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I don’t know what to say about the cruelty of humankind. It’s often harsh, unpredictable, and perhaps worst of all, done for fairly excusable reasons. Fear. Misunderstanding. Self-preservation. It’s hard to be mad at someone who is making choices from a place of darkness or a lack of faith.

Sometimes, I think when we have our heartbroken, it’s like God giving us a good, vigorous slap to psyche us up before a big game. Football movies show us that the real contenders don’t fall apart. No! They roar and shake their heads, gnashing their teeth with the fury of a true competitor, readying themselves for whatever comes next. 

I don’t think it’s easy to be positive about heartache or disappointment or failure, but I’m also not sure being positive is the goal or the underpinning logic of faith. We’re not meant to fake it all the time. We’re not meant to be numbed by drugs or alcohol and live life as if it is one big, long, party. We need downtime. We need trials, otherwise the tribulations are meaningless. We need strife and confusion and disagreement, otherwise how luxurious can the victories or love affairs or first borns really be?

I don’t feel good all the time, and honestly, I’m not sure that I would want to. I want to learn from my mistakes. I want to honor the ways in which I fail myself or others. If life was perfect all the time, there might not be any need for faith, God, or Good at all, and that sounds kind of… boring. I want to have my heartbroken, because that may be the only way to experience real love and commitment. I hate to say it, but I look back at previous mistakes and think, by golly, I AM learning. 

The only real heartache, in my view, is that we live in cultures where grief is disenfranchised. It’s hard to keep the machine of capitalism churning if we also allow ourselves time to wail at the coffins of our lost loves, adorn ourselves in the mourning black, cover our mirrors or turn off our phones to honor the dead or lost. Believe me, there have been days when I wanted nothing more than to adorn myself in Victorian mourning black, masked in a veil, covered in a floor length dress, preferably with a long miserable train, and then just drag myself around all day like that, publicly declaring I feel terrible without having to say a word. 

Instead, we put on every day clothes and every day faces, despite how awful we may feel. We post pictures on social media pretending we are happy and everything is fine, but that doesn’t do anyone any good. That is classic avoidance or disassociation. It is reinforcing a collective lie that everything is awesome. And nobody believes that, not really. Not even God (or Good). Especially not God (or Good). 

Good (or God) is light at the end of the tunnel. God (or Good) dispels the dark, but without the dark everything is just whitewashed, catatonic, the false euphoria that comes with substances or falsehoods. 

One of the most important things about therapy or distress tolerance or mindfulness is not the ability to master and then shun difficult emotions, but the tolerance of or even the ability to honor them. It is creating a place, time, and space to safely feel our feelings, with or without a witness.

Lately, Good (or God) has served as mine. I literally say, out loud, I feel terrible right now. And I allow my sadness or grief or misery to wash over me like a wave. I talk to God in a quiet place on my own, and I feel better afterward in ways I never could if I tried to explain it to a friend. Don’t get me wrong, friends are lovely and important, but we may expect too much of them as fellow human beings. Friends often try to explain it away or try to make us feel better, which is like a breakwater in a port, built to disrupt the wave. They hold their hands out, they talk too much, they are uncomfortable with pain. 

God and therapists tend not to be. It is a special skillset, to let someone weep in front of you and know what to say or do next. Even the best intentioned laypeople sometimes either don’t have that ability or we don’t allow them to hold that space for us. We know their mistakes and so their advice is tainted. We still feel skeptical and unsoothed, even if their guidance is sound.

Engaging with our feelings in a healthy way includes finding a safe way to experience them, allowing them to happen, and then finding safe people to experience them with. I think faith in Good or God is part of this. There are some people who are totally intolerant of emotion. It makes them feel weak, which often makes them feel angry, which definitely doesn’t help. 

While I think friends and family play important roles in our lives, often they are not the catchall we hope they will be. Often, that is asking too much of people who can barely understand, manage, witness, or process their own emotions, let alone the emotions of others.

Finding a good therapist and connecting with faith in Good (or God) have been a real blessing in helping me connect with my emotional, authentic self. This, in turn, has made me feel stronger, better, more in control, and better equipped for the trials and tribulations that lie ahead. Five stars, highly recommend.