Is Your Attachment To Sadness Keeping You Stuck?
Sometimes I think the sad songs I listen to don’t help my mood.
There is some science that says it’s cathartic, and I feel that sometimes, but most of the time I just think I’m digging myself a hole listening to the same songs that recount the same stories of trauma, loss, hopeless love, and identity crisis. Whilst sad music has its catharsis, it can also worsen depressive symptoms, studies show.
I sometimes think about deleting the sad songs but when I go into my 2500 song Spotifly playlist, I look at my beloved sad songs and think, “I don’t want to let you go!”, and so I don’t.
I’m like Golumn in Lord of the Rings, holding on to the One Ring like it’s life or death, even though I’d probably feel better if I let the wretched thing go and took a walk outside or something.
But I can’t let the sadness go, because I’m attached to it, just like Golumn.
A Sad Identity: The Devil We Know
I guess there’s a comfort and sense of familiarity with what we’ve always known. If sadness has been a consistent emotion in our childhood, our identity can grow around it.
Here, we get used to feeling sad, and even make peace with the reality of that we’re just a sad person. We might even find advantages to being “sad”, as a victim who wears their misfortunes to gain sympathy, for example.
I’m not writing this to say we shouldn’t feel sad. I think emotionality is a strength, and we need more of it in the world that evokes so much sadness. Without the ability to identify sadness, how can we advocate for happiness?
But can we create change when our desire to open old wounds is hurting us? Can we have strength when our sadness tells us we are week? Can we feel worthy of a good relationship when we’re busy running through the same patterns with the same old people because it’s just what feels natural to us?
Can we feel happy when our life is built to maintain our state of sadness?
There’s a balance to be found here, I think.
Letting The Sad You Go
I’m not advocating for you to go and delete your Spotify playlist (but I did feel better when I did this years ago), it’s just good to be aware of our tendency to attach to familiar emotions, sadness included.
Letting go of an attachment to sadness means having an awareness of where sadness is being maintained in your life and actively re-evaluating and changing those relationships, be they with others or non-social. For example, if you’re finding yourself dating the same type of person who evokes an all-too-familiar feeling of sadness in you, then it’s time to change something. I wrote about this in more detail, for those interested, in this recent article.
Insecure Dating: “What If I Can’t Find The Right Partner?”
You Can, You Just Need To Understand a Few Things First…medium.com
Letting go of sadness also means learning to accept happiness. There is a lot of good in life if you choose to see it and there’s a lot of good in you if you choose to acknowledge it.
We sabotage the good in life when we’re attached to a life built to maintain sadness. even if not changing means staying sad. Again, if we’ve experienced a lot of sadness in life, it’s probably something we’ve gotten used to and have built an identity around.
Happiness can evoke a sense of dissonance in us that something isn’t right when it conflicts with an identity that says we can’t or shouldn’t experience it but sabotage feeds a negative cycle; the more we sabotage happiness, the less worthy we’ll think ourselves worthy of it.
Recognise that prioritising your happiness might bring a sense of discomfort and you might feel like an impostor at times, but know that the discomfort means you’re growing. To change, we have to encounter new experiences. We can’t change dating the same types of people or chasing the same unfulfilling goals. You either need to accept that your sadness is here to stay, or you need to seek change.