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
