Making Space for Your Sadness When Everyone Wants You Strong

Welcome. I'm your host, Dr. Zoe, and today we're talking about ways to hold your sadness when everyone wants you strong. This episode was put on my heart because I've been seeing a trend of general sadness with my clients here in January, and if they're feeling it, my guess is you may be feeling it too. It's a new year and it seems we should be celebrating newness, but many are telling me that they felt that there was nothing to celebrate on New Year's Eve. So much is uncertain and people are feeling kind of a general funk right now, and all of the civil unrest continues to be a negative and visible cloak that has an effect on our sense of ease and peace in this world. I want to remind you that one of the focuses of my podcast is supporting you and your relationship with yourself. And when we feel sad, it's a little nudge, or sometimes it's a big proclamation, that we need to get deeper into ourselves. Maybe pull up a chair and hold our own hand and listen. So how can a strong woman create space for your sadness when everyone wants you strong? Listen in. Hi there, I'm Dr. Zoe. I'm glad you're here. This is the place for developing your strength as a woman and helping you navigate difficult relationships in your life, including that sometimes difficult relationship with yourself. Being a strong woman is not about what other people can see, and it's not about how loud you are about it. It's a quiet This isn't therapy, but you may feel like you've been to therapy after one of my episodes. Here, we also explore the intersection of psychology and faith, all with the purpose of creating a new kind of strong. Welcome to Redefining Your Superwoman. First, my win and my fail. The first one for 2021. My fail, it's a bad mom fail, y'all. Ah. So my son, he's almost 17. He's gonna be 17 on Monday. Happy birthday, Sage. He loves to cook. He's really a budding chef, and he decided he was going to make ramen from scratch. So when I say scratch, I mean he made the noodles with flour and whatever else you make the noodles with. He made them from scratch, and then he did the stock, and the stock took Hours, like 8 to 10 hours to make. He started, you know, with the vegetables and the meat and the straining and all the stuff. So he made this ramen from scratch and he was so proud of himself and it was really good and I've been eating on it for 2 days and I thought that he was done with it because he strained the veggies and stuff from the stock so the stock was separate. Anyway, I threw out the stock and I came home from work and Found out that he was really upset that I had thrown it out. I thought it was finished and everyone was done with it. And then I found out that he was using it still, and I felt horrible. It was a big fail. Maybe me not paying attention, definitely a misunderstanding. My win actually is that I have raised an amazingly gracious, mature, forgiving man, and he set to work Making his stock again. So actually I helped, and so I started the stock for him and he made it all over again. He already had the noodles still saved, so that's good. But yeah, that's my mom fail. I threw away the stock that my son spent 10 hours making. My other win is that I wrote a book, y'all! And I know you guys have been hearing me talk about books, hearing me talk about publish, hearing me talk about all of that, and thank you for listening for years now. But my self-care book is out. You can pre-order it. Click the link in the bio or in the podcast episode that you're listening to. Go to my Instagram, click a link, go on Amazon or Target or Walmart or Barnes& Noble or all the places and buy my book. It's called A Year of Self-Care. I wrote this book with you in mind, the busy woman, who has a lot going on, who knows on one level you should be caring for yourself, but maybe you don't know how, and it's too much to think about, and am I doing it right? I wrote a book that will take you a few minutes to read every single day of the year and give you a routine of self-care. So that's my win. It's pre-launch now. You can pre-order it. It technically comes out in February. I look forward to my words Going alongside with you on your self-care journey. Now on to the topic, ways to hold your sadness when everyone wants you strong. Before we talk about sadness, I want to talk about hope. In the last episode, which was the last one in 2020, I spoke about my word for the year, which is publish. I also encouraged you to share your word for the year, and I was so blessed by your responses. You women are amazing, powerful, resilient, and beautiful, and I am thankful that you take the time to listen to my podcast Thank you for listening to this podcast, and even more thankful that you took the time to share your word. My asking was not just for my edification, but for your own, because I know how powerful it is to speak what you want out into the world. And my hope and prayer for you this year is that all of your words will be manifested in your life this year. And I also know that your words will give hope to women who maybe just couldn't even muster the strength to come up with a word. Or maybe a woman who feels hopeless or is just plain tired of trying and failing, who may be struggling in her relationship with herself or with someone else. So here are your words for 2021.

Hi, Zoe. My word for 2021 is hustling. Basically, my goal is to work super hard and pay off all of my student loan debt by the end of the year.

My word for 2021 is balance.

My word for 2021 My word for the year is routine.

My word for 2021 is confidence.

My word for 2021 is accomplish.

My word for 2021 is faithfulness. My word for the year is joy.

And some of you didn't verbally share your words, you wrote them in to me, so I'm going to share those too. Other words were love. I'm focusing on showing up with an attitude of love this year. Amateur. I'm focusing on trying new things and not expecting to already know everything. Stand up. She said she picked this word so that she gets motivated to get off the couch. I thought it was going to be about something else, but I love it. And the last word, hope. Hope in the future, hope in the present. And God's plans and goodness. Hope in good times and the bad. I have to admit, all these words are so beautiful, I want to steal them for my word. I keep thinking, well, maybe that one will be my word for next year, but there's so many words and they're all so beautiful and there's only so many years. So thank you so much for sharing your words. They're very personal. Hearing your voice behind the words is really inspirational. Thank you for sharing. And so now, ways to hold your sadness when everyone wants you strong. I used to have periods in my life where I just felt bad. I wouldn't call it a clinical depression, but my mood would tank. I could usually trace it back to something, and sometimes I couldn't, but I would sulk and I'd feel somber. I'd want to lay on the couch or the bed all day and just kind of go inside and reflect or process until The wave crashed and I felt like normal again. I never thought much about it until I had my first son. He was about a year old and something was bothering me in my life. I don't remember what now, but it was causing me to sink low in that place. And it was such a jarring experience because for the first time in my life, I couldn't curl up in a ball and wait for the wave to pass. I had a little boy who was looking up at me excitedly to do all the routine things that I did for him every day to care for him. And I felt cheated. I felt lost and I felt angry. And I remember thinking, I don't even have the space to be sad because I have to care for him. Now, of course, I did still feel sad, but I no longer had the space that I used to make for my sadness. I had to be sad in between the cracks. I couldn't easily sit with it and work it out because he needed me present and he needed me strong. He needed me to smile and sing the nursery rhymes and read the books when I really wanted to curl up and go inside for a while. Maybe you're feeling that way now. Maybe it's not one child, maybe it's a couple of children, or maybe it's your work or your family or any other person or obligation that you have to be strong and present for whether you feel like it or not. Sometimes you need to feel sad in the cracks. So I want to make this clear. I'm not here today to tell you how to not feel sad. There's no 7 ways to make it better today. None of us have a magic wand to erase COVID, bring back lost jobs, relationships, our children's childhood, or even the carefree days of our youth. I'm here to hold your hand for a minute and show you how to hold your own. First, my dear friend, keep walking. One of the greatest gifts that my son gave me when he was little was that he taught me the act of walking through. When life's demands don't allow you to sit with your sadness, you have to walk through it in a different way. And when you stop trying to get the sadness to go away and you allow yourself to just feel it, the burden of fixing it goes away too. Did you even realize that trying to fix your sadness is an unnecessary burden that you put on yourself? From birth, we're taught that we should avoid sad feelings. We want to make the babies stop crying. We're sometimes told outrightly, don't be sad, stop crying, you're okay. But you're not okay. That's why you're crying. Robert Firestone, he was an author and a psychologist, he pointed out that when we feel sadness, it centers us. Now, I just want to also point out, I'm not talking about a clinical depression. That's different from sadness, and that's a whole other episode. But today I'm talking about sadness. When you name the feeling, when you acknowledge it, and you take another step forward— no skips, no jubilant runs, but one foot in front of the other— knowing that the way you feel is okay, it actually allows you, like Robert Firestone said, to feel healthy, centered, and to build resilience. When you cut it off, when you push it down, or you try to get it to go away prematurely, you could actually be at risk for creating a dangerous depression. Now I know when you're busy and there are high demands on your time, it's actually easier sometimes to ignore your sadness and just power through, right? You're a strong woman, you're powering through. And sometimes it is your only option. But there are always cracks, even in the busiest of schedules, where you can focus on your emotions. Maybe there's no time to curl up in bed for a day, but you can find 5 minutes to lie on your bed and simply let yourself feel. No judgment. Sometimes this whole process can be sped up by using your voice. When you're lying down, let out a deep sigh with maybe some sound or moan attached to it. The sound of your moan can actually access deep feelings buried a little more quickly than if you're just sitting there thinking about it. Once again, there's nothing to do with it. Just feel and let the tears flow if they must. They're healing. When we feel loss, it triggers other losses in our life. And when we're sad, there's often a deeper well of pain that we can easily tap into, and it can feel very overwhelming. When you're feeling overwhelmed, remind yourself that it's usually not about the present. It's about what you fear will happen in the future as a result of your feelings or your actions in response to a feeling. If you take a status check around you, in this moment, you're okay. So ask yourself, what is my sadness telling me? Remember, anger tells us something's wrong. Joy tells us something is very right. Sadness tells you you've lost something. Ask yourself, what have I lost? Once you acknowledge some loss, I think it's important to differentiate between self-pity from sadness. It may feel overindulgent for you to give yourself compassion for your sadness, and you might feel that you're just gonna wallow in self-pity if you give that to yourself. So let's look at that. Self-pity is essentially a useless mood state. Self-pity is a state of stuckness. It's an attitude of, it's always going to be like this and there's nothing I can do about it. Although we do need to pause and feel the feelings, we do serve ourselves best by walking through them, not soaking in them. Your sadness does not define you, and it doesn't even have to define the moment. It's entirely possible to see beauty in sadness, to feel sadness and joy at the same time, and know that nothing ever stays the same. And so this too shall pass. So the way you walk through your sadness is through self-compassion. I think it's good to look at it like a canoe in the water. It may lean to one side, and then it leans over to the other, and you could be riding a hard line between self-compassion and pity for a minute. But you will right yourself again. Trust the process and know that your intentions are not to stay stuck, but rather to move through, and your mind will follow suit. Last, I encourage you to find a piece of God in your sadness. Melissa May Mone wrote an excellent book called Radiant Midnight, where she talked about finding the gifts in a dark place. I encourage you to read it if you find yourself feeling stuck in your sadness. In her other book, Gathering Dandelions, Melissa says, hold on to the hope that in the midst of this ordinary, fractured life, you are deeply cared for, intricately known, and immensely loved by God. I think those words are beautiful, and they give me comfort. They don't fix everything, that's for sure. But by giving yourself self-compassion and comfort, by allowing yourself to feel sad in the cracks of a busy life, you're caring and connecting deeper with yourself. And so when joy comes, it'll feel that much more intense for having walked through the darkness. I want to leave you with words of hope, so I'm going to repeat the words of my listeners, and may this year be filled with a deeper connection to yourself and your relationships and to God.

Hi Zoe, my word for 2021 is hustling. Basically, my goal is to work super hard and pay off all of my student loan debt by the end of the year.

My word for 2021 is balance.

My word for 2021 is let go.

My word for the year is routine.

My word for 2021 is confidence. My word for

2021 is accomplish. My word for 2021 is faithfulness. My word for the year is joy.

And love, and amateur, and stand up, and hope. Until next time, my friends. Thank you for listening to the Dr. Zoe Show, Redefining Your Superwoman. New shows go up every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode and text the word strong to 38470 to get my weekly encouragement. I look forward to connecting with you amazing women on social media throughout the week. Have a super week.