How do you feel about the season of winter? Do you welcome the long nights and cold days that encourage you to hunker down? Or do you long for the warm breezes and light of spring and summer, and grit your teeth through the colder seasons?
I'm asking because often winter time can be a time of isolation and situational depression. If you apply the first Key to Emotional Genius to this statement, then you might agree that isolation and situational depression have value, if you're willing to sit with them and listen.
In our culture of doing, just allowing ourselves to sit with how we feel is going against the grain. Making time for feeling emotions and considering what information they bring to light may seem like a mystical practice only for ascetics and people who have more time than we do.
In the last couple of years, I haven't had the energy I've been used to having, or thought I should have. This has caused me some situational depression, and I've resolved to work smarter, not harder, to make the most of the energy that I do have.
Over the course of reflecting on my emotions and emotional patterns, I've realized that avoiding my emotions and the information they hold for me is taking up a significant amount of energy. In effect, I'm trying to hold back the dam with my finger. At first, it works, and I can ignore what I'm feeling. But the pressure keeps building, and it starts taking over my vision, my mind, and soon, all my energy is going to keeping this dam from breaking.
Are you familiar with Encanto, the Disney movie about the enchanted Madrigal family? There's a song called Surface Pressure, about the strong sister, Luisa, who "is as tough as the crust of the earth is." But, under the surface, she's just as fragile and self-doubting as anyone else.
She speaks to the way that it's considered normal to ignore and repress our emotions in order to be perceived as "strong," when really, it's draining away our energy trying to hold that dam of emotions at bay.
If situational depression is the "stop sign of the soul," what does it have to tell you? Where has your energy gone? Why was it sent away? What is stopping you from listening to it?
However, the other side of situational depression could be that you’re truly stuck in a situation that will end eventually, such as a graduate program or graduating high school, but you have to find some way of coping now. In this case, distraction behaviors can be sanity-saving, so that you can keep going forward to achieve the big goal, in spite of the ridiculous day-to-day hoops you have to jump through. Your anger, envy, and anxiety would help you keep your eye on the prize.
Understanding and welcoming that the gifts of the sadness family are about releasing and letting go is an essential part of working consciously and in harmony with sadness, grief, situational depression, and the suicidal urge. When you can recognize the feel of a particular emotion in your body, then your body will often know what to do all on its own. This is called emotional granularity, a concept coined by researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD. Since we’re often shamed for even naming emotions in the sadness family, then these emotions often get ignored or repressed, as we pretend to be “strong” like Luisa.
Would you join me in exploring the gifts of the sadness family of emotions in my upcoming course, Befriending Sadness? If you’ve taken it once, you can always repeat it at 50% off. Just email me for the code.