Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
I thought of his words yesterday as I watched Disney’s “Inside Out,” which I believe is as beneficial as a month of psychotherapy sessions. Watching it with your kids is even better: cheap family therapy. We could all use a reminder of the various characters — Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness — that live within us, and how our temperament is colored by the guy who is hogging the control pad of our brain.
As a person who has struggled with depression for most of her life, I was especially intrigued by the relationship between Joy and Sadness. I laughed when Joy draws a small circle toward the back of Headquarters and tells Sadness her job is to stay within that space. How many times have I given the same order to my depression? “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LEAVE ME ALONE??!! FOR THE LAST TIME … GET OUT OF MY LIFE!!”
For most of Inside Out, all Joy wants to do is get rid of the blue-ness that messes everything up. However, a few key moments in the pair’s odyssey back to Headquarters teach Joy the critical role of Sadness in the well-being of Riley, the girl whom they are inside, and how Joy and Sadness are more connected than she ever suspected.
I think most of us feel like Joy with that piece of chalk in hand, wanting to delegate our sorrow to the farthest, tiniest corner in our brain. As a society, we are uncomfortable sitting with a friend who has just been diagnosed with cancer and not saying anything — no platitudes, no advice, no jokes — just letting her tears fall wherever they may, as Sadness did with Riley’s imaginary friend, Bing Bong, when he rehashed his traumatic past.
In fact, we force happiness so much in our culture that it breeds unhappiness. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl quoted Edith Weisskopt-Joelson, late professor of psychology, who said:
Our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.
We are afraid of sadness even as it serves a purpose in helping human beings to survive. In his fascinating piece Four Ways Sadness May Be Good For You, University of California, Berkeley, professor of psychology Joseph P. Forgas, PhD writes:
Findings from my own research suggest that sadness can help people improve attention to external details, reduce judgmental bias, increase perseverance, and promote generosity. All of these findings build a case that sadness has some adaptive functions, and so should be accepted as an important component of our emotional repertoire.
In one of his studies, participants rated the likely truth of 25 true and 25 false trivia statements. Afterwards they were told if each was actually true. Two weeks later, only sad participants were able to accurately distinguish between the true statements and the false claims. The happy folks were more inclined to rate all of the previously seen statements as true.
However, we are so negatively biased in our assessment of this “problem emotion” — programmed in us through everything from sitcoms and media headlines to self-help literature and motivational speakers — that we don’t even flinch when people like Randy Pausch, the famous deceased Carnegie Mellon professor, ask questions like: “You have to decide … Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?”
I loved every part of his The Last Lecture except for that because the world needs its share of Eeyores: solemn, highly-sensitive, realistic, pensive creatures. Moreover, Eeyore exists in each of us — he balances out the annoyingly hyperactive Tigger. None of us are 100 percent Tigger or Eeyore. We aren’t completely Joy or Sadness. We are both and so much more.
Gibran writes:
When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
I will think of those wise words when I’m trying to force Joy to take over command central in my noggin and push Sadness back into her petite circle. Inside Out does a beautiful job of teaching us that we need all of our feelings — even Disgust, Fear, and Anger — and that the more we expand our vocabulary of emotions and become aware of the movement of each within the gray matter of our brain, the more resilient we will be to cope with life’s unexpected turns and twists.
Continue the conversation on ProjectBeyondBlue.com, the new depression community.
Originally posted on Sanity Break at Everyday Health.
Sabphoto/Bigstock
from World of Psychology http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2016/05/30/inside-out-animated-film-explains-that-sadness-is-essential/
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