The Power of a Scream
The Healing Power of a Single Scream
The scream heard round the world
Except for any noted source material, this spiritual diary is the copywritten material of Neva. J. Howell, all rights reserved
The scream heard ’round the world…..
Or at least, that’s how it felt to me.
I know I’m a week late in posting my response from a show I saw last week. I meant to post the next day……oh, well.
Anyway, I felt it should be acknowledged, the healing and transformative power of a scream that is bigger than the body.
The show is Desperate Housewives.
If you saw the episode about the tornado, you surely know the scream I mean.
Did huge emotion get released from your own gut and throat when Felicity Huffman screamed, the way it did from my own gut and throat?
Wow. As a performance artist myself, I’ve always appreciated the power of believable acting to transform and heal. This was one moment in tv history when all my beliefs were affirmed.
It was as if Felicity channeled the agony and disbelief of every person who has ever lost all they owned to a tornado. In a different way, I feel Adam Sandler did something similar for those who have suddenly lost someone they loved in the film Reign on me.
The Desperate Housewives moment was particularly powerful for me because wehad just had a tornado about 20 miles from my home about a week before and the devastation had been on the news a lot. I thought of the people in Indonesia and all those in New Orleans after Katrina….that same scream must have been in their throats.
In a way I can’t quite articulate, Felicity Huffman did a great thing that Sunday night. I’m grateful for her willingness to allow such a powerful emotional response to emerge from her,
with force and precision, as witness to all those who have lost their homes in an instant, from nature in violent breath.
In my own experience, it is not the scream that hurts us when we are in trauma….oh no, it is the holding back from screaming, the pushing down of cellular release. Holding back the scream, however, is what most of us tend to do. Anything that can help the world release those held back screams is healing, in my opinion.
Thank you, Felicity.