Dealing with Sadness through Self-Compassion (sadness and Polyvagal Theory)

Hey there. I'm Justin Sunseri. I'm a therapist, a coach, and the creator of the Polyvagal Trauma Relief System. Welcome to Stuck Not Broken, where I teach you how to live with more calm, confidence, and connection without psychobabble or woo woo. I got a question here from, we'll call her DL, from my private community, the Stucknaut Collective. DL has actually a bunch of questions around sadness.

She says, I experience waves of sadness over the holidays that are a bit more frequent and intense than the rest of the year. I understand sadness is part of being human and having emotions. How do we know if sadness is maybe subconsciously related to a trauma, or just natural, something just to accept and let pass on its own? Am I correct in thinking that anchoring in safety would be okay, be helpful for sadness of any origin?

Or are we to grin and bear natural sadness, in parentheses, non traumatically induced via cognitive acceptance? Or is it really best to develop tolerance for all feelings of sadness via safety anchors? So lots of questions here all around sadness. Let's try and break this down one by one. So the first thing she says, and yeah, sadness is part of being human and it's, it's an emotion that we have. Sadness is not random. It doesn't come out of nowhere.

I don't believe, I don't think that we're simply born feeling sad and therefore we'll be sad and depressed the rest of our lives. I don't believe that. I haven't seen that in my clinical work as a therapist. It's an emotion and emotions don't. They're not, they don't pop up out of nowhere. Emotions come from the state of our body. If you haven't heard of something called the polyvagal theory. Look in the description.

I have a link there for a deep dive into it in my my podcast, the Polyvagal 101 series, you'll get all the foundational pieces, simple language. So give that a listen and then come back here. Sadness and other emotions, they don't just exist within us for no reason. They come from the state of our body. If our body is in more of a state of like it's prepared for danger, like flight, fight. Then our emotions are going to be flavored by that. They're going to be more anxious.

They're going to be more maybe, maybe more aggressive. If our body's in like a shutdown state, we're going to have more sadness and depression and numbness and loneliness. If our body's in more of a freeze state, then we're going to have emotions of panic and maybe even explosive rage, overwhelm, stress. If we can change the state of our body, then our emotions change as well. It's not easy, especially to change the state of the body first. It's not easy.

Usually, or the way that I work as a therapist, the way that I work myself, the way that I teach in my courses is to work kind of in the reverse, which is we start with our emotions and then work backwards toward the state. So if we can notice our emotions like sadness, Then we can notice what we

might start to be able to notice what's happening underneath those emotions, which are sensations and impulses. If we can feel those, mindfully experience them, and even act on them, then our polyvagal state or the state of our body can change. If we can notice our sensations and impulses underneath the emotions of shutdown, for example.

That can help us come out of shutdown, at least little by little, we can come out of shutdown into fight and then flight and then safety, but every step of the way, we have to notice what's happening within us on an emotional level. But then the question is, well, what's it feel like to have that emotion? So saying I'm sad is okay. I'm glad that you can recognize that. But what does your sadness feel like? How do you know you're sad? How can you tell? What does it feel like?

Okay, so that's just the first part here. Sadness is part of being human or I guess a mammal perhaps. It's not random. Our emotions, they're for a reason. They come from the state of our body. Sadness comes from shutdown. So then she asked, how do we know if sadness is maybe subconsciously related to a trauma?

Well, we, I guess don't I would say let's not evaluate it. So the way that I work in with my clients in therapy and coaching as well I have this three step process and that's validate normalize and give permission So the first step is validation. Can you just validate? Can you name it? Can you recognize what's true? Do you already feel, do you feel sadness? Yes. So that's validation.

You're just naming it. You're not dismissing it. You're not minimizing it. You're just saying, this is true. I feel sad. All right, cool. Check. The second step is normalization and that involves asking yourself, does it make sense why I feel sad. The answer could be it makes sense that I feel sad because today something horrible happened or today I just feel depressed and I've felt depressed for years.

It could be I feel sad and that's connected to some horrible stuff I went through as a kid or that was connected to my parents never building a healthy attachment with me. So the question is does it make sense why you feel sad? Not is it good, not is it bad, is does it make sense and I think a lot of people might say no, but let me, let me put it to this way. If I had your life and I felt sad, would that make sense to you? Would you say to me, yeah, I get it. Yeah. I can see why you feel sad.

So that's the second part is normalization, validate, and then normalize. The third part is give it permission. So if we can name it and it makes sense why it's there, can you give it permission to be there? So none of this involves us evaluating, is this a trauma sadness? Is this a life context sadness? Is this a seasonal sadness? It's just sadness. And can you be with your sadness without judging it, without evaluating it? It's there. It's real. It makes sense why it's there.

Now give it permission to be there if you can handle it. If you can't, that's fine. Don't, that's fine. So validate, normalize, and give it permission. So the way that I work, which is very much present moment focused, therapy and coaching, my focus is on what's happening now. What are you currently feeling and can we let it be there? Especially can we let it be there while anchored in safety, which D. L. brings up in her question here.

She says, am I correct in thinking that anchoring and safety would be okay?

Of course it is always okay. It's always okay to anchor in your safety state. Am I correct in thinking that anchoring and safety would be okay? Be helpful for sadness of any origin. Yeah. To allow yourself to feel sadness or other emotions that come from a defensive state, you kinda have to be anchored in safety. If you feel sad without safety. then it's just sadness. It's you'll probably isolates in the dark. Maybe you're going to reject people.

But if you have access to your safety state, then you can allow yourself

to feel sadness with compassion. You can allow yourself to feel sadness with curiosity. And yeah, maybe you'll still, you'll still be by yourself, but it won't be like in the dark, in the closet, isolating and rejecting the world. It'll be more like recognizing, I need to be alone and giving yourself solitude. It might be saying, I need to be immobile. I need to be still. I need to just be and have low stimulation.

And so I'll put the right lighting on maybe, or I'll have the right kind of music that works for me or just quiet. So I need to be alone. I need to be still. I need the right kind of environment. And that's just what I need without judgment or evaluation. That's different than I'm terrible. I'm horrible. I have to hide in my house with the lights off and ignore people. That's isolation. That's more like dysregulated sadness, I would say.

What I'm talking about, the sadness from safety, it has a much different look to it. a lot more self compassion, although they both involve sadness and they both stem from the polyvagal state of shutdown. But the sadness without safety has dysregulated shutdown. The sadness with safety has regulated shutdown. It has safety plus shutdown. That allows the shutdown to be there, but with all the self compassion stuff. DL goes on to say, are we to grin and bear natural sadness?

That to me, I don't know if DL means it this way, but that to me means dysregulated sadness and we're just sort of like white knuckling it. We're just tensing our way through it and there's no compassion. There's no curiosity. And, you know, look, if you need to do that to get through the moment, that's fine. I'm not going to judge you. If you want to get through your sadness by some sort of coping, like distracting yourself okay.

Like, sometimes you might need to do that, especially when it's more the dysregulated sadness flavor. But ideally, no, we don't want to just grin and bear it. There might be times where you need to. Ideally, there are times where you're truly anchored in your safety state and then you can choose, you can allow the sadness, you can allow the shutdown to be there from your safety state. That's the ideal, and that's for my courses, that's really what I stress is,

in phase two we learn how to anchor in safety, in phase three, that's where we learn how to, or I teach, how to anchor in safety and then mindfully, compassionately allow the defensive state activation. And we start with emotions like sadness, and then we work our way down to sensations and impulses. So she says, are we, are we to grin and bear natural sadness through cognitive acceptance? I'm not quite sure what that means. Just accepting that like, Hey, I'm sad and I have to deal with it.

That's just dealing with it and that's fine, but that's not anchoring in safety and then allowing yourself to feel it and actually climbing your polyvagal ladder. So I, the ideal is something much different. And then the last thing she says is, or is it really best to develop tolerance for all feelings of sadness via safety anchors? And yeah, I think so. Sadness is sadness, but it can have different flavors. So someone might say I'm sad.

Someone else might say I'm sad, but they might not mean the same thing. The first person might say I'm sad, but it's flavored by loneliness. The second person might say I'm sad, but it's flavored by rejection. The person, the first person's loneliness might be more about abandonment. The second person's loneliness is like rejection. So they're sad, they're lonely, but the flavoring of those could be different. So, you know, sadness is sadness, but it has different flavors to it.

Yeah, you can anchor in safety, no matter what the sadness is, you can first anchor in safety, then mindfully, compassionately choose to allow that sadness, but it won't be dysregulated at that point. It should be a healthier. more regulated experience. And then if you can do that, then you can eventually work your way down and notice the sensations and impulses. That's the stuff I teach through phase three of my Polyvagal Trauma Relief System.

If you're interested in being a part of my courses, you can subscribe to my courses and my private community, just like DL here. You can subscribe to those through my total access membership. It gives you all three of my trauma recovery courses and my private community. We meet up twice a month for open Q and A's. The courses have numerous lessons teaching you how, teaching you all this stuff, but it takes that next step of like, how do I do this?

Not conceptually can I understand this, but what's the application of this? And that's what the courses do. If you're stumbling in the courses, you're not getting something. Or if you're. getting some ahas and loving it. Either way, you can share that with the community. And there's a really cool, great, supportive, small group of people there that are encouraging each other and giving, sharing their thoughts.

And every now and then just sharing pictures of their pets or a coffee in a coffee shop. It's a wonderful little community. And I invite you to be a part of it. I hope to see you there. If you wanna learn more about it, go to justin LMFT.com slash total access (JustinLMFT.com/totalaccess). Again, JustinLMFT.com/totalaccess. I'll have a link for you in the description. Bye.