I’ve never found it easy to sit with grief. Even when I let myself express it, there’s an uneasiness I feel because it feels so uncontrollable. Yet grief is part of the human condition and for men, it is an emotion we need to learn how to express and feel, so we can give voice to what we have otherwise held back from sharing. I share some of my own grief and in the process liberate myself through its release.
The Relationship between Sadness and Self-Worth
When I feel sadness or grief about a situation or a person or event that sadness is come from a place of loss. I feel like I am losing something and I am attached to what I am losing. Sadness can carry judgement with it. I have sometimes felt sad about a situation or person and felt judgement toward myself, thinking “if I had just been this way or done this thing, this would be different.” Sadness can be a form of resistance, an attachment to outcome that hasn’t occurred, and an effort to hold on. It’s a feeling and we need to accept it and also understand how it sets us up to hold on long after we need to.
Sadness can also be related to how someone made us feel. When that person is no longer in our lives or the relationship has changed, it can feel like we’ve lost something essential. The validation that other people bring into our lives can feel good and be addictive. In the wake of losing a relationship, it can be easy to get into a rebound relationship where you try to fill in the gap in yourself because are sad about the loss of the relationship, but also the validation that came with the relationship. The key is to actually embrace the feelings that are coming up so that you can work through them and change your life.
I got into a rebound relationship a few months after my divorce. It was absolutely one of the worse choices I could have made because I wasn’t ready for a new relationship. I was clingy, needy and hurting and I let my sadness and hurt dictate my choices instead of recognizing that I needed to use them as fuel to help me grow as a person and as a man. I was in the rebound relationship for a year and at the end of it I hit bottom and I realized I had to make a different choice. I had to become present with my sadness and hurt and everything else I hadn’t been dealing with in my life. I knew if I didn’t make that change, I would keep making the same mistakes.
One of the first lessons I learned is that I needed to validate myself. I started learning how to love and value myself. I made changes in my life for myself instead of for someone else. And I started letting go of the grief I had been holding onto, because I recognized it wasn’t grief for the person who had left me, or who I had left. It was grief around the changes my life had gone through and the loss of control I had felt around those changes. I wasn’t grieving for who I lost, but what I lost and that realization changed everything for me around sadness. When I was feeling sad, I was feeling sad about what I lost and that was keeping me from embracing the new opportunities I had available to me.
Loving myself allowed me to recognize that validating myself had to come first and that any changes I made couldn’t be made to get someone back or impress someone else. I had to make the changes for me and they had to be changes that allowed me to grow into authenticity and integrity with myself. It also allowed me to let go of my sadness and find joy in my life as it is, on my terms, instead of continuing to base it around someone else’s terms.
Sadness is a normal feeling and has its role and place. Grief allows us to process and work through something that has happened, but what grief also represents is a fundamental recognition that something has changed and we have lost a feeling of control that we were attached to. Embracing this understanding can help us work through the grief and accept the reality of the situation.
How do you handle sadness and grief? What do you do allow yourself to process and release those emotions?
