Sadness is a natural, common human emotion, and those of us living with addiction and mental health issues are no strangers to it. We experience sadness from the pain of our traumatic experiences, from our relationships, from the losses we’ve sustained. Learning to work with our sadness consciously and mindfully enables us to move through it in healthy ways so that it doesn’t hold us back, keep us stuck in our lives, or derail our healing progress.
When we don’t process our sadness, it has a way of creating cycles in our lives full of self-destructiveness and pain. When we haven’t healed from the sadness of a loss, for example, we might perpetuate patterns of loss where we manifest relationships and circumstances that bring us more loss, that reflect that initial loss and bring us more feelings of separation, disconnectedness and grief. Very often we aren’t aware of these patterns. We simply continue them without being conscious of them. Mindfulness helps us to break these cycles and stop these patterns from repeating themselves on autopilot. Mindfulness essentially puts us back in control.
Becoming more aware of our sadness on a conscious level can be uncomfortable, even painful. We’re confronting all kinds of painful emotions, thoughts, fears and memories that resurface once we stop actively suppressing them. Mindfulness encourages us to allow them to flow, without trying to interrupt or redirect them. Our goal is to just feel them as they are. We’re not wishing them away. We’re sitting with the discomfort that they bring, which can include physical sensations of anxiety, nervousness, even panic. Try to remind yourself that these feelings won’t destroy you. They are testing your ability to withstand them. They are a spiritual test of your resilience and courage. Usually our instinct is to want to suppress and avoid them, so we’re going to do the opposite. We’re going to let ourselves feel them. This is the only way we can process our feelings in order to heal them.
When we are mindful, we bring our full awareness to the emotion at hand. We’re able to calm our minds and move them out of their panicked, desperate state. We’re able to open our hearts. We can more easily follow our intuition and the messages it is always trying to send us but which we often block ourselves from receiving. Mindfulness is a practice we can use to work through our sadness, which allows us to heal in transformative ways.
Our treatment programs include multiple forms of therapy, as well as personalized care, to help you learn mindful ways of working with the sadness we all experience. Call 888-570-7154 for more information.
