Reflections On Despair

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

A person who has experienced violence or other traumatic event, as well as a person in crisis, sooner or later comes to the point of his own despair in therapy. On the surface, the reasons for its occurrence may be associated with the inability to get something very important in an actual relationship. Or a real life situation, with its dead end and hopelessness, actualizes this feeling. Often the client finds a connection between these experiences and his earlier experience, where there was no opportunity to influence the situation. When events unfolded in a terrible or painful direction and there was no way to be saved, or there was no one around who could save, or just suddenly something terrible happened.

Experiencing despair is a very difficult experience. You can only touch it if you lose hope. The hope that everything was really wrong, or that I am in control, or that what is happening does not affect me. This is always evidence of the loss of something valuable, which holds my idea of myself, relationships, or significant others, or the structure of this world.

Despair often comes with horror, or deep sadness and regret, sometimes with shame and guilt. It hurts and is hopeless from the inside, which is why this can be done fully only in the presence of another.

If something happens in life that changes its usual course, and which we cannot influence, sometimes it is necessary to experience despair, only in order to have the strength to move on. The death of a loved one, natural disaster, sudden bankruptcy or serious illness are events that are difficult to ignore. Usually, at such moments, a person goes to other people for support and the opportunity to rely on someone alive and more stable than himself. When the earth is slipping from under our feet, this is the best thing that we can all do for ourselves. And then you can experience what there is no way to influence.

In the case when a person experiences violence, when he comes to therapy, sometimes many and many meetings go to recognize the significance and size of this event or a series of many events. The degree of their influence on themselves and the inability to change what happened. This can be very difficult, because once he could cope with violence only by burying, freezing part of himself along with this story. It is here that despair and pain are the very feelings that a person seeks to experience in order to restore the picture of what happened and pull himself out from under the rubble. This is how grief works. Noticing his despair, a person gets the opportunity to see himself and his life as it is. And no matter how painful it is, it always comes with relief. Because you no longer need to pretend and spend a lot of effort to hide some part of yourself. Pain always asks outward to be experienced. And when there is no longer a need to fight with her, she first begins to live in full force, and then it always gradually ends.

Despair is necessary for us to face our pain. As spring comes only after winter, only after pain gives the right to life, a person can cope with it and continue his life, including in it already experienced and assimilated experience. By making it just a part of your story.

Erich Fromm once said: “Happiness is often seen as the exact opposite of grief or suffering. Physical and mental suffering is part of human existence and inevitably has to be experienced. Protecting yourself from grief at all costs is possible only at the cost of complete alienation, which excludes the possibility of experiencing happiness. Thus, the opposite of happiness is not grief and suffering, but depression resulting from inner sterility and sterility."

In some moments, we can remain alive only at the cost of experiencing our despair, grief and pain. This experience is difficult, but always bearable if there is another nearby.