What is Sadness? What is its purpose in our lives?

_Elsa_

Tiffi cannot get over the beauty of this town. Why hasn’t she ever heard of it before? That waterfall and those flowers take her breath away. She has to take some pictures of this to show her father and sister. They won’t believe that such a beautiful town is so close by. Time to continue……

‘The emotion of sadness is essential to our survival and has been a part of human experience since the beginning of time. Sadness is our body’s way of telling us that an event (e.g. the death of a loved one, divorce, infidelity) and/or internal experience (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, memories, our imagination) has hurt or upset us. 

During our childhood, sadness is there to communicate our distress and our caregivers respond by providing help or comfort while we cry. As we grow up, we learn of grief and betrayal and devastation, and very quickly sadness can morph into intolerable pain. The way our loved ones and society cope with sorrow will influence our willingness to let our sadness in. For example, it would be challenging to cry if you believed others saw you as ‘weak’ or if your friend told you there’s ‘nothing to cry about’. 

Why should we let ourselves feel sad?

In its most simple form, we have two ‘brains’: The Emotional Mind and The Thinking Brain. 

The Thinking Brain processes our life as a series of events whereas the Emotional Mind focuses on how we feel about what has happened. Every significant event needs to be processed by the Thinking Brain as well as the Emotional Mind. Feeling sad, angry, fearful, and joyful are essential features of our Emotional Mind, and they all have an important role to play when we emotionally process life’s events.

Sadness’ function is twofold: To let us know that we need to grieve and to seek out those who love and support us. But this is often ‘easier said than done’. Many of my clients tell me that they understand the role of sadness and why they need to let themselves feel it, but they are not sure how to connect with the feeling when they have avoided it for so long.

Sadness helps and guides us through multiple emotional and necessary journeys throughout our lives. the feeling is important and we all need to listen; the only way to make our pain disappear is to feel it and process it, because only then will sadness let us move forward. And you may be surprised to discover that wherever there is sadness, joy isn’t far behind!’ (Source)

Let’s continue – The emotional wheel

Start at the beginning - Tiffi ends up in the town of Wellspring