Dead Big Feelings (intensity and positive disintegration at Halloween)

The hallowing of positive disintegration

I wanted to write something for the time of year. Halloween, All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’, All Souls’, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain, Nos Galan Gaeaf, Gau Beltza, Pangangaluluwa…

A time of liminality and descent. The ending of the season of light and the beginning of the dark season. A time to honour the dead and engage with the spirit world. We watch the leaves change colour and fall. The nights spread further into the days. The cold forces us to create our own warmth. I can feel a great need to rest and let a sacred, earthly joy, pull me back into its mystery.

For me, I feel an intensity that matches my bigger feelings. When I was little, I used to enjoy decorating for Halloween as much as I enjoyed putting up Christmas decorations but Halloween was always more hollow – it didn’t hold any weight, it had lost its meaning – the world no longer needed to survive the winter what with indoor fires and supermarkets and hot water on tap. People no longer believed in talking about death let alone inviting the dead back into the living realm or sharing love into the afterlife. Now I’ve lived enough years to learn about the season, for myself, I can feel it living in me, offering a home for my intensity that the world I grew up never could.

Intensity is labelled pathological in most modern mental health systems and an interest in death is seen as morbid. But the tides are turning, you can now find death doulas and cafes, and perhaps the pandemic helped to jolt people into recognising how important the rituals of death are because of the cruelness of not being able to partake in them. The NHS has begun to move away from the more pathologizing aspects of mental health treatment by moving towards more trauma informed care and awareness of neurodiversity has exploded, however, I fear that without greater depth and allowance for complexity, these frameworks will become just as problematic as many others.

Intensity and positive disintegration

Personally, I find Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration more helpful in understanding mental distress. Unfortunately, the theory got lost in the realms of gifted education for many years, its full potential going unnoticed and here in the UK it’s hardly recognised anywhere. The theory explores how we develop as people, through a series of disintegrations, trying to reintegrate aspects of ourselves into better ways of being. Dabrowski argues that certain people have a type of developmental potential that often presents itself, at lower levels, as what has become known as pathological, but given time, as the individual learns to work with their own inner self, they can begin to redirect their inner experiences into higher levels of being – shaping themselves into a self-actualised whole. This requires ongoing work. There is no magic before and after, though, many people describe having ‘peak experiences’ along the way. To learn more, go to www.positivedisintegration.org

If you’d like a more poetic exploration around the themes of change, death, and intensity, you might be interested in my poetry collection The Tough of Love. I also have artwork associated with the book – if you’re looking for a visual reminder of our depths and mystery have a look at the posters in evren’s emporium.

Poetry is how I find expression for the feelings that feel more at home in the liminal and the deeper, less noisy places, where ‘soul work’ happens. This time of year, feels rich with poetry, poíēsis, making, creating, bringing forth… as things fall away and disintegrate back into the earth to feed new life yet to emerge, the present becomes a bridge between worlds, and we have a chance to step out of the images of time we’ve captured ourselves within, and give ourselves the space to share what matters – what survives through the seasons and through each other.

We used to sit round fires and share stories and this would help us keep our imaginative lives alight. Imagination and memory guide us through the dark times and both are fuelled by feeling. Big feelings can be overwhelming and can lead to frightening places but when we share them through memory and imagination, we create containers for our fire and we can learn to tend it instead of being consumed by it.

A lot of modern life and certain types of mental health treatments teach us to supress or try to escape from or deaden our big feelings because they scare us. It took me many years to learn how to share my bigger feelings and let them fall away to create space for more mature feeling to arise. I have just turned 40 and I am looking forward to the colour changes of maturity.