Inside Out: Accepting Your Emotions, Good or Bad

Amy Taylor September 01, 2015

Just recently, another animated film has conquered the big screens and really captured the hearts of millions of young people… and the older ones too. Inside Out, the newest 3D –computer animated drama produced by Pixar Animation Studio and released by Walt Disney Pictures, is indeed a very timely and must-watch film. Apart from the very cute characters, colourful backgrounds, and fun scenes, it shows, in a very clever way, how emotions shape our personality, and why they are – even the ones we consider negative – are important to our mental health.

Suppressing Sadness: a Threat to Mental Health

We’ve grown in a society wherein feeling sad seems to be ‘not a good thing’. When a friend or loved one is feeling blue, we try our best to make him or feel better. And that’s what most of us do to ourselves as well. When we are feeling down, instead of asking ourselves ‘why’, we end up looking for a solution already – thinking that feeling sad is a problem in the first place. We engage in various coping mechanisms, most of them are unhealthy. Some of us resort to comfort eating, others to substance abuse, self-harm, isolation, and many more.

But, is supressing sadness really the right thing to do to feel better? Unfortunately, not. Sadness, like anger, is a core human emotion. We can’t be humans if we don’t experience any sadness at all, or anger, fear, and disgust. The complexity of our emotions make us unique and the most intelligent creations in the planet.

Sadness Paves Way to Healing

Sadness is a normal response to a wound that ultimately, will heal. While the healing is person-dependent (which means the same kind of wound that heals faster with others may take weeks to heal for the rest), it is the body’s way of saying that there is something to be addressed. And the moment we acknowledge what that something is, healing starts to take place.

Like that beautiful scene of ‘Sadness’ trying to comfort ‘Bing Bong’ in a ‘sad way’, sadness may have bittersweet effect on us. This means that while we linger on the unwanted feelings, at the same time, memories that we enjoy come alive once more – reminding us of the great moments. By simply acknowledging sadness, it can open us to so many realisations, such as appreciating the good we’ve lost, and valuing the good we haven’t. This overrated human emotion can also make us more empathic towards others who are going through or have gone through what we are. It makes us more compassionate too, inclining us to give support to others. See how a calamity draws people together and encourage them to help one another?

Most of us would avoid feeling sad, but this is not only wrong but most importantly, harmful. Suppressing unwanted feelings because we are afraid to feel pain, could lead to greater pain that we may not be able to handle at all. And that unmanageable pain could result to debilitating mental health conditions, such as depression.

The greatest benefit of sadness perhaps is that it is liberating. After all, why do we cry? It’s to feel better. Sadness, in most cases, serve as the bridge that allow us to return back to our happy self.