Grief and sadness: how to deal with them?

To manage grief and sadness it is important not to try to avoid "negative emotions".

Throughout history, emotions have been relegated to second place to reason, without being considered sources of knowledge or usefulness for human beings.

The truth is that emotions provide us with very valuable information for our own survival and our self-knowledge, so we can say that they are generated by our emotions.We can therefore say that they are generators of wisdom.

Sadness has been catalogued as one of the negative emotions from the cognitive-behavioral approach and positive psychology, together with disgust, fear or anger. From contextual therapies we avoid making this classification of negative or positive emotions because they can condemn us to avoid them and generate additional problems.

In this way it is understood that all emotions present an adaptive function to the situation or experience that triggers them and their avoidance, non-identification or denial is what can generate maladaptive responses.

Do you feel discomfort and distress when you are sad?

If the answer is yes, you are experiencing something expected and normal in the face of a painful situation, period or experience. Sadness accounts for a change, a loss, a grief that does not have to be only the death of a loved one.

There are many types of grief, such as the feeling of loss or emptiness after a breakup of a couple, a change of city or country, a change of job or distance from a loved one.change of job or estrangement with a close person or friend among many other things.

Sadness is not positive or negative, it is there to give us information about the loss and the need to feel it and go through it in order to be able to say goodbye, restructure and relocate afterwards.

There are times when we feel sadness for no apparent reason; in this case it may be that there is another unidentified emotion or that we have learned to avoid and instead we feel sadness; then we will have to find out the underlying emotion to see what information it gives us and what we can do with it.

As a Western society we have learned to avoid and reject Pain and sadness.. From the early stages of our life the messages we hear from our referents and close figures contribute to the internalization of the avoidance and rejection of sadness. This is what Soriano & Salas (2006) point out when they state that the instructions shared innocently since childhood are "formulas for living" that we internalize as commands such as "no to pain, anguish, nostalgia and sad memories among others..." that lead us to avoid pain when it appears.

These formulas instead push us to the search for immediate pleasure, strengthening the erroneous conception that sadness and emotional discomfort must be avoided at all costs, a conception that contributes to the pathologization of sadness when it should not be so, being one of the basic emotions that are in every human being having an adaptive function for it.

What do we do with sadness?

After having read and understood in broad strokes the function of sadness, each person can decide what he or she wants to do with it.

We know the usefulness and liberation we feel when sharing sadness with close people and support networks, as well as being willing to go through it. It is essential to understand the importance of how unresolved or unresolved grief affects us today and its relationship with our state of mind, the way we relate to others, our motivation, communication... Therapeutic work and accompaniment are of great importance in the processes of change and loss.You can rely on the help of a professional if you think it is necessary.