How do you relate to sadness? Is it something you want to go away as soon as possible? Do you avoid feeling sad at any cost? Are you like many others who admit, “I don’t even know how to be sad in a fruitful way”?
Today I want to encourage you to learn a new approach to the sadness that comes up in your life and how we can learn to work through it in more fruitful ways. We can even learn to walk through sadness in such a way that we appreciate what working through emotions of sadness can bring about in our life.
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Sadness is a Misunderstood Emotion
Sadness can be a very misunderstood emotion in the Christian experience.
We all long to experience more joy, excitement, and gladness. But in our relentless pursuit to experience them more, we haven’t realized that we have to make room for sadness along the journey.
We want to experience great joy. We want to feel happy. We want to feel gladness. Sometimes we have this relentless pursuit of wanting to feel those things—we don’t realize we need to learn how to work through some of the other emotions as well, because they’re actually a part of strengthening gladness, joy, excitement and those happier emotions.
We think of sadness as something that is negative. We think of sadness as weakness. We fear sadness. We avoid sadness—we see it as something to avoid. We push away sadness—sometimes as much as possible.
Today, I want to explore what it means to work through sadness rather than around it.
What Is Sadness?
Sadness is the emotional response we experience when we encounter loss, disappointment, or pain—it’s our heart’s way of acknowledging that something matters to us.
It’s our heart’s way of acknowledging that something matters to us, something was important to us. It’s not about right now. It’s not about whether or not that was good or bad that mattered to us. It’s more just recognizing that’s what the sadness is bringing up. Something mattered to me, and therefore there’s a loss, there’s a pain that’s there.
It reveals what we care about and that something mattered to us.
In research, they found that people in general can only identify three emotions: happy, sad, and angry—revealing the lack of emotional language we have for our inner world. But even in that small list is the word SAD. Yet we don’t know how to effectively work through sadness.
“It’s showing us there is a lot of limitation in even naming our emotional world. That’s a problem and something that needs to be worked on. But even in being able to name happy, sad, angry, look at that word sad. Do we even know what to do with it?”
On one hand, our emotional language is small. But even when we can name it, we don’t know what to do with it.
A God-Given Emotion
Sadness is a God-given emotion, woven into the fabric of our humanity. It’s how our hearts respond to loss, disappointment, unmet longings, and the brokenness we encounter living in a fallen world.
Jesus Himself is described as a man of sorrows. He’s acquainted with our grief, very well acquainted with the emotion of sadness, and expressed it throughout the New Testament Gospels.
Jesus himself was described as “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” He wept at Lazarus’s tomb. He expressed deep anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The Psalms—God’s own prayer book given to us—are filled with lament, sorrow, and honest cries of a heavy heart.
The disciples were incredibly sad at the departure of Jesus—along with a mixture of many emotions.
Paul expressed sadness and sorrow over seeing the people he came from, the Jewish people, and watching many of them reject Jesus Christ.
Why Do We Struggle with Sadness?
Sadness involves acknowledging something painful and uncomfortable. We like to get away from pain and discomfort as quickly as possible. The more we do that, the more we’re not strengthening our muscles, especially our emotional muscles.
It’s uncomfortable inside of you. And it can be uncomfortable in how you respond to others’ sadness. People who deal with their own sadness are often better equipped and are more comfortable in those emotional moments when you’re sad. They don’t feel like they have to just clean it up quick or put a happy face on you or do a quick, hyper-positive thing, because they’re comfortable with it.
Those who have learned to walk through sadness are not uncomfortable when someone else is sad.
We fear discomfort and pain. This drives avoidance. We avoid pain and discomfort and RUN TO ANYTHING ELSE.
We don’t always have good examples of working through sadness. People who sulk in sadness. People who deny sadness at all cost. And perhaps the biggest influence: some are taught that Christians are not supposed to be sad. There’s this thing hovering over us that we should never feel sadness, should never be down, we should never ever go through depression, and we should never feel those sad feelings.
Unhelpful Responses to Sadness
We Avoid It at All Costs
The biggest way we do this is by staying relentlessly BUSY—physically busy with lots of movement, mentally busy keeping ourselves preoccupied with something in front of us. Space, quiet, aloneness, or margin of time means we’ll have to deal with our feelings, so we just go, go, go, and then crash at the end of the day.
Endless scrolling on our phones, watching shows, playing video games—stimulating distractions that feed our avoidance.
Then there are the “put on a happy face!” deniers who are very uncomfortable with sadness in themselves and even in other people.
I know people have done that with me. Express something sad I’m just working through, and they quickly jump to something positive, just kind of like, get out of it. And I’ve learned over the years like you don’t have to do that. It’s okay.
We Shame Ourselves for Feeling Sad
I feel sad, I feel down, and what do I do? I go, What’s wrong with me? There must be something wrong with me. We look at it as a negative emotion that needs to be gotten rid of.
Spiritual Bypassing
Using Scriptural wordings or Christian sayings to avoid feeling sadness: “I just need more faith. I don’t trust God enough.”
“We try to use it spiritually. We try to put something on there. It’s like the other day, I was actually working through something, feeling some sadness, and like I’m processing through it. And I found myself going like, ‘Well, you just didn’t do something. You didn’t trust. You didn’t do,’ and I was like, ‘Dude, stop. Just give yourself some compassionate grace. You’re feeling something. It’s okay.'”
Distractions That Numb the Sadness
Overworking, food, an addiction. Then we beat ourselves up for feeling numb.
We Go Into Despair (Without Hope)
This is when we take something that brings up sadness and we throw gasoline on it. We spiral.
“See, nothing ever works out for me!”
Over-reaction to pain—a domino effect. It leaves the sadness unattended.
“Mark, go ahead and allow yourself to be sad. You don’t have to despair.”
We Misinterpret Sadness
“Something is wrong with me!”
If you have perfectionistic struggles, it will say “It’s because I am doing something wrong or I did not do it well enough.”
OCD: It goes to your obsessive disturbance: “You are not saved. You are not a strong believer. You have committed the unpardonable sin. You are hard-hearted. You are a reprobate.”
We Ruminate Over the Sadness
We regurgitate over it—without a loving embrace—which keeps us in that spiral loop. We verbally ruminate over it. We feel the need to explain it over and over.
Many people struggle with pain of never being validated or acknowledged for their pain—so they feel it has to be loud for people to acknowledge it.
We need to be able to talk about it and share, but for some, it becomes consuming, where we cannot see anything else. This is a good cue to grab onto some compassionate grace to find steps of movement THROUGH the sadness.
Quick Transfers Into Anger or Anxiety
Sometimes the sadness quickly goes into rage or anger—can feel more empowering… but it may leave the sadness unaddressed.
Anxiety moves into busyness and drivenness.
Relationship Withdrawal and Isolation
Don’t beat yourself up over this one, because sometimes you need to just be with yourself to process. But when you constantly find yourself avoiding relationships you would normally connect with… recognize this.
Rushing the Processing of Sadness
“Hurry up, why am I not over this yet!”
Renewed Perspectives
Sadness Is Something That Can Be Beautiful
Beauty for ashes. There are great things you can discover and learn. Sadness can be a pathway that can lead to insight, can actually lead to healing for your journey, it can actually lead to productive grieving, if you’ll allow it.
You can learn things in sadness you will not learn anywhere else. Sometimes sadness makes you more tender to others.
Sadness Needs to Work Its Way THROUGH US
Don’t overreact to it, don’t push away, you don’t have to feed it. Just let it work its way through. It’s not sulking. It’s not being stuck. It’s allowing the movement to take its place.
Sadness Needs a Compassionate Embrace
As we learn to practice that for ourselves, it gives more empowering room for others. And yes, I know that many go into pity parties… but even that shows the disconnect to love.
Key: Be kind to yourself in the sadness.
We call on God for comfort, but we’re hostile towards ourselves, so it pushes back His comfort. It’s like we’re asking God to cut through all the walls we’re putting up against His love.
I need to treat myself in a way that mirrors how God sees me.
Sadness Can Illuminate Aspects of Healing for Our Hearts
Can you graciously “notice” your sadness, without feeding it or trying to make it go away?
Sadness may be a signal that something needs to be grieved through. Some people may say, “Well Mark, I am sad all the time.”
Maybe you haven’t had room to simply process through and grieve through the pain, loss, and disappointment you have experienced.
What would it look like if you lovingly observed your sadness, like a kind and patient friend, instead of as a hostile enemy?
Processed Sadness Can Open Up Healing and Greater Emotional Strength
I find when I let the sadness work its way through, sometimes I will recognize—I need to make a little bit more room for patience, or I need to… I’ve been overworking myself, or I’ve been expecting too much of myself.
Sometimes you can make more empowered decisions. Sometimes the sadness lets us have a sober look at something.
A Question for Your Journey
Where do you need to allow yourself at times to be sad?
Sit there and let the feeling work its way through. It’s not sulking. It’s not being stuck. It’s allowing the movement to take its place.
Because the goal isn’t to eliminate sadness from your life. The goal is learning how to walk through it—that God is here with His compassion and grace to walk with us in our sorrow, in our pain. He’s tender, and He’s there just as much as He is in our celebration, in our joy, in our love connection, and our peaceful experiences.
He’s there in the sadness too.
But do you allow yourself to go through it?
Recommended Resources:
- God Loves Me and I Love Myself!
- The Heart Healing Journey
- Experiencing God’s Love as Your Father
- The OCD Healing Journey
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