In fact, it can be really good for you.
In the Disney movie “Inside Out” there’s a poignant moment where the character Joy tells Sadness that she has a “super important job for her.” She then proceeds to draw a circle and tells Sadness that her job is to make sure all of the sadness stays inside of it.
Feeling a little familiar? Lock that sadness up.
A lot of my clients want to do just this with their feelings of sadness.
“Yep, come right over here, check out this great closet.” *shove in, lock the door, run away terrified hoping you won’t be able to hear the sobbing from the other side of the house while you clean, multitask, and take care of everyone else.
But the reality is, you can’t hide from emotions.
And actually, as you learn at the end of “Inside Out,” it’s the dreaded emotion of sadness that allows your brain to process grief and loss and eventually move forward. Without it, you just run around in circles feeling “happy” all the time while simultaneously feeling perpetually terrified deep down by the banging coming from that closet.
Sadness gets a bad rap in a culture where our most beautiful faces and spaces are on display through social media, and there’s constant interior pressure to keep up. But research on sadness has turned up some interesting insights.
For one, sadness can actually improve your judgment.
You know the saying about wearing “rose colored glasses?” Well, that’s all well and good until you’re trying to detect whether someone is telling the truth or not. A study by Joseph Forgas showed that when people are happy they’re more likely to make “social misjudgments due to biases.”
Basically, when you feel happy, you’re more likely to have blind spots about what’s really going on.
Sadness can also help increase your motivation to make changes.
It’s common for women who are considering divorce to experience what I have lovingly termed “the merry-go-round from hell.”
This is that cycle of something bad happening in your marriage, you feel upset and want to make changes, but then it starts to get a little better, the pain wears off, you talk yourself out of it, fear and complacency move back in and then Bam! another drop happens and you get to start it all over again.
Allowing the feeling of sadness can help you get clearer on where things are really at, what you want, and increase your perseverance for making changes.
In coaching we learn how to experience emotions in our bodies rather than in our mind, and it’s radically different than what most of us think “feeling our feelings” is like.
Letting yourself feel the sadness while considering divorce can be the very thing that helps you grieve and make peace with the past, and move cleanly into your future.
Photo by Jonatán Becerra on Unsplash