Welcome to from Insults to Respect. Today we seek to answer the question, If we are experiencing sadness does that mean that we are bad? We’ll begin with a little parable to see what it might reveal. Then we’ll look at the real life example of Laura, a young woman who came to think there was something wrong with her because of her sadness.

The Parable of a Mother Disciplining Her Son

It’s a Sunday night. Eight-year-old Carl is playing a computer game. Suddenly, his mom cries out, “Time to head up to bed, tomorrow’s school.”

“Let me just finish my game, Mom!”

“Take another five minutes, and then it’s off to bed!”

 Five minutes later, Carl, still engrossed in his game, hears his mother cry out again, “Time to head up to bed.”

“My game isn’t over yet Mom.”

“Put the game away now.”

“But Mom!”

“Don’t ‘but mom’ me, let’s go,” and she takes Carl firmly by his arm and begins to guide him to his bedroom. Carl’s eyes tear up, which infuriates his mother, and she cries out, don’t you start with this crap or I’ll give you a real reason to cry! You’re acting like an infant!!! Now you stop this instant and get to bed!!!”

Parable Discussion

First of all, I can empathize with this mother. Perhaps she had a very trying day. Perhaps she has learned how to handle the bedtime situation from her own growing up experience, observing how her parents handled this type of situation. Much of our own parenting skills are indeed learned this way, observing how our parents raised us. This mother’s intention was good; she wanted Carl to get enough sleep so he could be ready to do his best the next day at school. I certainly respect what she was trying to do.

That said, I find myself wondering if there might be some better way to respond when Carl begins to express his sadness, instead of threatening him and saying he is acting like an infant. Here’s one alternative approach that comes to mind.

When Carl begins to shed some tears, she might have said in a caring way,

“I see you are feeling sad. That’s understandable. You were enjoying the game so much, and you’re disappointed about having to stop. You know, when we feel sad, it’s to help us figure out how to better handle what we do in the future. I wonder how we can better handle the going to bed situation in the future. Any ideas, Carl?”

“No Mom. I just want to keep playing.”

“I think, Carl, that in the future playing these computer games right before going to bed might not be a good idea. They are designed to keep you wanting to play more and more, and it doesn’t come to an end. You reach one level and there is always another more challenging level to get to. What might be a better thing to do before bedtime?

“I could watch a show that ends at bedtime.”

“That sounds like a good thing to try, as long as it’s not a scary show that will get you all wound up right before bedtime. We could also go to the library and pick out some books that have pleasant short stories, and you can read one right before bed. Short stories come to an end in a reasonable period of time, and the reader feels a sense of completion when it’s over, without making you feel like you have to read the next chapter to see what happens next. That might work also. So, in the future, why don’t we try having you each night choose one of these ideas. I’ll let you decide each night which approach feels right to you.”

From this alternative scenario you might surmise that I think it would be better to frame our sad experiences as something useful for planning our future, rather than an experience that means we are bad or that there is something wrong with us. And, actually you would be right. But there is some nuance to my thinking about this issue that I wish to bring to your attention.

Some Nuanced Thinking When It Comes to Dealing with Our Sad Feelings

Suppose a guy named Fred tends to be sad more than the average person. This might be due to some natural born tendency to experience life in a more sensitive manner than most, or because of some rough stuff going on in his life, or some trauma in the past has been leading to recurring anguishing memories. For whatever reason, Fred regularly comes to work expressing his sadness from the look on his face as he goes around doing his job. Co-workers often stop what they are doing to ask what is wrong, and offer help by taking time to listen to Fred in a caring way. This would be nice in some ways, but let’s say it happens so often, coworkers begin to find that their work at the end of the day doesn’t always get done on time and they end up having to stay late. Some resentment begins to arise. Moreover, in this scenario, the boss begins to dislike what has been going on partly because of the time being taken from the tasks that have to get done with top-notch efficiency in a competitive business environment, and she was brought up by parents who taught that there is something wrong with people who are sad more than average. In the end, Fred loses his job.

Upset about this, Fred begins to share with his friends and family members how he is feeling, but his frequent expressions of sadness over an extended period soon begins to wear on them.

The point that I am trying to make is that experiencing sadness is not something that makes us bad, but how we express sadness can increase the chances that some will view us in a bad way.

Perhaps Fred would have been better off putting on a happy face at work despite his internal experience. Perhaps Fred, if he could afford it, would be better off hiring a professionally trained personal counselor to help him work through his sad experiences in a positive manner so that he doesn’t put too much on the shoulders of friends and family members. There are, in most communities, some counselors available, and at the top of any of my blog post there is a link titled “Counseling Services” that when clicked on provides descriptions and contact information for two excellent personal counselors that I personally can recommend who conveniently provide services through Skype, Zoom, or your phone.

However, counseling services do cost money, and if it is too expensive for someone’s budget, an alternative is to set up via such internet resources like meetup.com, a support group that meets regularly for the specific purpose of sharing challenging emotional experiences. Of course, the members will be unlikely to have the expertise of a trained personal counselor, but with trial and error it is often very possible to find the right mix of caring, empathic participants.

For these types of peer run support groups, it helps to set up some ground rules at the start of such meetings. Here are the rules that make sense to me.

1. We’re here to emotionally support one another.
2. Our internal emotions are to be met by group members with empathic caring and the encouraging of self-compassion.
3. When sad feelings are shared, it is worth considering how such feelings might help us to figure out how to better deal with the future.
4. When a member thinks that the way a fellow member is expressing his or her emotions is less than ideal, rather than to use any name calling, like, “You are being stupid for acting like that,” members are to gently frame their opinions as tentative suggestions. Here’s a useful phrase to consider using at such time, “I’m wondering if you were to (state whatever the suggestion might be) if that might be worth considering.”

The Example of Laura

Sometimes, instead of interpreting our sad feelings as “we are bad,” we come to think that something is wrong with our physical make-up. If this leads to considering taking steps in the future to improve our diet, get more exercise, or spend more time in nature, that can lead to healthy outcomes. However, there is potentially a dark side to blaming the body.

In an eye opening April 8, 2019 New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv titled, “The Challenge of Going Off Psychiatric Drugs,” we learn about Laura Delano, a remarkably talented woman. Although she did have a number of problems in her youth, as most of us do, she functioned well enough to get accepted to Harvard University. Then, at one point, she was at a party where she began sobbing so hard that her escort had to put her in a cab.

Shortly afterwards, she saw a psychiatrist who declared she had a mental disorder and prescribed an antidepressant. Laura was relieved to hear the doctor say that her distress stemmed from an illness. “It was like being told, It’s not your fault. You are not lazy. You are not irresponsible.”

So, at this point, Laura has become convinced that she is not being a bad person for how she was experiencing her emotion, it was her body that was being bad in the form of an illness. Was this really an improvement?

As her story continues,

She began taking twenty milligrams of Prozac, an antidepressant; when she still didn’t feel better, her dose was increased to forty milligrams, and then to sixty. With each raised dose, she felt thankful to have been heard. “It was a way for me to mark to the world: this is how much pain I am in,” she said….

At parties, she flirted intently, but by the time she and a partner were together in bed, she said, “I’d kind of get hit with this realization that I was physically disconnected. And then I’d feel taken advantage of, and I would kind of flip out and start crying, and the guy would be, like, ‘What the heck is going on?’” Most antidepressants dampen sexuality—up to seventy per cent of people who take the medications report this response….

During her junior year, her pharmacologist raised her Prozac prescription to eighty milligrams, the maximum recommended dose. The Prozac made her drowsy, so he prescribed two hundred milligrams of Provigil, a drug for narcolepsy that is often taken by soldiers and truck drivers to stay awake during overnight shifts. The Provigil gave her so much energy that, she said, “I was just a machine.”….

The Provigil made it hard for Laura to sleep, so her pharmacologist prescribed Ambien, which she took every night. In the course of a year, her doctors had created what’s known as “a prescription cascade”: the side effects of one medication are diagnosed as symptoms of another condition, leading to a succession of new prescriptions.

Despite taking all of these drugs she felt so distressed that she thought every day about dying. So a new psychiatrist put her on a new combination of pills. Again, despite these drugs she experienced what John Teasdale, a research psychologist at the University of Oxford, named “depression about depression.” She interpreted each moment of lethargy or disappointment as the start of a black mood that would never end. Psychiatric diagnoses can ensnare people in circular explanations: they are depressed because they are depressed.

As Laura’s story continued, during a brief period she decided to see another psychiatrist who was also a psychoanalyst. He questioned the way that she’d framed what she had been experiencing. He doubted her early diagnosis, writing that “many depressions are given a ‘medical’ name by a psychiatrist, ascribing the problem to ‘chemistry’ and neglecting the context and specificity of why someone is having those particular life problems at that particular time.” Laura decided that “he wasn’t legit.” She stopped going to her appointments.

Soon afterwards, despite all of the drugs that she was taking, she attempted to take her life. She did manage to survive, and afterwards,

She was started on a new combination of medications: lithium, to stabilize her moods, and Ativan, a benzodiazepine, in addition to the antipsychotic Seroquel, which she had already been taking. Later, a second antipsychotic, Abilify, was added—common practice, though there was limited research justifying the use of antipsychotics in combination. “It is tempting to add a second drug just for the sake of ‘doing something,’ ” a 2004 paper in Current Medicinal Chemistry warns.

In May, 2010, Laura wandered into a bookstore.

On the table of new releases was “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” by Robert Whitaker. The book explained to her that as more and more Americans have taken to psychiatric drugs to deal with their emotions, the number of Americans disabled by mental illness has risen. Whitaker argues that psychiatric medications, taken over the course of a lifetime, may be turning some episodic emotional experiences into chronic disabilities. As Whitaker explains what people like Laura are going through, they have “been prescribed one drug, and then a second, and a third, and they are put on this other trajectory where their self-identity changes from being normal to abnormal—they are told that, basically, there is something wrong with their brain, and it isn’t temporary—and it changes their sense of resilience and the way they present themselves to others.”

It was at this point that Laura decided to see what would happen if she stopped taking the drugs, and found that the process was an excruciating experience because of the medication withdrawal reactions. It took her many extremely rough months before her goal was achieved.

Internal records of pharmaceutical manufacturers show that the companies have been aware of this withdrawal problem for many years, and many doctors mislead their patients suggesting to them that the prescribed drugs were either not addictive, or withdrawal symptoms are mild.

Now off the psychiatric drugs, Laura began a relationship with a guy named Rob Wipond. Both of them became emotional when discussing Laura’s sexuality. “I felt like a newborn,” Laura confided. “I hadn’t ever figured out what my body was meant to be.” Rob said, “She was open and awake. Everything was new to her. We were, like, ‘Well, gee, what is this sexuality thing—what shall we do?’ ”

Prior to coming off the psychiatric drugs, Laura had been unable to have stable relationships. “I honestly thought that, because I was mentally ill, the numbness was just part of me.” Now she wondered about the other effects of the many medications she had been taking. “On this very sensory, somatic level, I couldn’t bond with another human being,” she said. “It never felt real. It felt synthetic.”

Laura felt as if she were learning the contours of her adult self for the first time. When she felt dread or despair, she tried to accept the sensation without interpreting it as a sign that she was defective and would remain that way forever, until she committed suicide or took a new pill. It felt like a revelation, she said, to realize that “the objective in being alive isn’t the absence of pain.” She remembered identifying with a sad little bubble pictured in a popular advertisement for Zoloft—the bubble is moping around, crying and groaning, until it takes the medication and starts to bounce while birds sing—and became increasingly aware that her faith in the drugs’ potential had been misplaced. “I never felt helped by the drugs in the sense that I have meaning, I have purpose, I have relationships that matter to me,” she said.

Perhaps we can all learn something essential from Laura’s experience.

Final Thoughts

From today’s post, I hope that you will consider the value of giving up any belief that you may have that feeling sad means you are bad. If, when you experience sadness, you find yourself saying such words like, “I can’t believe I’m feeling sad again, what an idiot I am,” consider how it may be far more helpful to view your sadness as a useful tool for helping us to better plan our future. If you are a parent, consider the value of teaching your children this “sadness is a helpful tool” idea.

Also worth considering is that there are ways in which to express our emotions publicly that can either hurt our reputation or enhance it. Over a half million people have been using this blog as a no financial cost method to learn skills that can enhance their reputation whenever they find themselves in various emotionally arousing situations. I’m hoping you consider the value of joining them.

Finally, the pharmaceutical industry, along with its allied psychiatrists, have enormous resources to convince people that the best way to deal with sadness is to take pills. Laura’s story provides us a cautionary sign to all those who are tempted to go down that road.

Well, that’s my post for today. Here’s hoping you’ll soon join us again right here at From Insults to Respect.

My Best,

Jeff

Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence. To begin at the very first post you can click HERE.