Recalling TV & Radio Spots I Did re: 9/11

How do you deal with such a massive terror attack? What about the stress? What about the anger some of us are feeling after the attack on New York and the Pentagon? This is the question we are going to put to Dr. Stephen Jackson this morning. Dr. Jackson do you have any answers for us?
—Rita Foley

[Note: To hear the interview with Rita Foley gp tp www.thespacebetweenstars.com and click on In the News and scroll down to Associated Press Radio. It is on the last few minutes of the 18 minute interview that starts with a discussion Talk America on dealing with anger, anxiety, grief and son rgarding September 11, 2001. See also TV clips on MSNBC clip with Rick Sanchez on talkng to your children and Iyanla Vansant. The following is an excerpt from the book A Matter of Love.]


Rita Foley of Associated Press Radio put this question to me just days after the tragedy that rocked our world. My answer, which I had to deliver in ninety seconds, can be summed up by saying we need to express rather than repress or aggress our stress over these horrific events and help others do the same. Emotionally, we can’t heal what we don’t feel. By feeling our pain fully and expressing it, we release our pain and foster healing. And yet, can we really heal our heartbreaking grief over the loss of loved ones?
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I explained on one show after another that we heal only as we keep ourselves from giving in to the tendency to repress our pain. Furthermore, I emphasized that we do this by continuing to express our painful feelings to ourselves and others. Eventually, we drain the pain from our heart by expressing all our feelings: our anger, fear, and grief. I told Rick Sanchez on MSNBC that we need to help our children fully feel and redirect the hate triggered by the murder of so many innocent people in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. I explained how the letters of the word heart reveal how we can redirect the hate. We need to hear and feel with our heart what our anger, fear, and grief are t—telling us about what we love, about what is important to us. If we repress or aggress our stress it will poison us with anger and rage, anxiety and fear, as well as with inconsolable grief and depression. Instead, we need to express our pain so that we can feel it and heal it.

We can find solace as we focus on the love in our heart. When we shift our focus to love we access the healing power of our heart and find some comfort. Though our loved one may be gone from this earth, our loved one will forever live on in our heart.

For our heart is the calm, caring, connecting, and continuous consciousness that is the core of our being. When our heart is open, it is like an endlessly flowing fountain. In the fountain of our heart, love flows freely and the poisons of our negative emotions cannot stagnate there. They are washed away.
Our heart can also be likened to the sun that continues to shine even as the clouds of our fear, anger, and sadness or grief hide it from our view. Just as the clouds can do nothing to harm the sun, so the poisons of anger and fear can only hide, not harm, our heart as the core of our being. Nonetheless, when the stress of holding on to our fear and anger is chronic, it may harm our physical heart.

Evil occurs when we allow the dark clouds of our anger and fear to block our access to the light of love in our heart. As we shall see, blocking out our pain is the mental and emotional basis of evil. When we block out our pain, we are in danger of being insensitive to the pain of others and we can more easily inflict pain on them. This is one of the reasons that adults who were abused as children often abuse their children. They don’t remember how it felt when they were beaten and humiliated.
By feeling and expressing our painful feelings of anger, fear, and grief, we can heal and eventually find inner peace and relief from our suffering. Expression and not repression or aggression keeps our heart clear and unclouded by the poisons of anger and fear. The letters of the word peace reveal the essence of inner peace:

P-peace, E-equals, A-acceptance, C-compassion, and E-empathy.

We heal as we feel by accepting with compassion and empathy our own emotional pain. And we help others heal as we help them accept with compassion and empathy their pain. Instead of defending ourselves against feeling our pain, we open our heart to feel and heal our pain. Inner peace is our reward.

The key to detoxifying our life and our relationships is to respond to the tests life gives us with acceptance, compassion, and empathy emanating from our heart. When I was in college we used to say we aced the test when we received a grade of A. Finding inner peace really involves learning to ace the tough tests of life. We do this by responding with acceptance, compassion, and empathy. Of course, we have to ace and then express our anger, fear, and grief arising from the stressful events taking place.

So many lost loved ones on September 11th and many children lost one or both parents. As individuals, and, as a nation, we got caught up in the illusion that retaliation was our healing balm. This instinctive reaction comes from our reptilian brain; the reptile in us is governed by fight and flight. Unfortunately, actor Richard Gere caught the rage of the reptile brains of the audience when he spoke at a rally in Central Park in New York City. Gere was booed when he conveyed how we needed to respond with love and compassion, not hate and retaliation. He was right. The audience was not yet ready for his beautiful message: it was too soon.

Many were still in the grip of heart-wrenching emotional pain. Nevertheless, we ultimately find inner peace as we feel acceptance, compassion, and empathy for our pain and the pain (even if based on delusions) driving our enemy to attack us. We can then begin to recover from such an immense tragedy as September 11, 2001.