Are Depression And Sadness The Same?

If, when sadness appears, you allow yourself to feel and express it, it will help you overcome the pain for something you have lost and you will be able to rest emotionally.

Depression, on the other hand, is not based on your emotions but on beliefs and preconceptions that deny reality. It appears when despite your suffering, you do not express it, you demand yourself to be well and channel the pain and anger towards yourself and not against what causes you pain …

The fear of expressing emotions and sadness

In our culture, one of the most feared and rejected emotions is sadness; among other things, because we have the fantasy that if we enter it we will irretrievably fall into depression.

Sometimes depression arises from the mere fact of not letting in pain or crying, which are expressions of sadness.

Societies more deeply rooted in nature, living more in the present and more accepting, admit that living involves experiencing loss, pain, obstacles, illness and death. They are not surprised by their arrival and give themselves permission to be sad, have a bad time and express it.

Precisely for this reason, when life is easy or pleasant, or brings something good to them, they are able to live it fully and with great joy.

It should not be forgotten that the effort to deny the expression and experience of sadness necessarily entails the elimination of the expression of the rest of the emotions. We are controlling the ability to feel or not, that is, we freeze for everything.

Differentiating between sadness and depression

But what is sadness? And what is the difference between sadness and depression?

Sadness is one of the basic emotions. Like the others, it always arises in relation to something or someone and has an adaptive function to the environment, that is, it allows us to adapt to the environment and to be able to react to it.

Sadness provides an emotional break to accept situations that we cannot change and that do not depend on us. It is an emotion that has more to do with the past than with the present and the future.

Its basic function is to allow the person to loosen up and loosen up to get rid of something or someone they had … and are no longer there.

• Relaxes the muscles and tension, while expressing the absence and the feeling of loss.
• It leads us to internalize, to recollect and to pay attention to ourselves instead of being aware of the outside.
• It allows us to elaborate on the loss of something or someone, connecting us with fragility and vulnerability and leading us, at times, to seek support.

Adaptive basic emotions are always transitory and chemically they do not last beyond 90 seconds.

An emotion registers a rise and fall, that is, a point of high intensity from which it fades. This whole process takes place in 90 seconds, as long as we allow its expression, recognize it and accept our state.

Adaptive basic emotions are always short and intense. Therefore, the sadness that we can feel before a loss or something that happens to us in our environment will also be short and intense.

The fear of sadness is counterproductive

However, when we imagine being sad, it is hard for us to believe that it will be a transitory state, that is why we resist entering the “tunnel”, we fear that we will not be able to get out of it. To demonstrate how wrong we can be, let us see as an example the experience of an emotion that is “easier” to experience, such as joy.

When we celebrate a pleasant event, we become joyful. But unfortunately, we cannot always remain in that state. The same happens with sadness if we allow ourselves to enter it: it appears, it stays for a while, then it disappears and we are ready to experience something else.

When sadness arises it is because we are feeling pain for something lost, which is not pleasant. That is why we usually want to cover it, to avoid that discomfort as soon as possible. Sadness forces us to face a feeling of vulnerability and fragility that leads to a certain inactivity and, also, to feel the need of others.

Cultures have created different rituals to facilitate the experience of sadness and the sensations that it entails and that help to navigate it. This is the case of funerals, in which mourners were previously paid to cry at the funeral, which helped people to express their feelings. Family members also dressed in black for a time as a way of showing the world their pain.

Releasing ourselves from the responsibility to be happy

In our current society, where constant activity and positivity are required of us, sadness does not have a good press, since it connects with the opposite (pain, inactivity, vulnerability, internalization …).

This makes traveling it more difficult than normal. In other societies where values ​​are different, have a slower pace of life and people are more oriented to mere survival, sadness does not have that taboo point.

Rationality and social norms do not so flagrantly restrict the expression of instinctive emotions that sometimes invade us.

Where is depression born?

What characterizes depression is a state of deep sadness. However, unlike the sadness that we have defined, we are not facing an adaptive state to the environment, but in most cases the origin of this feeling is derived from the beliefs that the person has, both about life and about herself.

Although there may be exceptions and other causes, from my experience in the office, depressed people have low self-esteem, as well as a loss of interest in everything and a low mood. What the person says to himself in many cases is: “I can’t, I’m not capable, I’m not going to get it, it’s not worth doing anything …”. This is what the depressive relates in the first instance.

But as soon as it goes a little deeper, as the Chilean Gestalt therapist Adriana Schnake points out, the person presents another, more hidden polarity that evidences a clear omnipotence when given voice.

His “I can’t” are a consequence of this omnipotent part: “I should be capable of anything, I should be able to do everything.” The omnipotent has so idealized what his life and himself should be – and, therefore, the world around him – that he almost demands himself to be a god and that his existence become a paradise.

He does not accept the fact that he cannot change the world according to his ideal. Consequently, that part overexposes the other to become a person who would need to make a superhuman effort to be real.

Although it may not seem like it, the depressive part is the wisest and most humane part of the person, the one that refuses to respond to such demands and therefore becomes inactive.

The omnipotent becomes angry with the world and with himself, and instead of directing that anger against the outside and towards action, what he does is direct it towards himself. This is called retroflection.

The burden of omnipotent behavior

We will see it better with the story of Marga, a woman who lost her mother after a long illness. After a few years of his death, Marga fell into a depression, she could not get out of deep sadness. Life for her had ceased to have meaning despite being a successful professional and having a family.

He felt guilty for not having done everything possible to save his mother. She was convinced that she could have done it. Therefore, he was having an omnipotent demeanor. She told herself that if she had cared for her more, her mother would still be alive.

Guilt prevented her from connecting with the pain and sadness of the loss, something that would have led her to make a grief without complications, which would allow her to be at peace with what happened. Instead, she became attached to a belief that “she was capable of saving people.”

As that belief was maintained over time through thoughts of the type: “I should have done …”, “I should have been able …” and other demands, the healthy and human part of Marga became depressed.

She was assaulting and punishing herself rather than directing aggression against the world for being the way it is … death included. He did not begin to feel the anger or the pain of the loss because, in reality, he had not been able to accept the situation despite the years that had already passed.

Accept change, accept life

To begin to get out of the situation in which he found himself, it was necessary for him to express his anger at what happened, to be pissed off with life for being the way he is. And then, to recognize herself as human: someone who cannot decide about life and death.

You had to stop demanding the impossible. It was necessary to accept that humans die and that life also involves disease, old age, death, pain and losses that we do not have the power to change.

It is about connecting with the most primal sadness and anger and staying more connected with what is reality and the very nature of things.

When we do not accept what we cannot change, and we attack ourselves by telling ourselves that we should be different and that the world should be different from what it is, we are using anger to cover up sadness.

Anger is an emotion that serves to give us strength to change things.

Sadness, on the other hand, allows us to accept what we cannot modify, to detach ourselves from it, placing ourselves in a place of humility with respect to the world. It makes it easier for us to recognize ourselves as human beings whose main characteristic is limitation, unlike the almighty gods.

Perhaps it would be a good antidote for depression to celebrate the arrival of sadness that loosens us up and gives us rest.