The following comes from Tian Dayton’s book on emotional healing The Quiet Voice of the Soul. Tian works with clients who have undergone trauma and a lot of her work is done with adult children of alcoholics. I highly recommend all of her books which include : Emotional Sobriety, Trauma and Addiction, Daily Affirmations for Forgiving and Moving On.
In this excerpt she explains how healing of depression involves the arising of anger and sadness in a process of awakening to deeper realities of our inner self we may have had to hide or dissociate from. I hope it helps some readers:
There is the depression that weighs heavily on body and spirit, the result of years of unfelt, unexpressed anger turned inward. There is the depression that comes from unfelt sadness, frozen tears that were held too long inside, waiting for a safe time and place to flow. There is also something that can feel like depression but is really despair. Paradoxically, this can be almost good news, because it means that we have reached bottom at last, and there is no where to go but up.
When we recover from depression, all the feelings that have been numbed in an attempt to get by, to look good, or to hide, will be warmed in the healing process. AS the frozen self begins to melt the anger courses through us like life returning to the body. It may seem inappropriate or out of control, but it is part of the healing, part of reconnecting with the self. Tears that welled in our eyes without falling now will at last be released. We can give voice to a wail that rocks us to the core.
People who come back from depression feel they are being reborn because they re-experience parts of themselves and feelings they forgot existed. Part of this rebirth is feeling all of our emotions, as if for the first time, and this can be both joyful and fearful, exhilarating and unsteadying. The road back from depression is rocky and full of emotion. But when our depression has lifted, we will be on speaking terms with parts of ourselves that we have not met for years.
The important issue she addresses in these quotes is the relationship of depression with loss of access to the self and emotions which are guides to our inner life and world. When we are depressed or dissocaiated we often feel numb we cannot feel anything. Additionally we may have feelings blocked in shame and when we start to feel them we feel shame. We may, at this point in our healing be besieged by negative voices of the inner critic, something Pete Walker deals with in depth in his book on Complex PTSD. We may even be shamed or discouraged from our healing process by others. What do you want to go feeling all that stuff for? Why can’t you just put it behind you? Surely its not good for you feeling all of these feelings!
We must not listen to these voices. We will move through our feelings and rections to trauma, loss, neglect, abandonment, betrayal or abuse, but we never can consciously put our trauma behind us, until we understand its full impact on our psyche, body and soul.
We need encouragement in our healing process and to feel our emotions, we need validation of our emotional reality and we also need to relate feelings to past injuries, losses, deficits or wounds. We need mostof all to practice self care and self compassion granting ourselves this acceptane and understanding that we are involved in a healing process that will take time and may, for a time, make us feel unstable. That is all a part of the emergence process we are going through. Finding ways to ground, to practice self care, to connect with nurture and soothing resources such as pets and nature or supportive healing friends or groups is helpful. Sharing about our experiences and receiving validation is also important to our healing process.
We may also need to cry and find a release and return of energy when we do allow this to occur naturally.
Tears release grief and when I am putting myself through the recovery process there will be times when I cry a lot. Though I will not necessarily know what I am doing, I will let myself weep, knowing that tears would not be coming if they were not within me to be shed. They heal me and restore a sense of health, well being and equilibrium. I let myself have my natural healing process.
* * * * *
When I was young, I repressed feelings of anger and pain because at the time I had nowhere to go with them. They were too dangerous for me; expressing them to myself would have meant I had lost my place in the world, the only place I had. It was a question of suvival and basic security When repressed feelings come to the surface, they feel overwhelming and frightening There is all this feeling and no particular place to go with it. I can project it into my life today or I can follow the feeling toward its origin and see what it’s really about and allow myelf to re-feel or re-experience it in the safety of today (Or with safe others.)
Tian Dayton
Emerging From The Dark Night 