Sadness
Sadness is one of the most common and familiar of emotions, but it's certainly not basic. Sadness has many emotional associates, and hides itself in plain sight in the guise of defensive anger, protecting our vulnerabilities. What if we were to achieve a life without sadness?
Sadness is murky. It makes the mind unclear, unable to perceive positive emotions. It’s the feeling of wrongness that reinforces himself. That sense of wrongness within sadness can develop into a feeling of being broken, as if there’s something malfunctioning in one’s self or in the world that is bringing sadness into existence. Feeling sad isn’t at all unusual, however. It’s a central part of the human experience.
Sharing their perspectives on sadness in this episode are psychologist Melissa Green, authors Karol Ruth Silverstein and Ian Williams, Extinction Rebellion activist Todd Saddler, and ayahuasca guide Jonathan Schwartz.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the diversity of subjective experience. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m a research consultant who has been studying the subjective side of emotion since the 1990s.
For decades even before I began this work, there was a group of psychologists who attempted to study emotion objectively, as if emotion was a thing that could be measured as reliably as you might measure the height, width, and mass of a brick. They came up with a conceptual system called the Theory of Basic Emotions, which asserted that humans are hard wired to experience a certain small set of core emotions. These emotions, the psychologists said, are determined by biological processes so fundamental to the human species that all people experience them in the same way, no matter where they live, no matter what their culture and language are, and no matter what their individual experiences may have been. Any other feelings beyond the basic emotions, they said, were either variations on a basic emotion, or combinations of them, in the way that green is a combination of yellow and blue.
The odd thing about the Theory of Basic Emotions was that the psychologists who promoted the theory couldn’t agree on what the basic emotions actually were. In the objective sciences, such disagreements can be settled through carefully designed and replicated experiments until scientists arrive at observations they can agree upon, and models that are supported by mountains of evidence. In chemistry, for example, chemists all agree upon the periodic table of elements. They agree on the characteristics of the elements placed within the table, and have come up with an elaborate system for reliably predicting how the elements will interact to create the world we see around us, based upon generations of experimentation.
That kind of reliable, objective system was what the psychologists behind the Theory of Basic Emotions were aiming for. It didn’t work out that way, however. Paul Ekman pioneered the effort with the claim that there are six basic emotions: Anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear, and sadness. Robert Plutchik, however, said that there are eight basic emotions: Anger, anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust. Psychologists at the University of Glasgow, however, declare that there are only four basic emotions: Happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. Richard and Bernice Lazarus declared that there are fifteen basic emotions. A few years ago, researchers at the University of California at Berkley announced that there are twenty-seven basic emotions. Even Paul Ekman has changed his mind, and now says that there are seventeen basic emotions.
There’s no consensus among proponents of the Theory of Basic Emotions. They each have their own claims about what the basic emotions are, and how they work, but as the years progress, they don’t come closer to agreement. They just keep talking past each other, disagreeing with each other. That’s because their work is largely an abstraction, disconnected from the actual experience of emotion in our conscious minds. They study things like language about emotions, or facial expressions that happen as a result of emotions, rather than emotions themselves. How, after all, could anyone conduct a truly objective study about subjective experience?
One thing all of the many theories of basic emotion agree upon, however, is that sadness is a basic emotion. Everyone feels sad sometimes, and sadness is one of the most fundamental human emotions.
But then, what, exactly is sadness? What does it mean to feel sad?
Chemists can describe lithium with a great deal of precision. Lithium is the third smallest element. It has an atomic mass of seven, is solid at room temperature, and has an electronegativity of 0.98 on the Pauling Scale.
There is no such precision in our understanding of what it is to feel sad, however. Tell a friend that you’re feeling sad, and your friend will get the general idea, but likely won’t be able to grasp everything that you’re going through. You and your friend could have a conversation for hours about what you’re sad about, why that makes you sad, and what you might do about it. The ambiguity people feel about being sad is one of the reasons they can end up going to psychotherapy sessions for years and still struggle to understand what’s troubling them.
As unclear as sadness is, it’s one of the most commonly talked about emotions. In public speeches, sadness is an emotion that politicians like to evoke, as it expresses a sense of disapproval without sliding into the extreme sense of urgency that comes along with anger. So, in June of 2022, Joe Biden gestured toward a feeling of sadness when the Supreme Court overturned the legal right to the abortion of a pregnancy.
Jonathan Cook:
It was “a sad day for the court and the country”, Biden said. A year later, in the summer of 2023, Donald Trump used the same kind of language as he declared it to be “a very sad day for America” when he was indicted on federal charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump:
“This is a very sad day for America and it was also very sad driving through Washington, DC and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti.”
Jonathan Cook:
The political use of an emotion like sadness feels disingenuous. It’s likely that Joe Biden and Donald Trump really did feel some sense of sadness on these occasions. Yet, their use of the phrase “a sad day” feels like a formula designed to indicate how their followers are supposed to feel as a tactical piece of political calculus, rather than as a genuine expression of sadness in the moment.
People can easily talk about an emotion like sadness without feeling it themselves. On the other hand, people can feel sad without talking about it, without letting other people perceive the feeling. There’s something in sadness that seeks to hide away from others.
Sadness is not only difficult to express, but is also difficult to define. How can we find and define the edges of sadness? If you’re asked to define what sadness is, the first idea that pops into your mind may be that it’s a feeling of unhappiness, but there’s more to sadness than just the absence of happiness, just as there’s more to darkness than just the absence of light.
In the last season of the podcast, we met Jonathan Schwartz, who leads ayahuasca retreats in which people confront their own difficult emotions. Jonathan has his own history with emotional darkness.
Jonathan Schwartz:
I think that the most difficult for me with the sadness, the depression, that sadness, that feeling of emptiness, because there was two or three times over the last ten to fifteen years when it got so bad that I didn't really have a desire to live anymore. That’s more painful than anything that was more painful than any of the feelings that I've had, really sad gloom, dark. I can't see, can't see the light or the goodness in anything.
It feels like when you're going through that, it feels like there's no hope. It feels like the time before the sun rises and it feels like the sun is never going to rise. You just don't want to do anything. You don't. You just right now, from what I know. I mean, it's caused by certain thought patterns. So, a sadness like that or a deep, dark depression like that for me is usually a lot of regret, a lot of going backwards and living in the past. Why didn't I do this? Why did I do that? Comparing myself to others, maybe looking at myself like a failure, maybe.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonathan describes sadness as a feeling of emptiness, of darkness, of gloom, of pain. He talks about it as the feeling of regret and hopelessness, although regret and hopelessness can both be felt without sadness. There’s something also about the perception of failure and looking backwards in feeling sad. Another way to put it is that sadness is a negative frame of mind.
Jonathan Schwartz:
I think what actually what it is, is that it's conditioning your mind to be depressed. There are two ways of looking, there's many ways of looking at anything, but you can either find the good in something or find the bad in something, and when I'm in that state, all I can do, when I was in the past, because I don't feel that way anymore at all, but all I would do was look at the darkness or the bad, the negative side of whatever happens. Over time, it starts to be the natural way, the natural thought pattern to look at everything and see everything that's wrong with it, or see the darkness or see the failure.
Jonathan Cook:
Sadness is murky. It makes the mind unclear, unable to perceive positive emotions. It’s a feeling of wrongness that reinforces himself.
That sense of wrongness within sadness can develop into a feeling of being broken, as if there’s something malfunctioning in one’s self or in the world that is bringing sadness into existence. Feeling sad isn’t at all unusual, however. All kinds of people feel sad, even psychologists working as mental health professionals to guide other people through difficult emotions.
So it was for Dr. Melissa Green, a psychologist who had to sacrifice a fulfilled life in Hawaii when she found out that her father had Alzheimer’s.
Melissa Green: The neuropsychologist is actually the one who did officially diagnose him with Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia. As you can imagine, my whole world changed and my family's as well. But I'm the youngest of nine and I've always been very close to my dad, and my mom has been deceased for twenty years, so he was living alone. I kind of felt like I'm it, right there. I didn't have a choice but to come back. I willingly, you know, came back to Georgia because I would always want to be there to support him. The whole trajectory of my life changed because I had to make adjustments. I had to relocate, find a new job. And that was just the beginning. We had to really assess his needs and there was a lot that I didn't know either about what to expect. You know, you kind of hear about it, but until you experience it personally, you don't realize there's so many things to consider, like whether or not there's the person is going to continue to stay in their home or if they're going to go somewhere else or, you know, you will move in all of these things to consider. So, it was it was a lot.
I felt sad about leaving Hawaii because I had a career that was, you know, pretty solid and established, and I had a good circle of friends. But I was happy that I was the one in the family that probably had more flexibility in being able to work in different places.
Jonathan Cook:
There’s something about sadness that has the power to dampen our happiest feelings. There’s a wetness to sadness, as if feeling sad is like standing out in the rain. It soaks through us, pervading every aspect of experience, weighing us down, and thoroughly changing the nature of our lives into a mess, all the way through. Melissa was already an accomplished professional when she left Hawaii to return to her home state of Georgia to take care of her father. Nonetheless, in her sadness, she felt like a failure.
Melissa Green:
I hate to say this because I think it sounds bad saying it out loud, but to some degree, knowing that I was going to have to come back to Georgia, even though I had been licensed to practice psychology, have these degrees, or it felt like I had failed to some degree. Just, you know, as far as my personal and professional life, because I'm going back home. So that felt sad. I felt like I had accomplished a lot of things and I had traveled a lot of the places, lived in different places. But for some reason, moving back and I didn't initially move back to my hometown, but now I'm in the town that I grew up in, which is a small town. It was sad because it felt like to some degree that was some sort of failure, even though logically I know that it's not. But it felt like I was regressing. I guess maybe I thought felt sad about that. I also feel like I'm sort of a, I guess, a free spirit type. I like to travel, I like to explore and go around different places. It felt very restrictive, and I still feel that way. I feel like I'm stuck, so to speak, even though there are, with all particularly with the virtual opportunities, there are lots of ways to do work with people in other places or connect with people in other places. I feel really limited. And so that makes me sad because I can't, I don't have the same type of freedom maybe that I had before.
Jonathan Cook:
Like water that soaks through, chilling us to the bone, sadness creates an urge to shelter in place, to retreat, diminishing the sense of freedom we enjoy when life feels bright and sunny.
Melissa Green:
Honestly, it’s a struggle. I've always been extremely close to my dad, so we've always talked regularly, and I spent most of my adult life away from Georgia. So that was the way that we maintained our relationship primarily. I went to school in Washington, D.C., lived there for 14 years. And like I said, I was in Hawaii for seven years. So once my dad started to decline more, he was not able to communicate on the phone. Right. Which made it difficult for me. I realized how much how important that was for me and how much that conversation was nurturing me, even though a lot of times we just weren't talking about anything significant. But just knowing that I had this supportive voice on the other end, I didn't realize until he wasn't able to really communicate on the phone how big of a voice that was and how sad that made me to not be able to talk to him, especially because initially I was not. I was about 2 hours away from him. So, it's not like I could just go see him. If I couldn't talk to him on the phone, I would have to wait until the weekends to go. That's still a struggle now.
He's still alive. He's ninety, but sometimes I can't. I'm in the same town with him, and I still can't get over there every single day. So I'm like, wow, I really wish I could just call him and just say, “Hey, you know, what's up, or how are you doing?” or whatever. So that, you know, that's another thing that is sad for me. Also, my siblings and I have all dealt with it very differently. My brother and I have been very involved other siblings have not. I have to remind myself that they have a different relationship with him than I did. And even though some sometimes they wanted to, he has rejected. He shows a preference for wanting me. I think he just feels more or better cared for when I'm around because we're closer. That's kind of sad to see that well, one, they don't feel that same type of connection. Now it's like some of my siblings really don't have any, at least I still have one parent. They don't have our mom or dad, in a sense.
Then I feel sad, you know, that they really just don't, I feel like some of them don't really understand. People still ask at times, “Oh, are we going to have him participate in X, Y, and Z?” And he, it really is not in his benefit to be in an environment that's so overstimulating. People think, oh yeah, it's a good idea, but they're not really, they don't really even understand the gravity of what's going on, basically. So that makes me sad because I don't know if it's because people just want to live in denial or they maybe just truly don't understand the nature of the diseases that he has, but I have to let it let it go.
Jonathan Cook:
In his dementia, Melissa’s father could no longer fully participate in life the way that he used to. He wore the same face on the outside, but on the inside, he had lost the ability to connect to others and to the world around him. Melissa’s emotional reaction to the radical changes forced upon her by her father’s Alzheimer’s produced an echo of that loss in her own mind.
Something had been lost for Melissa. As a psychologist, one way for her to describe this feeling was as a kind of depression.
Melissa Green:
I feel like I have lost freedom, but the reality is I mean, I could get on a plane tomorrow and go, you know, so to some degree there is loss. So I think that's the thing that people often feel sad about. As a psychologist, when we talk about depression, many times it's because people are we call it rehashing something that happened before. And so they may be thinking, oh, you know, I really wish that I could have done this or done that. So, they have a missed opportunity or they want to do something different, and so they maybe loss lost out on an opportunity or lost out on something that they, you know, once had, but now they don't have or something to that degree that makes any sense. I think the theme, particularly for me and the things that we talked about there at some level, I felt like I was I was losing something, whether it was autonomy or the ability to live where I wanted to live, or I was losing connections with friends and people that I had spent a lot of time with, and losing that relationship with my dad in the way that it was before.
Jonathan Cook:
At the same time her father was withdrawing from the world, Melissa found herself losing connection with the people and places she had loved. In her sadness, she felt isolated and left behind, no longer able to grasp the things she had once enjoyed.
Melissa Green:
When I think about depression, we as mental health professionals and we look at the degree to which it is impacting your life, your day-to-day functioning. And so, I haven't felt paralyzed by the sadness. There may have been moments where I felt bound and just felt like, oh, I just need a break from all this. But I've continued to work towards goals I've, you know, shifted my perspective on. Like I said, I literally am actively working on thinking about things in my town, building relationships with organization so that I can do work with them, so that I can appreciate the things that are that are here. Because it's there's not it's not really anything bad about it per say, but it just it just again feels like going backwards, coming back to a small town after living in these larger places and, you know, interacting with a lot of different people. There's definitely a difference between, you know, that sadness that may be situational versus something that's more, more chronic, that is impairing your ability to do the things that you need to do to take care of yourself or to live a more fulfilled life.
Jonathan Cook:
Depression is a complex clinical term. As Dr. Green explains, it’s about much more than just a pervasive feeling of sadness. Depression is a social condition as much as a psychological one. It’s marked by the inability to function normally in society, leading depressed people to become more and more inactive over time.
Depression can slow down anyone, diminishing their ability to accomplish tasks that shouldn’t be at all difficult. This can happen even to people who define themselves by their busyness, people like environmental activist Todd Saddler.
Todd Saddler:
My name is Todd Saddler. I'm an activist with Extinction Rebellion here in Ithaca, New York. I'm also a person learning about my own mind by trying to learn how to not be depressed.
I have experienced depression at different points during my life, but starting about six years ago, I had a very severe episode begin and it did not seem to be going away naturally. I tried therapy and medications and everything else. I have a list of prescriptions as long as my arm that I do various things and some of them help to a degree, but the basic experience, to my mind is doing something on its own, which is very uncomfortable, has not gone away. I find some relief intermittently and as I said, some things help a little bit.
Jonathan Cook:
When we talk about sadness, depression often becomes part of the conversation. We can ask what the difference between sadness and depression is, but maybe that’s like asking about the difference between London and England. Sadness is a part of depression, but there’s more to depression than just feeling sad.
Todd Saddler:
There's a number of pieces to it that make me think depression. And, you know, I only had the word relatively recently in my life. I think it was 2008, the first time I was officially diagnosed. Severe depression. It's difficulty concentrating. It's sadness, anxiety, anger, difficulty sleeping, a sense of fragility, avoidance, the feeling that I don't want to do that, whatever that is. I don't want to do anything. So, there's a number of pieces to it, but they seem interrelated. You know, it's something that another part of me is saying, this is painful.
Jonathan Cook:
Depression is more than just sadness. It’s a psychological dynamic that often includes powerful, lasting feelings of sadness, but as Todd points out, there are other emotions connected to depression as well: Anxiety, anger, fragility, and avoidance. Depression is also manifested in other symptoms, such as troubled sleep and difficulty concentrating. Sadness doesn’t necessarily lead to these additional experiences.
In fact, sadness can be an important source of inspiration. When everything feels fantastic and sunny in life, there’s not much motivation to do or say anything about it. On the other hand, the most heart-wrenching, sad experiences can cause us to feel compelled to reach out to others and communicate something of our misery.
Karol Ruth Silverstein, author of the novel Cursed, spoke to me about the way that she drew on her own sadness as a source of inspiration.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
I tend to write about that, to write about young girls who are facing some sort of abrupt change in their lives and have to figure out who they're going to be going forward. And that's you know, that's something that that definitely happened to me a few times as young as a young kid. And it's a theme that I think is very universal regardless of what the change might have been. And so, it's something that I explore a lot in my work. Though it was completely fiction, there were definitely parts of it that were drawn from my life, mainly the beginning, the setup where it's this kid whose family life is in disarray, and then she got sick on top of it and was very angry and sad and terrified, but not open to asking for help. That was very much how I was when I first got diagnosed and I was sent to live with my dad, who left for work before I needed to leave for school. So, I would pretend to be getting ready, and then when he left, I would go back to bed and just sleep because I was in so much pain and so much emotional anguish.
Jonathan Cook:
Cursed isn’t exactly a memoir. Karol wrote the book around a character who endured difficulties similar to what she went through in her teenage years.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
My parents separated when I was about ten and there was a lot of hostility between them. When I think of the term messy divorce or bad words, I think of like violence and court battles, and there wasn't any of that, but I recognized as an adult that that the level of hostility between my parents was really traumatic, and in particular, I am very much my mother's daughter and my father just had grown to hate my mother, and a lot of that was transferred on to me because I was so similar to her. I think that, first of all, another part of the story that is important, although it's not in the book, I was an overweight kid and I started gaining weight when I became aware that things were not great between my parents, sort of acted out with food. That's where I was very, very overweight and really bullied severely for that, and then I went to Fat Camp the summer between seventh and eighth grade and lost most of my excess weight. And my parents were then divorced. And I, I was so excited about being this brand new person that having a body that at the very least would not make me subject to bullying and make me stand out for the wrong reasons. And I got sick about six months after that. And so that really contributed to my just being like, you know, I'm going to curse here, fuck you, fuck everything. I'm going to take care of me and the rest of you go to hell. This is unfair, really. It manifested as anger, but I think underneath it all was just this profound sadness and disappointment, and so I was an angry kid.
Jonathan Cook:
Karol expressed her pain as anger, but underneath the rage was a profound sadness.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
You know when you travel to Europe, you've got to get that that transformer, that thing where you plug it to their parents, you can plug it your shaver, your blow dryer or whatever, and it changes the one kind of power to the other? I feel like I might have a defense mechanism in my brain that when I'm feeling sad or hurt, it transforms it into anger, resentment because that for whatever reason, it's a much more comfortable feeling for me than sadness and hurt feelings. I'm better at that than I was as a child, but I still that's sort of my go to. Instead of feeling that uncomfortable feeling, to be able to scream, you know, the anger, to make it about anger rather than, oh my God, my feelings really hurt my feelings. That is a defense mechanism that I built up, and it's still utilized and utilized less today, but I certainly didn't have that realization back when I was thirteen, fourteen years old.
Jonathan Cook:
Sadness hurts, and pain is vulnerable. So, sadness hides itself. It disguises itself as other emotions that are easier to display. The transmutation of sadness into anger creates a defensive display to others, a bluff of being at our strongest, and most dangerous, when in fact we are feeling at our weakest. Karol adopted this approach of a camouflaged sadness in writing her fictionalized self.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
I think she realizes it, but it’s subtle. I don’t lay it out on the page that I realize that I was just feeling sad. I think it's in the context and I think that obviously, I think that's a much better way than to just fill it out. You want to show, don't tell, in any writing. I think she, finally she does realize just how sad and alone and terrified she is. That's the other thing. She's really terrified, and she doesn't want to admit that she's terrified.
Jonathan Cook:
As Karol’s experience and her fiction show, sadness is manifest in different forms depending on the struggles of the person who feels it. Sadness is accompanied by a flotilla of associated emotions, and hides among them, disguising itself even from the person who feels it. Sadness is a close associate of fear, or even terror. It comes with the worrying suspicion that the apparently positive aspects of life are mere illusions, and that things can only get worse.
So, why would anyone ever want to feel sad? Is it bad to be sad? As uncomfortable as sadness is, it is an honest reaction to the difficulties of life. There are lessons in sadness, and a danger in avoiding those lessons.
Ian Williams, author of the book Soil and Spirit, advises us not to avoid the pain of sadness.
Ian Williams:
The notion that life is about experiencing pleasure and avoiding pain, I think, is an example of an emotional monoculture, so to speak. We only want to experience the good, but not the bad, and as someone who has spent time holding on to the pendulum as it swings wildly back and forth emotionally in life, dealing with things like anxiety and depression and oftentimes the bliss, albeit fleeting, from substance use, it took a while to recognize that life isn't necessarily about experiencing something and not something else, but rather finding ways to allow for the experience of all of it all the time.
Maybe a more articulate way of saying it is: Allow for the experience of whatever is happening in the moment, whatever is surfacing in the moment, and so, when that kind of conceptual or intellectual realization took place in my life, my therapy radically changed course, and it was away from and I mean, clinical therapy, yes, I was going to that, but I also mean just self-therapy, that self-worth, that inner work. It reoriented itself away from I need to find a way to experience the good and avoid the bad and into I need to develop a skill set and a self-awareness that allows me to navigate all the waters. That is a fundamentally different approach to emotional resilience, or at least has been for me.
Jonathan Cook:
Emotional resilience, as Ian frames it, isn’t about avoiding situations that will make us feel sad, but about learning to allow for a truly balanced emotional life that will consist of positive and negative feelings alike. An attempt to avoid negative feelings such as sadness, after all, would be in itself a negative act.
Sadness has a depth to it. It contains more than we often give it credit for. Ian’s perspective brings to mind the deep history of sadness, which has the same roots as the words satisfaction and sated. Originally, sadness was the feeling people had after they had their fill, and didn’t need any more. There’s a slowness and a sleepiness to a full stomach, and perhaps a bit of regret when a pleasant meal is over too soon, but it’s useful to remember that the losses we mourn in life, the failures we go through, and even the pain that we endure are often consequences of earlier pleasures and accomplishments. Sadness is the downbeat of the rhythm of life.
Unrelenting happiness might not be as pleasant as we imagine. Just as a full day in the sun leads to sunburn, a life without periods of sadness could exhaust us, leading to burnout.
Next week, Stories of Emotional Granularity will consider the emotion of burnout, the feeling we get when a good thing has gone on for too long.
Until then, thanks for listening.