Gnawing Old Bones
One of the original meanings of worry is "to gnaw." Like a dog with a bone, the worrier chews all day long, and sometimes it is a very old bone the worrier gnaws. The bone gets buried and dug up, buried and dug up, as the same old pain gets reworried ceaselessly. The only way to let go of that bone once and for all is to feel the original pain through and through.
Liz Brightman was preoccupied with a multitude of problems in her life, significant as well as trivial. But the real source of her worry was decades old. As I listened to Liz tell me her father had committed suicide in a mental hospital when she was 10, I thought to myself, "The sadness she has not felt has become the worry she continues to feel." Liz told me that after the funeral, her mother took the family to a carnival "to have some fun and forget." Her mother never talked about her father again. "Then she met my stepfather, and we went on. My father kept receding into the past, like a rowboat that had fallen off the big ship. I never even cried."
Many people's worries are really masked grief, still buried at home. People may even use worry as a psychological defense against feeling this long-buried pain. Often, the worrier knows what the pain is. Every day a little voice inside says that the answer to your worry lies in traveling north but still you spend your whole life deliberately going in every direction except north.
In Liz's case, going north meant talking about her father. She needed to remember and cry. For many people this is the act they fear the most. Crying feels humiliating, too out of control, too vulnerable, possibly overpowering. But Liz needed to let it out in front of another person and in front of herself, to discover that her world would not fall apart when she did it and that there was no shame in it.
How Liz and I worked on this together would make another book. It is not a simple matter, like saying, "Okay, Liz, cry." But once she had heaved up the big thing, it amazed her how the little things shrunk back down to size. She had gone north and she came back a whole person.
Liz Brightman was preoccupied with a multitude of problems in her life, significant as well as trivial. But the real source of her worry was decades old. As I listened to Liz tell me her father had committed suicide in a mental hospital when she was 10, I thought to myself, "The sadness she has not felt has become the worry she continues to feel." Liz told me that after the funeral, her mother took the family to a carnival "to have some fun and forget." Her mother never talked about her father again. "Then she met my stepfather, and we went on. My father kept receding into the past, like a rowboat that had fallen off the big ship. I never even cried."
Many people's worries are really masked grief, still buried at home. People may even use worry as a psychological defense against feeling this long-buried pain. Often, the worrier knows what the pain is. Every day a little voice inside says that the answer to your worry lies in traveling north but still you spend your whole life deliberately going in every direction except north.
In Liz's case, going north meant talking about her father. She needed to remember and cry. For many people this is the act they fear the most. Crying feels humiliating, too out of control, too vulnerable, possibly overpowering. But Liz needed to let it out in front of another person and in front of herself, to discover that her world would not fall apart when she did it and that there was no shame in it.
How Liz and I worked on this together would make another book. It is not a simple matter, like saying, "Okay, Liz, cry." But once she had heaved up the big thing, it amazed her how the little things shrunk back down to size. She had gone north and she came back a whole person.
This entry was posted by Mandy, on
Wednesday, May 13, 2009.
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