The Peculiar Problem of Sadness

In a nutshell  🌰

• Sadness is unlike anger or fear: there’s no action plan, just the hard work of tending to the wound that’s already there.
• Many of us were never taught how to hold our own vulnerability, so sadness can feel overwhelming or unsafe.
• Ordinary sadness often echoes depression, which is why we reach for anger or anxiety instead—they feel easier to manage.
• The hopeful news: with compassion, meditation, journalling, and honest conversations, sadness can become a catalyst for healing and self-reassurance.

The Essay

Unlike the emotions connected to our fight and flight response, which are anger and fear respectively, there is no action item connected to sadness, except to seek comfort and to repair. With both Anger and Anxiety, there is at least something to be done. Anger gives us something to protest or punish. Anxiety gives us something to plan for, manage, or avoid. Both pull our attention away from our more vulnerable feelings. Both keep us busy.

But with Sadness, there is nothing to do but accept that the unwanted thing has already happened. Nothing to do but to tend the wound left thereby. And this brings us to the problem: That tending to the wounded parts within us is difficult, and requires a special set of gloves to handle. Gloves, woven together by the thread of compassion, that ideally will have been passed down from one generation to the next. Except many of us never inherited these gloves. If our parents or caregivers couldn’t hold their own vulnerability, then chances are they couldn’t help us learn to hold ours either. So when sadness shows up now, many of us feel unequipped.

And so whilst Sadness is  just a set of passing sensations at one level, that whole range of feeling does strike us differently than most other emotions. Very often it cuts to the core of our sense of self. This is what makes it hard. And for anyone who has known depression, ordinary sadness can carry a faint echo of that dark season — so much so that it can feel unsafe to acknowledge it fully when it shows up in our everyday lives. Better, we think, to avoid it altogether, than risk sliding back into that ditch of despair.

If you relate to this, you’re not alone. Most of us don’t do well with Sadness, and there is very little practical instruction on how to develop the kind of self-compassion that we need to handle our everyday disappointments more effectively. And in that case, it is no wonder that we reach for anger or anxiety instead — they often feel way more manageable.

The good news? We can learn to hold Sadness more wisely – to the point where it becomes the catalyst for the kind of love and reassurance we seek out there in the world, but which we can also learn to give to ourselves also.  

In the meditation-gym podcast myself and my partner in crime Adam Breen, are dropping all sorts of truth bombs on how meditation and journalling and courageous conversations can be an infirmary — and at times a workspace — to heal our hurts and heartaches, and as vehicles to navigate our emotional lives with more wisdom, compassion, and skill.