We live in a society where being sad and expressing it is synonymous with being weak. It is the era of well-being, of positivism. And this is dangerous on an emotional level, since we repress the emotions that we consider “negative” when they are necessary and adaptive for our evolution.
Thanks to this, we have less and less tolerance for discomfort and frustration, our own and others.
When we see someone cry, we automatically say, “Don’t cry!” Transmitting, unintentionally, some pressure. Pressure because even if you are having a bad time and what you need most at that moment is to let off steam, you must be aware of “not crying” and “being well soon.”
In part, the message we send with that phrase is that it is wrong to cry and that the strong do not cry. So the person ends up experiencing guilt.
In addition, we minimize the importance it gives to the fact that makes you feel bad, “taking away” the right to feel and express it, putting a patch, an emotional plug because “we must be fine.” Society says so.
This prevents a good healing process and can have short, medium and long term consequences on an emotional level.
Denial of sadness is not beneficial
Deny amplifies. Denial is a defense mechanism that makes us unable to see reality and not listen to the message that sadness brings us. It protects us from pain, but only in the short term.
The emotions that we do not accept, that we castrate and repress in our interior, will end up going out somewhere else, through physical symptomatology, for example.
In this sense, anxiety is the perfect alarm that something is not going well within us, that we are not being consistent with what we think and feel. There we must listen to what we need and what we are “covering”.
Other examples could be: constant tummy aches, hair loss, herpes, tic in the eyes, headaches … In one way or another, our body will tell us what our mouth is.
Sadness, although it seems an emotion that is useless, allows us to stop. And stop allows us to connect with us and thus be able to reflect on what happens to us in order to change it. This space allows us to make an analysis of what happened, saving energy and then looking for alternatives, including asking for help if necessary.
We don’t have to spend it alone. If we let ourselves be carried away by this fleeting society, we do not give ourselves time to be with ourselves, so we continue to cover the discomfort, which ends up becoming enchanted.
Being sad makes us feel uncontrolled and that also scares us. In psychological consultations, there are many patients who comment on the “fear of falling into depression “; When in fact, all they need is to cry, get out of discomfort and do something with it, in short, perform good emotional hygiene. This is when this is denied when it is timed and its management is more difficult.
In other words: a o accept the discomfort will help this go and not become lasting suffering.
“Listen to the message that sadness brings you, it is more valuable than you think.”
Sadness is not a useless emotion
The more uncontrolled we feel inside, the more control we look outside, externally. And that feeling occurs when we feel sad and we don’t know why.
Thus, we try to solve it by controlling things that are “easier”: tidying up the house, turning to work in an excessive way, looking at what our children, our partner… Do, in short, focusing on things that are not really in our hands. And that generates even more frustration.
On the other hand, we must recognize that we have a low tolerance to see our loved ones sad. That is why it is easy to hear as one friend says to another: « Has she left you? Well, we’re going to party tonight! ” Instead of:“ Has he left you? Well, tonight we stay at home crying and talking.
Obviously, people often say these expressions in good faith and with the best intention, trying to help us out of the bad, but the message “you must not be sad” is present again and, once again, the denial of sadness it makes it stay there, latent, scratching the inside while we try to show ourselves whole in our routine.