Through A Glass Darkly

Miriam Greenspan On Moving From Grief To Gratitude

Psychotherapist and author Miriam Greenspan was born in a displaced-persons camp in southern Germany shortly after World War ii. Her parents were Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust, enduring dislocation, imprisonment in a forced-labor camp, starvation, and the destruction of their families, homes, and community. Although her mother and father did not speak to her about these experiences until she was thirteen, Greenspan remembers sensing their grief from a young age and knowing there was a story there that needed to be told.

A psychotherapist for more than thirty-three years, Greenspan sees the dark emotions as potentially profound spiritual teachers — if we can live mindfully with them. She knows from experience how to befriend these emotions: fate has brought her the death of one child and the disability of another. Though she believes firmly in the idea that conscious suffering can deepen our connection to life and make us more compassionate people, Greenspan understands our tendency to turn away. She quotes Carl Jung: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. . . . This procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not very popular.”

Greenspan holds degrees from Northeastern University, Columbia University, and Brandeis University, and she served on the editorial board of the journal Women and Therapy for a decade. Her first book, A New Approach to Women and Therapy (McGraw-Hill), helped define the field of women’s psychology and feminist therapy in the early eighties. In her most recent book, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair (Shambhala), she argues passionately that the avoidance of the dark emotions is behind the escalating levels of depression, addiction, anxiety, and irrational violence in the U.S. and throughout the world. Her therapeutic approach encourages what she calls “emotional alchemy,” a process by which fear can be transformed into joy, grief into gratitude, and despair into a resilient faith in life. She questions the prevailing psychiatric attitude toward grief and despair, which relies heavily upon psychopharmacology to return us as quickly as possible to a “normal” state. Her focus is on transformation rather than normalcy.

Now sixty, Greenspan has become a spokeswoman for what Jungian analyst James Hollis calls the “swamplands of the soul.” She leads the descent into the most-rejected places in our psyches, having spent a good part of her life learning to navigate this rough terrain.

I met Greenspan for this interview on a sunny day in May 2007 at her home in Jamaica Plain, a tree-lined Boston neighborhood. She lives in one part of the house with her two daughters and husband, while her ninety-five-year-old mother occupies the other. Greenspan led me to the space where she meets with her psychotherapy clients: a light-filled room adorned with images and objects from nature and mythology. Though we talked primarily about the dark emotions, the conversation was anything but depressing. I was struck by how willing Greenspan is to be present with what is. She quotes the comedian Lenny Bruce: “We all live in a happy-ending culture, a what-should-be culture. . . . We are all taught that fantasy. But if we were taught ‘This is what is,’ I think we’d all be less screwed up.”

Platek: Why do you think it is important for us to pay attention to the dark emotions, in particular?

Greenspan: Actually I think it’s important for us to pay attention to our emotions, in general. Too many people have never learned to do this, because they’ve never been encouraged to do it. We have the notion that our emotions are not worthy of serious attention.

Naturally we have less difficulty with the so-called positive emotions. People don’t mind feeling joy and happiness. The dark emotions are much harder. Fear, grief, and despair are uncomfortable and are seen as signs of personal failure. In our culture, we call them “negative” and think of them as “bad.” I prefer to call these emotions “dark,” because I like the image of a rich, fertile, dark soil from which something unexpected can bloom. Also we keep them “in the dark” and tend not to speak about them. We privatize them and don’t see the ways in which they are connected to the world. But the dark emotions are inevitable. They are part of the universal human experience and are certainly worthy of our attention. They bring us important information about ourselves and the world and can be vehicles of profound transformation.

Platek: And if we don’t pay attention to them?

Greenspan: Well, the Buddha taught that we increase our suffering through our attempts to avoid it. If we try to escape from a hard grief, for instance, we may develop a serious anxiety disorder or depression, or we may experience a general numbness. It is difficult to live a full life if we haven’t grieved our losses. I also think that a lot of our addictions have to do with our inability to tolerate grief and despair. Unrecognized despair can turn into acts of aggression, such as homicide or suicide. The same is true of fear. When we don’t have ways to befriend and work with it, fear can turn violent. We see too many examples of this in the world today.

Platek: You refer to our culture as “emotion phobic” but suggest that we are also drawn to “emotional pornography.” What do you mean?

Greenspan: By “emotion phobic” I mean that we fear our emotions and devalue them. This fear has its roots in the ancient duality of reason versus emotion. Reason and the mind are associated with masculinity and are considered trustworthy, whereas emotion and the body are associated with the feminine and are seen as untrustworthy, dangerous, and destructive. Nowhere in school, for example, does anyone tell us that paying attention to our emotions might be valuable or necessary. Our emotions are not seen as sources of information. We look at them instead as indicators of inadequacy or failure. We don’t recognize that they have anything to teach us. They are just something to get through or to control.

But despite our fear, there is something in us that wants to feel all these emotional energies, because they are the juice of life. When we suppress and diminish our emotions, we feel deprived. So we watch horror movies or so-called reality shows like Fear Factor. We seek out emotional intensity vicariously, because when we are emotionally numb, we need a great deal of stimulation to feel something, anything. So emotional pornography provides the stimulation, but it’s only ersatz emotion — it doesn’t teach us anything about ourselves or the world.

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