November 29, 2025 • 22 mins
In this episode of #FeelingsMatter, hosts Michelle Stinson Ross, Tina Schweiger, and Heather Hampton explore sadness - one of the most universally recognized yet complex emotions humans experience. The conversation examines how sadness differs from depression, the cumulative nature of unexpressed sadness, and the importance of self-compassion when experiencing this heavy emotion. The hosts share vulnerable personal experiences and discuss how to support others who are grieving or experiencing deep sadness.
Episode Highlights:
Podcast theme music by Dubush Miaw from Pixabay
This episode of the #FeelingsMatter Podcast was recorded and produced at MSR Studios in Saint Paul, MN. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.
This episode is sponsored by
FeelWise - bridging the gap between reflection and resilience, offering practical tools to help people overcome obstacles, embrace change, and grow stronger emotionally. https://www.feel-wise.com/
Don’t miss a moment of the conversation, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting platform
Episode Highlights:
- Tina describes sadness as having a "physical feeling, like a tightness and heaviness in the chest" and shares her current experience of feeling sad and helpless watching someone she loves suffer, noting how sadness can become "compounded" and engulfing
- Heather introduces the powerful metaphor of sadness as a cup that fills with "little sadnesses" until one more tips it over, causing all the accumulated grief to spill out - often revealing sadness about things we didn't even know we were carrying
- The hosts discuss distinguishing sadness from depression, with Michelle noting that sadness triggers tears and emotional pain while depression feels more like shutting down, though both share that heavy "lead muscles" quality
- Tina emphasizes that self-compassion is the "guiding North Star" when sad, encouraging listeners to give themselves permission to feel sadness without judgment, noting that "sitting with those emotions is the more courageous thing to do" rather than pushing them down
- The conversation explores how to support others experiencing sadness, acknowledging that people often avoid grieving friends because sadness is "contagious" and uncomfortable, but emphasizing that simple presence, witnessing, and validating someone's sadness ("I see how sad you are") is what's truly needed
Podcast theme music by Dubush Miaw from Pixabay
This episode of the #FeelingsMatter Podcast was recorded and produced at MSR Studios in Saint Paul, MN. No reproduction, excerpting, or other use without written permission.
This episode is sponsored by
FeelWise - bridging the gap between reflection and resilience, offering practical tools to help people overcome obstacles, embrace change, and grow stronger emotionally. https://www.feel-wise.com/
Don’t miss a moment of the conversation, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting platform
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Do you have trouble talking about your feelings? You're not alone.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's a topic that can make even.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
The most powerful people somewhat squeamish.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You're listening to Feelings Matter, where our mission is to
demystify everything about emotions so that we can all get
more comfortable in talking about them. Joining Heather, Tina and
Michelle as we unpack a new angle on emotions and
the psychology of human nature.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Feelings Matter. Hello, and welcome back to Feelings Matter. I'm
Michelle stin Zonaras, I'm Tina Schweiger, and.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm Heather Hampton.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Oh, we have more emotions to unpack today, Tina, But
how are you feeling today?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I have the emotion sad, and that's a big emotion.
It's one of those emotions that I think, I don't
know everyone experiences and can pretty easily label, which is
unusual for most of the emotions that we talk about.
(01:27):
Most of them are granular is the right word. And
sad it is really broad and sad can show up
in all kinds of different ways. And it has to
me a physical feeling, like a bit of a tightness
and heaviness in the chest, a desire, to avoid things
(01:49):
and not do anything, maybe lay down, maybe hide, maybe
just retreat. Sometimes even when you're sad, you're feeling like
it would be good to talk to somebody about it,
but you might even feel like I don't even want
to talk to anybody about it. I just feel sad,
and it's one of those emotions that can really feel
(02:12):
like it's engulfing you and taking over, and sometimes it
just feels like it's hard to escape from. And it's
so wrapped up with clinical problems of mental health problems.
One of the major symptoms of depression and many other
mental health problems is just sad, and so it's also
(02:36):
hard to know when that emotion tips into a mental
health problem that's treatable, and when sad it's just a
natural and normal experience of situational thing that's happened in
your life. That's my preface on sad. It's so many
things the experience. I feel sad today. I've had some
(03:04):
I have kids, and one of my kids is really
testing boundaries right now and doing everything he can to
hold everyone hostage to his own chaos in life. And
that has made me sad because I don't feel like
I have any power to I feel helpless. Really helpless
(03:25):
shows up in our sad category wheel, and I think
helpless describes this aspect of sadness that I feel sad
and I feel like there's nothing I could do about it.
I feel even that sense where you're sad and you
just feel like a loss for words and you just
get stuck in that feeling. And that's what I feel
(03:45):
right now. I feel sad that someone dear to me
is suffering, and then that suffering is spilling onto everyone else,
and it's like a compounded sad And then that said,
then all of that situation triggers me for feeling sad,
and I get stuck in the sad and then it's
just a big sad party. So it's not the kind
of party you want to ascend. What do you guys
(04:08):
experience when you experience sadness.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I'm just sitting here reflecting on what you're talking about,
like different kinds of sadness, and I the whole time
to mental health is obviously, I've been very frank about
my experience with depression, so sadness is part of that
that depression. Sadness is scary because you don't have any cause.
Often for why you're feeling that sadness, it just shows up.
(04:36):
And sometimes having a reason for a sadness, the sadness
still sucks, but you can at least say I know
it's caused by this, and that means.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
It's going to go away. I will get through this experience.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
I was really sad yesterday I got notification that a
job that I was interested in I didn't get into
the next round. And I was really upset about this,
and I started crying when I got this email, and
I'm upset now you can hear it in my voice.
And I made the analogy to my friend that it's
(05:10):
not even that like this job was that important that
will cause me to be upset, but that I feel
like we experience little sadnesses that get put in this
little cup that sit inside of us, and at some point,
one sadness comes along and tips the cup over and
(05:37):
all that sadness has to spill out and the tears
come and the weight of that is felt. And it
may not be about that one specific thing, but once
the release happens, you start experiencing, or for me at least,
I start experiencing like a lot of little sadnesses that
(05:57):
I have not acknowledged or been present too. So I
don't know if you guys have that experience as well.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
I do exactly what you described. I hadn't heard it
put so precisely, but it is. It's like a big
cup of sadness and one of them tips all the
other one in the whole thing spills, like I had,
like a cliche, but like a house of cards or
a sand castle or something that's just built on a
very of course, not a very sturdy foundation, and it
(06:30):
just all kind of crumbles, And yeah, that is. And
then the one you described about feeling sad about things
you didn't even know you were sad about, that makes
perfect sense to me too, Michelle.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Feel like for me, I tend to experience sadness along
with other things, like it could be pain, whether emotional
pain or physical pain, both can trigger sadness, grief and loss, sadness,
(07:14):
even just exhaustion. After a while, I'm burnt out, I
don't have any more energy, and now I feel broken
hearted and sad that I don't have energy to do
the things that I want to do but I can't
do because I'm just a mess. Sadness tends to come
along on the heels of other things for me as well,
in that maybe like in your case, Tina, where something
(07:39):
happened to somebody else that I care about, and that
empathy and that connection full sad into my existence because
it breaks my heart that somebody else's experiencing any number
of things and now I feel sad too. I know
(08:00):
from the physical experience. For me, it really is that
heavy weight. That's why I know that sadness can be
difficult to distinguish between depression, because that same feeling of
lead muscles tends to happen for me with sadness. But
I want to cry, and I don't normally want to
(08:25):
cry with depression. Depression shows up more as a lack
of energy. I just don't want to I want to
shut it all out, hide from you whatever. Sadness is
the one that actually will trigger tears for me. That
so it's like small little distinctions, and I really have
to pay attention to how I'm feeling it in my
(08:46):
body in order to distinguish one from the other. Sometimes
it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
What do you do when you're sad? That's a really
good question, And what can you do to help others
that are in a state of being sad. Both of
those would be good to talk through some options. In
an overall mindset, self compassion is really the guiding north
star when you're feeling sad. Self compassion as a mindset,
(09:19):
and what defining self compassion is compassion feeling I feel
what compassion means or passion, compassion feeling with self, feeling
with self. So giving yourself the room to feel those
feelings of sadness and recognize them non judgmentally, and then
(09:43):
looking from there, giving yourself just sometimes permission to be sad.
It's okay to be sad right now. It's okay to
feel sad about this. Anyone would feel sad about this.
It's a very sad thing. There's some techniques inside this
that we talk about. One of them I did this
morning just the box breathing. I paired it with a
(10:03):
walk because I felt like moving, just a movement and
a walk would help me break through a little bit
of it. And so I paired a walk with a
breathing exercise where I was breathing in that account of
five or six as I was walking, and then exhaling
for that count where I could walk without thinking about anything.
(10:24):
The box breathing, I think really helps give you something
to focus on during a time when you might want
to ruminate on the things that make you feel sad.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
Feelings Matter is brought to you by feel Wise. Most
people can identify three emotions sad, mad, and glad, but there.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Are over one hundred and.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
Fifty six ways to truly express how you feel. Feel
Wise tools help you build your emotional vocabulary and transform
understanding into action. Discover the language of emotions on the
fuel wise website at bitlely slash fuel wise. That's bi
(11:12):
dot l y slash f e e l wi s
e fiel wise.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Turn emotional awareness into your superpower.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Scanning the body as we were talking about having a
heaviness in the heart, also noticing if you have physical
pain like sadness might come with pain in your joints,
pain in your neck, headache, migraine. There might be an
injury that you have that starts flaring up when you
(11:47):
feel sad. It really is closely tied to pain, So
paying attention to where the sadness lives and where it
might overlap with physical pain. Journaling if you are ruminating
on something and it's not just sadness with no cause,
or even if it is, you could just do freeform writing,
but writing down what comes to mind that you're feeling
(12:10):
sad about, or just in general what comes to mind
can help move some of that through your body and
caring for yourself as if you were a small child.
We all were small children at one point. Arguably we
were held by our mothers and comforted and loved. We're
also lucky. How would you treat yourself if you were
a little baby that was needing comfort? And that thought
(12:32):
and looking at it through that lens concerningly invite self
compassion and not judgment. And I think that's the other
thing about sadness that can make it worse is judging it.
I shouldn't be sad. I should be tough in this,
And being tough means that I don't feel sad. Being
tough means that I don't cry, that I don't show
(12:55):
my emotions, that I have to push it down, and
actually sitting with those emotions is the more courageous thing
to do. Admitting that sadness is more courageous than trying
to tell yourself you shouldn't feel it. Your gender I
think affects how you feel about sadness as well.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
As women were more allowed to feel sadness and used
to supporting each other with sadness as boys and men,
I feel like it's more drowned upon to admit any
sadness as a sign of weakness, and sadness as a
sign of weakness invites judgment. Judgment invites feeling even more
sad and self defeated and alone and alone. Yeah, what
(13:38):
do you think, Heather, I see a lot of nos.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I totally agree.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
And that one thing when I was feeling sad yesterday,
I was definitely trying found myself trying to hold back tears,
which is that self judgment of this is not that
big of a deal, Like you've gotten rejections from jobs before,
it's as fine. But when I came to that analogy
of a filled cup, I was like, this is a release,
(14:04):
like my body needs to get this out, and so
giving my personal permission to cry in general, And it
didn't have to be about this one thing. It's like
life is like it's hard, gets hard sometimes, and if
we let those things build up, then is a little
(14:27):
festering wound inside of us and so I'm like, this
is my chance to let this out. It's hard to
make yourself cry if you're not feeling sad, So this
is an opportunity to let me vent this stuff that's
inside of me.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So release vent. I embraced it. I had a good cry,
and I feel better now.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
I'm glad to bring it back around full circle to
that idea of a cup getting so full and spilling over.
When we don't provide ourselves with some self compassion and
we try and stuff it down, shove it away. We
take what should be a cup easy to spill out
(15:14):
and turn it into a garbage bag where we just
keep shoving it and stretching the bag and stretching the
bag until the bag just can't hold it anymore. And
if you shove that down, and you shove a lot
of it down, what's going to happen in the garbage bag?
Eventually the garbage bag is going to explode. Instead of
having a small tipping over and pouring ounce and dealing
(15:39):
with it in good time, if we don't take care
of ourselves and we just keep shoving it down, eventually
it's going to explode into something more than just tears.
For a little while. And it's why that self compassion
component is so important, because emotions like sadness are cumulative
(16:00):
if they will build on it, especially if you don't
deal with them, if you don't pass through them, they
will build up.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Yeah, And I think before we stop with this topic,
I want to talk about the fact that sadness is
probably one of the most contagious emotions. And I also
want to talk about when you're not feeling sad, but
somebody that you care about is feeling sad, and what
do you deal about that? And I think our first
(16:29):
our first reaction, even if you're not used to being
around people who are sad, even if it's a child,
can be to be scared a person who's experiencing a
deep sadness and actually freeze and not know what to
do and then subsequently turn away. That can happen, particularly
(16:50):
in the case when somebody has recently lost a person
that's important to them and they're in a deep state
of grief and they're really in that sadness. And it's
often and when somebody loses a person in their life
or a pet, or just anything important, a job, anything
that really results in deep sadness, you can find that
(17:12):
like the people that you would expect to hear from
or that would be there to support you aren't. And
oftentimes it's because it's sadness can be so powerful, and
it can be so much of an engulfing experience, and
it's so contagious that people are just simply afraid of
you when you're sad. I know that I certainly felt
(17:34):
that way before, not having any education on emotions or
emotional intelligence, as we really weren't given when we were
growing up, I naturally felt scared or nervous or what
should I do? Or shaky or I don't want to
make it worse. I might say something that will make
it worse, so therefore I won't say anything at all.
(17:55):
That kind of a feeling is valid, and it's also
a missed opportunity, I think. And so just to suggest,
and I think, Heather, you've talked a lot about your
sadness and spilling in cups, and we know where you're
coming from with sadness, and so i'd love to get
your thoughts on this. But at least where I've come
to rather than self compassion, but a place of compassion
(18:18):
for somebody who is feeling sad. And sometimes it's as
simple as acknowledging and witnessing the sadness, saying I see
how sad you are, and I can feel how sad
you are, and it feels really intense, and I feel
that I can see your sadness and I can imagine
how sad that you must feel, and validate that anyone
(18:43):
would feel that sad in your position. This is very hard,
and you're feeling sad, and it makes sense that you're
feeling sad and giving a person permission to feel that way.
I think that's what they call holding space for somebody.
And sometimes it's not saying any thing at all, and
it's just being in physical proximity. Sometimes it's offering a
(19:04):
little physical touch if the person is comfortable with it,
a hug, not pushing it on somebody, but offering if
that's something that both you are comfortable with. So what
if did I get close to the right heather on that.
Speaker 5 (19:18):
You know what's coming up for me? It's exactly inline
with what you're thinking, is that a lot of processing
and being with sadness has to do with another emotion
that we're going to be talking about this session.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Which is about being present. Being sad requires you to
be present in your body. Being there for.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
Someone who is sad requires you to be present in
order to be authentic, and being present one of the
aspects of being present is uncomfortable, and so people sometimes
have a hard time with being present, whether for themselves
or for others, because it's unknown.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It can be uncomfortable.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
But I think I totally agree with you, Tina, that
being present is a component of that self compassion and
compassion for others.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I think it's really relevant being present.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The non judgmental component of approaching your emotions in a
way that's just I am feeling this. I'm not trying
to determine whether it's good or bad or just acknowledge that, yeah,
I'm feeling this. Is feel so key and obviously with
(20:37):
sadness and you know, an uncomfortable, unpleasant emotion to experience,
we have to be okay to just experience and pass
through it and let it show us light the path
(20:57):
in front of us to growth, Like you don't grow
without the unpleasant things. If I could say it this way,
Minori is stinky. Manure is not pleasant.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
But it is beneficial.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
It's beneficial it does sound, but.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
How do we grow our empathy with one another to
be able to sit next to somebody who's experiencing sadness
if we don't allow ourselves to experience it. So you
got pleasant, but it's also powerful and important.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
That's a bit of wisdom.
Do you have trouble talking about your feelings? You're not alone.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
It's a topic that can make even.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
The most powerful people somewhat squeamish.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
You're listening to Feelings Matter, where our mission is to
demystify everything about emotions so that we can all get
more comfortable in talking about them. Joining Heather, Tina and
Michelle as we unpack a new angle on emotions and
the psychology of human nature.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Feelings Matter. Hello, and welcome back to Feelings Matter. I'm
Michelle stin Zonaras, I'm Tina Schweiger, and.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm Heather Hampton.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Oh, we have more emotions to unpack today, Tina, But
how are you feeling today?
Speaker 4 (01:04):
I have the emotion sad, and that's a big emotion.
It's one of those emotions that I think, I don't
know everyone experiences and can pretty easily label, which is
unusual for most of the emotions that we talk about.
(01:27):
Most of them are granular is the right word. And
sad it is really broad and sad can show up
in all kinds of different ways. And it has to
me a physical feeling, like a bit of a tightness
and heaviness in the chest, a desire, to avoid things
(01:49):
and not do anything, maybe lay down, maybe hide, maybe
just retreat. Sometimes even when you're sad, you're feeling like
it would be good to talk to somebody about it,
but you might even feel like I don't even want
to talk to anybody about it. I just feel sad,
and it's one of those emotions that can really feel
(02:12):
like it's engulfing you and taking over, and sometimes it
just feels like it's hard to escape from. And it's
so wrapped up with clinical problems of mental health problems.
One of the major symptoms of depression and many other
mental health problems is just sad, and so it's also
(02:36):
hard to know when that emotion tips into a mental
health problem that's treatable, and when sad it's just a
natural and normal experience of situational thing that's happened in
your life. That's my preface on sad. It's so many
things the experience. I feel sad today. I've had some
(03:04):
I have kids, and one of my kids is really
testing boundaries right now and doing everything he can to
hold everyone hostage to his own chaos in life. And
that has made me sad because I don't feel like
I have any power to I feel helpless. Really helpless
(03:25):
shows up in our sad category wheel, and I think
helpless describes this aspect of sadness that I feel sad
and I feel like there's nothing I could do about it.
I feel even that sense where you're sad and you
just feel like a loss for words and you just
get stuck in that feeling. And that's what I feel
(03:45):
right now. I feel sad that someone dear to me
is suffering, and then that suffering is spilling onto everyone else,
and it's like a compounded sad And then that said,
then all of that situation triggers me for feeling sad,
and I get stuck in the sad and then it's
just a big sad party. So it's not the kind
of party you want to ascend. What do you guys
(04:08):
experience when you experience sadness.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
I'm just sitting here reflecting on what you're talking about,
like different kinds of sadness, and I the whole time
to mental health is obviously, I've been very frank about
my experience with depression, so sadness is part of that
that depression. Sadness is scary because you don't have any cause.
Often for why you're feeling that sadness, it just shows up.
(04:36):
And sometimes having a reason for a sadness, the sadness
still sucks, but you can at least say I know
it's caused by this, and that means.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
It's going to go away. I will get through this experience.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
I was really sad yesterday I got notification that a
job that I was interested in I didn't get into
the next round. And I was really upset about this,
and I started crying when I got this email, and
I'm upset now you can hear it in my voice.
And I made the analogy to my friend that it's
(05:10):
not even that like this job was that important that
will cause me to be upset, but that I feel
like we experience little sadnesses that get put in this
little cup that sit inside of us, and at some point,
one sadness comes along and tips the cup over and
(05:37):
all that sadness has to spill out and the tears
come and the weight of that is felt. And it
may not be about that one specific thing, but once
the release happens, you start experiencing, or for me at least,
I start experiencing like a lot of little sadnesses that
(05:57):
I have not acknowledged or been present too. So I
don't know if you guys have that experience as well.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
I do exactly what you described. I hadn't heard it
put so precisely, but it is. It's like a big
cup of sadness and one of them tips all the
other one in the whole thing spills, like I had,
like a cliche, but like a house of cards or
a sand castle or something that's just built on a
very of course, not a very sturdy foundation, and it
(06:30):
just all kind of crumbles, And yeah, that is. And
then the one you described about feeling sad about things
you didn't even know you were sad about, that makes
perfect sense to me too, Michelle.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
Feel like for me, I tend to experience sadness along
with other things, like it could be pain, whether emotional
pain or physical pain, both can trigger sadness, grief and loss, sadness,
(07:14):
even just exhaustion. After a while, I'm burnt out, I
don't have any more energy, and now I feel broken
hearted and sad that I don't have energy to do
the things that I want to do but I can't
do because I'm just a mess. Sadness tends to come
along on the heels of other things for me as well,
in that maybe like in your case, Tina, where something
(07:39):
happened to somebody else that I care about, and that
empathy and that connection full sad into my existence because
it breaks my heart that somebody else's experiencing any number
of things and now I feel sad too. I know
(08:00):
from the physical experience. For me, it really is that
heavy weight. That's why I know that sadness can be
difficult to distinguish between depression, because that same feeling of
lead muscles tends to happen for me with sadness. But
I want to cry, and I don't normally want to
(08:25):
cry with depression. Depression shows up more as a lack
of energy. I just don't want to I want to
shut it all out, hide from you whatever. Sadness is
the one that actually will trigger tears for me. That
so it's like small little distinctions, and I really have
to pay attention to how I'm feeling it in my
(08:46):
body in order to distinguish one from the other. Sometimes
it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 4 (08:54):
What do you do when you're sad? That's a really
good question, And what can you do to help others
that are in a state of being sad. Both of
those would be good to talk through some options. In
an overall mindset, self compassion is really the guiding north
star when you're feeling sad. Self compassion as a mindset,
(09:19):
and what defining self compassion is compassion feeling I feel
what compassion means or passion, compassion feeling with self, feeling
with self. So giving yourself the room to feel those
feelings of sadness and recognize them non judgmentally, and then
(09:43):
looking from there, giving yourself just sometimes permission to be sad.
It's okay to be sad right now. It's okay to
feel sad about this. Anyone would feel sad about this.
It's a very sad thing. There's some techniques inside this
that we talk about. One of them I did this
morning just the box breathing. I paired it with a
(10:03):
walk because I felt like moving, just a movement and
a walk would help me break through a little bit
of it. And so I paired a walk with a
breathing exercise where I was breathing in that account of
five or six as I was walking, and then exhaling
for that count where I could walk without thinking about anything.
(10:24):
The box breathing, I think really helps give you something
to focus on during a time when you might want
to ruminate on the things that make you feel sad.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
Feelings Matter is brought to you by feel Wise. Most
people can identify three emotions sad, mad, and glad, but there.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Are over one hundred and.
Speaker 6 (10:49):
Fifty six ways to truly express how you feel. Feel
Wise tools help you build your emotional vocabulary and transform
understanding into action. Discover the language of emotions on the
fuel wise website at bitlely slash fuel wise. That's bi
(11:12):
dot l y slash f e e l wi s
e fiel wise.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Turn emotional awareness into your superpower.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Scanning the body as we were talking about having a
heaviness in the heart, also noticing if you have physical
pain like sadness might come with pain in your joints,
pain in your neck, headache, migraine. There might be an
injury that you have that starts flaring up when you
(11:47):
feel sad. It really is closely tied to pain, So
paying attention to where the sadness lives and where it
might overlap with physical pain. Journaling if you are ruminating
on something and it's not just sadness with no cause,
or even if it is, you could just do freeform writing,
but writing down what comes to mind that you're feeling
(12:10):
sad about, or just in general what comes to mind
can help move some of that through your body and
caring for yourself as if you were a small child.
We all were small children at one point. Arguably we
were held by our mothers and comforted and loved. We're
also lucky. How would you treat yourself if you were
a little baby that was needing comfort? And that thought
(12:32):
and looking at it through that lens concerningly invite self
compassion and not judgment. And I think that's the other
thing about sadness that can make it worse is judging it.
I shouldn't be sad. I should be tough in this,
And being tough means that I don't feel sad. Being
tough means that I don't cry, that I don't show
(12:55):
my emotions, that I have to push it down, and
actually sitting with those emotions is the more courageous thing
to do. Admitting that sadness is more courageous than trying
to tell yourself you shouldn't feel it. Your gender I
think affects how you feel about sadness as well.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Yep.
Speaker 4 (13:13):
As women were more allowed to feel sadness and used
to supporting each other with sadness as boys and men,
I feel like it's more drowned upon to admit any
sadness as a sign of weakness, and sadness as a
sign of weakness invites judgment. Judgment invites feeling even more
sad and self defeated and alone and alone. Yeah, what
(13:38):
do you think, Heather, I see a lot of nos.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
I totally agree.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
And that one thing when I was feeling sad yesterday,
I was definitely trying found myself trying to hold back tears,
which is that self judgment of this is not that
big of a deal, Like you've gotten rejections from jobs before,
it's as fine. But when I came to that analogy
of a filled cup, I was like, this is a release,
(14:04):
like my body needs to get this out, and so
giving my personal permission to cry in general, And it
didn't have to be about this one thing. It's like
life is like it's hard, gets hard sometimes, and if
we let those things build up, then is a little
(14:27):
festering wound inside of us and so I'm like, this
is my chance to let this out. It's hard to
make yourself cry if you're not feeling sad, So this
is an opportunity to let me vent this stuff that's
inside of me.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So release vent. I embraced it. I had a good cry,
and I feel better now.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
I'm glad to bring it back around full circle to
that idea of a cup getting so full and spilling over.
When we don't provide ourselves with some self compassion and
we try and stuff it down, shove it away. We
take what should be a cup easy to spill out
(15:14):
and turn it into a garbage bag where we just
keep shoving it and stretching the bag and stretching the
bag until the bag just can't hold it anymore. And
if you shove that down, and you shove a lot
of it down, what's going to happen in the garbage bag?
Eventually the garbage bag is going to explode. Instead of
having a small tipping over and pouring ounce and dealing
(15:39):
with it in good time, if we don't take care
of ourselves and we just keep shoving it down, eventually
it's going to explode into something more than just tears.
For a little while. And it's why that self compassion
component is so important, because emotions like sadness are cumulative
(16:00):
if they will build on it, especially if you don't
deal with them, if you don't pass through them, they
will build up.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Yeah, And I think before we stop with this topic,
I want to talk about the fact that sadness is
probably one of the most contagious emotions. And I also
want to talk about when you're not feeling sad, but
somebody that you care about is feeling sad, and what
do you deal about that? And I think our first
(16:29):
our first reaction, even if you're not used to being
around people who are sad, even if it's a child,
can be to be scared a person who's experiencing a
deep sadness and actually freeze and not know what to
do and then subsequently turn away. That can happen, particularly
(16:50):
in the case when somebody has recently lost a person
that's important to them and they're in a deep state
of grief and they're really in that sadness. And it's
often and when somebody loses a person in their life
or a pet, or just anything important, a job, anything
that really results in deep sadness, you can find that
(17:12):
like the people that you would expect to hear from
or that would be there to support you aren't. And
oftentimes it's because it's sadness can be so powerful, and
it can be so much of an engulfing experience, and
it's so contagious that people are just simply afraid of
you when you're sad. I know that I certainly felt
(17:34):
that way before, not having any education on emotions or
emotional intelligence, as we really weren't given when we were
growing up, I naturally felt scared or nervous or what
should I do? Or shaky or I don't want to
make it worse. I might say something that will make
it worse, so therefore I won't say anything at all.
(17:55):
That kind of a feeling is valid, and it's also
a missed opportunity, I think. And so just to suggest,
and I think, Heather, you've talked a lot about your
sadness and spilling in cups, and we know where you're
coming from with sadness, and so i'd love to get
your thoughts on this. But at least where I've come
to rather than self compassion, but a place of compassion
(18:18):
for somebody who is feeling sad. And sometimes it's as
simple as acknowledging and witnessing the sadness, saying I see
how sad you are, and I can feel how sad
you are, and it feels really intense, and I feel
that I can see your sadness and I can imagine
how sad that you must feel, and validate that anyone
(18:43):
would feel that sad in your position. This is very hard,
and you're feeling sad, and it makes sense that you're
feeling sad and giving a person permission to feel that way.
I think that's what they call holding space for somebody.
And sometimes it's not saying any thing at all, and
it's just being in physical proximity. Sometimes it's offering a
(19:04):
little physical touch if the person is comfortable with it,
a hug, not pushing it on somebody, but offering if
that's something that both you are comfortable with. So what
if did I get close to the right heather on that.
Speaker 5 (19:18):
You know what's coming up for me? It's exactly inline
with what you're thinking, is that a lot of processing
and being with sadness has to do with another emotion
that we're going to be talking about this session.
Speaker 3 (19:31):
Which is about being present. Being sad requires you to
be present in your body. Being there for.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
Someone who is sad requires you to be present in
order to be authentic, and being present one of the
aspects of being present is uncomfortable, and so people sometimes
have a hard time with being present, whether for themselves
or for others, because it's unknown.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It can be uncomfortable.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
But I think I totally agree with you, Tina, that
being present is a component of that self compassion and
compassion for others.
Speaker 3 (20:10):
I think it's really relevant being present.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
The non judgmental component of approaching your emotions in a
way that's just I am feeling this. I'm not trying
to determine whether it's good or bad or just acknowledge that, yeah,
I'm feeling this. Is feel so key and obviously with
(20:37):
sadness and you know, an uncomfortable, unpleasant emotion to experience,
we have to be okay to just experience and pass
through it and let it show us light the path
(20:57):
in front of us to growth, Like you don't grow
without the unpleasant things. If I could say it this way,
Minori is stinky. Manure is not pleasant.
Speaker 5 (21:08):
But it is beneficial.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
It's beneficial it does sound, but.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
How do we grow our empathy with one another to
be able to sit next to somebody who's experiencing sadness
if we don't allow ourselves to experience it. So you
got pleasant, but it's also powerful and important.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
That's a bit of wisdom.
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