Over the last four years I have given talks or day-long courses on EFA to various groups of people, through psychotherapy training programs, an institute for art therapy, and a university continuing education program. Most of these groups contain both professional helpers who want to apply EFA at work and people who want to apply it with family and friends. Some questions most often asked by professional helpers or counselors are discussed in the next chapter. This chapter addresses more general questions. But, of course, since counselors also are humans who have families and friends, and ordinary people are sometimes called upon for special help in emotional crises, the two categories overlap.

The questions discussed here have all been asked frequently at EFA courses. I have arranged them in the order in which their subject has been discussed so far in this book. There are no easy answers to questions about the emotions. My responses make no claim to be definitive. They are based on study and experience, but are naturally consistent with the theory of emotion and the framework for EFA which I have proposed. Most important is that the topics can be opened to discussion. The most rewarding EFA courses have been those attended by a relatively small number: a dozen or so people, with a balanced mix of men and women, who can raise exciting questions and begin to respond to them from their own experience. My own responses to the questions given here have been tested over the years by being matched to the personal experience of several hundred people who have engaged in vigorous discussions about them.

Does grief ever stop ?

This question is sometimes asked existentially: can we ever be free of grief? Or sometimes more practically: is there some average time period for grief to be worked through and done with? Sometimes a person after a great loss, such as a death or the breakup of a marriage, seems capable of crying forever.

Although life does not have to be a vale of tears, without pain and grief it would be mechanical, or at least flat—"little in joy, little in pain." It can be argued that without pain, no species could have evolved, since the awareness of possible pain is protective. For human beings, pain must include emotional pain as well as physical. In the EFA of grief it helps to encourage the person to breathe out fully, right down to that agonizing place where sobs rack the body, and to urge the person: "Let yourself feel the pain. It will be all right soon, but for now let it hurt."

This is not sadism. Pain can be lived through. And if it is denied, this is usually at a price. One woman said to me: "I have not cried openly or shed a tear since I was a child. Instead I feel the tears inside, trickling and burning down the back of my throat." She had just been diagnosed as having a stomach ulcer "of nervous origin." But even this conscious "crying inside," with an over-stimulated autonomic nervous system (one factor in the genesis of stomach ulcers), is preferable to the autonomic deadness of the person who has long suppressed even the sensation of grief, the "human machine" who is nevertheless prey to deep, vague, disturbing longings. A poet, Charles Sorley, killed in the First World War at the age of twenty, wrote:

We have a dumb spirit within:

The exceeding bitter agony But not the exceeding bitter cry.

Even a dumb spirit within is better than none. But EFA can help the "exceeding bitter agony" work itself through in a cry.

Overt grieving after a loss does stop eventually. Eventually hope and capacity for joy begin to emerge. After a few months, unless the person becomes stuck in a deep depression in which grief and anger are not being expressed, the worst is over. But who can say the grief from a severe loss should ever be finished? Almost all of us have experienced losses which even if in the distant past may still bring tears to our eyes when we think of them. This aliveness to past grief and openness to remembered pain do not have to stop us from experiencing pleasure now. Sometimes I meet people in therapy who have cut themselves off from past sadness in such a way that their memory contains huge gaps, or can be recounted simply as history—something that could have happened to someone else. But if we cut out chunks of our memory, or convert it to history, we are cutting out or denying parts of ourselves. Think of the poignant sadness of some of Mozart's music, or of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. These are not merely howls of pain transposed into music or verse: the grief they express is mixed with elation and joy. The expression of grief does not block the capacity for joy, it opens the way. Of course, sustained joy is out of place when a loss has just occurred. But the EFA of grief has worked when the person has retained the capacity for joy—even if the loss will always be remembered with sadness.

Is anger really necessary?

Even when the consequences of blocked anger (see Chapter 5) have been understood, this question lingers, and is probably the most common asked in EFA courses. This seems to be because many people have been badly hurt by other people's anger, especially as children, and, in turn, hate themselves when their anger hurts others. The whole thing is ugly, and frightening, like the face of anger itself.

But I still maintain that anger is at its most ugly, violent, indiscriminate, and unjust, when it is mixed with fear. The face of anger is too often like the masks on the totem poles of Pacific Coast Indians: a distorted expression of loathing and horror, with the teeth bared in a snarl but the eyes open in terror. The totems scared off intruders not so much by expressing anger as because the manifest fear in the masks in turn evoked fear. In real, blazing anger, the face is flushed and extremely concentrated and determined, but not distorted as with fear. The genuinely angry person is focused and therefore in control.

One woman told me of her rage at her husband during a quarrel about a vital matter. He began to walk out of the room. She picked up a wine glass and threw it. It smashed against the wall near his head. "You could have killed me," he gasped. But as she quickly picked up the glass, she had said to herself: "This is a crystal goblet which cost $45. But it's worth it." And she aimed for the exact spot on the wall where it hit. There was no question of her missing and hitting her husband.

This was not a commendable act. The quarrel was out of hand. Perhaps the woman could have made her point earlier, and less dangerously. But it is an example of how a person capable of retaining a focus in anger can thereby retain control. Controlled focus through the eyes aids muscular control, as for example in archery or tennis. People are most dangerous when they panic. I was once standing with a lumberyard worker beside a pile of wood from which a non-poisonous snake suddenly slithered out. The man, apparently phobic about snakes, grabbed a slat of 2 x 4 lumber and, his face contorted by rage and terror, pounded the snake to death. He "beat it to a pulp," the end of the slat kicking up the dirt from wild and unaimed blows. One well-aimed blow would have been enough—if the snake had been dangerous in the first place. But for a minute or so this mild-mannered man had become a panic-stricken killer.

I would maintain that if a person is incapable of focused anger, he or she is also incapable of constructive aggression. (Town gossip, for example, referred to the lumberyard worker as "henpecked" by his wife.) Assertiveness training workshops miss this point, in not acknowledging that blocks to assertion are in turn based on blocks to anger. The capacity for anger does not mean a person is perpetually angry. On the contrary.

Often anger is used defensively to cover up fear. When the mask of anger is only skin deep, or partial, so that signs of fear are discernible, EFA can help—either to concentrate the anger into a genuinely effective expression of a need which has been denied; or in acknowledging the fear, which is often of rejection or weakness. But in extreme cases, the defensive anger has taken over completely: the person has a short fuse and blows up easily, will never admit to fear, sadness, or weakness, and sets out to eliminate all opposition. The person becomes so dominated by anger as to be paranoid. A humorous example of the very unhumorous process in paranoia occurs in Winnie the Pooh, when Tigger suddenly jumps at a tablecloth and wrestles it to the ground. Pooh asks: "Why did you do that?" Tigger replies: "It moved." Pooh says: "But it didn't move." Tigger replies: "It might have moved." Paranoia gives anger a bad name.

But the opposite to paranoia, a complete rejection of anger, can lead to severe physical consequences, as is acknowledged in psychosomatic medicine. One woman in an EFA class got into an argument with some other participants. At least, they were arguing—she was not. She was sitting very calmly in one of the upright wooden chairs in the circle, and very sweetly stating that she was never angry. She thought anger was bad, and she said she meditated, concentrating on positive imagery, in any circumstances which might provoke anger. This riled the other participants. One woman whose house had recently been vandalized, gave this as an example: "Wouldn't that make you angry?" "No," the first woman replied calmly. Then suddenly, with a bang, the chair she was sitting on broke into three separate pieces, throwing her to the floor. The other participants gasped, then involuntarily laughed. The woman scrambled to her feet as I helped her up: "I'm not angry!" she said, pushing my arm away, her eyes blazing. A down to earth explanation of this odd event would be that her muscular tension was such, as she denied ever being angry, that it put an impossible stress on the chair. But she was very lightly muscled. Whether her tension was physical or psychic, it was hardly healthy.

William Blake wrote:

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.