by Kim Jones
Even with the phone held several inches from my ear, Ann's* voice could be heard by anyone in the room. Having just experienced yet another setback in her recovery from a below-the-knee amputation for cancer, I asked the question that burst her emotional dam. "How does that make you feel?" I asked. I should have put on rain gear!
At the Outreach of Hope we call it "unloading." It's the vital-and often unmet-need for people who are hurting to express their feelings and unload the emotional pain they are carrying. Cancer patients and their families carry a great deal of pain. Consider some of the emotional burdens they often shoulder:
- Anger about the loss of control over your body. People constantly poke, prod, and produce pain-and you have little or no say about it.
- Hurt because people treat you differently or avoid you.
- Frustration because you can't do the simple things you used to take for granted.
- Jealousy because people around you live normal lives and don't have to deal with the day-to-day struggle of living with a serious illness.
- Loneliness because you're stuck in neutral while the world passes by in the fast lane.
- Rejection by people who are too frightened or selfish to step into your world.
- Sorrow over the loss of vitality, lifestyle, relationships, and dreams that cancer sometimes takes away.
- Fear of what tomorrow may bring.
Added to this mix are the numbing effects of pain medication, the exhaustion of treatment, and the instability of the world in which cancer patients live. No wonder they need to unload! The sources of their emotional pain are abundant.
What happens to pain when people don't have a safe place to express themselves and work through their feelings? Pain becomes anger, building to a point of inward explosion that manifests itself through depression, physical symptoms, or burnout. Or, it leads to an outward explosion that often hurts the people whose support and presence are most needed.
What makes it difficult to talk about and unload our emotional pain? Often we have been told that our emotions are wrong, that they represent weakness or vulnerability. But our emotions are a gift from God that connect us to the world around us, the soul within us, and the God who made us. So it's not our emotions, but what we do with them, that can be right or wrong.
Our emotions also may be expressed with such power and intensity that it is frightening for us as well as for those who are close to us. It can take a great amount of energy to deal with powerful emotions-energy that families who are living with serious illness simply do not have. So feelings are often dismissed or put on the back shelf to be dealt with later. But denying and suppressing emotions can backfire. "Denial of our emotions only increases our pain and sense of alienation from a fundamental part of our personality," psychologist and cancer survivor Dr. Gary J. Oliver explains. "It puts us out of touch with a third of who God made us to be." When we push our emotions away, we run the risk of building a dam as Ann did-a dam that will one day break, endangering ourselves and others with the emotional floodwaters.
In addition, those who want to help may try to suppress, control, or rationalize the emotional expressions of their suffering friends. That's the opposite of what a cancer patient really needs. One cancer survivor vividly remembers the attempts by others to control or silence her emotions. Eventually, their actions became her greatest source of anger.
For these (and many other) reasons, friends who allow and encourage "unloading" are great treasures. They give a hurting person a safe place to express and work through feelings that may be difficult to uncover, feelings that may create a mental fog, obscure our vision, or immobilize us. By verbalizing his or her feelings, a person can more clearly define them, discover what they mean, and make appropriate decisions related to them. When a friend allows a hurting person to unload his or her pain, it is like opening the doors and windows of the heart so that the fog can lift and the individual can see clearly again.
As precious as the listening ears of a friend can be to a hurting person, the greatest listener in the universe is God. He is never too tired to listen, never interrupts, never gives unwarranted advice, never grows weary or gets frustrated when we don't make sense or when we come to Him repeatedly with the same complaint. Best of all, He truly wants our company and cares intimately about our pain. He has given us a standing invitation to unload-and He doesn't need rain gear. * Not her real name
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