Unresolved Feelings Quotes

They hurt you. You hurt 'em back. Or maybe it is the other way around. Whatever. Someday you might find a way to forgive each other. But it won't be like it used to 'cause that pain never really goes away.

Love brings up our unresolved feelings . One day we are feeling loved , and the next day we are suddenly afraid to trust love . The painful memories of being rejected begin to surface when we are faced with trusting and accepting our partner's love .

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediatel;y shut ou all our iner doubts, anxieities, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.

I have to do something about this collection of unresolved feelings before it destroys me.", Celestra Caine, FADE by Kailin Gow

The movies make the brooding guy the hero – the guy with problems the guy who carries a gun, the gun with unresolved anger, the guy with a chip on his shoulder, the guy who’s a vampire – and they tell you that you can have the mythical happy ending with that same brooding guy. But in reality, the brooding guy is cranky. He doesn’t reply to emails. He doesn’t call. He’s only half there when you’re talking to him, and he doesn’t chase you when you run. You feel insecure all the time. You get needy and sad and you hate yourself got being needy. If you don’t know why he’s brooding, you’re shut out. And if you do know why he’s brooding, you’re still shut out. (Because he’s busy brooding.)

Secondly, extroverts often incorrectly assume that introverts are suffering. Introverts internalize problems; we like to take things inside and work on them there. Extroverts prefer to externalize and deal with problems interactively. Because of this difference, introverts may seem psychologically burdened, while extroverts spread the burden around and seem healthier—from an extroverted standpoint. But note that I said introverts like to take problems inside. Sure, an introvert can overdo it, but so can the extrovert who feels compelled to express every unresolved thought or emotion. The former gets depressed or anxious and goes to therapy; the latter sends others to therapy.

Most churches make people feel guilty about natural human inclinations, making them feel dependent on the church for forgiveness. Religion focuses on unresolved human problems of insecurity, shame, fear, and wish fulfillment, and offers hope for a better life in the next world. Science offers people the tools of reason and knowledge to help build self-reliance and free people from mythology and simple wish fulfillment.

Everyone grieves differently. No one handles the loss of a loved one the same. Some put on a brave face for others, keeping everything internal. Others let it all out at once and shatter, only to pick up the pieces just as quickly as they came apart. Still others don't grieve at all, implying they are incapable of emotion. Then there are the ones like me, where grief is a badge we wear, where it's hard to let go because we don't want to. We probably wouldn't know how even is we wanted to. There's unanswered questions, unresolved feelings. Tere is anger that this person could even conceive of leaving us behind. We are the furious ones, the ones that scream at the injustice and the pain. We are the ones who obsess and slowly lose rational thought, knowing it is happening but unable to find a way to care. We are the ones who drown.

Willow Creek, Iowa. Population 5,241. And now, one fewer.

Unfortunately, premature forgiveness strands us in relationships with our parents that are as devoid of genuine warmth and intimacy as ever. Unless we work through the unresolved fear and hurt our parents caused us, we will always be uneasy around them and hold them at an emotional distance. This is commonly the case even when they have outgrown their abusive ways.

Imagine the infant who one day cries and gets fed, and the next day cries and goes hungry. One day smiles and is kissed and hugged. The next day smiles and is ignored. This is what psychologists called 'preoccupied or unresolved attachment' with the primary caregiver--usually the mother. There was love one minute and disdain the next. Affection that was given in abundance for no reason and then taken away without cause. The child has no ability to predict or influence the behavior of the parent. The narcissist loves a child only as an extension of herself at first, and then as a loyal subject. So she will tend to the child only when it makes her feel good.

We all have that one person. It’s not necessarily someone we end up with. But it’s that person who, for whatever reason, gets under your skin and stays there. You can move on, but parts of them are always with you. Sometimes, if things never had a chance to develop, if feelings are still unresolved, that person becomes an even more powerful force in your life, even in absentia.

It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has.For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.

Oh, sweet little boy, beloved little girl, you are so overwhelmed by life sometimes, I know, by the enormity of it all, by the vastness of the possibilities, by the myriad of perspectives available to you. You feel so pressed down sometimes, by all the unresolved questions, by all the information you are supposed to process and hold, by the urgency of things. You are overcome by powerful emotions, trying to make it all "work out" somehow, trying to get everything done "on time," trying to resolve things so fast, even trying not to try at all. You are exhausted, sweet one, exhausted from all the trying and the not trying, and you are struggling to trust life again. It's all too much for the poor organism, isn't it? You are exhausted; you long to rest. And that is not a failing of yours, not a horrible mistake, but something wonderful to embrace!

Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal — the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism.

Through the mechanism of carried shame and carried feelings, the unresolved pain of previous generations operates in families like an emotional debt. We either face it or we leverage our children with it.

I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up. Someone once told me that that was me low-balling my own creativity. That might or might not be the case. But still, on the story I am working on now, I do have some unresolved problem. It doesn’t keep me awake at nights. I feel like when it comes down, it will be there...

Almost everyone who feels stymied, aimless, directionless is carrying an unresolved emotional wound. A lack of enthusiasm for life is always a sign that the deep self is hurt. Every person's essential self is pure, productive energy, and yours will return and send you into a fulfilling life almost automatically if your psyche is in good repair.

Erikson maintained that, in later years, we experience a sense of integrity if we believe we have lived meaningful lives. This sense of integrity gives us a feeling of completeness so that we can better accept our approaching deaths. But if we have unresolved regrets about the past—if we think that we made poor choices or failed to accomplish important goals—we feel depressed and hopeless, which leads us to despair.

Your pain may never be adequately acknowledged by those who injured you. Profound feelings of grief might strike you as you work through unresolved feelings of resentment or disappointment.

If you feel crappy, it's because that's your brain telling you that there's a problem unaddressed or an issue unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it's because you're supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then like everything else, positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.

Childhood trauma can range from having faces extreme violence and neglect to having confronted feelings of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. You may have grown up in an environment where your curiosity and enthusiasm were constantly devalued. Perhaps you were brought up in a family where your parents had unresolved traumas of their own, which impaired their ability to attend to your emotional needs. Or, you may have faced vicious sexual or physical attacks. In all such situations, you learn to compensate by developing defenses around your most vulnerabe parts.

So yes,” Sean gave me a pointed look, “I approve of it wholeheartedly. In fact, seduce her again.” I coughed, choking on nothing, and sputtered, “What? What did you say?” “I said seduce her. And do it now. She has more unresolved feelings for you than Jennifer has for Brad.” He paused, then added, “And do a good job. Do a great job.” I stared at him for several seconds, dumbfounded. “Of course I’ll do a great job.” Sean pointed at me accusingly. “I’m serious. Look up some moves or watch some videos, do whatever it takes to make sure she enjoys herself.” Now I was offended. “Fuck you, Sean. Of course she’ll enjoy herself. She’ll like it so much she’ll beg for-” “Hey.” My teammate narrowed his eyes, slicing his hand through the air. “I don’t need or want to know the specifics. I’m just saying, take good care of her. Take excellent care of her. Give her everything she needs. And don’t be selfish.” “I won’t be.” I shook my head with the denial, staring at Sean. Staring at him because . . . Did he just tell me to seduce his cousin?

I decided to choose: No more sadness because of how someone else will feel. No more hiding my feelings. No more avoiding the truth of how I felt. No more unresolved situations. No more letting people rob me of my happiness and joy and letting life pass me by. No more misery and selling myself short. No more letting people take and steal my inner peace. No more giving a shit about what other people think of me—they are going to form their opinion anyway—and the question is, who cares? Not me. That’s the least of my worries. No more giving everyone the best of me. It is time for me to fall in love with myself and give myself ALL of me!

We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict.

Spiritual bypassing—the use of spiritual beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs—is so pervasive that it goes largely unnoticed. The spiritual ideals of any tradition, whether Christian commandments or Buddhist precepts, can provide easy justification for practitioners to duck uncomfortable feelings in favor of more seemingly enlightened activity. When split off from fundamental psychological needs, such actions often do much more harm than good. ROBERT AUGUSTUS MASTERS, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters

I feel like you have unresolved anger issues with wizards,” I said. “Were you ever scorned in love by a human? Maybe had a Twilight fling?

There's a kind of indignation I know well, when someone feels that the wrong done them has been unrecognized, and a kind of trauma that makes the sufferer into a compulsive storyteller of an unresolved story. You'll tell it until someone lifts the curse by hearing and believing you.

Spiritual bypassing is a term I coined to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us were sincerely trying to work on ourselves, I noticed a widespread tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks. When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and developmental deficits. I see this as an ‘occupational hazard’ of the spiritual path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current karmic situation.

What the actual fuck, Ava? Of course I’d choose shagging over your mimosas and drunken rants about a certain psycho. Shagging is the whole point of these parties, not your unresolved feelings!

if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

Reconciling is about cleaning out your psychic closet. Do you have unresolved issues which are draining your reserves, causing hurt feelings, filling you with regret, or taxing your tenacity? Reconciling can allow you to move forward with acceptance and surrender, rather than berating yourself for what cannot be changed. Are you ready to enjoy peace?

Alcohol robbed me of the ability to see others—like Marc—and understand what they might be feeling or going through. Drinking to escape was profoundly selfish, and all those unresolved resentments and worries metastasized while I drank to ignore them.

When you refuse to think about an issue, it remains unchanged, in precisely the same state as you tucked it away." "Precisely the point of boxing it. The issue dies. Can no longer affect you. It's a damned effective tactic." "Short-term yes. Long-term, a recipe for disaster. When you next encounter whatever you boxed your feeling about, you're ambushed by repressed, unresolved emotion.

Unwilling to tolerate life’s ambiguity, its unresolvability, its inevitability, we search for certainty, demanding that someone else must provide it. Stubbornly, relentlessly, we seek the wise man, the wizard, the good parent, someone else who will show us the way. Surely someone must know. It simply cannot be that life is just what it appears to be, that there are no hidden meanings, that this is it, just this and nothing more. It’s not fair, not enough! We cannot possibly bear having to live life as it is, without reassurance, without being special, without even being offered some comforting explanations. Come on now! Come across! You’ve got to give us something to make it all right. The medicine tastes lousy. Why should we have to swallow it just because it’s the only thing we can do? Can’t you at least promise us that we will have to take it just once, that it won’t taste that bad, that we will feel just fine immediately afterward, that we will be glad we took it? No? Well then, surely, at least you have to give us a lollipop for being good. But what if we are talking to ourselves? What if there is no one out there listening? What if for each of us the only wise man, the only wizard, the only good parent we will ever have is our own helpless, vulnerable self? What then?

if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it

He was the first to look away. I felt something inside me shatter. I still can’t comprehend how he could leave so abruptly, without any farewell, without even glancing back. Why did he never say, "I love you"? The pain is tearing my heart apart. A year has passed, and I still see him in my dreams.

If we ignore and repress an emotion, we won’t erase its message—we’ll just shoot the messenger and interfere with an important natural process. The unconscious then has two choices: to increase the intensity of the emotion and present it to us one more time (this is how unresolving moods or escalating emotional suffering may be activated), or to give up on us and stuff the emotional energy deep into our psyches. Now, that instinct will no longer be readable as itself—as fear or anger or despair—but it will still contain all its original intensity and information. Usually, this squelched intensity mutates into something else, like tics, compulsions, psychosomatic illness, addictions, or neuroses. Repressing our emotions is a perilous way to manage them.

I had the vertiginous feeling one gets standing at the precipice of an unresolved plan, for I had brought Bon and myself to the brink of disaster without knowing how to save us. But was not this how all plans developed, unknown to their maker until he wove for himself a parachute, or else melted into air?

She closed her eyes briefly, feeling sick. Olivia had experienced strangulation before. Having to look directly into the face of the person who was killing you made the experience beyond awful. But there were worse things than that. Staring into the void of unresolved memory, living an eternal mystery, waking up night after night seeing the face of someone you desperately wanted to save but having not the slightest clue how to do it—all that was worse. If going through with this experience gave her the answers she needed, if it gave her peace, it would be well worth one-hundred-and-thirty seconds of fear and pain.

The psychological need to avoid independence - the "wish to be saved" - seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down.

When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.

The feeling was like a phrase ending on a deceptive cadence, hovering, deliciously unresolved.

To feel the pain of unresolvable regret-- this, Jacob is hell. It is far worse than any fire and brimstone man has conjured.

if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved.

Something inside is burning me up, and all I know is it makes me think of you.

Each of us—whether a loved daughter or not—has experienced hurts, slights, and disappointments that, even if half-forgotten or mostly unseen, remain remembered and a part of us nonetheless. Sometimes they are rooted in the deep past but, equally, they may be part of the lived present, and there may be moments when our own unresolved feelings may endanger the equilibrium of our relationships with our daughters. From the point of view of brain science, whether we address those feelings from what Siegel and Hartzell call the “high road”—the powers of reflection embedded in the prefrontal cortex of the brain—or the “low road”—automatic responses embedded in the past applied to the situation at hand—will make all the difference.

It is hard to believe we feel pain for the world if we assume we’re separate from it. The individualistic bias of Western culture supports that assumption. Feelings of fear, anger or despair about the world tend to be interpreted in terms of personal pathology. Our distress over the state of the world is seen as stemming from some neurosis, rooted perhaps in early trauma or unresolved issues with a parental figure that we’re projecting on society at large. Thus we are tempted to discredit feelings that arise from solidarity with our fellow-beings.

He's as bad as my mother. Maybe worse. He's a market-research consultant. He studies people's facial expressions to see how they feel about commercials and products. He used to be a psychologist but he makes more money helping big corporations dupe the public. The worst part is he can look at your face and say 'Your upper lip just twitched! Anger! You're angry. Don't try to hide it from me, young man. Why does it make you angry when I say those pants make you look like a girl? Doe you have something against girls? Perhaps some unresolved Oedipal feelings?

In the same vein, the problem in economic life is supposedly greed, both outside ourselves in the form of all those greedy people and within ourselves in the form of our own greedy tendencies. We like to imagine that we ourselves are not so greedy—maybe we have greedy impulses, but we keep them under control. Unlike some people! Some people don’t keep their greed in check. They are lacking in something fundamental that you and I have, some basic decency, basic goodness. They are, in a word, Bad. If they can’t learn to restrain their desires, to make do with less, then we’ll have to force them to. Clearly, the paradigm of greed is rife with judgment of others, and with self-judgment as well. Our self-righteous anger and hatred of the greedy harbor the secret fear that we are no better than they are. It is the hypocrite who is the most zealous in the persecution of evil. Externalizing the enemy gives expression to unresolved feelings of anger. In a way, this is a necessity: the consequences of keeping them bottled up or directed inward are horrific. But there came a time in my life when I was through hating, through with the war against the self, through with the struggle to be good, and through with the pretense that I was any better than anyone else. I believe humanity, collectively, is nearing such a time as well. Ultimately, greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem. To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of the present crisis of civilization.

We have been together for 40 years, married for 36. There have been three times in our relationship when we were unable to resolve an issue on our own. We used all the skill that we have and yet it was still unresolved. In those three times we sought professional help because there was a blind spot for each of us. The therapist was able to listen to both of us and help us come to a place of resolution that we both felt good about. I feel very grateful for that help. Most times we have been able to work things through on our own. Sometimes we can clear the issue in a matter of a few minutes, sometimes an hour and sometimes it can take several days. But we still keep working on it until we both say that we feel complete, we understand our own part and responsibility in the issue rather than simply blaming each other, are willing to go on, and there is an even deeper connection and sometimes even humor to the situation. In working each issue through to completion we have been able to retain a beautiful lightness in our relationship that we both cherish.

/You’ve been presented with a rare opportunity that,at the moment,remains unresolved. But why is the unknown a burden? It doesn’t have to be. It can just as easily be the opposite - a kind of awakening to feel something. I don’t just mean the Installation. Even before that. This is a chance to be taken out of your daily, weekly, monthly, yearly routine, regardless of the final outcome. Again . . . /This is for both of you. It’s a chance to wake up. How many people live day to day in a kind of haze, moving from one thing to the next without ever feeling anything? Being busy without ever being absorbed or excited or renewed? Most people don’t ever think about the full range of achievable existence; they just don’t./

If you are not dealing with your emotions and the unresolved trauma trapped inside of your body, you are revictimizing yourself. Being sick and hurt is the single greatest way we gain power over others, because what happens when we get sick and hurt? Everyone comes to our rescue.

The door opened, and it was like an apparition materializing before me, some sort of heavenly messenger descended from above. I’d never been away from her for this long, and after all this time, part of me wondered if I was imagining this. Her hand went to her mouth, and she stared at me wide-eyed. I think she felt the same way-and she hadn’t even had warning of my visit. She’d just been told I was coming “soon.” No doubt I seemed like a phantom to her, too. And with that reunion… it was like I was emerging from a cave-one I’d been in for almost five weeks-into the bright light of day. When Dimitri had turned, I’d felt like I’d lost part of my soul. When I’d left Lissa, another piece had gone. Now, seeing her… I began to think maybe my soul might be able to heal. Maybe I could go on after all. I didn’t feel 100 percent whole yet, but her presence filled up that missing part of me. I felt more like myself than I had in ages. A world of questions and confusion hung in the silence between us. In spite of everything we’d been through with Avery, there was still a lot of unresolved business from when I had first left the school. For the first time since I’d set foot on the Academy’s grounds, I felt afraid. Afraid that Lissa would reject me or scream at me for what I’d done. Instead, she drew me into a giant hug. “I knew it,” she said. She was already choking on her sobs. “I knew you’d come back.

Most of us can only recall important events in our childhood. The inner child tends to be pushed aside when we grow up and develop our identity as an adult. However, the unresolved hurtful feelings that we have carried since childhood still reside in our memories and body, whether we are aware of them or not.

When George stuck her head around the door and watched him work, his stomach clenched and his skin tingled. The feeling was like a phrase ending on a deceptive cadence, hovering, deliciously unresolved. There was something unsettling and adolescent about it, as though they were both teenagers and falling in love for the first time.

Separating from Family Issues: January 4 We can draw a healthy line, a healthy boundary, between ourselves and our nuclear family. We can separate ourselves from their issues. Some of us may have family members who are addicted to alcohol and other drugs and who are not in recovery from their addiction. Some of us may have family members who have unresolved codependency issues. Family members may be addicted to misery, pain, suffering, martyrdom, and victimization. We may have family members who have unresolved abuse issues or unresolved family of origin issues. We may have family members who are addicted to work, eating, or sex. Our family may be completely enmeshed, or we may have a disconnected family in which the members have little contact. We may be like our family. We may love our family. But we are separate human beings with individual rights and issues. One of our primary rights is to begin feeling better and recovering, whether or not others in the family choose to do the same. We do not have to feel guilty about finding happiness and a life that works. And we do not have to take on our family’s issues as our own to be loyal and to show we love them. Often when we begin taking care of ourselves, family members will reverberate with overt and covert attempts to pull us back into the old system and roles. We do not have to go. Their attempts to pull us back are their issues. Taking care of ourselves and becoming healthy and happy does not mean we do not love them. It means we’re addressing our issues. We do not have to judge them because they have issues; nor do we have to allow them to do anything they would like to us just because they are family. We are free now, free to take care of ourselves with family members. Our freedom starts when we stop denying their issues, and politely, but assertively, hand their stuff back to them—where it belongs—and deal with our own issues. Today, I will separate myself from family members. I am a separate human being, even though I belong to a unit called a family. I have a right to my own issues and growth; my family members have a right to their issues and a right to choose where and when they will deal with these issues. I can learn to detach in love from my family members and their issues. I am willing to work through all necessary feelings in order to accomplish this.

when it comes down to it, if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

Why remember we not, what, and how many contradictions we find and feel even in our own judgment? How many things served us but yesterday as articles of faith, which to-day we deem but fables? Glory and curiosity are the scourges of our souls. The latter induceth us to have an oar in every ship, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

All of us are in relationships every day of our lives, but particularly if we are people who want to help others—people with cancer, people with AIDS, abused women or children, abused animals, anyone who’s hurting—something we soon notice is that the person we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through that door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can’t handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to benefit others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; we’ll be confronted with ourselves.

The new gurus have taught us to embrace our light bodies, shunning the darkness, and focusing purely on love and light, constant happiness and extreme optimism. But, as Karin L. Burke astutely points out: “In our efforts to feel better, many of us start shutting it off, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality. It’s called spiritual bypass. It’s an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or developmental needs.

These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.

need to listen to my anger to know that I’ve had a boundary violated. I need to listen to my loneliness to know that I need to invest in deep relationships. I need to listen to my anxiety to know that I have an unresolved trauma that needs to heal. I need to listen to my depression to know that I need care for my heart’s deepest wounds. I need to listen to my fear to know that I may need to create safety. I need to listen to my stress and irritability to know that I’m out of balance and need rest or reprioritization. One common experience, however, keeps us all stuck. Instead of moving toward our pain and listening to the valuable messages it has for us, the vast majority of us move against or away from it. We ignore it, deny it, feel ashamed for feeling it, resent it, or attempt to numb, deflect, or dismiss it. We’ve been well taught to not listen to, or even feel, those yucky, hard feelings. Suck it up, buttercup. Be a man. Big girls don’t cry. Stop your whining or I’ll give you something to whine about! You can see why I believe we suffer from a very serious leprosy of the heart. And it’s killing us.

However, we rarely see what happens after the hero grasps what is sought, for if we did, the impotence of the MacGuffin would be revealed and we would not get the feel-good fantasy of fulfillment that so much popular cinema offers. For example, a romantic film might end with a passionate kiss that symbolizes the beginning of a new relationship between two people who fought all obstacles to be together. It will not end with a scene that depicts the same couple, one year later, sitting uncomfortably in a restaurant, silently resenting each other because of some unresolved domestic issue.

A review of 850 research papers concluded that people with religious involvement and belief system have better mental health outcomes. They have higher levels of psychological well-being such as life satisfaction, happiness, positive effect, and higher morale and less depression and suicide. If however you are gay or lesbian (in the closet or your sexuality/belief system unresolved)…….. it is the exact opposite….it can drive you crazy or kill you (suicide). Also it should be noted that this research has shown that the very places where Christian young people should feel safest (in their churches, Christian homes, schools and with friends) are actually places of harm.

We react constantly through life. Breathing, noticing, thinking, swallowing, feeling, and moving are all reactions. Most reactions are not really observed because they are commensurate with their stimuli, but a triggered reaction stands out because it is out of sync with what is actually taking place. When we are triggered, we have unresolved pain from the past that is expressed in the present. The present is not seen on its own terms. The real experience of the present is denied. Although reacting to the past in the present may make sense within the triggered person’s logic system, it can have detrimental effects on those around them who are not the source of the pain being expressed, but are being punished nonetheless. They are acting in the present, but are being made accountable for past events they did not cause and cannot heal. The one being falsely blamed is also a person, and this burden may hurt their life. The person being triggered is suffering, but they often make other people suffer as well. There is narcissism to Supremacy, but there is also a narcissism to Trauma, when a person cannot see how others are being affected. Although the triggered person may be made narcissistic and self-involved by the enormity of their pain, both parties are in fact equally important. And it is the job of the surrounding communities to insist on this.

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him. Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

I just finished reading it [Tanner's Grief] and found it showed many sides of grief...often never talked about. Shared it with two friends yesterday...one has a friend that has been grieving many losses but too busy to stop and feel it. Personally I have believed unresolved grief is what's behind all of the anger, mass killings, hate etc.. So many are crying out but not allowing themselves to really cry through the inner pain and anguish as we are created to do as humans. I have seen this working with kids in schools...with hospice patients as chaplain, in spiritual direction one-on-one and pastoring a church. This is the first novel\book I have ever read Abby that deals with grief in a way that can help those reading it have hope they can do this...and not believe they have to do it alone or with those in their family or friends. Getting the help they need isn't being unfaithful to anyone. --A Retired Minister

When a person gives attention to unresolved issues of the past, she often must work through resistance and apprehensions. To dismantle rigid defenses, interpret unconscious motives, or reflect on unexplored feelings we must sometimes push the client to the brink of her patience and endurance. She must confront parts of herself that have been deeply buried, and she must risk the consequences of relinquishing coping strategies that have worked fairly well until this point, even with their side effects and collateral damage. There is a risk (or perhaps even a certainty) that some destabilization will occur. In order to attain real growth, the client must often be willing to experience intense confusion, disorientation, and discomfort. She leaves behind an obsolete image of herself, one that was once comfortable and familiar, and she risks not liking the person she will become. She will lose a part of herself that can never be recovered. She risks all this for the possibility of a better existence, and all she has to go on is the therapist’s word.

What did you hope to get out of killing Win’s doctor?” “Enjoyment.” “No doubt you would have. Win didn’t seem to be enjoying it, however.” “Why is Harrow here?” Kev asked fiercely. “I can answer that one,” Leo said, leaning a shoulder against the wall with casual ease. “Harrow wants to become better acquainted with the Hathaways. Because he and my sister are … close.” Kev abruptly felt a sickening weight in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed a handful of river stones. “What do you mean?” he asked, even though he knew. No man could be exposed to Win and not fall in love with her. “Harrow is a widower,” Leo said. “A decent enough fellow. More attached to his clinic and patients than anything else. But he’s a sophisticated man, widely traveled, and wealthy as the devil. And he’s a collector of beautiful objects. A connoisseur of fine things.” Neither of the other men missed the implication. Win would indeed be an exquisite addition to a collection of fine things. It was difficult to ask the next question, but Kev forced himself to. “Does Win care for him?” “I don’t believe Win knows how much of what she feels for him is gratitude, and how much is true affection.” Leo gave Kev a pointed glance. “And there are still a few unresolved questions she has to answer for herself.” “I’ll talk to her.” “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Not until she cools a bit. She’s rather incensed with you.” “Why?” Kev asked, wondering if she had confided to her brother about the events of the previous night. “Why?” Leo’s mouth twisted. “There’s such a dazzling array of choices, I find myself in a quandary about which one to start with. Putting the subject of this morning aside, what about the fact that you never wrote to her?” “I did,” Kev said indignantly. “One letter,” Leo allowed. “The farm report. She showed it to me, actually. How could one forget the soaring prose you wrote about fertilizing the field near the east gate? I’ll tell you, the part about sheep dung nearly brought a tear to my eye, it was so sentimental and—” “What did she expect me to write about?” Kev demanded. “Don’t bother to explain, my lord,” Cam interceded as Leo opened his mouth. “It’s not the way of the Rom to put our private thoughts on paper.

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In cases in which the benign narcissist is a parent, there may be some unresolved resentment about the parent’s immaturity, and as an adult, it may feel as though the parent is emotionally stunted, while you have progressed and leapfrogged your parent into adulthood.

INVEST IN THE CONSCIOUS MIND Just as you are not your mind, you are not your thoughts. Saying to yourself “I don’t deserve love” or “My life sucks” doesn’t make it a fact, but these self-defeating thoughts are hard to rewire. All of us have a history of pain, heartbreak, and challenges, whatever they may be. Just because we’ve been through something and it’s safely in the past doesn’t mean it’s over. On the contrary, it will persist in some form—often in self-defeating thoughts—until it teaches us what we need to change. If you haven’t healed your relationship with your parents, you’ll keep picking partners who mirror the unresolved issues. If you don’t deliberately rewire your mindset, you are destined to repeat and re-create the pain you’ve already endured. It may sound silly, but the best way to overwrite the voices in your head is to start talking to them. Literally. Start talking to yourself every day. Feel free to address yourself with your name and to do it out loud wherever you’re comfortable doing so (so maybe not on a first date or a job interview). Sound is powerful, and hearing your own name grabs your attention.

I was warned unresolved trauma could fester inside like a rotten apple, sprouting poisonous spores that grew veined and thorny, drilling deep down only to surface further along in ugly and unexpected ways. I approached each new emotion cautiously as though I were entering a dim and unfamiliar room, one tentative foot feeling in the dark, the ever-present sense of something lurking in the shadows, waiting to lunge at me. In my present state, it seemed unfathomable that I could function at all, yet somehow I managed.

I know that look in his eyes. He’s hoping to kill someone, and I can’t help but share his enthusiasm. I sometimes think our fucked-up childhoods created something dark inside all of us. We all carry around a lot of anger, a lot of unresolved shit that we’ll never get closure for, and the only thing that’s made any of us feel any better about it is violence. There’s no denying that we all feel loads better about our pasts when our hands are covered in blood. The beautiful thing about it is that it’s also free and doesn’t require me to spend an hour talking about my goddamn feelings. I’d much rather kill a man than have an emotional heart-to-heart. No fucking thanks.

A mother was supposed to go to the temple after the death of a child. She was supposed to speak to the spirits of the Dead until she had said all she needed to say to the child, until all her unresolved feelings were spent, all conflicts resolved, all grudges laid to rest, until the finawu were satisfied that the deceased could move on in peace.

The journaling helps because your brain stores trauma, unfinished actions, and powerful memories in areas that can trigger strong emotions and subconscious stress responses. Often these unresolved events can trigger anxiety for no apparent reason. When you convert your feelings into words, it prompts a neurologic change. MRI scans have proven that the act of speaking or writing about feelings that are top of mind can move stored experiences away from the emotional reptilian parts of the brain, where they continually recirculate up to the rational parts of the brain, where they begin to dissipate. This effect can be invoked any time you convert ideas into words, regardless of whether you are speaking, writing, or typing and regardless of any feedback you receive.

...making endless plans. Moving, moving, moving. If you didn't look to closely you might admire my type A efficiency. But dig in just a little bit, and you'd realize that I was moving my body to distract myself from some deeply rooted unresolved feelings.

When you’re in the GAP, you have an unhealthy attachment to something external. You feel you need something outside of yourself in order to be whole and happy. You need to have a million dollars. You need that person’s approval. You need that position or promotion. You need to be a particular size or shape or to look a certain way. When you’re driven by need, rather than want, you have an urgency and desperation to fulfill that need. The problem is that “needs” are unresolved internal pain, not something you can solve externally. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said, “All progress starts by telling the truth.

Even when our friends and loved ones recognize our pain and try to help, our emotional suffering seems like it must remain a solitary affair. That leads to loneliness and despair. Left unresolved, the isolation we experience grows to the point that we feel no one can relate to our pain.

You write about the people you owe your discomfort to, and no one reads you, you denounce the conditions you work in and no one notices, you scream and no one hears, everything remains as it is, unresolved, in your lecture hall and in the world, so that exhaustion sets in and you say who gives a fuck, bring on the catastrophe, let everything go to hell, when we hit rock bottom we'll feel the impact, and then the sparks will finally fly, iron to iron, and everything will go up in flames, and then we'll rebuild the right way. But, meanwhile, as we wait for that to happen, life goes by, and goes by ever more debased, ours and those of the children who parade past us year after year, and we never really hit rock bottom, debasement yes, old age yes, death yes, but never the bottom, no, it can always get worse. Therefore, I concluded, I'll tell you how I see it. I don't want to feel like I have to declare that the best would still be the best even if I weren't their teacher, and the worst are still the worst even though I'm their teacher. Shitty pay or not, forthcoming apocalypse or not, I want to say, here, quietly, that I feel less sad - yes, less sad - if I work like a slave because the ones who would do well anyway do better thanks to my work, and because those who would, in any case, do poorly learn to do better thanks to me.

Dr. Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania is perhaps the world’s foremost expert on optimism and motivation. In his groundbreaking book, Learned Optimism, he suggests that depression is primarily the result of wrong thinking. He writes, “Depression . . . is caused by conscious negative thoughts. There is no deep underlying disorder to be rooted out: not unresolved childhood conflicts, not our unconscious anger, and not even our brain chemistry. Emotion comes directly from what we think: Think ‘I am in danger’ and you feel anxiety. Think ‘I am being trespassed against’ and you feel anger. Think ‘Loss’ and you feel sadness. . . . If we change these habits of thought, we will cure depression.”5

Feeling at moments of deathlike being; all human beings are worthy of love. Waking you feel the bitterness of the world; therein lies all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect penance.

When you are feeling hurt, anger, stress, jealousy, rage, competition, or frustration, on the other hand, the signal from the heart to the brain becomes incoherent, and this triggers the release of approximately 1,200 chemicals into the body equal to those feelings.17 This chemical dump lasts approximately 90 seconds to two minutes. In the short term, these stressful feelings are not harmful; in fact, if they’re resolved they improve your resilience. However, the long-term effects of unresolved survival emotions put the entire body into a state of incoherence, making you vulnerable to stress-related health challenges. These survival emotions draw from the field around your body, causing you to feel separate and materialistic because you are putting most of your focus and attention on matter, your body, the environment, time, and of course, the source of your problems.

An eighteen-year-old boy with anger management issues definitely has something to do with an unresolved parental dispute, feelings of abandonment, needing to prove himself. Needing to seem strong when inside, he’s breaking.

Some factors that can contribute to a child adopting an anxious insecure attachment style are:23 Parents who are unable to consistently co-regulate with their child, which leaves the child dependent on others to regulate their emotions, again and again turning outward to make sense of their inner feelings and unable to emotionally regulate on their own. Over-involving the child in the parent’s state of mind, where the parent’s emotions or state of mind is more central to the parent-child interaction than the child’s. In this case, the child might be asked (whether explicitly or implicitly) to be responsible for meeting the parent’s needs, making the parent feel better or supplying the parent with meaning and purpose. This is often due to a parent’s own level of anxiety, stress or unresolved trauma, or their own anxious attachment history. When the state of mind of the parent is the centerpiece of interactions, the child is left to constantly monitor and be concerned about their parent’s state of well-being, which can encourage a role reversal in which the child is acting more like the parent in the relationship. As a child, being responsible for a parent’s well-being is a misplaced, confusing and overwhelming responsibility.

Unresolved love always circles back. It lingers. It festers. It builds inside of you until it has to come out, and it putrefies everything else. It makes you resent who you’re with because they can’t be the one you really love and never will be. It makes you compare and feel disappointed every time you realize no one is as good as her.

I too behaved in ways that suggested I had issues. Most of my issues aren't that unusual among those of my race, class, gender, and level of education -- white, middle, female, college -- and these issues include low self esteem, panic and anxiety attacks, unresolved anger toward my mother, an general bitchiness.

We are taught that grieving is feeling sorry for yourself, and that real strength is to not show any emotions at all. Because we do not know how to be sad, we want to get to the end-stage of grief; we want the benefits and the results of healing, but we do not want to take the time to move through the often long and painful process of grief. For too long we have been taught that shedding tears is a sign of weakness and that you must not wallow in your sorrow. . . . As a result of this approach to grief, we have a whole generation of people with unresolved issues, hurts, and pains in their past that have been shallowly dealt with at best, and at worst have been ignored and discounted completely. The result has been an increasingly shallow Christianity and a profound lack of understanding of the nature of God and how, as His people, we are to move and live in a fallen world.[117]

Even though the victims of spiritual abuse have suffered greatly (more on this topic in the next chapter), one tactic of abusive leaders is to talk about how much they’ve suffered. They will go to great lengths to describe how much pain they are in because of the unresolved “conflict” with those accusing them. They will tell how they have lost sleep, been wracked with anxiety, and are “deeply saddened” by the whole affair.28 Even Saruman wanted to talk about the “injuries that have been done to me.”29 This move is designed to engender sympathy not for the victims but for the abuser. Again, it is designed to flip the script. To produce even more sympathy, some abusive leaders then appeal to how the whole situation has affected their spouse or their family. They might point out how much their wife has suffered or how their kids are heartbroken and disillusioned.30 This tactic is effective precisely because we ought to feel sympathy for the family members harmed by the scandal. Often the spouses and children are unaware of how the pastor has mistreated others (though some spouses enable and defend their husband’s abusive behavior and sometimes even participate in his deceptions). Indeed, some church courts feel less inclined to prosecute such a pastor because they feel sorry for his family, which “has suffered enough.

If we’re not aware of what is happening in the moment because we are caught up in our thoughts or reveries, or in the grip of worry or other strong emotions, it’s as if we have left our house. If we stay away for a long time, dust accumulates and unwanted visitors may take up residence in our home. Things like stress and tension accumulate in our bodies and minds, and over time, if we don’t tend to them, they can lead to physical or psychological illness. But the beauty of awareness is that we can always return home to ourselves. Our home is always there, waiting for us to come back. There are numerous ways we can go home to ourselves: by being aware of our breath, by being aware of body sensations or bodily movements, and by connecting with the reality around us, like the sounds in our environment. And when we come back home in these ways, we are able to take stock and survey the territory of our being, seeing clearly what parts of our inner landscape need more support, where we need to pay more attention. It is especially tempting in times of transition and challenge to abandon our homes, to leave our territory, in search of answers, perhaps by worrying about what will happen in the future. This is precisely the moment when we need to return to the present moment, feel our bodies, and take good care of ourselves now. Because the future is made of this moment. If we take good care of this moment, even if it is very difficult, we are taking good care of the future. It may also be hard to come home if we sense that unresolved pain has accumulated and we don’t want to face it. We may get into the habit of avoiding our home completely. We don’t want to be with those raw, unprocessed parts of our experience that are painful and may be quite scary. If this is our situation, it is important to have compassion for ourselves for not wanting to return home to face these difficulties inside of us. And yet the only way we can heal them, move through them, and make our home a more cozy place is to turn towards them. As the teaching goes: “The only way out is in.” Or through.

There can also be a particular problem with couples in a group. Sometimes a couple will form a faction splinter group. Then if they are upset about something going on in the group, they will collapse into collusion and gossip with each other, instead of airing their concerns with the whole group. Other times the factions are created along political lines or gender lines. With gender lines frequently the men think the women are “too sensitive” and controlling. The women think the men are “too insensitive” and domineering. When these judgments are shared by people without Nonviolent Communication skills, they most often create painful unresolved conflict. When they are thought and not shared it creates a tense depressed feeling in the group. 7. Remember that after you have shared something of yourself in front of a group you almost always need some kind of honest feedback in response. If you don’t ask for this feedback your mind will often project, onto the blank screen, nightmarish self-judgments which will serve to shut you down in the future. Example: You have just shared with the Committee to Create an Alternative School that you are afraid that the school will not be created in time for your five year old to attend and you will have to enroll her in public schools. You find yourself crying as you explain how important it is for you to protect her from the many kinds of violence found in public schools. Having cried, you feel vulnerable. You might ask: “I feel a bit vulnerable, having cried in public. I would like to know how people are feeling about what I have shared.” Then be prepared to empathize with the worst. Take a moment now to write down the three things that would be the most scary to hear after you have made yourself vulnerable and then asked for feedback. Here is what I came up with when I asked myself what would be scary feedback to receive and some possible empathic responses. So I have cried in front of the Committee to Create an Alternative School and asked for feedback and heard back:

Andy’s Message Around the time I received Arius’ email, Andy’s message arrived. He wrote: Young, I do remember Rick Samuels. I was at the seminar in the Bahriji when he came to lecture. Like you I was at once mesmerized by his style and beauty, which of course was a false image manufactured by the advertising agencies and sales promoters. I was surprised to hear your backroom story of him being gangbanged in the dungeon. We are not ones to judge since both of us had been down that negative road of self-loathing. This seems to be a common thread with people whom others considered good-looking or beautiful. In my opinion, it’s a fake image that handsome people know they cannot live up to. Instead of exterior beauty being an asset, it often becomes a psychological burden. During the years when I was with Toby, I delved in some fashion modeling work in New Zealand. I ventured into this business because it was my subconscious way of reminding me of the days we posed for Mario and Aziz. It was also my twisted way of hoping to meet another person like me, with the hope of building a loving long-term relationship. It was also a desperate attempt to break loose from Toby’s psychosomatic grip on my person. Ian was his name and he was a very attractive 24 year old architecture student. He modeled to earn some extra spending money. We became fast friends, but he had this foreboding nature which often came on unexpectedly. A sentence or a word could trigger his depression, sending the otherwise cheerful man into bouts of non-verbal communication. It was like a brightly lit light bulb suddenly being switched off in mid-sentence. We did have an affair while I was trying to patch things up with Toby. As delightful as our sexual liaisons were there was a hidden missing element, YOU! Much like my liaisons with Oscar, without your presence, our sexual communications took on a different dynamic which only you as the missing link could resolve. There were times during or after sex when Ian would abuse himself with negative thoughts and self-denigration. I tried to console him, yet I was deeply sorrowed about my own unresolved issues with Toby. It was like the blind leading the blind. I was gravely saddened when Ian took his own life. Heavily drugged on prescriptive anti-depressant and a stomach full of extensive alcohol consumption, he fell off his ten story apartment building. He died instantly. This was the straw that threw me into a nervous breakdown. Thank God I climbed out of my despondencies with the help of Ari and Aria. My dearest Young, I have a confession to make; you are the only person I have truly loved and will continue to love. All these years I’ve tried to forget you but I cannot. That said I am not trying to pry you away from Walter and have you return to me. We are just getting to know each other yet I feel your spirit has never left. Please make sure that Walter understands that I’m not jeopardizing your wonderful relationship. I am happy for the both of you. You had asked jokingly if I was interested in a triplet relationship. Maybe when the time and opportunity arises it may happen, but now I’m enjoying my own company after Albert’s passing. In a way it is nice to have my freedom after 8 years of building a life with Albert. I love you my darling boy and always will. As always, I await your cheerful emails. Andy. Xoxoxo

Ladies and gentlemen.” His voice carried straight into the darkest corners of the hall and straight into Ellen’s heart. “There is a slight misprint on tonight’s program. We offer for our finale tonight my own debut effort, which is listed on the program as Little Summer Symphony. It should read, Little Weldon Summer Symphony, and the dedication was left out, as well, so I offer it to you now. “Ellen, I know you are with me tonight, seated with my parents and our friends, though I cannot see you. I can feel you, though, here.” He tapped the tip of the baton over his heart. “I can always feel you there, and hope I always will. Like its creator, this work is not perfect, but it is full of joy, gratitude, and love, because of you. Ladies and gentlemen, I dedicate this work to the woman who showed me what it means to be loved and love in return: Ellen, Baroness Roxbury, whom I hope soon to convince to be my lady wife. These modest tunes and all I have of value, Ellen, are dedicated to you.” He turned in the ensuing beats of silence, raised his baton, and let the music begin. Ellen was in tears before the first movement concluded. The piece began modestly, like an old-fashioned sonata di chiesa, the long slow introduction standing alone as its own movement. Two flutes began it, playing about each other like two butterflies on a sunbeam, but then broadening, the melody shifting from sweet to tender to sorrowful. She heard in it grief and such unbearable, unresolved longing, she wanted to grab Val’s arm to make the notes stop bombarding her aching heart. But the second movement marched up right behind that opening, full of lovely, laughing melodies, like flowers bobbing in a summer breeze. This movement was full of song and sunshine; it got the toes tapping and left all manner of pretty themes humming around in the memory. My gardens, Ellen thought. My beautiful sunny gardens, and Marmalade and birds singing and the Belmont brothers laughing and racing around. The third movement was tranquil, like the sunshine on the still surface of the pond, like the peace after lovemaking. The third movement was napping entwined in the hammock, and strolling home hand in hand in the moonlight. She loved the third movement the best so far, until it romped into a little drinking song, that soon got away from itself and became a fourth movement full of the ebullient joy of creation at its most abundant and beautiful. The joy of falling in love, Ellen thought, clutching her handkerchief hard. The joy of being in love and being loved the way you need to be. Ah, it was too much, and it was just perfect as the music came to a stunning, joyous conclusion.

One of the reasons I became a grief therapist was that my own grief work healed me. I had been an emotional cripple all of my life. I was afraid of being hurt and afraid of being close—all because of my unresolved loss. Thinking back on the losses was akin to putting my hand on a hot stove. I would recoil every single time. But when the pile got to be too big, I had to give in and work through it. I had to look at all of my losses, feel them, heal them, and then move on. Each time I did that, I became a more confident person, a more alive person. I started to heal and experience true happiness for the first time. I became a grief therapist to help others heal their broken places and experience the joy that is life once you heal your unresolved loss. Almost every client I have ever worked with resisted acknowledging his or her grief and working through the loss after a breakup. At first the process seems very difficult, because you have to face your true feelings head on. For a time it seems easier to ignore it, but when you ignore loss after loss, it takes an emotional toll that exacts a very high price.

Being with Tracy and Colston distracted me from all of the unresolved issues I felt about Iraq, about my injuries, and about my uncertain future. She also helped me cope with the little moments when I forgot to be distracted. She cut up my steak for me when we went out. One time when I couldn’t open a jar I got very mad. But she just came over and opened it for me. She didn’t make a big deal about it; she just did it. I told her, “You know how hard that is as a man to have you open a jar for me? I am supposed to be doing these things for you and I can’t.” But she told me that was no big deal. And she made me feel like it wasn’t. I struggled a little with Colston as well. I was capable of taking care of him in many ways, but it was hard and little things would trip me up. Putting a sock on a toddler with one hand will absolutely stress you out. It’s funny now, looking back. But back then I really struggled to get a sock on that boy.

There’s a term we use for it: “ambiguous grief.” It can be a life sentence. It’s a kind of unresolved grief. You might feel it if you have a child or another family member who is mentally impaired. You might mourn the person you think they could have been if things had turned out differently. That person is physically present but psychologically absent. Conversely, and this is what happens in cases of abduction, or more commonly in divorce, the child or the person is psychologically present but physically absent.

Gothic is the genre of fear. Our fascination with it is almost always revived during times of instability and panic. In the wake of the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade described the rise of the genre as 'the inevitable product of the revolutionary shock with which the whole of Europe resounded,' and literary critics in the late eighteenth century mocked the work of early gothic writers Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis by referring to it as 'the terrorist school' of writing. As Fred Botting writes in Gothic, his lucid introduction to the genre, it expresses our unresolved feelings about 'the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality' and yet is extremely concerned with issues of social disintegration and collapse. It's preoccupied with all that is immoral, fantastic, suspenseful, and sensational and yet prone to promoting middle-class values. It's interested in transgression, but it's ultimately more interested in restitution; it alludes to the past yet is carefully attuned to the present; it's designed to evoke excessive emotion, yet it's thoroughly ambivalent; it's the product of revolution and upheaval, yet it endeavors to contain their forces; it's terrifying, but pretty funny. And, importantly, the gothic always reflects the anxieties of its age in an appropriate package, so that by the nineteenth century, familiar tropes representing external threats like crumbling castles, aristocratic villains, and pesky ghosts had been swallowed and interiorized. In the nineteenth century, gothic horrors were more concerned with madness, disease, moral depravity, and decay than with evil aristocrats and depraved monks. Darwin's theories, the changing roles of women in society, and ethical issues raised by advances in science and technology haunted the Victorian gothic, and the repression of these fears returned again and again in the form of guilt, anxiety, and despair. 'Doubles, alter egos, mirrors, and animated representations of the disturbing parts of human identity became the stock devices,' Botting writes, 'signifying the alienation of the human subject from the culture and language in which s/he is located.' In the transition from modernity to post-modernity, the very idea of culture as something stable and real is challenged, and so postmodern gothic freaks itself out by dismantling modernist grand narratives and playing games. In the twentieth century, 'Gothic [was] everywhere and nowhere,' and 'narrative forms and devices spill[ed] over from worlds of fantasy and fiction into real and social spheres.

but when it comes down to it, if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it.