It's okay to be sad. How many times a day are we asked "How are you?" only to give an obligatory reply, "Fine, thank you". We're always fine, okay, not bad, doing good or alright. When is the last time you answered with: "I'm sad"? Or, "I feel afraid". I'm melancholy, distracted, bothered, lonely, confused, overwhelmed, angry, bitter, regretful or any number of hundreds of other emotions we all experience on a daily basis. Therapy, at its core, is designed to help clients better understand, account for and manage their emotions. Unfortunately, our culture has lumped human emotions into two seemingly polarized groups - positive and negative. Nobody comes to therapy because they are totally happy and wonderful. Our culture celebrates and encourages all of the positive emotions and feelings like happy, fulfilled, satisfied, exuberant, joyful and content. On the other hand, our culture tends to frown on what we consider to be the more negative emotions as mentioned above. If a person were to inquire, "How are you?" and is met with "I'm feeling sad", that person would likely follow up with "Really, what's wrong"? There's nothing wrong with sadness.
We spend so much time avoiding, ignoring, changing or denying our emotions that have a negative social connotation. That's draninig. We need to give ourselves permisssion to feel the wide, all encompassing range of human emotions without adding guilt, shame or regret. Given the world we live in and all the tragedy that unfolds, we'd have to be a sociopath not to feel hurt, loss, pain and sadness. The next time we wake up in a foul mood, let's give ourselves permission to say "Today, I'm feeling (insert "negative" emotion) and it's okay. I'm a human being and to be human is to feel (negative emotion) some of the time. There's nothing wrong with this feeling and there's nothing wrong with me for feeling this way."
Now, of course if this particular mood persists in duration or intensifies, this may indicate a larger, underlying mental health need requiring treatment. My point is to begin to embrace all of our emotions as normal. We're complicated. We have feelings. And, we are not designed to feel "great" 100% of the time any more than the weather is designed to be 75 degrees and sunny all day.
Be kind to each other and to yourself.
© Copyright 2014 Douglas Layer, M.A., LPCC
We spend so much time avoiding, ignoring, changing or denying our emotions that have a negative social connotation. That's draninig. We need to give ourselves permisssion to feel the wide, all encompassing range of human emotions without adding guilt, shame or regret. Given the world we live in and all the tragedy that unfolds, we'd have to be a sociopath not to feel hurt, loss, pain and sadness. The next time we wake up in a foul mood, let's give ourselves permission to say "Today, I'm feeling (insert "negative" emotion) and it's okay. I'm a human being and to be human is to feel (negative emotion) some of the time. There's nothing wrong with this feeling and there's nothing wrong with me for feeling this way."
Now, of course if this particular mood persists in duration or intensifies, this may indicate a larger, underlying mental health need requiring treatment. My point is to begin to embrace all of our emotions as normal. We're complicated. We have feelings. And, we are not designed to feel "great" 100% of the time any more than the weather is designed to be 75 degrees and sunny all day.
Be kind to each other and to yourself.
© Copyright 2014 Douglas Layer, M.A., LPCC
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