The only way through is down

Finding our steadiness by Psalming It

I gave a talk recently at a charity working on poverty alleviation and the climate crisis. I knew they would be carrying a lot of heaviness, that their jobs entail daily proximity with issues most of us try to only think about in small doses. If this is you (perhaps especially if you are in the United States right now) you will recognise the weariness and numbing it can create.

In my talk, I lead the group through the process I experienced a few years ago while writing Fully Alive, and which I find myself having to return to again and again. The name I use for myself is “Psalming It”. The Psalms are a book of poetry or songs in the scriptures of both Jewish and Christian communities. There are a lot of them, and they aren’t all the same, but many of them follow a distinctive pattern.

1. Complaint

2. Lament

3. What else is true?

This structure has taught me that, often, the only way through is down. When I’m feeling overwhelmed(by the state of the world or some site of suffering in my own life) my first instinct is not to Psalm It. The two, equally unhealthy, places I go are into denial or despair. In denial I am numbing and distracting, seeking to not just manage my exposure to existential issues but avoid them at all costs. This is when I buy face serums. Giant problems are beyond me, so why not focus on a fixable (pseudo-) problem like uneven skin tone? The other state I go to, less often, is binging on terrible news, turning all my attention and focus to the problems out of some misguided belief that worry is effective action. It very quickly degenerates into fatalism and cynicism.

Psalming It is neither of these. It is a form of emotion processing or regulation which requires us, in that hoary old therapy phrase to “feel our feelings”. There is a mountain of evidence that resisting or repressing negative emotions is a terrible long term strategy, while allowing ourselves to be honest about them reduces stress levels¹. This is one of the first things I had to work on when God tricked me into going to therapy by sending me to a Spiritual Director who was also a therapist. A few sessions in she noticed that I had a compulsive need to put a positive spin on things or distract myself with fantasies of adventure (anyone who knows the Enneagram, feel free to put your guesses of my number in the comments).

I read a beautiful New Yorker piece by Tara Westover which reminded me of myself at this point. In it, Westover, estranged from her family, travels to India to stay with the mother of a friend. Westover asks her:

“How did you keep from breaking?”

There was a tension in my chest. …my question was not about her, I knew that; it was about my own stuckness.

“I broke,” she said. “That is how I kept from breaking.”

She said that one night, sitting outside the city, on the banks of the River Ganges, she had come to pieces in the arms of her friend….

“I succumbed,” she said. “I stopped denying the wounds and felt them, felt their width and breadth. Pain can be clarifying. If you are able to feel it…the pain itself will tell you what to do.”

I looked out of the window, feeling disappointed and empty. This was not the answer I had come for. I wanted something else, some other formula or technique, something more recognisable as strength. I wanted her to tell me I could live my life and never succumb to anything.

….I dreamed that night and for many nights after…In the dream, I travel to a distant land and ask the woman king: what is the source of your power?

Weeping, she says. The source of my power is that I weep.

She has given me the answer. But I do not believe her.

Luckily, I had a spiritual director I did believe. She gently pointed out that the tradition I am in theory trying to live by is very comfortable with grief and anger, but not such a fan of fear. Very opposed to fear, in fact. It became clear that my clenched, mainly subconscious anxiety was a brittle layer masking a magma cave of sadness and rage. Things got messy for a while after that.

The moment we stop denying our wounds and feel them is scary. I am always afraid I will get stuck there, that the wound will swallow me whole. What I have learned is that allowing air to them is necessary for healing. Going down is the only way out. Unprocessed hard feelings just get stuck. Rage or grief start clean, cleansing even, but when I resist them they fester just out of the corner of my eye, necrotising. When I’m struggling to feel joy, to see the beauty of the world, to worship, even, that is what is usually going on.

So how do we do this? Journalling helps, and making art, going for a long walk without your phone. Read a great novel, watch a great film or listen to great music. Whatever works. The thing I have found to be most powerful is this three step process for the psalms. It works best with others.

While speaking to the charity, what this meant was creating a space where we could name what is hard, honestly. In this case, it involved me modelling it, being vulnerable enough to state, not with black humour but baldly, how tempted I sometimes feel to existential despair. I told some stories about that, and many of us had a weep. It gives permission not to pretend. Not pretending, together, is a balm for loneliness.

We use a similar technique during the Larger Us programme, helping participants share tender things about themselves in a safe and appropriate way. Many ritual practitioners attest to the power of these patterns. Creatives too. Catharsis as a reaction to tragedy in theatre was written about by Aristotle. It is one of the key reasons being part of a congregation can be so good for our wellbeing, when they create containers for processing hard feelings in music and story and ritual. This is where I take many of mine.

So that is step one and two. Be honest about what is hard, ideally with others, then let yourself feel the feelings that come up. Give them time. Express them. They might not be pretty. They are often not in the Psalms. That is ok.

Once I’ve “gone down”, I am usually already feeling better. Emotions are designed to be passing states. When we can accept them, they move through us. The third and final step is where I come out into steadiness. The psalms of lament often end with an ascent, an expression of trust in God, and something like the phrase “and yet I will praise him”. The complaint and lament have not shifted the circumstances, and yet, there is something to hold onto. I call it the “what else is true?” step. Injustice and pain are true things about the world, and we need to look them in the eye, but they are not the only true things. Once you’ve eyeballed the darkness and let the rage or grief pass, you can often see other parts of the landscape. Your own resilience, maybe. Other’s kindness. The longer view of history which teaches us how much humans have weathered. In my case, that Love is stronger than death.

As we dried our tears in the charity’s event space, these things began to emerge. Those amazing colleagues shared the vital work they were doing, and the people they met in tough circumstances who seemed to have held onto joy. We all breathed a bit slower, and laughter, real (not bitter) laughter, came easier.

Sadly, I don’t think you can go straight to step three. It comes out too Pollyanna, becomes just spiritual bypassing. Much talk of hope rings this slightly thin, tinny note, because the base line of the song isn’t there. You see it in the churches where everything is always exciting and awesome. I was reminded that these steps have been codified by Hebrew bible Walter Breuggeman in his book Reality, Grief, Hope, and that he often points out that activists are good at reality and hope but bad at grief. They aren’t the only ones.

Despite what is currently being imaged for us, power (real power) is acquainted with pain. It is sapped when we deny it. You can’t get to depth without going down. When we do, we can move forward. And it is often more spacious on the other side.

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

1. Here is one study https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5767148/#:~:text=Finally%2C%20in%20a%20longitudinal%20design,status%2C%20and%20life%20stress%20severity.