Sadness, a Hollowed Emotion

About… emotions

What do our emotions tell us? Florent Pennuen, Executive Search Consultant and Coach at Grant Alexander, invites us to complete this small journey around the world of the self, exploring our emotions with a final chapter devoted to sadness.

“Let us remember that only sadness is fertile in great things.” — Ernest Renan

To close this voyage through emotions, I suggest we sail for a while with sadness.

To look at it, observe it, feel it…

How can we lean on it? How can we work with it and not against it? How can we dare to draw nourishment from it, not conceal it? How can we accept what it reflects back to us, and what it opens us toward? This vast leap into our most hidden zones, into ourselves. Let us slip together into the gentleness of this emotion, so singular, which so deeply testifies to our humanity.

Sadness unfolds at the confluence of joy, anger, and fear—emotions it often associates with.

Sadness flows through us like a muffled current.

It seizes us without warning, sometimes unexpectedly. Unlike the sharp, brutal emotions of anger and fear, less radical than they are, less explosive than joy, sadness has a different nature, often taking the opposite path—it works quietly, in silence. Another difference lies in the fact that sadness is expected to be contained. Held in. Sadness may even express a difficulty, an impossibility to voice our fear or anger. A kind of escape. “Gentle,” perhaps, but no less problematic. For overall, it is withdrawn from reality.

It languishes. It makes us weary. It chips away at our capacity to act—or to act upon. It alters our future. Sometimes it drapes itself in melancholy. Dresses itself in grief.

Its expression is met with the disapproval of our society. Sadness is socially unacceptable! In a tyrannical environment ruled by the cult of positive thinking, dazzling smiles, and the obsession with cheerfulness, paradoxically, anger would be more tolerated. Anger belongs to our history, to the collective unconscious—even despite its destructive potential.

Sadness is the emotion condemned to silence.

We release it sometimes, alone, in the dark, through a pretext, an image, a scene, a passage of writing. Or simply at a moment when we let go—without even realizing it. Sometimes even under the pretext-effect of joy that overwhelms us, joy that can flow through tears. This is something I sometimes witness in coaching sessions. When the coachee allows themselves to enter that space—under the seal of trust, of benevolence, of empathy, of deep listening, of words being received… Certainly with modesty. With restraint. With the surprise, too, of being welcomed by the Other. Ultimately, sadness has power in that it pushes us to unravel, to untangle, to loosen our knotted emotions. What troubling truths does it hold up to us?

“Crying has always been a way for me to release things buried deep inside. When I sing, I often cry. To cry is to feel, it is to be human.” — Ray Charles

Sadness meets us at the point of loss, of abandonment, of the original act of detachment, of absence, of our relationship to the ego, to inner autonomy in the face of the world. It touches the very principle of life: ephemeral, finite, ending beyond our control. Sometimes sadness reaches us through another person. But it is not really they who cause the sadness—it is what their presence (or absence) awakens in us. What have we lost of ourselves? What object is cutting into us at this moment? How do we move forward and live with the finitude of things? To dare to open that door is, certainly, to walk very close to oneself. To approach a certain truth of the self. Yet, so often, we dismiss it through denial—thus deepening the furrow of our vulnerability. The nakedness we feel in those moments of solitude with ourselves—let us open our arms to it, cradle it, receive it as a force woven from a certain emotionality, a raw sensitivity, the fragility of feeling, of allowing ourselves to be traversed by what is happening there.

Florent Pennuen – September 2019
florent.pennuen@grantalexander.com