The Hidden Message Behind Your Sadness (Most People Miss This)

Why do we feel sad… and what is sadness actually trying to tell us?

In this episode of Rise Up, Vicky Ross explores the deeper mechanics behind sadness — one of the most misunderstood human emotions.

Sadness often appears when something meaningful in our lives changes, ends, or fails to unfold the way we expected. But sadness is not simply something to “get over.” It is an emotional signal that something important has shifted.

In this episode, Vicky explores:

• How to recognise sadness in your life
 • Why sadness sometimes follows failed expectations
 • The difference between sadness and grief
 • Why anger can sometimes hide sadness
 • The beliefs that often sit underneath sadness
 • How understanding sadness can lead to emotional freedom

Sadness is not an enemy emotion.

It is often a messenger pointing us toward something meaningful about our expectations, our beliefs, and our relationship with life.

And when we understand that message, something begins to soften.

If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who might need to hear it.

Transcript

Why Sadness Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hi, and welcome back to Rise Up and Live. My name is Vicky Ross, and I'm your host for today. And today I was thinking that I wanted to talk about an emotion, specific one, that every human being experiences at some point of their lives. And that emotion is sadness. Now, sadness is one of those emotions that many of us just try and avoid because it feels so uncomfortable. So we push it away, we distract ourselves from it, or sometimes we might even get angry instead of allowing ourselves to feel it. But sadness is actually a very, very important emotional signal. So today I want to explore three things with you. Firstly, how to recognize that you have got sadness specifically. The second thing is where sadness comes from. And the third, what you can do when it appears in your life. So sadness usually has a very particular quality to it. It often comes with low energy, a heaviness in the body, and a tendency to withdraw or to reflect. So your mind may be drifting to the past. You might find yourself thinking about what happened, what changed, or what didn't work out in the way that you hoped. And that's because sadness often appears when something very meaningful in your life has changed or has ended or has been lost. So it could be that a relationship didn't last, it could be a job that didn't work out, or a dream that didn't unfold the way that you imagined. So sometimes sadness is connected to grief. And that's a very particular type of experience because grief is the sadness that appears when you lose somebody that you love. And grief has a different texture to it because grief exists where there was once love. So without love, there can't be grief. Now, sadness doesn't always come from the same place. There are many different reasons that we get sad, but one of the reasons that sadness can appear is when life doesn't match an expectation that you've got. So what do I mean by this? You know, what is it that's happening here? A useful question to ask yourself is not why I'm sad, but rather what expectation did I have that reality didn't fulfill? And sometimes the next question becomes, whose expectation is it? So you can start off by just asking, am I being sad because something that I expected to happen, something that I believed would happen, hasn't happened. So it could be like, for instance, that you now around about 35, 40, 45 years old, maybe even older, and suddenly you realize this is not the life that I want. This is not what I imagine to have, and there's a sadness around it. This is where you know that there's an expectation attached, wrapped around that sadness, and the expectation has been unfulfilled. So you have to ask yourself that question of is it my expectation that I didn't fulfill, or is it somebody else's? Was it an expectation that somebody had for you? For instance, a parent or a partner or a teacher, society had this expectation of you that you haven't fulfilled. And because they come from so far back in the past, you may not initially remember the exact expectation that hasn't been fulfilled, and therefore who gave it or who did it belong to. But if you just intuitively feel it's an expectation that's unfulfilled, sit with it and let it just surface up and give you the information. Sometimes that expectation is expectation that you unconsciously, very quietly in those early years of your life, created for yourself and didn't fulfill this. I remember I was doing some deep reflections on my life. So for quite a long time, I felt like I had somehow failed in one area of my life, and I believed I should have turned out differently. I couldn't understand why that feeling of disappointment sat so heavily with me until one day I realized something very, very important. That I hadn't failed life, but I had failed an expectation that I had created for myself many, many, many years ago. I think I must have been around about the age of eight, around about there. And it was an expectation about something in my life, or about how something in my life would unfold, what that outcome would be. And then I must have forgotten about it. But years later, my unconscious mind hadn't forgotten, and it raised its little head to say, you failed at this. So when I saw it clearly for what it was, something inside of me shifted completely because the expectation can be questioned, and expectations can be changed. Reality simply is. Now, there's another interesting layer to sadness. Often, underneath sadness, we find certain beliefs about ourselves or about life. For instance, there's a theory, or some psychiatrist came up with a theory for people that were depressed that all negative emotions and all negative ideas, all negative beliefs came down to three. So the three were I am helpless, I am hopeless, or I am worthless. So you can question, you can play around with a belief that you have about yourself that is negative, and then ask yourself, is it about being helpless? Is it about being hopeless, or is it about being worthless? So when it comes to sadness, the first belief that you feel is that I'm helpless. And if you think about it, is something has happened, we recognize that we cannot change it because it's in the past. We cannot reverse the event, we cannot undo it, and therefore what has happened has happened. Therefore, you feel that helplessness because there is absolutely nothing that you can do. The second belief that sometimes appears is hopelessness, and this is when your mind starts looking into the future and concludes that things will never improve and that nothing will ever change because of something that happened in the past. So you have the helplessness because it happened in the past, you project that to the future, and then you feel it's hopeless because it's never going to improve. And this is where sadness can deepen if we get stuck in that belief. Interestingly, sadness does not always come with the belief of I'm worthless. That belief tends to belong more to shame. But sadness very often connects to helplessness and sometimes hopelessness if the future is attached. So have a look at your negative belief, especially the one that's attached to sadness, and notice how you have that belief of helplessness and hopelessness. Now, sometimes something else happens. Sometimes we don't experience the sadness at first. Instead, we feel anger, and that becomes confusing because if you're feeling angry, you don't go, I'm feeling sad. But you see, this often happens when relationships end, when people lose their jobs, or when something deeply disappointing happens. People become angry. Now, anger is often a secondary emotion, and it is the armor that appears before we can feel and before we are ready to feel the sadness that is underneath. So when we can't cope with that sadness, because that sadness makes us feel so, so vulnerable, and the nervous system wants to protect you, it will produce anger first. So ask yourself when you're angry, is it really that you're angry? Because it could be, or are you actually sad? And that's why you're getting angry. So sadness isn't an enemy emotion, it's a messenger, like actually all emotions are just messengers, and it tells us something mattered to us, that something meaningful in our lives has changed, has ended, or it didn't unfold the way that you hoped. So when you understand that message, sadness can soften, not because you erase the past, but because you begin to understand the relationship that you have with it. So if you are experiencing sadness in your life right now, perhaps a gentle question you can ask yourself is this what has changed in my life? What expectation have I got that was there from a long time ago or that I haven't fulfilled, or what belief might still be sitting underneath this feeling? Not as a way of judging yourself, because that's not nice to do to anybody, but as a way to understand yourself, to bring that awareness so that you're able to take the responsibility and change it for something else. Because when there's awareness, that's the first step to freedom. And remember, this is all about creating the life that you want, living on your terms, which is a sign of freedom. So when we understand what emotion is trying to show you, then you no longer need to fight it, you can actually welcome it in. So you can simply allow it to move through you and eventually make space for something new. Now, if this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone that you think might need this and hear it. And as always, if you want to do deeper work, you can always reach out to me through my website, have a chat with me first, and we'll see where it goes from there. Alternatively, I've got a beautiful membership group, I run retreats. So, whichever way is right for you, I'll be waiting for you to come and join my group, my tribe. And as always, keep rising up for yourself and your life. And till then, I'll see you next uh episode. Here's to your success.