Your father died a couple of days ago, you are sitting on a bench and crying, suddenly someone put a hand on your shoulder and asks you why you are crying, in a fit of sorrow you tell him the reason. The person takes a deep breath and tells you that his father also died last month he knows exactly what you are going through. Suddenly you feel relived; a sense of little relief runs across you.
Catharsis is a process in which your sorrow or other repressed emotions gets released hence providing the relief to the person. Common practices related to catharsis are used in anger management and such. Some institutes take money from people for putting them in a room full of objects and things with a hammer so that these people can take their anger and frustration out on these things. The idea is that this way you will take out your frustrations out of your system in a harmless way, a harmless way for you and for others.
What are you doing?
Many movies are created, and games are designed so that they can serve the same purpose. Although, it is debatable that how much this method of catharsis actually gets rid of your anger, but one thing that is important to notice here is that this sure does make people feel better for a while. All these movies with lots of destruction, chaos and fight give a cocktail of excitement and satisfying relaxation.
Life is hard, it is hard not because of some outside factor, it is hard just by itself. It is hard just to exist. Have you ever noticed how much of your time is spent just in you trying to avoid misery, like you work to avoid poverty, you eat to avoid starvation and you sleep to save yourself from fatigue and so on. Just like this a lot of your time is also dedicated to get rid of misery of mind, which is already there, a constant need for catharsis.
A hard week at work can lead to alcohol and movies on weekends, a frustrated parent takes out the anger over their child conveniently, a holiday trip outside of the city just to escape, a violent video game playing session at times are all the same.
It’s everywhere.
But these are quite crude and obvious instances of catharsis. The game goes much deeper than that. Catharsis is in the large part of our day-to-day activities; it’s always going on in some form under the surface. Even drugs are nothing but a form of catharsis, when the life feels unbearable.
It has been found that people, who relapse into drugs after a very long period of being clean and sober do it not because of cravings but because normal life appears to them as mundane, boring and unbearable, from which they want freedom and for that they go back to the method they know very well.
Drugs are really good at releasing the pressure inside you, but the reason behind it is not what we usually think.
What makes us truly feel better is really something we often don’t agree to. A human in misery is always craving to relate this misery to the outer world.
You know what’s worse than being sad? It’s being sad just by yourself, it’s the realization that everyone else is happy and enjoying their life except you. When we are sad, we don’t avoid people because we want to stay alone, we avoid them because we want to avoid their happiness. If everyone is equally miserable than it’s not misery, it is normal life.
Need for chaos
From the place of sorrow you want to see chaos, destruction and loss everywhere. Any sight of other’s happiness stings like a wasp, it hurts to no end especially if it’s the happiness which you wanted but don’t and can’t have. All these means of catharsis always have a hint of destruction and chaos in them. If suffering can be normalized it cease to exist.
Have you ever wondered why being poor is such a misery today. Poverty was far more widespread in the past then it is today and yet poverty is seen as a far bigger curse in present. This is because most of the people were poor in the past, therefore being poor was just a way of lifestyle, there wasn’t much to compare your poverty to, so people were poor, but they were not too much sad about it.
If you want to convince a scientist to create a weapon of mass destruction, do it when he or she is at a low point. Destruction is and always will be a form of cathartic release and the reason behind this is that sorrow and frustration always search for destruction in any way possible.
This is what drugs do to you not physically but mentally, they destroy your sense and perception of reality and hence they destroy reality for you. In drugs it seems like the real word is meshing into oblivion and it feels really good to be free of it. You will take cathartic destruction in any form, you will take it in the form of your perception, or you will take it in the form of physical evidence, either way it is soothing to you.
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The cycles
One thing to understand here is that there are rules in our psyche that can’t be changed just like there are rules in this universe that can’t be changed. Even if you are sitting on a chair and doing nothing you are still going to feel repressed and damped sooner or later, you are still going to do something that will serve as a catharsis for you. No one can escape this cycle, and everyone is practicing it in their own way even if we have completely different life situations.
The want for destruction as catharsis can lead to really dangerous outcomes. There are many heinous acts in this world that are result of this cathartic need and sometimes just like drugs, want for spreading suffering and chaos can also become an addiction. There are instances in which you yourself came really close to commit what you normally would consider as a wrongdoing, and there are times in which you even did commit it.
What we don’t know is that this catharsis can come really cheap to us even without doing anything or even without crossing any sort of line. The thing with chaos and suffering is that it’s everywhere; we don’t see them often because we are really good at hiding them. We hide our misery all the time, it’s a constant struggle that people bear their whole lives, and yet the misery is in so much quantity that it becomes obvious from time to time.
A misconception
Ask any person you know, or think is really happy that are they alright? They will obviously be going to say they are good, but then ask them again with the sentiment that you feel something wrong is going on in their lives and that it feels like they are sad about something. You will see a look on their face, a look which says how the hell you know this? Am I this obvious?
Most of us are not alright, if not outright pitiful. Most of us are not happy; most of us are just really good at faking it. It’s a tiring job but we have become so much accustomed to it that we do it naturally all the time, without even knowing that we are doing it. It feels so normal to do it that not doing it is the real abnormal thing to us.
And this is the real reason we feel so isolated and lonely in our own misery. It feels like everyone else is somehow having the best of their lives, it’s only you who is defective. Something is wrong only in your life and then you ask this question, why is it happening to me? Only if you knew it is happening to everyone else too. Maybe quite differently to the way it is happening to you but it is happening, and actually we do know it, we just don’t realize it to the full extent.
A pitiful relief
This is a big relief that we all are together in this hell hole. You may feel that this is a really pitiful way of being relived or assured, but to that I will say that one can and should take relief from wherever it comes from, because relief is not a thing of abundance in this world. The man who talked to you rudely this morning, maybe he has a sick son at hospital, maybe he needed to shout at someone to stay sane. The person, who broke your heart, maybe has been broken themselves.
The person you are mad at because you feel they don’t understand you maybe has been misunderstood by many others.
If you can relate to someone you will find that they maybe are at fault but it’s not much of their fault, they never had much of the choice in the matter and you like it or not are always going to relate to someone’s misery more than someone’s happiness. It is not a myth that misery reduces when gets shared, but it is only true when sharing is done from both sides.
But even if there is no one to share their misery to you, your realization of the world’s misery is enough for you to feel better. If everyone is poor, no one is, and if everyone is miserable, well, let’s say then the misery is a little more manageable.
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