Recognizing Sadness Is Brave

How many times have you tried to contain or make up sadness? Since we are little we receive messages from society that tell us that we cannot allow ourselves to be sad, that we must be brave, that we must be strong at all times, that we cannot lose heart, that we learn nothing from sadness…. that joy is the only desirable emotion and that it does us good. A joy, of course, also contained: nothing regulated or euphoric.

Sure, sadness is an emotion of negative valence, but… what if we turn it into an emotion that gives us something positive, and if we were able to accept it as an emotion and learn from it? What if instead of imprisoning her we gave her some space?

Sadness: a basic emotion

The loss of a relative, a love breakdown, losing a job, an illness, when we do not meet the expectations that we set for ourselves… these are some of the situations that often cause us sadness. It is true that many times it is not an instantaneous sadness, since in the first moments what arises is anger against those forces that have caused us the loss.

A very important difference is that between sadness and depression. The latter is not an emotion, it is a disease that goes beyond a specific moment and requires a sustained and more intense state of sadness associated with other symptoms to be diagnosed. Despite this difference, which is very important, sadness is seen in a similar way to how depression is understood, so that many people try to end it.

If, in addition to being very sad for some time, you experience sleep disorders, inability to feel pleasure with activities that previously provided it, lack of desire for your daily activities, lack of concentration, feelings of guilt … no doubt: it is the time to seek professional help.

However, sadness itself, as an emotion, is a unique opportunity to get to know each other. An emotion that some studies link to a greater activation of our body so that we respond after a loss. In addition, it is an emotion that by itself demands the support and help of loved ones and not clinical treatment.

The tears

With the amount of tears that human beings shed and we have not yet managed to fully understand the mystery that they contain.  Although all studies suggest that, as social beings that we are, they fulfill a function of liberation and communication with others to seek comfort.

Behind them, the usual thing is that there is a complex network of emotions, more than just one. The circumstances in which we can cry are also many: we can cry out of happiness, out of empathy with the people around us, out of anger and even watching a movie that moves us. Each tear tells a story that is important to us.

Thus, containing them or visualizing them as enemies does not make us stronger or better people, we are simply behaving based on what others may think about them. And at this point we must ask ourselves, has that person never cried? If you haven’t, something is wrong.

Crying calms us, lowers our anxiety levels, makes us breathe better, makes us be faithful to what we feel, makes us connect with others and, to top it all, makes us eliminate bacteria while protecting our organism.What’s wrong with them then?

Do not cry be strong

If we are easy to tear, how many times in our life have we heard someone censure our relief? That we have to be strong first of all, that crying is from weak people, that it is ridiculous or, what is worse, that we are childish because of it. In addition, from listening to this answer so much, we ourselves have come to internalize it. Thus, we have become the first censors of our tears.

Sometimes we can understand why they tell us. Perhaps they do not do it with bad intentions, after all, they are phrases that we hear and learn since we are little and that are incorporated into our repertoire. We build and share them automatically, regardless of them.

However, as we have said, its effect is not harmless. The acceptance and socialization of this message is the fertile ground for it to sink in the new generations that inherit the product of our steps. Thus, children usually do not delay and incorporate this censor proposed by adults, as if doing so constituted a necessary step towards adolescence and adulthood.

With them and with us we have a responsibility: to understand the role of emotions, regardless of their valence. It is about accepting them and letting them breathe so that they can play their restorative role or their motivating role. On the other hand, theoretically it can be very didactic to separate our emotional part from our more logical part, however at a functional level we cannot forget that the processes tend to intermingle, making the whole have a very different result from what we could imagine with the sum of the parts.

In short, sadness is one of our * emotions * and, well used and reasoned, it is one of our great allies. Thus, do not transform her into an enemy by starting a battle against her , because in these cases the only possible result is an even more intense and disheartening suffering.