When Sadness Hides: Why Repressing Emotions in Therapy Slows Healing
Leslie sitting with difficult emotions
Why We Learn to Repress Sadness
The other day my son had a baseball game and it was lightening and thundering outside. My son’s coach is the head of the league and made the call to wait it out to see if playing the game would be possible. Now my son is a rule-follower by the book. He has understood the rules around weather and cares deeply about keeping himself and others safe. I saw him hiding in trying to find something in his bag and went over to see if he was okay. The moment I checked in on him, he hid behind me and the silent tears started to come. His coach walked over to see if he was okay and immediately I could see my son cover up the tears and say, “I’m fine.”
This is how it starts. In the moment I could see how hard he was working to hold back his tears. From a place of embarrassment, nervousness of judgement, fear of being seen as less than, and shame….all of it was the need to repress the moment of flow of tears.
From a early age, we all received messaged around sadness being too much. We’ve heard and felt and seen the reaction others have around tears = pain and therefore it needs to be fixed.
“You’re being too sensitive.”
“Tears are a sign of weakness.”
“Be strong, you’ve got this, you are fine.”
“This isn’t that big of a deal”.
These messages show up constantly through our culture around sadness, through our family of origins way of handling emotions, or early life experiences of “saving face”. These experiences teach our nervous system it is safer in this moment to disconnect from sadness, push it away, and exile it to somewhere safer. Where you don’t have to deal with it and don’t even have to feel into it anymore. To protect you from overwhelm and rejection.
These protective parts are not flaws, they developed to keep you safe. Many women enter therapy knowing something is off, but when sadness tries to surface, they freeze, disconnect, or deflect. In therapy, this can show up as:
Laughing or making a joke when talking about something painful
Staying in your head through intellecualizing, rather than being in your body
Minimizing your story or comparing
Feeling numb, stuck, or emotionally flat
What Happens When We Repress Sadness
Unfortunately as helpful as those protective parts are in keeping parts that carry sadness away, we then hold places of stuckness and disconnection from ourselves. These parts that carry sadness are often young parts that also hold the energy of feeling deeply, attuned sensitivity to the world, creativity and expression of emotion, etc. We lose out of that too when these parts are burdened and not able to fully express as their most authentic parts. Repressing sad parts blocks the full expression of your emotional truth.
Protective parts too are burden with the responsibility of caring for these repressed parts and this can come out as:
Anxiety
Irritability or anger
Emotional disconnection
Chronic fatigue or body tension
Depression
This then interrupts the healing process and keeps you in survival mode instead of integration and wholeness.
Healing Starts with Allowing
Here is what I want you to hear from me today- Sadness is not the enemy- it’s a messenger. Just like in Inside Out, Sadness is beautiful part of the system that deserves to be sad and to be understood, witness, and held supportively…just like Joy is. Sadness asks to be witnessed, not erased. If we do so, then we lose a important asset to our system. One in which I believe holds depth of emotion unlike many other parts have the capacity to.
I see sadness so connected to water (from tears) as a outward signal of flow and release. It’s an expression that others can see and have the opportunity to witness if they have the capacity to do so.
In a safe therapeutic space, you can begin to:
Befriend the protective parts that fear sadness or have concerns about letting you witness sadness
Slow down and notice what your body is holding
Make space for grief, unmet needs, and tender truths
Allow tears without shame
This link here describes some easy journal prompts to begin your exploration with sad parts. Start with externalizing your sadness in any creative way that feels right for you. Perhaps write out what sadness says, how it moves, etc. Or maybe even write a letter, Dear Sad Part….what I want you to know….
This process of exploration does not have to be done alone. Gaining support from trauma-informed therapy, somatic therapy, Internal Family Systems, and mindfulness-based practices gently help you to reconnect to your inner world.
What Letting Sadness In Looks Like
The tightness in your throat. The sensation behind your eyes. The heaviness in your chest. You feel it all there and look around the room to see if it’s okay to let it out. “But it’s too much” you say to yourself. So you swallow hard, choke back the tears, try to think about something different. You do all the things to fight and push it away.
This dance with sadness is so common because the unfortunately truth is many of us have not have supportive and validating environments where sadness could be seen and held. There is so much fear around feeling sadness means drowning in it and never coming up for air. But through titration, trauma-informed therapy, somatic understanding, and IFS therapy we can learn how to support sadness so it doesn’t lead to overwhelm. In therapy this might look like:
Letting the tears fall without saying “I’m sorry” or rushing to grab the box of tissues
Staying with the sensations of the tightness in the chest or the lump in the throat. Being with NOTICING.
Saying “this hurts” and letting that be enough
Feeling sadness with support, not in isolation
Small moments of emotional honesty create deep shifts. This is the heart of Peace By Piece healing.
Repression Is a Pattern- Not a Life Sentence
The beauty of our nervous system, is that it can always rewire and change. Neurons are always firing and just because they have a familar pattern, does not mean they are stuck in that same firing pattern. If you’ve been repressing sadness, it’s not because you’re broken- it’s because your system learned to survive that way.
But healing invites a new way forward.
One where you can trust your body again
Where you can soften into your emotions
Where you can feel without falling apart
You don’t have to do this alone.
Finding a supportive way to be with difficult emotions that are connected to sadness, like grief can help remove years of walls that have been built up inside. This blog I wrote earlier this year provides more information on being with grief and other difficult emotions.
Ready to Stop Carrying It Alone?
At Peace By Piece Therapy, we help women to feel more alive, connected, and whole through gentle, trauma-informed care. Whether through 1:1 therapy and coaching, somatic yoga, or IFS-based sessions, we guide you back to your emotional truth- piece by piece.
Click here to book a free consultation or send us a message. Your sadness deserves space. You do, too.
