It amazes me that we know so little about emotions. We tend to shy away from negative feelings, dislike it so much that we battle against it or try to ignore them. Most people I know are ill at ease with emotions of sadness and do not know how to handle it when they see it being displayed. We feel awkward around someone who is sad, or sometimes become hard-hit with heaviness at the pain expressed.
I was confronted with this reality during a discussion that took place when we were in midst of developing training materials on the topic of depression. Concerns were brought up about getting participants to relive sad memories. They were well-intended concerns set to safeguard participants, in order not to let them go away feeling unregulated in their emotions.
Could such concerns be misinformed?
In trying to justify why we should not shun away from recapturing sad memories and naming it, I have borrowed heavily the ideas from an eminent psychologist, Dr Leslie Greenberg, who has played a major role in developing Emotion-Focused Therapy.
- Sadness and any other feelings; be it negative or positive are all part of normal human experience. Is there anything wrong to experience grief as a form of reaction to our situations like breakups, failures, death etc? If there isn’t, what is stopping us from expressing it? Shunning these emotions does not take these difficult situations away.
- Emotions provide information. How are we to obtain information without acknowledging our emotions? The use of language by putting words into our inner states is the first step towards greater understanding of ourselves and why we may be feeling what we are experiencing. New information can then guide us into action. In expressing grief, it allows us to understand that someone we lost was important to us and possibly lead us to cherish the other people around us.
- Experiencing emotions is part of a process and does not indicate that it is a permanent state. It is not a concluded truth. Being sad when we re-live painful memories does not mean that we will get stuck with the feeling all the time.
- As Dr Leslie Greenberg nicely puts: “You need to arrive at a feeling before leaving it”. How many of us, in avoiding pain by sealing our bad memories find that we are hit by the twinges and pangs of sorrow at unexpected times. It seems almost cruel to force a person to revisit bad memories, only that through constructive re-visiting can we address the grief and move on.
- By moving on from sadness to another emotion state, we also learn to regulate our emotions and be confident that negative emotions can transit. This can be achieved through the use of self-soothing strategies that looks at evoking compassion for ourselves, or even relaxation techniques that anyone can practice.
I really do not believe that expressing sad emotions will destroy a person. Naming is the first step in regulation because speaking about it does not mean that we act on it. Saying “I feel sad” or “I feel worthless” does not mean that “I have depression” or “I am worthless”. By reprocessing the emotions, it gives information, separates the feeling from the person and strengthens the belief they can do something, or see a new perspective. It may even help one to establish a sense of control.
To be fair, just expressing sadness on its own may do no good unless there is a trained facilitator. I can also understand that there is a fear of opening up fresh wounds in more vulnerable individuals who may have experienced trauma.
I also recognise that although I can cognitively understand the importance of facing my feelings, I find myself sometimes unconsciously doing things to avoid being subjected to sadness or longing-ness. When I am away abroad and missing my family, I made it a point to avoid looking at their pictures, lest I find the emotions unbearable. I guess, we all gravitate away from pain as protection for ourselves.
This is also reflected in the numerous campaigns that focus on positivity and thinking happy thoughts. Of course, such campaigns are definitely meaningful. Though I would want to add on that it is perfectly fine to think sad thoughts. Maybe that in itself is a happy thought?
We ended the discussion to further think about how we can recapture feelings of sadness and at the same time to make it safe and protected for all participants. So if you do join in some of the experiential activities that CHAT does in our training, be sure that you will have a positive experience even while experiencing the blues!