Badnews Affective Disorder? (BAD)

Whenever I'm feeling low (and I've been low lately), I submit myself to a maddening interrogation: Are my expectations of myself to high? Are they too low? It is because I'm going through a transition - I'm in limbo? Is it because my jobs aren't fulfilling? And so on... I'd like to note that the relentless interrogation never actually helps me feel better; it only adds frustration to sadness - not a pretty combination.

You'll notice a theme in my self-interrogation: I, me, my... In their book Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown make an astute point:

"[The source of pain] lies less in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering - of what happens to our and other species, to the legacy of our ancestors, to unborn generations, and to the living body of the Earth.
"What we are dealing with here is akin to the original meaning of compassion: "suffering with." It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. It is the pain of the world itself, experienced in each of us...
"That pain is the price of consciousness in a threatened and suffering world. It is not only natural, it is an absolutely necessary component of our collective healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose: it is a warning signal, designed to trigger remedial action.
"The problem, therefore, lies not with our pain for the world, but in our repression of it." (Macy and Brown, pp. 27).

They go on to discuss several sources of repression, including fear of pain, fear of appearing morbid (or, as I would put it, fear of being "Debbie Downer"- see earlier posts), fear of guilt, fear of causing distress, fear of appearing weak and emotional and belief in the separate self. I am guilty of most of these, but the last one is what really gets me:

"It is hard to credit our pain for the world, if we believe we are essentially separate from it...So, people have come to assume that feelings of fear, anger, or despair about the world are merely a reflection of personal inner conflict...We find it hard to believe that we can suffer on behalf of society itself, and on behalf of our planet, and that such suffering is real and valid and healthy." (Macy and Brown, p. 31)

The remedy for "pain for the world" as Macy and Brown call it? Grieve!!

When I first read this book last summer, I took their words to heart, bawling on the back porch, book in hand. It was cathartic. Macy and Brown suggest a series of practices to deal with "pain for the world," which so far, for all the reasons they eloquently describe, I have neglected to do. For one thing, you're supposed to do them in groups. I have a hard time with the notion of inviting a bunch of friends over to bawl with me, though I know it would probably be good for all of us. But everybody is so busy, and so on... All the typical excuses...

For now, it's a good start to remind myself that the source of my sadness is not necessarily internal. The constant barrage of bad news takes a toll. And it's okay to cry for it...