OMG Digital Magazine OMG Issue 290 4th January 2017 | Seite 6

OMG Digital Magazine | 290 | Thursday 4 January 2017 • PAGE 6
SoulFood
The Key to Healing
Emotional
Wounds
By Martha Beck
It's healthy to share painful experiences—
but there's a difference between honoring
emotions and wallowing in them.
Recently I met a new client (let's call her Greta) who had
been feeling worse and worse—depressed, defeated,
devoid of energy and joy. After visiting doctors,
therapists, astrologers and psychics, she scheduled me
for three days of intensive coaching, proclaiming that I
was her last hope. She began by showing me her diary of
poetry and illustrations, which seemed to describe every
bad thing that had ever happened to her, from childhood
bed-wetting to split ends. You could call it Greta's Little
Book of Hurt, except it wasn't little.
"Why do I still feel so horrible?" Greta sobbed. "I work so
hard on myself." True, she'd worked diligently—but not
in any way that would help her feel better. Instead of
honoring her emotions and healing, Greta had chosen to
wallow in them.
Everybody does this sometimes, including me. At my
yearly retreat in South Africa, I often see my worst self in
Cape buffalo, which are like cows, if cows were a gazillion
times stronger and appeared to be full of seething rage.
When they're not trampling hunters, Cape buffalo spend
their time wallowing in mud, ruminating, and probably
dreaming of ways to kill. They're metaphors for the way I
can loll about in emotional negativity, rechewing stories
from my own Little Book of Hurt. But wallowing only
mires us deeper in the pit of despair.
The reasons we wallow are part nature, part nurture. Like
all animals, we're biologically programmed to focus on
injury; doing so helps us stave off threats to our survival.
But we humans aren't usually defending ourselves
against hunters, so our painful memories don't serve the
same practical purpose. Humans also have a unique way
of recovering from trauma: We need to share our hurts.
Fortunately, pretty much everyone now knows that
talking to a compassionate, nonjudgmental person can
heal emotional wounds. But when our cultural focus on
"the talking cure" joins forces with our natural inclination
toward negativity, we can get stuck. That's what had
happened to Greta, who didn't know that repeatedly
telling a sorrowful story only lights up your brain's
pathways of suffering, so you're essentially experiencing
the tragedy over and over. At least buffalo wallow in
soothing mud and rechew tasty grass. Humans wallow in
emotional acid and ruminate on the bitterest moments
of our lives.
If you wonder whether you're honoring your feelings or
stewing in them, see if these statements ring true:
Your thoughts often drift toward the same story of loss or
injustice—and each time, you're left unhappier.
You can feel mildly peevish or gloomy, then brood until
your feelings intensify into fury or depression.
The agony feels perversely comfortable, like a pair of
well-worn sweatpants.
Your loved ones glaze over when you talk about your
problems.
You're starting to bore yourself.
Sound familiar? Chances are you're up to your eyeballs
in muck. Luckily, you can pry yourself out. Here's the key:
Change the way your story ends.
A South African friend says that Cape buffalo look at you
as if you owe them money. Emotional wallowers are also
obsessed with unpaid debts: Someone has done them
wrong, and they deserve reparations. That payback
never comes, so the tale of woe isn't resolved. In his
book What Happy People Know, psychologist Dan Baker,
PhD, says that joyful people finish their life stories on a
very different note: appreciation. Instead of going over
and over what they've lost, they focus on what they've
gained. He recalls a woman who reminisced fondly about
her deceased husband: "I said something along the lines
of what a good man he must have been. 'No way,' she
said. 'He was a womanizer and a drunk. A real pain in the
butt. But we had more love than most people ever dream
of.'" That's a heroic ending if I've ever heard one.
If you've suffered deeply and no one knows, by all means,
find an accepting, empathetic person to talk to. You'll
feel a wave of pain, followed by ease, lightness, and
freedom. After two or three tellings, those emotional
waves will begin to subside. That's the time to walk out
of your wallow and see yourself as a hero. Yes, you went
broke, but people who loved you stepped up to help.
True, you totaled your car—but in the moment you
thought you were about to die, you experienced a peace
beyond fear that you've been able to access ever since.
These aren't stories of self-pity.
They're epic sagas that end with
beauty, courage or wisdom.
You don't have to feel
that way immediately,
but you'll get there
eventually if you
can find a way to
honor your own story
without sinking beneath
it. Alas, Greta's pain did
not abate during the days she
spent reading to me from her Little Book
of Hurt. You can't pull a buffalo from the
mud; it has to climb out under its own steam.
When you can pull yourself out of your own
muck, by giving your same old stories happier
endings, you'll find that rage turns to peace, pain
to power, fear to courage. Now, that's something
to chew on.
Noted!
In a series of studies at the University of California,
Riverside, unhappy subjects who ruminated were
less likely to come up with effective solutions to
problems—and reported being less willing to
implement solutions they did come up with.