Melancholy and Mourning and The Sixth Sense

One of the fundamental aspects of being human is that we are constantly in a state of change.  Transition and our response or reaction to change is our greatest teacher.  As I write this from my desk and in between sessions, I'm struck with how many men I help who are stuck in a process of change; meaning they're emotionally suspended as change is happening around them.  Typically I see men who present a variety of problems which are keeping them awake at night and when they do the work to look at what is driving these issues invariably what shows up is the place where they have been emotionally parked - a major life transition - that they just have not processed fully.  This state is melancholy and it comes with a sense of drifting, of a lack of deep engagement with anyone or anything, and most important an emotional palette which is limited or non-existent.  If you look around you can probably identify many guys you know who fit this bill; perhaps even it's you.  When I'm in melancholy, I'm never fully happy, never really excited, never fully in love, never truly ignited by living.  I'm a poltergeist locked in angst desperately trying to get away from where I am and wanting to cling onto anyone who can give me a way out or whose life energy I can suck to make me feel better.

Sounds horrible right?

So what's the answer?

Well, let's look at M. Night Shamalayan's breakthrough movie - Sixth Sense for a clue.    In the film, a young boy is visited by numerous 'ghosts,' who are seeking to end their drifting suffering.  The boy's function is to tell the truth about how these people died setting the record straight, righting any wrongs and thereby bringing closure and releasing the apparitions from their pain.  But he's deeply disturbed by what he sees and wants to escape the realities that visit him.  Bruce Willis, as a 'dead' psychiatrist enters to ease the boy's pain to make life less scary and in doing so, finds his own salvation.  Sixth Sense is about melancholy and the process by which we can exit melancholy which is mourning.  

Our culture has lost the willingness or the stomach to mourn fully and it is killing us.  Mourning, grieving are the processes by which humans naturally move through transition.  Mourning is how we move from attachment to detachment, to re-attachment.  Mourning requires us to tell the truth about what has happened, and feel all the emotions connected to the power of that truth.  Mourning brings us closure to our life's major changes as we move through the defined stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Sadness and Acceptance.    Mourning requires us to feel.  Sadly, it seems our culture has lost the enormous value of this process by favouring a "Get On With Life" solutions-oriented approach which places greater importance on action over feeling.  Don't get me wrong.  Action is necessary for moving us forward lest we decide to roll around lost in the muck of our emotions, but action without feeling is empty and ultimately creates more pain and disorder because the pain is never fully healed.

Look around  - Isn't this what is affecting America right now.  Their take action approach to 911 truncated the nation's mourning and mis-directed all of that hurt into adversarial policies which have created alienation, mistrust, and economic woe.  America needs to grieve fully to have a hope of ever becoming a superpower again.