The Power ofThe Power ofLaughter and therapy are not generally paired in the minds of clinicians nor in the minds of the general public. For most, therapy constitutes serious business and is approached with a proper amount of ponderous gravity. After all, people enter therapy for serious reasons, often at critical times in their lives. How, then, can laughter become a vital part of the therapy process with such serious subject matter?
If one entertains the idea of laughter as a physical process that releases emotional pain, then a laughing response to serious triggers like stress, anxiety and tension makes sense. If we put laughter into a pain framework, all kinds of laughter in painful situations begins to seem appropriate.
Cathartic psychotherapy believes that laughter releases emotion. It provides the physical process that powers out certain kinds of pain. Psychiatrist Raymond Moody believes that through laughter, people's feelings and emotions erupt from inside them into the outside world.1 Therefore, if one curtails or quenches laughter, it quenches the release of pain as well.
Our cultural preference for processing feelings cognitively instead of feeling them in our bodies tends to maintain and prolong emotional distress. Clients from families who do not allow feeling, may have squelched their ability to laugh, cry and feel angry. As clinicians, we may offer assistance in regaining these cathartic processes, enabling our clients to release deeply held emotions.
Only now has research begun to validate the belief that the body stores emotions, not the mind. Cathartic techniques allow clinicians to help clients access their stored emotions and release them. The more catharsis the client experiences, the faster he moves through the healing process. Laughter, which is possibly the most powerful cathartic process and the least threatening in many respects, leads the way in easing controls on emotion and often opens the door to crying and deep anger.
The laughter catharsis does not change the facts, but it does change the way one relates to the facts. It allows a person to see things from a bird's-eye view, where horrendous misfortune seems much more bearable. Life's most tragic and bizarre occurrences contain things that may strike one as personally absurd if one looks at them appropriately, and the absurd serves as a trigger point for laughter. Underneath the layers of unresolved pain, a child resides who possesses a strong biological drive toward joy and with the capacity for it, even with the capacity to generate it for itself.2 All that prevents a person from feeling joyful once again is the release of the pain layered on top. Laughter provides that release in a pleasurable way.
Emotionally, laughter takes care of several painful feelings. It releases fear, which is often the root cause of emotional distress. Created biologically to protect humans from danger, it only becomes a liability if not heeded and released. This is sometimes complicated today because our fears may remain subtle and difficult to recognize.
Laughter creates a safe and clear thinking frame of mind. It allows one to reframe a specific threat or stress so that it becomes less overwhelming. As people laugh at things that threaten their well-being, they release anxiety, and discomfort decreases. For example, many people who face life-threatening illness find laughter enables them to face the possibility of death directly while still enjoying and even enhancing the quality of their lives.
In addition to fear, laughter releases light anger. It also works to release deeper anger, indirectly. It does so by allowing one to shed the lighter aspects of fear and anger that may then open access to deep rage. Laughter often serves as a more acceptable way to approach one's angry feelings. Fear represses so much anger that laughter actually serves the dual purpose of first releasing the fear of anger and then the anger itself.
Anger, which is the emotional response to the invasion of one's boundaries, is not allowed in many families. When childhood boundaries are ignored and instinctive angry responses are not permitted by adults, they must be redirected or repressed by the child. This teaches the child that anger is unacceptable. To access their anger, many clients must overcome the defenses of their own childhood. Laughter allows this.
Finally, laughter releases boredom, the emotion related to changing the amount of stimulus in our environment. Boredom is a numbing, demoralizing emotion, that undermines one's sense of purpose. It ranges from the simple type, which is acutely distressing until the cause is removed, to hyperboredom that is comparable to an agonizing, chronically painful disease that in some cases ends in death.3 When we have too much or too little of something, we get bored, and we need to take action. Failing that, we need to laugh.
Clinicians may facilitate their clients' laughter by helping them play with their pain. According to Max Eastman, "…We come into the world endowed with an instinctive tendency to laugh and have this feeling in response to pains presented playfully."4 Laughter is not just about humor. It is about the release of pain and therefore highly appropriate for all the things in life that are not in the least amusing. When a client can play with pain, the result is laughter.
There are many ways to play with emotional pain. For example, playfully looking at the "good things" about depression can help clients feel that they will learn to cope after all. Their depression becomes less consuming, allowing them to take positive action. However, first and foremost, it is important to have a firm understanding of cathartic theory as the springboard for leading clients into laughter. Doing so without knowledge can result in harm, however well-intentioned therapists may be. People have different degrees of willingness and different capacities for creating playful approaches to their issues and their feelings. It is important that the therapist follow the client's lead, approaching catharsis with the deep respect it deserves.
Upon entering adulthood and learning to distinguish importance from unimportance, we need to maintain our ability to take things playfully. Once we have learned to care about things, it is important to balance that concern in a way that eases the intensity. To do so we must reverse our early brainwashing and tap into play that is "a socio-physiological state or posture of instinctive life. It is not only something that we do, but also something we are while we do it."4
Inviting and facilitating laughter in therapy is not the same as developing and using humor to make the client laugh. Humor is not necessary to have laughter. Adults can laugh without it, as do infants. Actually, we laugh when we hurt, if our guard drops. Humor can serve as a cause for laughter, but clients must feel free to use it in their own way with their own issues.
Laughter in therapy is not a paradox. The two belong together in the quest for healing. It is the wisdom of nature that equipped us to provide our own spoonful of laughter for the medicine of life. Laughter and pain are so perfectly paired. We often overlook the connection.
References
Enda Junkins is a therapist in
private practice in Irving, Texas. She is a graduate of the
University of Illinois with a master's in social work and has worked
as a therapist since 1972. She has developed a therapeutic specialty
that utilizes laughter as a major part of the healing process.
