“I only miss you when I’m breathing.” Jason Derulo
This was Jason Kurtz’s response to my question: “Is the feeling of “missing” someone always healthy?” An esteemed psychotherapist in New York City, and the author of a wonderful memoir (Follow the Joy) about discovering one’s true self and passions, Jason believes the healing process not only requires the feeling of emotions, fully or whatever level is possible, but also feeling them with compassion, patience and understanding. But there are “term limits” to feelings, and in the case of mourning a death, for instance, holding on for too long and for the wrong reason is unhealthy, as Jason describes below.
“Some people feel like they are betraying their loved one if they get over the pain of their passing and often fight to keep the grief alive and intense, going over and over memories and refusing to allow themselves to be consoled, out of fear that it would be an insult to the departed if the grief subsided. When this happens, then the grief is harmful, because it prevents the person from healing and potentially filling that hole with a new love, taking up activities they enjoy, engaging in the full experience of life. Instead, they are frozen in time with someone who is no longer there.”
When, however, is the right time to move on? And is it even possible after losing a loved one? There really is no way to know; no calculation exists on the number of days, months, years, even decades that must pass before one might feel better. I know from my own experience, after my father died, that sorrow came later than expected, and then hit harder than expected. I chose therapy to cope with the resulting anxiety. Talking with a mental health professional helped me to stabilize, providing me with a regular forum to feel and process my feelings. It also helped me understand that these feelings, painful as they were, had a purpose, and to rush past them or avoid them altogether was counterproductive. As Carl Jung opined, “What we resist, persists.”
But how not to resist something so painful? According to Jason, “You have to feel whatever you are feeling, even when it is uncomfortable or inconvenient.” Like many things in life, this is easier said than done. When my anxiety was raging, my only desire was for the suffering to stop. Sometimes prescribed medication helped to calm things down, and sometimes it didn’t. There were moments when I believed I was doomed to be forever in an anxious state. If you asked me then if I was feeling the feeling, I would say, “Yes, and then some.” I was miserable, and it showed.
Finally, things improved – gradually, at first, and then gaining momentum as my nervousness abated and my mood brightened. It was then that I was able to look back with perspective on a year of pain and see how I contributed to it. I did “fully feel” my anxiety during that period, spending my waking days (and sleepless nights) trying to figure out how to get rid of it. But I did not “fully feel” what truly mattered: the overwhelming sense of grief about my father’s death. That was more than my psyche could handle at the time, and so anxiety became a distraction, an outlet for my sorrow, a receptacle for my swirling thoughts and dark moods.
What I went through, Jason often encounters in his practice. He says, “Often, when we feel emotions that either feel bad, or feel embarrassing, or feel inappropriate we tend to want to repress them and deny them, and when we do that the feelings fester and often come out in unexpected and unwanted ways. When we’re talking about grief, if something happens that reminds you of the loved one, or of a cherished memory, and you feel sad, the goal is to allow yourself to feel that sadness. To cry if you need to cry. Or laugh if you need to laugh. Without judging whether your grief is lasting too long or whether it is disrespectful to be laughing when the person is dead. Our bodies, and our nervous systems, have a deep wisdom, developed over countless millennia.”
All this reminds me of what my therapist often said to me during that difficult year after my father’s passing, when I was riddled with anxiety and asking when the bad feelings would go away: “Grief will let you go when it wants to let you go.” It’s a wise idea in many ways, reinforcing the truth that we need time to mourn, to explore our feelings, to regain our footing, if we are to heal. Still, we must not be passive in the process. As Haruki Murakami said, “We cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.” But we can feel them. And the more we do, the less they hurt.
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