Connection with our Sadness

According to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living." Avoiding our emotions can make us lose touch with our true selves and the attachment we have to them. When we allow ourselves to feel, we begin to recognize the value of our lives. We care more deeply, aspire for more, and are capable of loving and growing in ways that might not have been possible without embracing our emotions. A full life necessitates experiencing all emotions, including sadness, which often adds a significant dimension of meaning to our experiences.

Throughout my childhood, we moved around frequently - almost every year until I reached college. This meant I had to leave behind many homes, schools, and friends. By the time I was in high school, I was severely sad and depressed; however, sadness wasn't an emotion that my parents knew how to handle or comfort me in. I was raised in a Christian family where hard work and dedication to God held precedence over physical and emotional presence. As a child, I remember feeling sad and scared to feel this emotion, which often led me to hide in the closet, the only safe space where I could cry quietly without drawing attention to my broken heart. For me, sadness wasn't an emotion that felt safe to feel.

How about for you? What did you learn to do with your sadness as a child?

As humans, we have a natural tendency to avoid feelings of sadness. This is particularly evident from a young age, as we're often not granted the opportunity to express the full range of our emotions. From a young age, little boys are often taught to be tough and avoid showing any signs of sadness, as it's perceived as a sign of weakness.

Throughout our lives, we are confronted with painful realities, from the pain of our interpersonal relationships to rejections, frustrations, and incidental hurts. We also face existential issues, loss, diseases, and death. It's worth noting that most of us carry old pain from our past. As children, we depended on others for survival, meaning that many things, like an inattentive or angry parent, could be perceived as threatening. We carried this sadness with us as we grew up, sometimes without even realizing it.

Many of us are fearful that experiencing sadness will cause us to tap into a well of repressed emotions. Consequently, we might adopt methods to cut off or dampen our emotions. As children, we often develop specific psychological defenses to cope with painful experiences, making life feel more bearable but less fulfilling. Unfortunately, the techniques we use to quell our emotions often turn out to be harmful to ourselves and the people we care about the most.

Holding in sadness and repressing our emotions leads to a significant loss, repressed emotions prevent us from engaging with what is truly important to us. Sadness, as a raw emotion, signals that something has been buried, suppressed, or lost. It is the manifestation of an issue that demands to be felt and processed, and if we hold it in, we lose the ability to act on it.

Feelings of grief serve as a way to heal from sadness, but grief is not an accepted way of being in our culture. Our society views grief as a sign of weakness, placing immense pressure on individuals to appear happy, even if they are experiencing significant difficulties. However, we must remember that it is essential to grieve and process our sadness. Grief offers the opportunity to understand and accept those emotions fully. It ensures we hold space for our sadness and creates an adequate space to process these emotions healthily.

A healthy grief process provides an individual with the tools they required to initiate the healing process and reach a place of acceptance, eventually gaining more inner liberation. By honoring all emotions, we provide ourselves with much more freedom to fully engage with life, allowing us to gain a deeper sense of empathy and understanding for those around us.

Written by: Talitha Bullock

Human Connection: The Choice to Hurt or to Heal

1) “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” 

2) “I wish I hadn't worked so hard.” 

3) “I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.” 

4) “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” 

5) “I wish I had let myself be happier” 

You’ve maybe heard of the top regrets of the dying.* While it may not be obvious, I’d invite you to consider that each of the top 5 all have to do with relationships - our connection to others. What is this great longing we as humans collectively feel around how we connect with each other? For most, learning of these top regrets of the dying brings a shift in perspective, sometimes so powerful that we finally speak our truth to a loved one, we tell someone what we really want, or we declare our dream and that we’re moving towards it. 

Ask anyone who’s coexisted with others in any sort of attempt at human connection and they can confirm it: relationships are not always easy or simple. Whether we think of a family situation of any type, friendships, romantic partnerships, or business partnerships we can all agree that human relationships can be the source of our greatest fulfillment and accomplishment, and can also sometimes be the source of our greatest challenges and pain. The power of relationships and what they can bring to our quality of life and fulfillment is no small thing. So how do we make the most of the power of relationships and spare ourselves the regret of wishing we’d done something different? Allow me to share a personal story. 

I can recall a time many years ago when I shared some relationship woes with a friend. It was a time when it seemed I wasn’t being respected and loved like I wanted and felt I deserved. This was apparent in friendships, personal relationships and a potential romantic relationship that was brewing. I had a lot of complaints of emotional turmoil and thankfully my friend was willing to listen and offer some support. After listening to me express one thing after another, almost exhausting myself, I finally paused and looked to her for some compassion and support. She took a brief moment as if to let something sink in and then looked at me warmly and shared something I’ll never forget. She said, “I once heard someone say that all the relationships we attract serve to either further wound us or further heal us.”

This struck me in a profound way! It was as if I had no conscious intention about whether the connections I was contemplating were serving to further wound or heal. But through that statement the power of choice became reawakened for me. I began to see connections in my life as opportunities to experience wholeness and healing. This perspective change brought some connections closer and stronger, and some it let naturally release. It was as if the intention for human connection to be healing rearranged my life, my relationships, my behavior and my priorities. 

Now I’ll be real, it wasn’t always easy. The stories I held of woundings were strong and I was tested by life after this realization. The familiar patterns of relationship dynamics I had attracted before still seemed to show up. And recognizing the patterns, I gradually made shifts towards healing through asking myself honestly although sometimes reluctantly: how would I engage in this connection if healing was my highest choice? 

Sometimes we’re willing to tolerate quite a lot being out of alignment. Whether this is learned behavior, a coping mechanism or a blind spot, I’ve found that life has its ways of making what needs addressing apparent. And when we make a choice towards healing, towards wholeness, we know what to do next to respond and handle any situation. 

Maybe some situations in your own experience are becoming apparent for you while reading this. I’d like to leave you with the invitation to take a moment to write down a few situations where healing, or the realization of wholeness, has been neglected in your life. Next, write out what wholeness would look and feel like in those situations - for everyone involved. Finally, envision how you would act, speak, feel, hold yourself if that wholeness was a fact now. Whether this inspires a healing action or graciously reveals a few more layers to work through, you can be assured that you’re taking the necessary steps now to not later regret what nearly all humans wish they did better before dying: connect.

Written by: Justin Froese

All the relationships we attract serve to either further wound us or further heal us. - Justin Froese