Greenspan - Healing through the dark emotions : the wisdom of grief, fear and despair

Winner of the 2004 Nautilus Award

Greenspan writes intensely and compassionately. This is a committed, serious look at the emotions most of us would rather sweep under the rug.

Publishers Weekly

The gold standard of books on difficult emotions. This book has the power to heal and change your life and the way you live it.

Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Womens Bodies, Womens Wisdom

A crucial book that teaches us to alter fundamentally our fearful relationship to deep feelings.

Kim Chernin, Los Angeles Times

A book of remarkable depth. The author is a brilliant thinker and a natural storyteller. I've read countless books about the difficult emotions. None is as helpful and riveting as this oneor offers as much hope for our personal suffering and turbulent times.

Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., author of The Dance of Anger

A modern day alchemist, Greenspan teaches us to turn our pain into wisdom and our fear and sorrow into energy to improve the world. She offers us a clear and profound analysis of what we must do as individuals and as a species to survive these troubled times.

Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

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 Expecting Adam and The Joy Diet

This is a beautifully written, deeply compassionate, and revolutionary approach to working with the most difficult human emotions. Miriam Greenspan teaches us how to trust our emotions and how to listen to hear the truth they reveal. This is a practical guide that illuminates how the wisdom of the heart can heal ourselves, each other, and our world.

Janet Surrey, Ph.D., founding scholar of the Jean Baker Miller Training Institute at the Stone Center, Wellesley College

Miriam Greenspan will help you turn the lead in your life into gold of joy and peace. Of equal importance, she helps us see that such changes are not for ourselves alone, but for the whole world.

Henry Grayson, Ph.D., author of The New Physics of Love

This book is essential reading for all people. It beholds that which is tragic about the human condition but embraces it in a therapeutic and consoling way. Greenspan describes enormous grief and terrorher own and the worldsand explains what it means to surrender to fear, to face straight into it, to let it be as the royal road to sanity, exuberance, and freedom. She is a trustworthy guide for us in these times.

Phyllis Chesler, author of Women and Madness and Womans Inhumanity to Woman

Written with grace, clarity, and humility, this book beautifully integrates the psychological, spiritual, and political wisdom necessary for personal and social transformation.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun magazine and author of Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul

This riveting book is a powerful, urgent appeal for a transformation of our values and the way we conduct our lives. The author is a therapist but she writes not only for other therapists, who will deepen and expand their practice from their reading, but for all of us who struggle daily not to be defeated by the global darkness in which we live.

Sophie Freud, Professor Emerita, Simmons College School of Social Work

This is a profound and liberating book. Miriam Greenspan helps us to discover the life-redeeming power of the very emotion we most fear. Thus she opens ways to both our integrity and our freedom.

Joanna Macy, author of Widening Circles

ABOUT THE BOOK

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 its 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.

MIRIAM GREENSPAN is an internationally known psychotherapist, writer, and speaker who has helped to establish the field of womens psychology. She is the acclaimed author of A New Approach to Women and Therapy and lives in Boston with her husband and two daughters.

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Shambhala Publications, Inc.

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2003 by Miriam Greenspan

Cover art by Christopher Harris, Summer Hill, Riley Road, Whitman County, photograph.

Courtesy of Lisa Harris Gallery, Seattle, Washington.

Excerpt from East Coker in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot reprinted with permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from Ash Wednesday in Collected Poems 19091962 1930 and renewed 1958 by T. S. Eliot reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Will We Help Them Save the World? by Colin Greer is reprinted with permission from the author and Parade Publications 1999.

Diligent efforts were made in every case to obtain rights from copyright holders. In a few instances, the efforts were unsuccessful. The author and the publisher are grateful for the use of this excerpted material.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalogues the previous edition of this book as follows:

Greenspan, Miriam.

Healing through the dark emotions: the wisdom of grief, fear, and despair/ Miriam Greenspan.1st. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2427-0

ISBN 978-1-57062-877-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-59030-101-2 (paper)

1. Affective disordersPopular works. 2. GriefPopular works. 3. FearPopular works. 4. DespairPopular works. I. Title.

RC537.G726 2003

616.8527dc21

2002008069

With love and gratitude, this book is dedicated to my family of spiritual teachers

Aaronfor the blessing of your spirit

Annafor the light in your eyes and the fire in your soul

Estherfor knowing the secret of life is love people and showing us how to live it

and especially Rogerfor your courage and for a mind and heart as large as the world

A Note to the Reader

ALMOST ALL OF THIS BOOK was written before September 11, 2001. I was putting the finishing touches on the last chapter when I heard the news and ran to see on television the crash that shook the world. Throughout this book, but especially in the last two chapters, I have made the case for the profound connection between our personal experiences of grief, despair, and fear, and the world we inhabit. After September 11, this connection has become all too transparent.