I've been becoming dimly aware of a pattern that I think I see in some clients' responses to grief, and my own responses to strong negative emotions - 'black hole' emotions ... and perhaps to some other things less obviously malign.
Places that act like points of repulsion - we start to approach them and suddenly find ourselves going somewhere else - ritual, denial, distraction, comfort behaviours. Even 'interpretation' can be a kind of diversion. What is hard, is just to live in them for a while. To experience them as places that a whole human being can find themselves in ...
The black hole is so 'obviously' a horrible place, that avoiding it might hardly seem to require explanation. But as well as the repulsion, there is a puzzle - why are these places there, unless they have some organismic purpose? Why do none of our diversionary tactics quite work?
How can we feel that these locations of the soul, of imagination, of metaphor, might overwhelm us? How can they seem, like monsters of nightmare, both insubstantial and catastrophic? Places that do not exist in our 'physical world', but contemplating whose existence might snuff out our engagement with that world?
A clue might be in the loneliness of our visits to them - we often go there with neither a witness nor a companion. But is there a step beyond loneliness here? We can describe loneliness, we can (a little paradoxically) even share feelings of loneliness. But can the horror of the black hole be beyond even this? Do we feel that it cannot be made intelligible - that nothingness, confusion, ambiguity, the edge of the map is, after all, more terrifying than 'dragons'?
And do we feel we might be abandoned there exactly because we cannot make it intelligible to another?
How did we come to associate intelligibility with emotional contact? How did we learn that we had to explain ourselves or we would be left alone?
How did we learn we had no right to feelings that we could not explain, or justify, or otherwise render potent?
How did we learn to fear these quiet places beyond the world of words?
