Hey, fellow 40-somethings! (The rest of you can take a nap or whatever it is you do)
Down in the dumps? Under the weather? Other silly metaphor for sadness? I just found out that mid-life blues is super-common via Scientific American. (Actually, K, my primary news source, told me about it.) You know you can trust them — they’ve got SCIENCE (or, at least, SCIEN) right in the name. I guess that kooky malaise I’m feeling is normal and I shouldn’t worry about it. Or should I?
I’m reading an interesting book called Healing Through the Dark Emotions by Miriam Greenspan. Greenspan puts forth this idea: that grief, fear, and despair are not “negative”, but an important part of the human experience. However, since we often don’t deal with them because of social stigmas or circumstance, they get planted deep in our psyche, only to resurface later as anxiety and depression.
Frankly, I thought I was over sad circumstances from my past, but lately I’ve realized it’s not so. There still some buried pain there that I basically disowned because I didn’t identify with my former (low self-esteem, socially ostracized) self.
Greenspan claims that by carefully bringing these painful past events to consciousness, and feeling them anew, we can daylight them and reduce their hold over us, and the accompanying anxiety/depression problems that they caused.
Well, goddamn. I hope she’s right.
Here’s a cool interview with Greenspan.
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I wrote this post 2 years ago and I must say that I am no longer suffering from the malaise I had at that time. I’ve also confronted a lot of “dark” things from the past, especially in the last year. This causes me to conclude that Greenspan is indeed correct that by examining and confronting painful experiences from the past, they can stop weighing us down.
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