How to Be Sad

Helen Russell

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063115378
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Salute mentale e benessere

"In any human life there are going to be periods of unhappiness. That is part of the human experience. Learning how to be sad is a natural first step in how to be happier."—Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute

" How to Be Sad is a poignant, funny, and deeply practical guide to better navigating one of our most misunderstood human emotions. It's a must-read for anyone looking to improve their happiness by befriending the full range of their own feelings." - Laurie Santos, Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychologyat Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast

An expert on the pursuit of happiness combines her powerful personal story with surprising research and expert advice to reveal the secret of finding joy: allowing sadness to enrich your life and relationships.

Helen Russell has researched sadness from the inside out for her entire life. Her earliest memory is of the day her sister died. Her parents divorced soon after, and her mother didn't receive the help she needed to grieve. Coping with her own emotional turmoil—including struggles with body image and infertility—she's endured professional and personal setbacks as well as relationships that have imploded in truly spectacular ways. Even the things that brought her the greatest joy—like eventually becoming a parent—are fraught with challenges.

While devoting a career to writing books on happiness, Helen discovered just how many people are terrified of sadness. But the key to happiness is unhappiness—by allowing ourselves to experience pain, we learn to truly appreciate and embrace joy. How to Be Sad is a memoir about living with sadness, as well as an upbeat manifesto for change that encourages us to accept and express our emotions, both good and bad. Interweaving Helen's personal testimony with the latest research on sadness—from psychologists, geneticists, neuroscientists and historians—as well as the experiences of writers, comics, athletes and change-makers from around the world, this vital and inspiring guide explores why we get sad, what makes us feel this way, and how it can be a force for good.

Timely and essential, How to Be Sad is about how we can better look after ourselves and each other, simply by getting smarter about sadness.

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 practice more humanity.

Introducing my mom and dad, Orange Backpack Man, Kevin the driving instructor, the tall guy and T.

Featuring 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 couch 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 bell-bottoms 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 October 31, 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 mom 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 pajamas after breakfast rather than having my hair and teeth brushed immediately afterward. 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 a popular chain of family-friendly eateries. I eat a lot of corn from the salad buffet then stuff my face with ice cream for dessert, so I don’t have to talk too much but then feel sick after. My dad has started wearing a leather jacket and now drives a convertible Golf GTI. This would probably be termed a midlife 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 small apartment 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 ass through boxer shorts. It’s confusing and it doesn’t smell great. But then, nothing seems to smell great anymore.

My mom and I move to be closer to my grandmother, a formidable woman who looks like a cross between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. I start preschool in 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 mom, my dad, my baby sister and me. My mom 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 mom 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 cookies, white bread and cereal straight from the package. 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 house with a packed suitcase by my side. Toothbrush, pajamas, two changes of underwear (just in case), my favorite purple sweater and brown corduroy pants (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 upward, right at the top. This is the time my mom 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 toward 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 practice.” 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: preschoolers typically believe that they’re responsible for their parents’ separation. “What you have there is a case of childhood omnipotence,” the 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 center 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 at 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 percent 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). According to the American Psychological Association, 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States end up divorced.² So bereaved couples may actually be 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 to run for the hills. No judgment toward anyone whose longest relationship to date is with “the hills.” Really, I get it (I heart hills . . .). People do crazy 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 Child³ 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 anesthetized away, then we’re really in trouble. And trying to fight “sad” is something many of us are taught from birth. We administer sweet-tasting painkillers to babies after their first vaccinations, or anytime they have to travel, or feel discomfort from teething. The message is clear: being a good caregiver means never allowing your child 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.

“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. 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.⁴ Professor Nathaniel Herr from American University in Washington, DC, an expert in emotional regulation, says, “‘Sadness’ is really important. People need to recognize 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! ...