An exploration of the emotion with psychotherapist April Snow, LMFT
One of the rawest realities of life is to be sad. Like a majestic wind, sadness can take over our presence. It is a feeling. A force. There are few experiences as true and real.
Yet we tend to fight this natural emotion. So often, sadness can be too painful to explore. Too much to admit to ourselves. And as psychotherapist April Snow sees it, sadness can become a burden in our society. “It feels like a deficit or a weakness to be sad,” says Snow. “Our instinct is to ignore, disavow or disconnect from it.”
Turning away from our sadness is a disservice. When we push our sadness away rather than lean into the “poetic experience of it,” we miss out on learning about ourselves, says Snow, who dedicates her practice to working with highly sensitive people, those who feel emotions, particularly sadness, extra deeply. “When we are able to tap into our sadness, we get to experience more of the complexity of life, more of ourselves, more clarity around our needs,” she says.
Of course, exploring our sadness can be hard to do. Daunting, even. So we asked Snow to gently guide us in exploring this complex emotion and all that it can potentially reveal.
A Conversation with April Snow, LMFT
Firstly, April, how do you define sadness, and what evokes it?
Working with clients every week, I am able to witness sadness as a natural expression of being human. It’s something we feel when we have disappointment, loss, or stress. When something difficult happens, we understandably feel sad.
Oftentimes we lump sadness together with depression, which makes us afraid of going into this emotion. Our instinct is to push it away. It’s inconvenient because sadness is something that pulls you inward and makes you slow down. With sadness there are often tears, but other emotions may come up alongside it like anger, fear, or acceptance. That’s one thing people are really surprised about – the complexity of sadness. They may feel sadness, so they believe they can’t feel the other emotions arising, but emotions constantly coexist with each other. There are layers that are usually coming into play at once. The depth of sadness can be surprising, as can the value of it, if we’re able to listen and be with it.
But again, sadness is something we all experience regularly in different doses because it can be evoked by a number of things. Everything from you missing your favorite cup of coffee in the morning to getting disconnected from a cherished friend or family member. There’s such a wide wide range of sadness.
Sadness is often something we try to get through and push away, at least in Western cultures. Why is that?
We’re conditioned to be okay, to put on a happy face, and to push our emotions away. Especially in our culture of hyper-productivity where you’re constantly pressured to be “on” to maximize every minute, sadness becomes a burden. It becomes an inconvenience, a deficit, or a weakness to be sad. With these messages ingrained in us, the instinct is to ignore sadness, to try to disavow or disconnect from it.
Ignoring sadness usually only makes it bigger and causes the sadness to linger in the background, waiting to be seen and felt. Pushing it away doesn’t solve the problem. You’re still sad. You’re just not recognizing the sadness or learning why it’s present.
So how do we lean into it? For those who may be used to trying to push sadness away, what are your tips for healthily looking at sadness and building emotional strength in the face of it?
You’re likely not going to go from pushing away to fully embracing sadness. Being comfortable processing your emotions is a process, for sure. It can be overwhelming to try to go from A to Z, especially if you’re someone who’s always pushed your sadness away. Maybe you were taught to do that in your family, or you live with a partner or roommates who don’t have much tolerance for sadness, so you’ve learned to minimize your emotions out of survival. Give yourself time to open the doors back up to sadness.
Baby steps are important. First, try to just sit and name the sadness before you even feel into it. You can say, ‘sadness is here.’ With clients, I’ll often help them walk around the neighborhood of the emotion before we actually go into the feelings. Even just saying, “I feel sad” could be a big step forward.
Then you can slowly start to allow the feeling to come in, as much as you feel comfortable with. There are feeling charts online, which can be helpful if you don’t have the language to express how you’re feeling and want to see what words resonate. If language doesn’t quite capture your experience, maybe there’s a color, image or a memory that resonates more than words. You figure out what fits and then, however it works for you, slowly go into feeling it for small moments, practicing naming your experience along the way. Start with 10 seconds, then 15 seconds, then one minute, then two minutes, and so forth. You can simply notice the sadness, write, draw, create, or talk to a friend or therapist about what is coming up for you—however you express yourself. Slowly increase the time you spend with the sadness and honor that process. Some people are going to do this quickly while others will need more time. Honor your own process and remember that it doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.
What are some common things people do that exacerbate sadness that you suggest being avoided?
Pushing away or completely denying how you feel can be detrimental to processing and releasing the sadness.
Oftentimes our first response is to think, Well I feel sad, let’s get rid of it. We do this because A: we worry it’s going to consume us or force us to collapse. Or B: We were taught that our emotions aren’t welcome. A lot of people have that experience. Often our parents or caregivers didn’t know what to do with our emotions. They didn’t have the time, capacity, or tools to deal with emotions. If you’re highly sensitive, they didn’t understand the complexity of the emotion that was coming up, so they tried to shut it down or soothe it away. In some ways, parents felt like this is caring: ‘I don’t want you to be sad. Don’t cry!’ So we’ve learned to repress our sadness.
The problem is emotions don’t just go away because we tell ourselves or hear from others, not to be sad. When we don’t get to process the emotion in the moment it comes back later. Further down the line, the sadness gets deeper and deeper and deeper. Never learning how to deal with emotion makes it seem harder and harder to be with.
Ignoring sadness takes away an ability to build resilience, which is such a beautiful byproduct of sadness. We push ourselves to move past the sadness but then there’s loss on the other end too! By cutting off from sadness, you lose an opportunity to be with a meaningful experience and learn from it. There can also be missed opportunities of connecting with loved ones during moments of sadness, to grieve and feel together.
April, you are a highly sensitive person, and you work exclusively with people who are highly sensitive. What should those who feel things deeply know about sadness?
That the sadness is going to be deeper, more complex, and there are going to be multiple layers to it. When you’re highly sensitive, you’re only in your own experiences but you’re often hearing from people who aren’t highly sensitive and comparing yourself to their experiences. Let’s say you have a family that’s grieving a loss and they’re experiencing sadness. The highly sensitive person in the family is going to feel that in such a bigger way. That’s how you’re wired – to feel your emotions deeper.
It’s also important to consider that there may be more than just that moment of sadness that arises. We often beat ourselves up and think: Why am I still sad? Why am I feeling this so much? Why can’t I just get over it? These self-criticisms pop up into your mind to push away or judge the feeling, when what you may need to do is recognize that humans often have a unique experience with any emotion, especially sadness.
As highly sensitive people, we’re often going to want to make meaning out of the sadness, as well. You may think: What does this sadness mean? What does it say about me? Why am I feeling the sadness in this particular way? You’ll want to understand it in a way that most people aren’t necessarily wired to do. You want to know why something’s happening so you can understand it going forward and take the lessons out of the sadness so you don’t have to feel it so deeply next time.
Let’s talk about the learnings. What can be revealed from leaning into our sadness?
When you’re able to be with any of your feelings, especially sadness, it offers perspective. It helps you slow down to reflect and understand what’s important to you. When you can take some time to think, Why am I having this reaction? Why am I sad? Where is this coming from? that could open up so many insights. Perhaps you need to set firmer boundaries to prioritize what’s important to you, or you realize you want to go in a certain direction with work or in relationships. There are so many insights that can be opened up from sadness. And when we push it away, we miss all those insights. It’s an opportunity to learn about yourself and what’s missing from your life.
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April Snow, LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist in California and the author of the Mindfulness Workbook for Stress Relief and the HSP Self-Care Journal. She aims to help Sensitive Introverts, Perfectionists, and Creative High Achievers embrace their sensitive strengths and calm the storm of overwhelm and self-doubt that gets in the way of living their best life. To learn more about Snow and her resources, visit sensitivestrengths.com.
One Response
This article has enlightened me to respect the sadness of a close loved one and not try to “snap” them out of their feelings. It’s hard to watch someone you love so much be in the midst of sadness.