Continuing the series, after anger, today we will look at sadness. My experience as a kinesiologist has shown me that this emotion is often taken into account belatedly, by ourselves and by others, because its external manifestations are hidden or socially less troublesome, at first glance. Yet its roots are deep and this emotion can lead to addictive behaviours, such as excessive alcohol consumption and hard drugs, or escape into work, food, smoking…
Where does sadness come from? It results from the loss of someone or something that was dear to us. With sadness we enter a phase which is, normally, transitory. It's the end of one period, giving way to the start of another. We are more or less aware of it. Sadness can be directly related to loss (bereavement) or to a situation and a biological reaction of the body (depression, melancholy) that we do not always explain to ourselves well.
Sadness activates our body in different ways which may occur in alternation :
- The secretion of the stress hormone may increase and put our body under tension, driving us to action. However, it is important that this state of tension is not prolonged, to avoid exhausting the body.
- Conversely, the body may slow down, and a feeling of exhaustion may set in. A phase of introspection is often necessary before being able to bounce back.
In the case of the loss of a loved one, due to death, a romantic break-up or geographical distance, sadness arises. To stop it, we will first seek to find the person we have lost. Faced with the impossibility of going back, a phase of acceptance begins because the relationship is no longer; it is transformed. It is the grieving process that begins: apathy, denial, anger, acceptance with sadness in the background. Whatever the nature of the loss and whatever the order in which these stages unfold, they are necessary and inevitable.
In the case of depression and melancholy, the origin of the sadness is not clearly defined. It is often linked to a poor self-image which causes daily suffering and great difficulty moving forward. Self-image is the result of perceptions of ourselves, innate or acquired in childhood. By innate, I mean the perceptions that we have inherited. To move away from sadness and return to joy, we sometimes need to review our beliefs, our relationships with others, and our priorities.
Kinesiology can provide valuable support in the exploration of these inherited or acquired beliefs, as well as in the grieving process. Our body has a memory. All our personal history and our family heritage, genetic and also emotional, are “engramed” there (i.e., fixed in the nervous system in the form of an engram, which is the imprint left in the brain by an event and which can be reactivated by appropriate stimulation). It is therefore like a large library from which the kinesiologist can draw information in order to relieve us, to help us to remove what is blocking us. The tool she uses is the muscle test, which gives access to all our memories and allows us to bring up to consciousness the unconscious mechanisms and beliefs that trouble us. This can therefore allow us to clean up our ways of functioning and thus our relationships with others.
This may take more or less time.
Coming next, fear...
* Illustration Clemence Renault, https://www.instagram.com/clemence.renault/