Sadness: The Valuing Feeling

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Only Eight Core Feelings

Everything in Dr. Chip Dodd's work goes back to a simple claim he makes in *The Voice of the Heart*: human beings have only eight core feelings, and no one can live in fullness without knowing them. As he puts it in that book, "The paradox is that if we choose fullness, we also choose to experience pain."

Sadness is the valuing feeling. It brings honor and value to something. Lived into, it delivers a gift called acceptance — the place where things are not okay, but I'm okay that they're not okay, and I'm okay. That doesn't happen instantaneously. It's a process, which fits the old aphorism that it takes a lifetime to learn how to live. When sadness isn't felt, a person moves instead to self-pity to defend the heart. But the sadness keeps doing its work anyway and comes out in all different directions. The result is missing your own life because you aren't willing to grieve your own losses.

Why People Stay Away From Sadness

Of all the feelings, sadness is the one people keep the greatest distance from. People will run to shame like crazy. They'll run to anxiety and fear. They'll even go to anger a little bit sometimes, and they'll try to manufacture gladness. But sadness is not something people try to spend much time with.

Dodd says that avoidance makes complete sense. It is a very appropriate and natural experience to want to avoid. Not wanting to have to be sad, we do everything we can not to experience loss. Nobody wakes up in the morning looking around eager to have eight feelings — nobody says, "I can't wait to get up and get hurt tomorrow," or looks forward to loneliness hitting like crazy, or to a big old shame sandwich right in the mouth.

But these feelings are inevitabilities. We are born with them. The problem, Dodd says, is that we had to suppress them or get rid of them, so to speak, in order to survive in a world that is feeling-averse. We think feelings are the problem when actually they're the gift.

The Attachment Feeling

Sadness, in particular, is about a willingness to take the risk of caring. It is the attachment feeling — the feeling that tests whether or not a person is capable of attaching at all. If I care, and the someone or someplace or something I care about goes away, the experience of that being torn from me or having to be given up is sadness. It is the grieving feeling that honors loss.

That is why, in treatment, in therapy, and in Sage Hill training, one of the first things people are asked to do as they enter the recovery of their own hearts is to make a list of their ten most painful life events. The question underneath the exercise is whether they are willing to attach back to who they are, and whether they are willing to admit that they have been attached — that they have been affected, that they have cared and lost and it hurts, that something mattered to them. Moving into sadness that way begins to open a person up to so much more of their life.

Sadness Opens the Capacity to Care

Sadness is a doorway to change, to recovery, and to hope. What it opens up is a person's capacity to care in spite of the inevitability of loss. If you can't do sad, you can't care — because you can't come to acceptance of life on life's terms.

Dodd tells the story of a friend whose family cat died. The family cried, because they had had the cat a long time, and the son announced that if that is what it means to have a pet, he was never going to have one. Now that same boy's mother is looking for a dog. The desire to attach is in all of us all the time, because we are relationally based. But because loss is inevitable, we try — realistically enough — to avoid it. The way we avoid it is to try to care less, or worse, to try to control what or who we care about. It cuts both ways.

Think about all the things we tell our kids "for their good" that are really our attempts not to have to experience loss. Don't do this, don't do that, watch out for this, watch out for that — because if you do these things, I'm going to be in pain. When actually the child needs to go try out for the team, even though we fear they aren't talented enough. We want them to take the risk of being inspired toward something, to go be who they're made to be — but to do it in a way that spares us the experience of loss. Go climb the mountain, but in your dreams; make sure it's one with plenty of rails on it, a fake mountain. So many children aren't resilient anymore, because they don't know how to do their feeling of sadness.

It's Not a Digital World

Dodd describes being at the beach in October, where hurricane damage from Irma, and from Matthew the year before, had changed the shape of the shore. The ocean came in closer and harder because of the steeper slant of the sand, and the waves were crashing heavily. Walking out into them even a little way, he recognized plainly: this is dangerous. This isn't a digital world. This isn't computer-generated imagery. This is real life.

While they were eating nearby, an EMS vehicle went over the bridge, then a fire truck, then a sheriff's car, then an ambulance. Driving back, they found the vehicles near where they were staying, two police boats out in the ocean, and a helicopter overhead. Two middle-aged men had been out just yards from shore, bouncing in the waves, and one of them didn't come out of the water. Three days later he was found. Two miles up the beach, a fourteen-year-old boy was lost the same way; the family tried to form a human chain to reach him, and his brother said the last thing he saw was the boy's hand.

Life is real. It isn't digitized, and there aren't enough stunts. The earth is an extraordinary place and nature is extraordinarily powerful. This isn't about being scared of it; it's about fully participating in it. You know good and well that in a relationship you can get hurt. If you care about children, terrible things can happen to them. If you love somebody in a marriage, the other person can quit and go away. This is very, very difficult and very scary. Only the courageous are willing to have sadness, and then to develop acceptance — life's not okay, and it's okay, and it's not okay, and yet I still can't stop wanting to live it, and I'm going to do it. There is courage in sadness.

Invited to Grieve Again

We each carry our own losses, and some of the old losses a person believes he has grieved well come back around. As new seasons arrive, we are invited to grieve again, invited into sadness once more.

One father described this with his daughter finishing high school: the sadness that she isn't two years old anymore, that he can't get that back — and doesn't want to, because he loves being with her now. As Dodd points out, it isn't only the time you can't get back. Whatever you wished you had done, you can't get back either. There is no second chance, no do-over. If you love her, you're going to have regrets — a ton of them. And that grief opens a person up to love her more.

It also opens up the wounds of one's own childhood more deeply. For this father, his own senior year had not been good. He came home from the Junior Olympics that summer, and the next day his parents told him they were getting divorced. The next week his senior year started. A couple of weeks after that, his high school girlfriend left for college. The dog died somewhere in there. Loss after loss. He remembers almost nothing of that year except a few more significant losses and a few joys.

As his daughter's senior year began, all of that sadness came back to be faced again, and he found himself working out his own crap on her — demanding that she go through the college search he never got to go through, demanding that she appreciate him in the process. His wife helped him see that he needed to calm down, though she didn't put it that way. In calming down, he saw that his daughter's becoming an adult was bringing back all that sadness. Leaning into it produced space — graciousness for her, for himself, and even for his parents. A newfound acceptance.

Sadness Makes Space, and Space Is Presence

Dodd notes that the word arrived intuitively, accidentally, naturally, and exactly where it fit: acceptance. The sadness produced the ability to live in the present, and in presence, with his daughter. What that father called "space" is presence — it is heart. Doing the grief work in a new season doesn't mean the earlier grief work wasn't done; it was. The story is still sad. A middle-class tragedy.

"Get over it" and the people who say it

To dismiss someone's pain because their circumstances look comfortable — because they're middle class, say, and therefore supposedly shouldn't hurt — is itself a form of shaming. Yet that dismissal is common. Dodd points out that when a person describes their grief openly, there will always be someone who responds, "Dude, how old is he? Still crying about that? Get over it, man."

But the very fact that a person didn't get over it is the point. Facing your life, feeling your life, stepping into the truth of your life, receiving the gifts related to your life, taking responsibility — that is what makes it possible to love your daughter better. The response is exactly the opposite of what the critics assume. The people who ask, "Why is that still bothering you? What's wrong with you?" are the ones who are missing their lives. And Dodd is candid that those voices will outnumber the others, by something like a hundred thousand to sixteen.

Caring about your life puts you in a minority

The answer to why a person keeps feeling it is simple: because you love your daughter. Because you care about yourself, because you matter, because your story matters too. And if you care about your life, and about your daughter, you are in a minority. If you do it truthfully, you are in even more of a minority.

Dodd is careful to say this isn't that people don't care. It's that people are too scared to care, and are living under the rules of somebody else's approval rather than under the relationship that matters more. The problem usually isn't a parent's lack of care for their child — of course they want to care for their child. It's their lack of care about their own story. They are unwilling to care about themselves. They have left their inner child, their younger version, behind.

Whose rules are they following, then? Self-rejection is unnatural. They are following the rules of whoever it is whose approval they needed and didn't get — rules that eradicate who God made. God did not create us to self-reject. Nor did He create us to self-aggrandize. Both are forms of running from feelings.

What sadness is for

Dodd closes with sadness. To experience life to the fullest, the heart requires a willingness to feel it. Sadness speaks to how much you value what is missed, what is gone, and what is lost — and equally to how deeply you value what you love, who you have, and what you live. It is proportional: the more sadness you feel after a loss, the more you valued what was lost. And the more openheartedly and fully you live, the more you will lose. In *The Voice of the Heart*, Dodd writes that "sadness gives us the gift of valuing and honoring life."

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the sadness module. Or explore all eight feelings.