In a society that sees sadness as an inconvenience and positivity as the antidote to sadness, it doesn’t surprise me that we often associate sadness with depression. The association making sadness something that needs to be treated or gotten rid of. I want to shed some light on what is happening when we are depressed, in an attempt to free both sadness and depression from their pathological association.
Depression is very often experienced as the absence of feeling—numbness and paralysis. When we are depressed, our nervous system helps us detach from sensations and emotions in our body and also from what might be posing a threat in our environment. It is trying to protect us by removing us from what it perceives to be dangerous. It is helping us to not feel when we do not have the capacity to do so. In this state of paralysis, our body is deprived of energy for movement and feeling. It is as if, from the inside, we are involuntarily turning away from what we cannot be or face right now.
When our nervous system feels safe enough, it will be able to access and process more feeling. So, sadness becomes a way out of depression. Being able to feel sadness means something is known and becoming clear. It is getting unstuck. It is a sign depression is lifting and we are re-inhabiting our bodies; that we are coming back to life. The opposite of depression is not happiness, it is feeling alive.
What often happens when we start to feel sadness is we try to make it stop. We try to push it away, and just as sadness was ready to be known and felt, we are unaware of how to welcome it. We learned to fear it, and without really knowing it, we see sadness as a threat and again we become detached and numb to it. We suppress it, and we are back where we started, needing protection from feeling. We will continue to experience this cycle over and over, sadness getting stuck, always starting but never finishing. Every emotion is a natural and fleeting experience, something that must be felt in order to have a beginning and an end. So, depression can be interpreted as both an absence of feeling and sadness that never ends.
Our learned intolerance of sadness overwhelms us and keeps it frozen, ongoing but never fully expressed or felt. Sadness is not depressed. It is proof we are alive and feeling what needs to be felt. Healing is teaching our nervous system it no longer needs to fear sadness so we can become interested in understanding it, holding ourselves within it, and giving it the space and time it needs to finish.
Like sadness, Joy is one of the six mammalian emotions that we were born with a right to have. The tendency of our nervous system to go into a state of depression comes from an intolerance or a low capacity for high-energy experiences, like anger and fear, but also excitement and joy. When managing a history of trauma, numbness can become a necessary defense against our experience of feeling too much aliveness.
It can become written into our nervous system from a very young age to engage with our lives in a way that is functional enough, but unknowingly disconnected from our sense of self, other people, and the world around us. We sustain just enough energy to go through the motions, and eventually, the lines between what feels good or bad become blurred. We might have even forgotten we have the option to explore with others, with our own identity, nature, or creativity in a way that is emboldened through play, curiosity, and freedom. It is an unconscious propensity that we most likely wouldn’t have chosen if we were aware of the alternative.
We wonder about Joy and where to find it. Or if Joy is just different when you’re an adult than when you’re young. If it is more complicated or less important. It’s not. Underneath numbness is always suppressed energy, something waiting to wake up. Our nervous system doesn’t know the difference between “good” and “bad” emotions; it will just shut down feeling in general as a protective instinct when it is overwhelmed. It needs to trust it is safe enough to come back to life. The more open we can become to feeling things like sadness all the way through to the end, the more everything else can start to wake up too.
A desire for happiness is a desire to feel alive. I know what they say about changing your mindset and your thoughts towards positivity. I also know that our body knows the difference between practicing positive thoughts and feeling genuine safety and Joy. Straining ourselves to feign Joy is very different from experiencing it as an involuntary response to being alive and feeling connected to living. Joy is not a reward for suffering, nor is it something we have to be diligent in cultivating. It is a birthright. It is built into us as a way of interacting with and responding to what is already here, in us and around us.
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