I’m talking about emotional pain.
The kind you feel in your chest.
The lump in your throat that forms when something has hurt you.
Sadness is your reaction to an experience. Someone dying can make you feel sad. Someone being physically and/or emotionally abusive can make the victim sad. Being betrayed by a loved one can cause you to lose your trust for them and make you sad.
Everyone displays sadness in different ways.
Some people display it by becoming angry. Some don’t have the energy to do anything at all and their sadness is silent. I usually cry it out.
Although sadness is very real and should be acknowledged, it should not lead me to act on it. I have in the past acted out of sadness and it has made situations worse for everyone involved, including myself. Heightened emotions lead to impulsive actions and it’s about controlling yourself fully. So to contain that sadness within is really hard.
But it is necessary for me.
These are the 4 steps I follow to help me cope with Sadness:
Become aware of Sadness.
When I feel emotional I tend to spiral. I have on many occasions replayed a horrible experience in my mind with a very zoomed-in lens. The event becomes exaggerated in my head by a thousand in minutes. I start to feel more anxious and my anxiety feeds me stories that are completely distorted. What might have been a mild annoyance to begin with it often turned into a full-blown meltdown.
How many times have you looked back in time and thought, “maybe I did overreact”?
It can be really difficult to recognise the exact feeling of sadness because it’s masked under various other feelings like Anger or Frustration. When you feel yourself becoming increasingly emotional, that’s when you can stop to ask, what’s making me feel this way? And then, how am I feeling, really?
It may seem like a silly task, and I’m no psychologist — this is what I do to help me acknowledge exactly what’s going on because I feel the need to be in control of my own feelings, not the other way around.
Once I found myself doing this, I dodged anxiety. I no longer spiral out of control. Mild annoyances stay mild annoyances. This enables me to do the next step.
Detaching from Sadness.
I’m not Sadness, I’m not Anger, I’m not Anxiety.
I’m Sylvia, and sometimes I interact with all of those things.
I have learned over time to recognise each feeling and nip them in the bud before they worsen.
Again, this only worked for me with copious amounts of practice. But first, I had to be in the right mindset in order to know how to look at each emotion as if it was not part of me. Some people give their emotions names. I gave them roles. Fear is my Health and Safety Director and Love is my Chief Operations Officer.
Sadness is my misunderstood friend because she is there for me — I cannot banish her from my mind. We cannot oppress sadness as no matter how much we do it, it will just come out in different ways without us even knowing it. So just embrace her and let her be your friend by holding you when you need her to.
Acceptance.
I believe the hardest part of any multi-step challenge is the acceptance of it. My kind of sadness is usually an outrage or a shock of betrayal. It offends me when someone or something hurts me.
How could the train have been so delayed? The world is against me.
How could you have lied to me? You’re against me.
How could he think this is ok? He’s against me.
What I mean is, it is good to allow myself to feel the pain and express it in a way that doesn’t physically hurt me. But once I’ve done that, I need to look at how to not let it affect my day or my life. I am not letting someone get away with X, Y, or Z by accepting my pain. I am simply self-preserving and minimising the damage it will do to me.
Sadness is part of life. All pain is unfair. It’s unfair that I was bullied in school and at work. It’s unfair that throughout my life I have felt undervalued and disrespected by colleagues or people whom I considered to be my friends. But what’s done is done, and it will not shape who I am.
I can’t afford to lead my life with Sadness.
But she will be there when I need a good cry. And this is why she is a good friend. It is OK to feel sad and it is OK to have a good cry to let it out. Sadness is there to help me through it. If I suppress it I can become numb and that’s why I cannot ignore Sadness. But once that’s done, I get back up and continue on with my life.
Photo by Jacob Mejicanos on Unsplash
You live and you learn.
This is the last step. With anything that happens, no matter how bad, there is always a lesson to be learned and this is the silver lining.
For me, there is no option to have something bad without something good. That’s why we need to feel sad in order to feel happy.
Yes, I was bullied in school, but I had amazing friends who stood up for me and who are still there for me today. I learned who I could trust.
Yes, I was mistreated at work but it led me to find better work with awesome colleagues and more money. I learned what type of firm I wanted to work for.
Yes, I have been disrespected and undervalued by others but they don’t get to decide the course of my life so their words and actions don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I have learned they own their words, not me.
Let Sadness be there for you, but don’t let her interfere with your life. That’s what Love is for.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
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