20 Jan Desperation: It’s Beyond Fear and Anxiety – Can We Finally Talk About It?

Today I want to write about an inner experience that gets very little attention in the world of emotional intelligence, but that is perhaps one of the most important challenges we face.

I’m talking about the experience of desperation.
While it’s felt differently by each of us, it usually comes like a punch in the gut, and then remains there, persistently, sometimes for hours at a time.

Desperation is different from fear or anxiety. Imagine an infant deprived of care, of even the most basic attention, when it’s needed most. Imagine the tiny hands of that infant reaching out as it wails. As yet without words, the infant’s cry is unmistakeable: “Wait! Come back! I need you! Don’t leave me!”

For this child, there is a complete and total emergency. There is no distinction between the need for emotional soothing and literal survival. In that moment, they are experienced as the same thing.

This child, at one time, was me. Was it you, perhaps, as well?

And why is this so important to us as adults?

Most emotional waves are surf-able, once you get the hang of it. Most wounds, even deep ones are cradle-able, once you get the hang of it. But then there’s desperation.

Desperation is like a black hole that can temporarily overwhelm everything else you feel and know. It can override your best intention to stay present, to recognize the difference between what’s happening now and what happened so long ago.

When desperation arises, the past is present, and there is no way to convince the desperate part of you that its sense of absolute emergency is not real.

This experience of life-threatening disconnection, when it happens, feels about as real and threatening as anything ever could, even after lots of therapy and life practice.

I’m sharing this with you because if we’re not educated about it before the moment comes, we’ll resort to any and all of our coping mechanisms, especially the most damaging ones such as addictions, compulsions, and all other forms of “acting out” in order to banish our desperation.

Some of that’s okay, of course – we’re human, after all.

And yet…there is another possibility. All our desperation needs is that we come back to it. That we stay with it. Precisely in the way that didn’t happen when our desperation first arose, and then got almost hard-wired into our conditioning.

The most important word in that last paragraph is “almost.” Because even though the smallest-seeming trigger can bring about our desperation in adult life – a slight at work, an unreturned phone call, a cold shoulder from the object of our desire – that does not have to be the end of the story.

When we consciously choose not just to stay with desperation, but to let desperation stay with us, we heal. By letting it stay with us I mean deciding that it’s okay to feel desperate for as long as the desperation requires. Which may be an hour, or a day, but is never forever.

Even when the feeling comes and goes over a longer time, as when we’re grieving a terrible loss, it still doesn’t persist endlessly at its peak. There are valleys, too, if we’re paying close enough attention to perceive them.

It’s one thing to choose to stay with desperation, and it’s another to actually accomplish it. To actually accomplish it, here’s the key: We need to recognize that the feeling of desperation doesn’t know what it needs.

That’s important enough to say again. The feeling of desperation doesn’t know what it needs. Without recognizing this we’re likely to get all tangled up in responding to all its pleas and demands. Do this, stop doing that, get me out of here, go get love, flee from love, and all the rest.

Staying with desperation, as a feeling, in the body, will only happen if we calmly, quietly, and consistently refuse to engage with those pleas and demands which all arise as thoughts, in our heads.

Think of those pleas and demands as the tantrum of a three-year-old. We love that tantruming child completely, and provide it the safety of our adult boundaries, but we don’t for a moment take the content of the trantrum seriously. We listen patiently, we don’t criticize or disparage. Instead, we keep gently redirecting back to what matters most.

When it comes to desperation, what matters most – indeed the only thing that matters – is the feeling itself.

Once we get that, and stay with the feeling, we also get all the benefits of healing. Perhaps the greatest benefit of healing through our desperation is that we are then actually, reliably able to determine what we need. We can respond with the greatest possible skill and care to what brought about our desperation in the first place. We become our most trustable, perceptive, self-loving and effective self.

Is there anything better than that?