jimmy jamesHe aint heavy, he's my brother
July 14th 2008 19:55
I lost my brother last week. The cause of death has yet to be determined. We may never know how he died. It was sudden and it came as a shock. A day later, my brother-in law died of a heart attack.
Life has a way of happening that changes you. I will never be the same person I was. There is such a hollow empty feeling inside, along with sorrow and sadness. Anger is mixed in there as well. I feel numb. It makes me think of the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb”. I hate to feel emotions. I never learned good coping skills to handle them. Killing the pain with drugs and booze provided a type of numbness that pushed all those feelings and emotions deep down and when they started to rise, I would drink and drug to keep them down deep so I wouldn’t have to feel them. After a few years, it was a lot of work to keep going. It became a full time job.
Maybe the reason why we get depressed is because we don’t want to feel things. We are fearful that those feelings will knock us down for good. We have no place to run so we spiral down into the depths of our feelings. Overwhelmed by them, we become over stimulated by everything. We shut down. I once had a counselor tell me that I won’t die from those feelings. I got so angry when she said that. I didn’t feel as though it was a very good thing to say to help me. But years later, I came to see that it is true. My resistance to all those feelings and emotions are what causes the pain, not so much the situation that awakens those emotions and brings them to life. They are like a huge monster that comes along and starts tearing down everything in sight.
Maybe the reason why we get depressed is because we don’t want to feel things. We are fearful that those feelings will knock us down for good. We have no place to run so we spiral down into the depths of our feelings. Overwhelmed by them, we become over stimulated by everything. We shut down. I once had a counselor tell me that I won’t die from those feelings. I got so angry when she said that. I didn’t feel as though it was a very good thing to say to help me. But years later, I came to see that it is true. My resistance to all those feelings and emotions are what causes the pain, not so much the situation that awakens those emotions and brings them to life. They are like a huge monster that comes along and starts tearing down everything in sight.
Look! It's Godzilla
This is what it’s like. Some one close to me dies and I can’t understand the constant changing of emotions. That is the grief, the loneliness, the sorrow, the shock, the numbness. There is a school of thought in the world of psychology that breaks it down like this. First there are our thoughts which lead to our feelings that lead us to our behavior. That triangle is an easy way to understand what is going on with us. Yet, knowing what is going on doesn’t make things any easier. That sort of thinking is only an illusion based upon our fear of not wanting to feel.
There are things that happen in which there is no explanation. All will be revealed in time I guess. These feelings are going to take different shapes and different forms over the course of time. It probably is true that we all deal with grief in our own way. But it needs to run it’s course. The only way out of it, is to go through it.
There are things that happen in which there is no explanation. All will be revealed in time I guess. These feelings are going to take different shapes and different forms over the course of time. It probably is true that we all deal with grief in our own way. But it needs to run it’s course. The only way out of it, is to go through it.
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