Sadness isn’t always a desired feeling, but it is an essential emotion as part of the human experience. While some are more able to allow sadness in and to move through, others 
might find themselves trying to keep it at bay. This can include a number of ways of avoiding the present (and present emotion), such as scrolling on the phone, snacking mindlessly, dissociating, or even lashing out when someone brings up a topic that hits home too centrally. Everyone has mechanisms they default to when unwanted emotions start to come in, often without even realizing it.
Sadness Isn’t Bad
While focusing only on positive emotions might seem helpful, this approach often can backfire. Toxic positivity — banishing difficult emotions and only acknowledging the “good” ones — can take a toll on your emotional wellbeing and authenticity. Replacing an unprocessed emotion doesn’t generally “get rid” of it, as much as it stores it in the body for later. You may even notice that certain feelings start to build up and feel heavier over time as they are brought forward and not dealt with, until eventually they start to take over and lead to issues such as depression.
Letting yourself feel sad doesn’t mean wallowing in misery. Instead, it’s about acknowledging and allowing yourself to move through your current emotional state. By acknowledging and being present in sadness when it shows up, you’re taking the steps to moving forward meaningfully and letting go of the emotions. It can be easy to forget that it’s okay to feel sad sometimes — it’s a valuable emotion and can even bring benefits when you can connect with it.
Sadness Can Feel Both Safe And Scary
Sadness can be complicated. At times, it can feel safe to be sad. It may help to naturally generate an empathic response from certain others around you, and it can elicit care and warmth that you may need. It can have a way of creating connection with others who are also experiencing sadness, as well. It can also help you understand what you need, don’t need, are grieving, and more. There’s a lot within sadness that’s useful to reflect on while processing through it.
However, a complicated part of sadness is that not only does it feel heavy and painful at times, sadness can also feel scary to open oneself to. This is often because the the hurt, pain, or the grief with sadness can sometimes feel overwhelming (emotionally and even physically), depending on the magnitude of the sadness, or for how much time feelings have been building up or kept away. And, it can also feel scary when the responses around you have been misattuned over time — leading you to possibly feel shame, self-judgment, or alone in the moments you may have needed empathy, care, and connection.
Many people didn’t have the attunement needed in order to deal appropriately with sadness when growing up. Perhaps parents, siblings, teachers, or peers would say to “be happy”, or “smile”, or shame or even bully you for being sad. Or, they even just plainly did not notice the sadness at all, leaving you to feel alone in dealing with such heavy and painful feelings, not understanding what is going on and why these powerful feelings are showing up for you.
Sadness, Grief, and Trauma
Sadness plays a significant role in the grieving process. It’s not just a passive emotion, but an active feeling that promotes reflection and process. By allowing yourself to feel sad, 
you’re allowing your mind and body to make sense of loss and strong emotions. Effectively being able to sit with sadness, metabolize it, and move through it actually helps promote forward movement and letting go. At the same time, pushing down sadness can often lead to becoming emotionally stuck, depressed, and can lead to other issues such as chronic migraines, for example, and other body responses, as well.
Sadness in response to various forms of trauma can also be complicated. When surviving trauma — not only single-event traumas, but also relational traumas that tend to carry on over time in toxic home, work, or peer environments, for example — the mind and body can sometimes dissociate from emotional experiences that can be too overwhelming, or emotionally threatening in the moment. This is often why it is important that treatment is sought as soon as possible after a traumatic event (or as soon as possible during ongoing trauma).
When sadness becomes dissociated because of trauma, it can start to feel very scary to access the pain that needs to be slowly processed in response to trauma. When deep emotional responses are able to accumulate behind the scenes, it can wreak havoc on the mind and body that often worsens over time. Trauma often creates a significant emotional burden to carry. It is commonly the case that addiction is turned to in order to block out the pain of trauma — especially if it feels like facing it will destroy you, on some level.
Moving Forward
On the other side of this coin, when stored sadness related to trauma is able to be slowly released, it allows you to be able to let go, move forward, grow, and feel lighter in your life. The sadness serves a function during the trauma — the need for care, empathy, and more. However, it also serves a function to grieve the pain and the losses through the sadness. (It’s also worth mentioning that grief involves more emotions than only sadness).
Keep in mind that sadness is just one part of the full spectrum of human emotions. If you’re struggling with depression or ongoing sadness, connect with me to see how therapy can be helpful in moving forward.
