Page 58 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

Disaster Relief 27

can it mean to “get over” it? When a child dies, is there ever a time her
parents stop dreaming about her or stop their painful yearning? Would
recognizing that they sometimes felt angry with her cause them to “get
over” her death?
To me, bearing pain, unexpected losses, tragedy, is part of the human con-
dition. We can no more get over it than we can get over being ourselves.
So then, when a disaster strikes, what is “relief”?

Insight Helps Us Moderate the Intensity of
Our Emotional Reactions to Pain

In my view, the belief that cognitive insight has the power to delimit emo-
tions is a mistaken premise. It is held as much by the public as it is by
members of various mental health professions. To my way of thinking, it
is an absurdly rose-colored view. Victims of disasters, veterans who have
witnessed the unspeakable, those who have known life at its most ghastly
can, in this view, erase horror with some positive mantras. Just say the
magic words to yourself and presto! Suffering fades like laundry stains
succumbing to the latest detergent.
I believe that only other emotions have enough power to change how
we feel. What can make life worth living when, as Emily Dickinson poeti-
cally asks, the “wreck has been”? To me it seems possible, for example,
that a person in extreme pain may nonetheless want to live out of love for
her child. The depression hasn’t disappeared or been tamed by any magic
words. It is, however, modified by love that is also very real. Love, along-
side pain, may have the power to modify it.
The idea that one emotion has the power to change another rests on
the vision of how emotions work that I have adapted from discrete or dif-
ferential emotions theory (Buechler, 1993, 1995; Izard, 1977). I now spell
out some of the basic tenets of that theory about human emotionality and
how they might inform anyone trying to work with the intense feelings of
a human being in emotional pain.

Theory as a Guide for Working With Intense Emotional Reactions

The most fundamental tenet of emotion theory is that “… the emotions
constitute the primary motivational system for human beings” (Izard,
1977, p. 3). Emotions, in contrast to the older notion of drives, are more