Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes

Author:Claire Weekes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1990-09-04T05:00:00+00:00

13

Sorrow

Although overwhelming sorrow can temporarily disorganize our lives, it is not so complicated to manage as apparently insoluble problems. Sorrow may bring problems, it is true, but these are usually overshadowed by the grief itself. Deep sorrow alone can cause nervous illness without the addition of conflict or guilt. However, when the source of such an illness is studied, it is usual to find fear somewhere involved. As mentioned earlier, sorrow at the loss of a loved one is mixed with the fear of facing the future alone.

BROODING

Many of us, when we suffer deeply, may think we are overwhelmed; however, as time passes, life carries us with it and we rally and find happiness. But there are people who become so affected by sorrow, and whose environment offers such little encouragement, that they find it impossible to lead a normal existence. They sit and think only of their ill fate. This continuous melancholic brooding gradually exhausts their emotional reserves, so that their reactions become exaggerated, their sadness becomes deeper and deeper, the waves of despair more and more overwhelming, and the body subjected to this assault becomes less and less able to withstand it.

These people eat and sleep little and literally fade away. Finally the mind becomes so exhausted, it perceives and thinks so slowly that it seems impossible to communicate with them. They stare vacantly and answer hesitatingly, if at all. If the doctor cannot penetrate this unresponsiveness, shock treatment is usually advised, and the result may be so good that after a few treatments the patient can discuss the future rationally and with hope.

An Italian woman was brought to me by her despairing family. Her husband had died six months earlier and she had become so slowed down by grief that she followed her daughter wherever she went, like a child, in a lifeless, mechanical way. When I spoke to her she merely looked blankly. As my words were making no impression, I advised shock treatment.

After a month in a hospital her one wish was to get home as quickly as possible and help with the grape picking. This woman stands as an excellent example of the blessings of shock treatment in such circumstances. It shows how, if the chain of sorrow-brooding-sorrow can be broken, the sufferer is capable of accepting life again.

THE SUFFERING HABIT

It is possible that this woman could have recovered without shock treatment, had she had help earlier and been shown where she was drifting. So much of our suffering is due to memory and habit. We remember what we suffered yesterday and fail to appreciate the difference between reality and memory. This woman’s husband had been dead six months; no grieving could bring him back; she lived in a large farmhouse with a family who needed her care. That was reality, and after shock treatment she recognized it. And yet before treatment she spent her time brooding over the memory of the past until nothing but that existed, and that certainly was not reality.

Suffering soon brings fatigue, which brings more fatigue, because we grow so tired of feeling tired.

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