I’m not great with sadness.

When it sneaks up on me, I often try make it vanish:  DVDs, M&Ms, online surfing, laundry. I know that ‘drink heavily’ should be on the list of distracting vices instead of laundry, but after I lurch down the basement stairs with dirty clothes and then an hour or two later, trudge up with warm, clean, clothes, I say to myself, “Well, it sucks to be sad, but at least I have clean socks.”

Who doesn’t like clean socks?

There’s a part of me that wants to analyze and interrogate sadness as opposed to feel it. My theory is that If I can just root out its known causes, I can figure out how to make it go away. Is this sadness based on the economy? People losing homes? State of the resource-drained earth? Or is this more personal, like revisiting an old relationship that did not last or pondering on the ‘what ifs’ in my own life?

Through my work in New Warriors, I’ve conducted a few workshops on the Basic Guy Emotions and one that seems universally tough just let sit there is sadness.

Men like to fix things.

Other emotions (anger, fear, shame, frustration with Lost reruns, and even guilt) all have inherent action-items built in:  justify the guilt, make a bulleted list of how to overcome fears. With anger, my brain can devise clever scenarios about revenge, righted wrongs, weeping perpetrators who finally understand the horror of their deeds…junior-high fantasies, of course, but it still feels like *doing* something. The brain takes a certain pleasure in saying, ‘Well, at least there’s action to contemplate!’

Sadness just kind of sits there and bleeds.

Ironically, joy is another feeling that is hard to just *feel.* When I am full of joy, I want to channel it into calling friends, being goofy, or maybe tackling projects I don’t particularly enjoy, like laundry. (Note to self:  I really should look at the correlation between my emotions and dirty laundry. Maybe I invent joy or sadness in my life when I’m out of clean shirts?) Joy demands expression sometimes, and very often, I’m okay with that.

Sadness requires…sadness. I don’t necessarily need to cry, but it might feel better if I did. No, this is worse:  just feeling it. Letting it pass through. Sadness is usually about loss - having lost something and what it feels like to be lost. Sadness is quite wonderful, actually, if I let it remind me about loss and others who have lost. This feeling might help me become more compassionate or more understanding. I love writing about sadness - that’s incredible. But feeling my own sadness head on, well, that’s another story.

I’ve been feeling sad the last two days and I’m working through it with the help of a Season 3 episode of My Name is Earl. I know, I know, I probably shouldn’t look to NBC Thursday sitcoms for therapy, but in one prison-themed episode, a gang leader who did not like having feelings glumly kept repeating, “I’m sad” completely without expression. Then seconds later, he’d make anotherstone-faced utterance of, “I’m sad.”

I liked that approach; it’s honest. It’s not a problem to be fixed or a bulleted item on a list.

I think it’s good work for me to just say those words aloud every now and then when I’m feeling sadness. “I’m sad.”

Saying this aloud reminds me that I’m doing this warrior thing:  feeling a thing instead of letting it drive my shadow behavior. If I’m not clear about my feeling and intention, I could call a friend for support and end up picking a fight because anger is easier than sadness. (For me.)

To be crisp an clear in my intention does not mean banishing emotional energy, but letting it come up and out when it needs to, even when it’s something I don’t want to feel.

But on the plus side, I have clean socks.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 11:14 am and is filed under Warrior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.