An Aversion to Sadness

A few days ago, I found myself distracted by a question that we frequently ask when offering the Spiritual Location Exercise to spiritual direction clients and retreatants: “What are your prevailing emotions?” The question was rhetorical. I already knew the answer. Sadness. I felt sad. So sad that I couldn’t read or think about anything else. So I did what I often do. I created a mind map that helped capture the topography of my sadness.

I wrote previously about the events that have contributed to this current emotional landscape. To give you a brief synopsis, my 91½-year-old mother-in-law recently fell, was hospitalized, then entered rehab, and finally, we moved her into an assisted living apartment. In addition to responding to this unexpected crisis, we’ve also begun to empty her home of 60+ years of living and keeping.  

We’ve made impressive progress! That being said, we hadn’t anticipated these events nor all the difficult, overwhelming, and exhausting work it would take to get David’s mom settled into a new place and clean out her house. We’ve lost our summer. Our sabbatical. Our vacation with our kids and grandkids. Our time of rest and repair. And there are many other losses that I’m not at liberty to name here. 

When I identified sadness as my prevailing emotion, of course it made sense to me. What was surprising was how uncomfortable it was to feel. How I felt an aversion toward engaging my sadness. How I preferred to side-step this emotion, pressing it to the edges of my consciousness so I didn’t have to experience it fully. 

I was also surprised to spot some remnants of an “old” belief system co-mingling with the sadness: beliefs like “You shouldn’t feel that way.” or “Feeling sad is feeling sorry for yourself.” Even after two decades of receiving spiritual direction and doing lots of personal work, certain unpleasant emotions still intimidate me! My visceral reaction is to avoid them.  

Let me pause in my story and offer an image that comes to mind from one of my favorite books, Into the Silent Land. The author, Martin Laird, suggests that we think of ourselves as Mount Zion, the Mountain of God, and our anxious feelings and thoughts as the weather. His point isn’t to ignore the weather of our emotions, but more importantly to pay attention to what lies within and beneath the weather. That’s what I unknowingly began to do—pay attention to what was within and beneath my sadness. 

Once I completed the mind map, I noticed the layers of losses spilling to the edges of my journal. I could see how imposing sadness was for me, like a threatening storm cloud (the weather) engulfing me. But as I listened to the message of my sadness, attended to the cry of my soul to be seen, a shift happened. Processing and integrating sadness gave me a clearer sense of how to live into this time. Rather than it coming out sideways in angry outbursts or repression through numbing activities, I opened to sadness as a grace of being human and a source of empathy and wisdom.  

Then something spontaneous happened. I felt prompted to write a list of gifts and gratitudes from these last weeks. At first, I was suspicious that this idea was my psyche’s attempt to bypass feeling sad. But as I’ve paused and reflected, I didn’t think so. I began to name what I’d detected in my peripheral vision: an occasional softening in my mother-in-law’s demeanor; the abundant capacity to do the tasks before me; a premonition that after all this heavy lifting, life would feel so much lighter!    

The act of bringing sadness into the light has helped me begin to metabolize it and notice a fuller gamut of my experiences. Not only that, I awoke this morning and realized that my sadness had lifted. It’s slipping away. Dissipating. Like clouds and the weather always tend to do.