What Is Sadness? Sadness Is Self-Hypnosis.

In this series of articles, I'm exploring how negative emotions actually have their roots in positive intentions.

My ideas for this series of articles came from the Disney Pixar film Inside Out. The film is about a group of characters representing emotions in a teenage girl's head. During the film, Sadness creates a number of problems, and Joy is at a loss as to what good Sadness does.

One of the film's insights is that although sadness feels like a negative emotion, it has a positive intent. When you lose someone or something meaningful you require the support of others. Sadness is a message from you to you to get that support. Sadness attracts support from others. If you become that message though you become sad, your life becomes sad and you risk descending into darkness and negativity where it's ironically harder for those who love you to support you.

Sadness is a detrimental emotional trance. Trance is a narrowing of focus. Your focus can become so narrowed on the sense of loss, on what you no longer have, to the exclusion of everything that you do have. You lose touch with the simple pleasures. You lose motivation and the ability to be proactive and your self-esteem takes a nose dive. There are still aspects of your life that are good, and changes that you can make, but they are not on your radar until you wake up from the trance.

If you are able to experience sadness as message though, you can experience the emotion less overwhelmingly while remaining able to continue appreciating the good things in life.

If you're interested in how to protect yourself from your own detrimental emotional trances, I'd be very happy to talk with you.