Certain needs tend to evoke emotional responses that make the situation worse in a way that aggravates the need, which of course leads to an even stronger emotional response, which aggravates the need even further.  Thus begins the downward spiral.  One descends like a meteor into a hole that becomes increasingly difficult to climb out of.

One such need is the need to be liked or loved, to be important in someone’s life.  When this need is frustrated, the ensuing response can quickly gain momentum, because the things we tend to do when we feel disliked or unaccepted, when we feel we’ve lost our special place in someone’s heart, are precisely things that make it harder to find that place again.

In the movie, Where the Wild Things Are, a monster named Carol sorely misses another monster named KW, who left the group to spend time with two new, special friends.  KW speaks very highly of her new friends, which makes Carol jealous.  He feels as though her new friends are taking his place.

How does Carol respond to the sense that he is no longer as important to KW?  He becomes angry and resentful.  He pouts, withdraws his affections, and implicitly pressures her to give up her new friends.

KW responds to Carol by moving further away.  She is truly sad that she can’t be close to him anymore, but she needs the freedom to include others in her circle of friends.

As KW backs away, Carol becomes even more distraught and resentful.  He begins to feel a sense of helplessness, and he is clearly torn between his need for her and his resentment.  He wants to be with her, and at the same time, he wants her to go away until she gives up her new friends.

As Carol descends into resentful sadness, KW also begins to feel helpless.  She retreats even further into her new world.  At one point, she says, “I don’t know how things got this way.”

I know that feeling.  It all begins with one small moment, a brief exchange of words that signify so little and yet carry so much.  Everything shifts slightly, the tectonic plates of one’s social world moving just an inch in separate directions, but the fear of an impending quake is so great that the ensuing resistance to little change sets off a chain of events that leads to dramatic change.

Notice how both Carol and KW respond to the behaviors that they have evoked in one another due to their prior responses.   Some emotions are responses to things that happened because of the emotions that came before.  The stereotype is that emotions occur in response to single events, then we return to baseline to await the next emotion, which has nothing to do with the last one.  However, in the downward spiral, emotions build upon emotions.  One day, everything has changed, and the grief is immense, and one wonders how it all happened.

The downward spiral I’ve observed in my own life began with the recognition that certain relationships could not continue in the form they had taken.  Anticipatory grief and a sensitivity to indifference led to grasping.  As something beautiful slips away, the urge to hang on and keep it close is overpowering.

My grasping created aversion in those I held dear, and their aversion aggravated my sense of loss.  I wanted to do anything to allay the raw, pressing pain of seeing harmony destroyed, and to be a source of repulsion is excruciating.  In the face of disharmony, the urge is to move closer, but if the disharmony is caused by being a source of aversion, coming closer increases the aversion, causing even more alienation and disharmony.

The only way out of such a spiral is to find a way of being okay with things as they are, being okay with the mess, being okay with being misperceived and misjudged, being okay with loose ends and things gone unsaid, being okay with the fact that, despite your grief, the one you are grieving over is already perfectly okay with it.  Perhaps that is the hardest un-okay thing to accept.  At one point in the movie, Carol paces frantically around the fort in the wee hours of the night, recognizing just how far the situation deviated from the warmth and friendship he once knew, and mutters, “It’s all wrong!  Everything is all wrong!”

To be okay with wrongness, this is the challenge, but it brings the downward spiral to a screeching halt, imbues it with peace, and eventually dissolves it completely.  The harmony one lost returns from a place within.