How to be Sad

Helen Russell

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008384579
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Salute mentale e benessere

We live in an age when most reality TV shows climax in a tearful finale. But feeling sad – genuinely sad – is still taboo. Yet, sadness happens to us all, sometimes in heartbreakingly awful ways. If we don’t know how to be sad, it can be isolating for those experiencing it and baffling for those trying to help loved ones through dark times.

Today, most of us know intellectually that ‘sad’ is normal. But we’re not always brilliant at allowing for it, in practice. Sadness is going to happen, so we might as well know how to ‘do it’ right. And it’s time to start facing our problems and talking about them. Positive psychology may have become more accepted in mainstream culture, but rates of depression have continued to rise.

We’re trying so hard to be happy. But studies show that we could all benefit from learning the art of sadness and how to handle it, well.

Part I

How to Look After Ourselves When We’re Sad

On loss and learning to accept it; the physical manifestations of sadness; the perils of perfectionism; and why getting mad can help sometimes.

How boys do cry (everyone should); why abandonment and adolescence make for a heady combination; the truth about mangled hearts and the myth of the ‘just world’.

What we can learn from anxiety and addiction; how grief is seldom neat; unemployment; injustice; and why we all need to practise more humanity.

Introducing my mum and dad, Orange Rucksack Man, Kevin the driving instructor, the tall guy and T.

Featuring John Crace, Jeremy Vine, Professor Peg O’Connor, Professor Nathaniel Herr, psychotherapist Julia Samuel, the ‘Tear Professor’ Ad Vingerhoets, Harvard University lecturer Dr Tal Ben-Shahar, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and Phil Collins.

1

Don’t Fight It

IT’S 1983, IT’S raining, and Phil Collins’s ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’ is playing on the radio. I won’t know what irony is for at least fifteen years but this already seems cruel. Because it turns out you can’t slow love down, either. I’m on the sofa playing with my blue-haired doll when I hear the familiar squeak of hand on banister. It is my dad and he’s carrying a suitcase. He’s wearing flared trousers and a shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, despite the fact that it’s January. His hair is long, spilling over the edge of his collar. And it’s brown. It’s the early eighties, so most things are brown – the clothes, the decor, my hair and that of my parents. I am three years old and it’s only been three months since a Very Sad Thing happened to our family, on 31 October 1982. Halloween, in fact. A day that changed all of us but that will remain unspoken of for years to come.

My dad’s eyes used to crinkle when he smiled and my mum used to be ‘chatty’, but now my dad doesn’t smile and my mother doesn’t chat. Nothing has been right since the Very Sad Thing happened, and now my dad is leaving.

He’s back after a few days the following weekend but he doesn’t stay the night. I know it’s the weekend as I’m being allowed to watch TV in my pyjamas after breakfast rather than having my hair and teeth brushed immediately afterwards. This is strange. What’s stranger still is that when my paternal grandparents visit, no one mentions the lack of sleepovers.

‘You haven’t told them?’ I hear my mother whisper to my father in the kitchen.

Told them what?

My dad starts picking me up every Saturday and driving me to either the nearest pub or to the Harvester, a popular chain of family-friendly eateries in the days when a gastropub was a mere glint in the foetus of Tom Kerridge’s eye. If we frequent the Harvester, I’m asked, ‘Have you ever been to the Harvester before?’ by someone dressed as Aunt Sally from Worzel Gummidge. I eat a lot of sweetcorn from the salad bar then stuff my face with ice cream for ‘afters’. If it’s the pub, we wait until opening time and then sit outside on a bench under a Carling Black Label fringed umbrella. My dad has a pint of lager and I have a white bread ham sandwich with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. My dad has started wearing a leather jacket that smells equally of ‘smoke’ and ‘bloke’ and now drives a convertible Golf GTI. This would probably be termed a mid-life crisis for most men, but my dad is only twenty-seven. So perhaps it’s just a ‘crisis’. I don’t much like the convertible Golf GTI because having the roof down makes my hair blow about until I can’t see and then get carsick and vomit. This makes the car smell so bad that having the roof down becomes a necessity; otherwise my dad will vomit, too. Nausea is fast becoming a constant.

These outings are … fine. But soon our weekly lunchtime jaunts morph into monthly, overnight expeditions. My dad is staying in a tower block in London with his ‘new girlfriend’, her sister and her teenage son. There isn’t really room for all of us so I share a bunk bed with the fourteen-year-old boy. Sunday mornings now start with a teenage boy swinging his legs down from the top bunk and scratching his behind through boxer shorts. It’s confusing and it doesn’t smell great. But then, nothing seems to smell great any more.

My mum and I move house to be closer to my grandmother, a formidable woman who looks like a cross between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. I start kindergarten in the September while my mother goes back to work. No one tells the school what has been happening in our family until my mother is confronted with a picture I have drawn that my teacher is particularly pleased with – a drawing of my mum, my dad, my baby sister and me. My mum turns white at this and has to explain to the teacher that my baby sister is ‘no longer with us’ and that my dad isn’t coming back either. I am baffled by this.

Dad gone too?

To cheer us up after this upsetting incident, we decide that it is my blue-haired doll’s birthday and my mum bakes her a cake. I have little appetite but stuff it down regardless. I turn out to be pretty good at this. Food is a way of showing love – and who can be sad eating cake? Sadness can also, I learn, be resisted or at least rescheduled by eating biscuits, white bread and cereal straight from the packet. All hail carbohydrates.

My dad and his new girlfriend want a place of their own to live, but they haven’t got enough money to do this ‘what with me to pay for as well’ and so my dad becomes stressed. He also becomes forgetful.

Pigtailed. Wide-eyed. Aged five. I remember waiting. Sitting on the beige carpeted bottom step of my mother’s new semi-detached with a packed suitcase by my side. Toothbrush, pyjamas, two changes of underwear (just in case), my favourite purple jumper and brown corduroy trousers (the 1980s …) have been stowed away with care. But the blue-haired doll has been left out ‘for air’ and is held tight in my arms. The clock shows both hands pointing upwards, right at the top. This is the time my mum said that my dad would come. I have been ‘good’, so he will come. He has to come. So I wait. And then I wait some more. Minutes tick by, audibly, until the big hand on the clock points towards the floor. The clock is now making an altogether different shape to the one my mother and I have drawn together on pieces of paper ‘to practise’. My mother’s voice becomes slightly higher as she assures me: ‘Everything’s fine!’ over and over. She alternates between checking the street for signs of life, trying the telephone, and even, unusually, offering the option of cartoons. But I will not be moved. I sit, eyes trained on the front door, for three hours.

He does not come.

When my baby sister was here, my dad did not forget things, and life was okay. Now it’s just me, my dad is increasingly forgetful and life is very much not okay. This confirms a new, niggling fear that has begun to develop: that it would probably have been better if I’d gone instead and it’s all my fault that Dad left.

I’m not special: pre-schoolers typically believe that they’re responsible for their parents’ separation. ‘What you have there is a case of childhood omnipotence,’ US psychologist Aphrodite Matsakis tells me three decades later. This is a well-documented tendency of some children (and some adults) to think that the world revolves around them and that they control everything that happens in it. ‘Some young children have trouble seeing things from others’ point of view and tend to think that they’re the centre of everything – as well as the cause of everything. They often think that if they wish something it might come true. It’s an exaggerated sense of responsibility based on the belief that “I, personally, have the duty and power to save loved ones in trouble.”’

No one tells me otherwise. No one tells me much at all. So I make it up. ‘If we don’t tell them the truth, children do make it up,’ says Jane Elfer, a child and adolescent psychotherapist who works in a large London hospital. ‘They invent their own version of what’s happened – their own reality or faulty ideas. Often, what children imagine is even worse than what’s actually occurred,’ she says, ‘so from a really young age, we need clear, concrete and specific communication to avoid misunderstandings. We have to get better at unhappiness as a society – if something sad has happened you need to allow and accept this.’

We do not accept it: we fight it. Ignore it, even.

The paperwork comes through and my parents are officially divorced. Despite the commonly held myth that most couples split up after the death of a child, around 72 per cent of parents who are married at the time of their child’s death remain married to the same person.[1] It is doubtless insanely painful, and cracks in a relationship turn to chasms under pressure. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we or our relationships are broken (although it may feel that way). The latest figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate that 42 per cent of all marriages in England and Wales end in divorce.[2] So bereaved couples are actually more likely to stay together and one loss doesn’t necessarily have to lead to another. Grief is the price we pay for love, but if we’re not prepared for this and we’ve been raised to demand happiness, or at least a numbing out of pain at every turn, we’re less able to ride out the storm. If we expect too much of ourselves and our relationships after a loss, we will be disappointed. I fully understand the impulse to run for the hills in an attempt to ‘escape’ sadness and pain: most of us have been raised on running for the hills. No judgement towards anyone whose longest relationship to date is with ‘the hills’. Really, I get it (I heart hills …). People do daft things. Neither of my parents were saints. And divorce is often the best course of action for both parties. But it’s worthwhile to remember that there is another way. When we’re experiencing loss, from low-level sadness to the catastrophic, life-changing kind, we will feel bad – that’s normal. If we learned to accept that things were going to be hard, we might be better equipped to endure periods of extreme sadness. Something I wish someone had told my family in the 1980s. But they don’t. Because no one tells each other anything.

Instead, I join the esteemed legions of men and women worldwide with ‘Daddy Issues’. I grow up with a single parent who does the work of two – a woman who, fortunately for me, is extraordinary in her strength and resilience. There are some pros to being the child of a single mother: I will grow up blissfully ignorant of the gendered nature of many domestic tasks, since in my house what needs to be done gets done, by her. I will become, like my mother, excellent in a crisis. I will value independence, although unfortunately, to the extent that I will become hooked on the stuff, wary of commitment or going all-in with anyone (I’ve seen where that can get you). I will insist on ‘room to breathe’ in every relationship I’ll ever have. I will struggle to negotiate – there was no need in our house, since one person made all the decisions. And I will see how keeping busy is a way to keep going. To fight the pain. Ish. The world already makes no sense to me so I make sense of it myself. I’m told, regularly, not to be sad and not to cry. So I don’t. No one does. Until the urge to cry or ‘feel sad’ becomes strangely unfamiliar. Alien, even.

The late psychologist Haim Ginott wrote in Between Parent and Child[3] that: ‘Many people have been educated out of knowing what their feelings are. When they hated, they were told it was only dislike. When they were afraid, they were told there was nothing to be afraid of. When they felt pain, they were advised to be brave and smile.’ Children look to parents for how to regulate their own emotions because they don’t yet know how to do it themselves. But if caregivers don’t know either, or were never taught because the ‘bad feelings’ were anaesthetised away, then we’re really in trouble. And trying to fight ‘sad’ is something many of us are taught from birth.

A Guardian article from 2019[4] reported that our society is teaching us ‘not to be sad’ from day one. The first thing that most infants taste in the UK, after milk, is Calpol – the sweet purple painkiller administered in handy oral syringes that make parents feel a lot like cowboys in a Western. The NHS advises parents to give babies liquid paracetamol after their first vaccinations at eight weeks to prevent possible discomfort and 84 per cent of babies will have been given Calpol by the time they’re six months old.[5] A Calpol ad when I was growing up read: ‘When the family go on holiday don’t take the risk of aches and pains.’

The message was clear: being a good caregiver meant never allowing your children to suffer, no matter what the reason for this might be. We live in a culture where distress demands to be alleviated and sadness is supposed to be ‘solved’, rather than experienced – so we’re less able to tolerate it than previous generations. A 2018 BBC documentary reported that UK kids are being given three times as many drugs as they were forty years ago.[6]

‘With most things in our life these days if we have a problem, we expect technology or medicine to “fix us”,’ says the psychotherapist and grief expert Julia Samuel, MBE, ‘but sadness doesn’t work like this. Our parents try to immunise us against it from a young age. We are mollycoddled. Often, we are not taught to experience a little bit of pain so that we can learn to deal with big pain.’

We try to fight it: to lessen discomfort as a society, almost on autopilot. Only by doing so, we’re all worse off,[7] says Professor Nathaniel Herr from American University in Washington DC, an expert in emotional regulation. ‘“Sadness” is really important,’ he tells me over Skype. ‘People need to recognise it and what it provides. I have people saying to me: “I just don’t want to feel anxious anymore – I don’t want to feel ‘sad’,” and I have to say to them: “I can’t help you with that!” Because you shouldn’t want “not to feel sad”.’ This is something that even Herr’s psychology students have a tough time getting their heads around. ‘If I ask them, “Why do we have sadness?” most will say something like, “Well, we couldn’t have happiness if we didn’t have sadness! It’s like light and shade.” But that’s not it: they’re ignoring the function that sadness has socially. It sends out a signal, like, “Hey! Come help me!” to make other people rally around.’ Herr also takes the view that we’re often sad when we’re stuck somehow and don’t know how to get ourselves out of a situation, ‘which makes sadness profoundly useful’.

‘Sadness is a problem-solving type of emotion,’ he says, ‘it produces rumination. I see rumination as the cognitive manifestation of the emotion sadness – j...