- How do we move through sadness?
Sadness is healthy.
Sadness is okay.
Sadness is part of being human.
But I don't know that it's anybody's favorite emotion.
I think most people prefer feeling happy.
(bright music)
So how do we move through sadness to happiness?
Four things.
One, feel it, don't fight it.
Two, don't feed it, but let it happen.
Three, resolve what you can.
Four, grieve what you cannot.
So first of all,
feel it, don't fight it.
One of my very first therapy clients,
when I was in graduate school,
was a woman whose husband had recently died,
whose son was in the military
and was about to go off to war.
She carried a lot of grief about her husband,
and a lot of anxiety about her son,
and sadness at the thought that she might lose him too,
or at the very least,
that she wasn't gonna see him for a couple years.
And her response was to pull herself up by her bootstraps,
to put her chin up,
to throw herself into her work,
to throw herself into her responsibilities.
The reason she came to therapy
is because she kept having these attacks of crying,
and sadness, and grief,
when she didn't want it to happen.
She'd be in the middle of a board meeting or something,
and then suddenly her lip would start to tremble,
the tears would start to flow,
the mascara would run,
the snot would also start to run,
and it was just this big, embarrassing ordeal.
Ditto at church,
or ditto at family functions.
And she came to me, and said,
"I want your help to stop crying.
I want your help to stop having these attacks
of grief and sadness."
And I looked at her,
and I can't believe I was so gutsy to try this
as such a young therapist,
but I said, "Do you poop?"
And she says, "Excuse me?"
And I said, "Pooping. Do you poop?"
She goes, "Of course I poop.
Everybody poops."
I'm like, "That's my favorite book."
(Jonathan laughs)
She says, "Everyone poops."
And I said, "Can you imagine
if you had an uncomfortable experience,
like just a really either gnarly poop or painful poop,
and you said, 'That's it. No more pooping.'
And you went to a specialist for help
to not poop anymore?
What would happen if you didn't poop anymore?"
She's like, "It would get backed up."
"What would happen if you just held that all inside?"
I said, "Walk me through it."
And she said, "Well, I imagine it would get backed up."
And I said, "And if you felt that you needed to,
but you just clenched and you just held it in,"
She says, "Yeah, it would get backed up
in a really nasty way,
and then it might not come out at all."
And I said, "You'd probably have to go to the hospital."
She says, "Yeah."
And I said, "They probably have to use
like a hose or a tube or something."
And I'm like, "That would be a horrific, awful mess."
And she says, "I see where you're going with this."
I said, "You have to be regular with your crying.
You want my help to not feel sad.
You want my help to not tear up,
but you're wanting to go the wrong direction.
What you need to be doing is going in the direction
of crying whenever you need to cry.
The reason you have these crying fits
and these attacks of sadness, as you put it,
at these inopportune moments,
is because you don't allow yourself to be regular.
And this demands to be felt.
The sadness will be felt.
It demands to be felt.
And so it will make itself known,
and make its voice heard at the inopportune times."
I said, "So, yeah, I mean,
I'm not saying cry whenever you have the urge to cry,
I'm saying if you have the urge to cry,
and you're not in a place
where you feel comfortable doing so,
excuse yourself and go sit in your car.
Or go into the restroom and cry, right?
Or have a private moment.
But let yourself cry whenever you need to.
Let yourself be sad whenever you need to.
You need to feel it and not fight it.
'Cause the more you fight it,
the more it fights back,
and it's gonna win."
So she gave it a try.
And all that week, whenever she needed to cry,
she would let herself cry.
Either right then or there,
or she would excuse herself
and go someplace and have a good cry.
And she found that she wasn't having these attacks anymore,
of sadness.
They weren't coming, because she was being regular.
You need to feel it, don't fight it.
The next thing is to not feed it, but let it happen.
So we said feel it, don't fight it.
There's two extremes here, right?
You need to feel it.
On one extreme, you could fight it,
on the other extreme, you could feed it.
And that's not gonna help you either.
Like, just really having what people call a pity party.
There's a difference between venting
and having a pity party.
There's a difference between expressing your sadness,
and I don't like the phrase "pity party."
I get it, 'cause it's condescending,
but it speaks to a truth,
which is that at a certain point you've gone from,
"I'm gonna pull myself up by my bootstraps
and not feel sad,"
to the other extreme of,
"I'm not going to pull myself out of this.
I'm going to stay in this gear.
I'm not going to live my life.
I'm not going to make things better.
I'm not going to do the things that I need to do.
I'm just going to sit in this grief and despair,"
and that's not healthy either.
So don't feed it.
But yes, feel it.
And my experience is that these things run their course.
There are things in my life
where I'm going to be a little bit sad,
until I can resolve this or mourn this.
But if I let myself be sad,
then I feel happy, right?
I had a good cry, or I had a good talk,
or I did what I needed to do,
and now I can have, at the very least,
the bittersweet experience of some joy.
The third is to resolve and fix what you can.
Sometimes we feel sad,
because things are wrong that we can put right.
There's a friendship that's damaged,
that we haven't done everything we could do
to make it right.
There's a relationship that's on the rocks,
that we haven't done everything that we could do to fix.
So resolve what you can.
If I feel sad because my son and I aren't close,
I can go and apologize to him.
If I feel sad because my daughter and I are struggling,
I can go and say,
"Hey, we haven't hung out one on one in a while.
I'd like to spend some time just you and I," right?
I can take steps, I can take measures.
And then there are things that you can't fix.
Relationship is too far gone.
The other person's not willing to do the work.
You've lost someone.
They've passed away.
They're not here anymore.
Those are things that you need to grieve.
And how do you grieve them?
By feeling the sadness.
How do you grieve them?
In the case of someone that you've lost,
by honoring them.
By honoring their memory.
By making sure that they are remembered.
By fighting for the causes that they fought for.
By remembering, and being grateful,
that they were in your life at all.
That's how we grieve.
Lost opportunities, they're gone.
I grieve them by recognizing that they're gone,
feeling that pain and sorrow,
and then making a commitment
to, "here's what I'm gonna do next time,
so I don't miss the next opportunity."
So once again, when it comes to sadness,
feel it, don't fight it.
Don't feed it, but let it happen.
Resolve what you can,
and grieve what you can't.
Thank you for joining me on this journey
of better understanding our emotions,
and how to process them, move through them,
and arrive at a place of peace and happiness.
I'll see you next time.
(bright music)