The wisdom inherent in sadness

‘How are you doing?’ I asked, after he entered my room clearly in a disoriented state.

‘Intense,’ he said. I noticed he tried to catch my eye and I invited him to join me for a cup of tea.

While arranging the cups it was as if I had eyes on the back of my head and, through kinesthetic impressions, saw his emotions rise to a level he could not contain anymore. With a symbolic empty cup in one of my hands I turned around and approached him a bit more with conscious, slow movements. Sustained eye contact was the final doorway into his inner pain. He started to cry intensely, his body trembling and his head shaking while he kept saying ‘no, no, no’. A ‘no’ that was the briefest summary of a lifelong trained resistance based on chronic emotional neglect.

I did away with any psychological theory swirling around in my mind.

I just held him, softly and firmly all at once. I stood there, like shoulders sometimes should. Breathing in, breathing out, I just held him. For more than thirty minutes, he cried and cried and cried and shook his head repeatedly. Every now and then he would ask me whether it was okay for him to cry like this, and I simply responded with a brief but deep sounding ‘Humm, humm’.

If we would have stood there for more than an hour, that would have been okay also.

Sometimes, often even, the best thing we can do for a fellow human being is staying present with our shared bio-rhythm expressed through our breathing and use our capacity to speak very attentively.

‘I felt so, so, so, so lonely,’ the inner child cried out. ‘There truly was nobody there.’

What courage, I felt (but did not mention too quickly), it must have taken him to express his emotions, his deeply hidden pain, outwardly. Let all the ‘no’ be expressed by him until what remains is a sensitive, embodied feeling of being alive and being interconnected with the all-encompassing here and now. In that space and time, I knew, he would surely verbalize the emotional process in a way that would reflect the wisdom back to him, consolidating it in his cognitive structures. I was only there to facilitate him.

This, I think, is what truly counts psychologically.

And, indeed, when he felt ready to drink his tea to soothe his body, he quickly started to talk about the wisdom inherent in sadness. ‘What a shame’, he said, ‘that we don’t acknowledge the insights and truth sadness tells us, that we miss and neglect this truth on a societal level. This is it, this is connection, now I see it.’