Allowing Yourself To Feel Sadness

It can be difficult to feel sadness.

When we encounter a loss or a disappointment or other difficult experiences along these lines, it’s natural to feel sad. Sadness is a natural human emotional state. As we go through life all of us will encounter losses and disappointments and other sources of sadness and grief. And when we do, it’s important to be able to feel the sadness that arises, rather than always pushing it away. The problem is, when we get into the routine of pushing sadness away and clinging only to ‘positive’ emotions, your sadness doesn’t really disappear. Instead, the sadness tends to remain active in your psyche and body, but now it moves out of your view, constraining your emotional range and leaving you carrying a weight that is difficult to identify, process, and move through.

There are many reasons that people tend to avoid feeling sad. First and foremost, allowing yourself to feel sad means allowing yourself to encounter a kind of emotional pain—and this in and of itself can be difficult to do. After all, we often want to move away from pain; we steel ourselves against it. We throw up walls between ourselves and our pain, in both our bodies and our minds. And it’s true that feeling sadness involves suffering. But at the same time, allowing yourself to feel sadness, allowing yourself to grieve or mourn or acknowledge that you’re sad, can also bring with it deep relief. When you are feeling sad it takes a lot of emotional energy to push that sadness away and keep it at bay. On the other hand, allowing yourself to feel your sadness is allowing those muscles to relax. And so, while feeling your sadness is suffering, it is also a kind of release and relief. And this suffering, and release and relief, is part of the process of moving through your sadness into the more emotionally expansive life that will exist for you beyond.

There are many other impediments that people encounter when it comes to feeling their sadness. For instance, you may wonder if what you are feeling is really sadness or if it’s depression. And when we worry about depression, many of us adopt a ‘fighting’ stance—you may try and fight back against depression and make arguments to yourself as to why you should not feel this way. You may list for yourself all the reasons that you should feel happy, all the good parts of your life that should blot out the sadness. Sometimes people come into therapy unsure of whether they are feeling sadness or depression, or both. We can work this through together and support you in the particular ways that you need. But where you are encountering sadness that you haven’t allowed yourself to feel, where a deep part of you needs to mourn but you are tightened against that mourning—part of our work together can be supporting you to feel safe enough to feel the sadness. Feeling sadness can actually help you move through the feelings fluidly, and not feel stuck and depressed. Sometimes allowing yourself to feel this kind of sadness takes time. We can move through this at whatever pace we need to. But as we go you may experience, along with the sadness, deep relief in finally being able to face and feel it. There can even be lightness that comes, in allowing yourself to feel sadness.

Other reasons that people resist feeling sadness include the great cultural resistance to feeling sadness, a cultural suspicion of sadness. Rather than experiencing support from the wider culture to feel sadness and grief, we often receive messages that sadness is pathological, that it’s a character defect, something that should be hidden from view. Some people are able to rely on their particular cultural, community, or religious resources to support them to effectively experience and move through sadness and grief. But many people do not have these resources, or the resources that they have are not enough. And so, people often feel isolated and alone when they are sad, because they worry that others will not be able to dwell with them in it, or will feel awkward around it, or will judge them for it. This aloneness contributes to the need people feel to push their sadness away.

In light of all of this, as well as other emotional and cultural impediments to feeling sadness, the ability to really feel sadness can be an achievement. It can be something to work towards. This isn’t a matter of sinking into depression, or of worrying too much, or of turning away from happiness, all of which can be their own struggles. But what I’m addressing here is something different—the ability and the practice of allowing yourself to feel healthy sadness when it comes; the ability and the practice of being able to grieve and to mourn in full and meaningful ways.

This is something that most of us can work on and get better at. And therapy can be a great support in this process. In the safe and supportive environment of our work together, you can increasingly allow yourself to feel and express whatever is within, including sadness. As we go, this can translate to your life beyond therapy—a growing capacity to feel the healthy feelings that come, both sadness and joy, rather than pushing them away. The ripples of this new emotional expansiveness and freedom can play out across your life experience. For instance you may find yourself developing more confidence that you can handle life’s ups and downs as they come; a greater ability to ask friends and loved ones for company and support when you are having a hard time; an expanded capacity to think, feel, and be creative in more open-ended and complex ways; and onward.

If you are wrestling with sadness or with difficulty feeling your sadness, or if you would like to deepen and expand your emotional life and capacity, I invite you to call me at (510) 500-9722 to talk about how depression therapy can help.