Sadness: the bridge from stress to strength

I was asked once, sitting around a table at a church function, what was the secret to my healing from difficulties on the field and being able to keep going. I responded, “I cried a lot.”

There was an awkward silence. No one asked me to explain, and no one said anything. I think they had hoped to hear something profound. Maybe they hoped I would say something about God. Maybe they wanted to hear some useful idea. But what if tears say a lot about God? What if they are also very useful?

God made us rational and emotional

Somewhere around the time people put their trust in reason, they lost faith in an important aspect of how God made us: as both rational and emotional beings. Our amazing brains are created with both cognitive and emotional capacities with important roles to play. Sadness is a universal emotional experience, yet our current culture tells us sadness is something to avoid. We perceive it as the opposite of happiness, fearing that feeling sad puts us at risk of a mood disorder.

Sadness is not the same as despair or depression. It is not grumpiness or agitation—though these might be indicators of sadness in need of release. Sadness does not always have to show on the outside, nor does it have to be accompanied with tears.

Sadness is the inner feeling we experience when we come up against a loss, a disappointment, or the end of something where there is nothing left to do but cry

Sadness is the inner feeling we experience when we come up against a loss, a disappointment, or the end of something where there is nothing left to do but cry. Sometimes when we feel sad it’s hard to imagine ever feeling happy again, but sadness does not get stuck. It is the feeling that moves us from one feeling to the next and makes possible the bounce back to happiness.

Is sadness a sin?

Within the church, there can often be an expectation to feel and demonstrate happiness—as though sadness would be evidence that we lack the joy of the Lord in our lives. Is it a sin to be sad? Of course not! Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). David drenched his bed with tears (Psalm 6:6). Solomon declared that “sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us” (Ecclesiastes 7:3 NLT). Why do we so seldom acknowledge the importance of the time to cry alongside the time to laugh?

Why do we so seldom acknowledge the importance of the time to cry alongside the time to laugh?

God has gifted each of us with an amazing design in the centre of our brains. It is available to every human no matter age, cognitive capacity, experience or personality. Gordon Neufeld, in his address Bouncing Back: From Stress to Strength (Neufeld Institute Conference 2022), describes the incredible design of the brain to feel its way through sadness, leading to the recovery of hope and perspective, the capacity for fulfillment and happiness, as well as the spontaneous unfolding of potential. Sadness is the turning point, the pivot where fears and frustrations can melt away at least for a time.

Neufeld describes a special process that happens in our brain when we feel sad or disappointed, a chemical change that shifts our brains in powerful adaptive ways. Sadness or disappointment supports the grieving process, enables us to deal with stress even if that stress doesn’t go away, and takes that stress and turns it to strength for our future resilience. The low precipitates the bounce. David’s weeping lasted the night, but joy came in the morning (Psalm 30:5). Jesus wept, and then turned around and raised his friend from the dead (John 11).

Honouring our sadness

Our society does not honour tears. Even most experts teach coping strategies to avoid feeling sadness. However, if we watch closely, we can still see tears honoured in the arts. Some music and film artists have held onto their intuition around this. Watch a good film and see that the moment when the tears flow is often the turning point for the character or the plot. Even Pixar captures it in Inside Out when Sadness sits down to support Bing Bong and the candy tears start to fall. After the tears, Bing Bong bounces back up with renewed purpose.

While we were living overseas, we faced constant stresses large and small. When we were able to leave the country for a break, I would find myself feeling a lot of sadness, often crying for the first couple of days anytime we had reached a safe or restful place. It always seemed so incongruent. Why cry now when I’m in a beautiful place with people taking care of me?

The brain has an incredible capacity to help us do the work we need to do, to numb back the messy feelings when we are in a situation that requires toughness and the possibility of wounding.

Living where we lived, I needed to be able to do things, to go places that were stressful for me, and I needed to not have to feel all that stress all the time. But that state is not meant to be chronic. We need to have a place to get back to our feelings to access our capacity to heal. For many people that inability to feel has become stuck. The brilliant design is available for all, but not automatically accessible all the time. Many of us have lost our tears. Numb feelings were quite common early in the pandemic. The alarm was so high for many, and the stress didn’t seem to stop. How can we get our feelings back, especially when stress is never fully going away?

The good news is, emotion is always there inside us, stored in our bodies and ready to move when given a chance. Recovering an understanding and value for sadness doesn’t mean we can just will ourselves to cry or schedule a time to be disappointed. But it will inevitably come.  And once it comes, we can give it space and permission to be felt. Barbara Brown Taylor in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, writes “I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.”

The good news is, emotion is always there inside us, stored in our bodies and ready to move when given a chance.

A safe place allows us to be ourselves

For me, leaving the places we were living overseas was enough to create the safety I needed to recover my feelings. How can we recover that sense of safety when we can’t make a geographical move to access it? Neufeld teaches that the primary need for our brains to feel safe and to come to rest is close connections in our supportive relationships. We each need one or two people with whom we feel safe to be ourselves, who give us space to express what’s inside us. It can be hard to offer that to someone, especially when the feelings coming out are a bit messy or “negative.” Other’s difficult feelings can bring up our own. We can feel sad as our loved ones grapple with their sadness. Rebuilding trust in our God-given emotional processes is important. We need to know it’s safe to feel sad and that relief is around the corner.

It is uncomfortable to feel sadness. If we haven’t felt it for a while, it can feel scary to let it start. The support of a companion can help.

It is uncomfortable to feel sadness. If we haven’t felt it for a while, it can feel a bit scary to let it start. The support of a companion can help. Other things that can help include music and story. Allowing music to bring up a bit of sadness can bring relief in small manageable amounts.  Music can carry us and take off some of the weight. We usually can’t face sadness head on, so stories, movies and drama can help support it one step removed from the places in our lives that feel like too much.

Relationships and creative play help to support our sadness. Susan Cain, in her new book Bittersweet: How sorrow and longing make us whole, writes that sadness also inspires creativity and supports closeness in relationships. Making more space in our congregations and worship services for these emotions could support our corporate healing, our relational health, and our worship.

Walking through difficult feelings builds strength

The Psalms are such a great example to us of pouring out the full range of feelings out to the Lord in song and poetry. We need safe relationships, and the Lord is the ultimate Safety for us, available and inviting us to share all that is within our hearts. The Creator has provided the brain structures to feel our way to recovery and gives us the relationship to support us to do so.

It takes some strength to feel sad. To endure difficult feelings and not avoid them. But walking through those feelings also builds strength. Afterward we can look back and see, “Wow, we walked through that valley, and we were not overcome.” The Lord was with us. Enduring the waves of emotion supports our ability to continue to ride those waves, assured that we will keep coming up again. This is the journey of resilience.