for instance, moves in the direction of healing when we know how to surrender to it mindfully, she believes. What are the gifts in store for a person who learns to practice this emotional alchemy? Grief can become gratitude. Fear can become the hard-won joy of living with our fear and using it intelligently. Despair can become an abiding faith in life.

Emotional Ecology: “In the deep structure of emotion, there is an inescapable link between the self and the world.... Dark emotions grow in the soil of a painful world.... The dark emotions both grow out of and return us to a living matrix of relationships with others.”

It is generally accepted that people who suffer are isolated and enclosed by their suffering and that their suffering divides them from the rest of humanity, drives them inward and keeps them from participation in the world. But Greenspan reverses these assumptions and places the individual who is despairing back into the world. Questions that are usually left outside of the therapeutic inquiry -- because they do not take us back into the past, into childhood, into already named psychological complexes -- come into play with contemporary urgency.

Furthermore, Greenspan asks how are our feelings are related to a world filled with destruction. She wonders how we understand mass psychology in a violent world and how might we change ourselves to meet the crises of our world. How do we heal our world in order to be healed ourselves as individuals?

“The dark emotions are shared in the human family,” she writes. “Emotional energy is transpersonal.... Grief, fear, and despair in the human family carry information that remains private and disempowered so long as we see it as ‘mine’ alone.”

Greenspan believes she can teach us to alter fundamentally our fearful and avoidant relationship to deep feelings. She presents 33 exercises that could be regarded as spiritual practices. They are concrete, specific, ingenious, helpful, demanding; they include lessons in intention, bodily sensations, conscious breathing, the expanding of one’s emotional palette: “Remember having a pack of eight jumbo crayons as a child? You could draw vivid pictures, but subtlety and nuance were limited. Now remember your first box of forty-eight crayons?”

If we learn to color with subtlety and nuance, we can identify and recognize shades of feeling and the bodily sensations that often carry them. We can be brought to participation with rather than alienation from others. We can use our own emotional darkness to understand and perhaps change our world. “Healing Through the Dark Emotions” is road map to that world.