Healing Through the Dark Emotions

From journal writing to writing finished plays, memoir, poems and fiction, writers evoke and examine encounters with the dark emotions incited by misfortune, abuse, divorce, severe lack of confidence, fear of difficult and horrifying situations in our world, as well as the loss of a loved one or of a career or of one’s health. Whatever the experience that has been painful, writing about it helps create a shape and a vessel to hold the experience so you don’t have to carry the formless emotions inside. In that way, writing provides a path for encountering the dark emotions and discovering a path toward healing.

Here is a description of author and therapist Miriam Greenspan book Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear and Despair that supports the benefit of writing through the dark emotions:

In an age of global threat, emotions like grief, fear, and despair have become widespread and overwhelming. Our culture calls these emotions ‘negative’ and views them as symptoms of mental disorder or spiritual inadequacy, harmful unless controlled.

In this riveting book, Miriam Greenspan takes a fresh approach to the three emotions we most dread and devalue: grief, fear, and despair. She argues that our avoidance and denial of these dark emotions contributes to the epidemic of psychological ailments characteristic of our age: chronic depression, anxiety, psychic numbing, addiction, and irrational violence. By attending to and befriending the dark emotions, we discover their innate intelligence and purpose. We learn the emotional alchemy by which grief turns to gratitude, fear delivers us to joy, and despair becomes a doorway to a more resilient faith in life. The wisdom of the dark emotions not only helps us to heal and transform our lives, but strengthens our connections to one another and to the world.

Writing is one of the sturdiest of tools for people who want to attend to and befriend the dark emotions.

Greenspan’s website includes sample pages from her book. When you visit there you will find this quote in her essay on the grieving process, which begins with the death of her child and ends with this insight: “Whatever the nature and extent of the loss, we grieve because we are not alone, because we are interconnected; and what connects us to one another also breaks our hearts.” And that is what writing is about — we write because we know that somewhere there are others to connect with; we write because the state of being human is bittersweet and to taste the sweet we must also taste the bitter.

Poets and readers of poetry routinely use poetry to encounter the dark emotion and begin to transform their grief and sorrow. Theodore Roethke’s famous poem “Elegy for Jane” is not only about the loss of a life, but it is also about the inability to connect with the others who are grieving because of the poet’s position outside his student’s family and friendship circles. It is a double loss the poet experiences — both the death of a student and the absence of a community in which to grieve. Writing his poem provides that connection needed to properly grieve. Writing is a necessary friend.

Another poetic form, the villanelle, is especially useful in encountering the dark emotions because it uses the repetitions of lines and rhyme in a specific pattern throughout the poem, a pattern that allows the poet and the reader to encounter their painful emotions over and over but in a way that builds to a crescendo. Wikihow’s entry for the form explains it this way:

• The villanelle has 19 lines, split into 5 tercets (three-line stanzas) and 1 quatrain (a stanza of 4 lines). There are two repeating rhymes and two “refrains,” or repeated lines.
• The 1st and 3rd lines alternate as the last lines of stanzas 2, 3, and 4. The last stanza uses the 1st and 3rd lines as a rhymed couplet. If we use capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2
• There is no set meter in a villanelle but there is a set rhyme scheme. There is no fixed number of syllables for each line in a villanelle.
• The villanelle is broken into three parts: the introduction, the development, and the conclusion. Most villanelles build up intensity and tone until they reach the conclusion.

Martha Collin’s villanelle “The Story We Know”  uses the lines “The way to begin is simple, same, Hello” along with “and Good-bye. In the end, this is a story we know” as the lines that repeat, although she employs a slight variation at the end of her villanelle where the two lines come one after the other to end the poem. The rhyme she uses in the center lines are fine, wine, nine, line, pine, and sign. As we progress down the stanzas, we begin to relive all of the relationships we’ve had. Good-bye is truly at the end of every story we know.

There are times using sarcasm helps us to encounter the dark emotions. Here is a link to poignant, satiric essay in letter form that addresses the break up with a fiancée via the metaphor of losing a limb: “As the infection grew the risk increased (as did the smell). Keeping you from catching the scorn I was getting from family and friends became too much, and I was going poor buying perfume.” You can image that after writing about this encounter with the pain of separation, the author felt better for having revealed it as a disease.

How You Might Begin Writing from Dark Emotions

It may seem daunting to write about the dark emotions. But here is a system with prompts for helping you begin to write, whichever of the emotions you are encountering.

1. Make a list of losses and painful experiences you have experienced under the categories of people, pets, jobs, locations, ideals, body parts, objects, relationships, understandings, prestige, loss of face, money.
2. Thinking in categories will help you find subjects that you might not have thought about without making the list. When one loss or experience that has resulted in dark emotions strikes you as one you’d like to write about, start off one of these three ways:
3. Next, use one of these prompts to begin writing:

When I think about this loss (or painful experience), I….

Dear (name the loss or painful experience), I’ve been thinking about writing to you for a long time and I have much to say….

If I could bury what makes me think of _______, I would bury this _______ and here is why.

****

Once you begin with any of these prompts or use a strategy from the models I have shared, you will find yourself concentrating on form and in that way more easily able to say what you have to say.

Having written about the dark emotions from the painful experiences and losses in a way that provides them shape, I think you will find a transformation back into the light.