Sadness
“The best way out is always through.”
- Robert Frost
The secret to feeling better is to get better at feeling... all feelings.
In our culture, we’re told sadness is bad. Sadness is to be avoided, shoved down; it’s considered unattractive, embarrassing. Feeling it means you are “less than,” and will make other people uncomfortable. You may have been taught that if you see a friend who is sad, you should cheer them up. Which also implicitly communicates, “it’s wrong to be sad.”
For most of my life, I didn’t even realize I had an untapped well of sadness I had shoved down and was carrying deep inside of me. I later learned that some mental health professionals call this, “unexpressed grief.” It took me a long time just to be able to connect with, to feel, the sadness I was in fact always carrying. Then, once I could feel it, of course that meant I was well, sad. So I wondered, was this an improvement?
Once I got in touch with my unexpressed grief, I set out to discover how to get rid of or at least lessen it. I was told I needed to mourn the sadness, to grieve my lost childhood or whatever else had caused it.
Was it a singular event? Was it when my grandfather died and I felt abandoned? When my dad missed a birthday, I had remembered being sad then? Or was it more complex? Perhaps, a lifetime of not feeling okay with feeling my feelings? Had not feeling okay with being myself built up until drops of sadness became the deep well I ended up with?
The latter answers seemed more likely and also more difficult to address.
What truly made me feel better was, paradoxically, when I stopped trying to cure my sadness. When I no longer aimed to get rid of it, but rather told it, “Welcome home, sadness. You’re okay, you have a right to exist”. When I could communicate to myself on a deeper level that it was okay to have this sadness, when I gave myself true permission to feel it, I moved through it. Suddenly, I was a lot less sad.
If you tell a child not to cry, he’ll attempt to follow your orders, but it’s difficult. He still wants to cry but now believes he’s wrong for wanting to feel the way he feels. His emotion has been invalidated. He may try to push it all down, and in the end the emotion won’t go away, but the child won’t know how to feel, much less cope with, his pesky feelings. Whereas if you sympathetically tell the child who is about to cry, “It’s okay, you can cry if you want to,” he’ll often instantly feel better. He’s been given permission to feel his feelings and move on. He may not even have the desire to cry anymore.
The same goes for us. At any given moment, you can decide whether or not you are going to give yourself permission to feel your feelings. Giving yourself this permission can be quite difficult. Many of us have decades of experience repressing our feelings and far less experience actually feeling them.
Sometime we’re afraid that if we were to let ourselves feel our feelings, the emotion might never stop. That we could be crying or sad or angry forever. However, once people give themselves permission to feel their feelings, they inevitably realize this fear is not true. Emotions, once felt, do pass. Nothing is permanent (we’ll look at this more deeply later in a letter titled, “This Too Shall Pass”).
Some people are not only afraid that an emotion might not stop; they’re afraid (on a conscious or unconscious level) that feeling an emotion will kill them. That it will be so overwhelming they simply can’t take it. However, again, when someone bravely begins to feel their emotions, he realizes that while feelings may be intense, they are not fatal. At times, my fears of rejection, loneliness, failure, and abandonment felt like they were life-or-death. However, by letting myself feel them, I realized I could and would survive. If permission is granted, the emotion will pass through you.
What if we reconsider the assumption that sadness is to be avoided? What if we come to appreciate that sadness plays an important role, that it exists as part of our being for a very valid reason, and rather than avoiding it, we should embrace it. Even if others don’t know how to react, that’s okay. That’s their problem. For myself, I can find safe places and safe people to be sad with. Once I make feeling my sadness a goal, I’m not so sad anymore.
What if the secret to “feeling better” is letting go of that very goal?
The goal is not to feel better. The goal is to get better at feeling.
Ironically, getting better at feeling all our feelings is the path towards feeling better.
Ask Yourself:
- Do I think it’s okay to be sad?
- What do I think about myself when I’m feeling sad?
- Are there judgmental thoughts I think about other people when they are feeling sad?
- Am I willing to let myself feel my feelings just for a little bit?
Next Letter: Pain