Healing through the Dark Emotions
The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair
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4.5 • 6 Ratings
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Nautilus Book Award Gold Winner
A psychotherapist offers “crucial” guidance on how to “alter fundamentally our fearful relationship to deep feelings,” from depression and anxiety to grief and fear (Los Angeles Times)
We are all touched at some point by the dark emotions of grief, fear, or despair. In an age of global threat, these emotions have become widespread and overwhelming. While conventional wisdom warns us of the harmful effects of “negative” emotions, this revolutionary book offers a more hopeful view: there is a redemptive power in our worst feelings. Seasoned psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan argues that it’s the avoidance and denial of the dark emotions that results in the escalating psychological disorders of our time: depression, anxiety, addiction, psychic numbing, and irrational violence. And she shows us how to trust the wisdom of the dark emotions to guide, heal, and transform our lives and our world.
Drawing on inspiring stories from her psychotherapy practice and personal life, and including a complete set of emotional exercises, Greenspan teaches the art of emotional alchemy by which grief turns to gratitude, fear opens the door to joy, and despair becomes the ground of a more resilient faith in life.
“This remarkable book has taught me a whole new way of thinking.” —Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People
“A beautiful piece of work destined to become a perennial classic.” —Martha Beck, author of The Joy Diet
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heartfelt therapeutic manifesto, psychotherapist Greenspan (A New Approach to Women and Therapy) argues that grief, fear and despair are not pathologies to be medicated away but emotions that help us grow psychologically and spiritually. The disavowal of these painful emotions (which she blames on Western culture's privileging of"masculine" reason over"feminine" emotion; lifelong lessons in suppressing emotional pain; and modern psychology's focus on"dispelling feelings, not learning from them") leads to depression, numbness and violence in both individuals and the world at large. But by"attending, befriending, and surrendering" to grief, fear and despair we can effect an"alchemical transformation" through which they become"gratitude, faith and joy." Greenspan's eclectic approach to healing invokes"depth psychology, Hasidic Judaism and Buddhist meditation"; her desire to make"meaning out of suffering" owes something to religious traditions that acknowledge the redemptive value of pain, as well as psychoanalysis's dedication to lighting up the mind's dark recesses, while her praxis includes New Age and recovery movement therapeutics such as visualization, breathing exercises,"chakra bodytalk" and prayer. Drawing on her clinical experience and her own painful recollections of the death of her infant son and her parents' travails during the Second World War, Greenspan writes intensely and compassionately. This is a committed, serious look at the emotions most of us would rather sweep under the rug.
