Why You May Be Feeling Sad For No Reason
Have you ever had a day where you woke up and for no explainable reason you just felt a little sad? Or really sad? You feel into yourself and find that you can’t really discern a reason. Maybe like me you take a look at your cycle tracker but no period in sight, and you start to wonder… what the hell is going on wth me?
Well the good news is that this is really common. Especially if you are working on your healing or holding emotional wounds and past trauama inside. Because quite often what it turns out to be is stuck emotions or trauma rising to the surface to be processed and released. Sometimes as you work o releasing trauma those stuck energies start to rise up, wanting to be felt and released. Or your inner child is raising the flag that they are hurting and need your attention. The best thing you can do in this case is let yourself feel the emotions.
Here are my favorite ways to work through these feelings when they come up:
Try a meditation like a body scan where you center inside yourself and feel through different parts of your body starting at the crown down to the feet until you locate where in your body this is coming from. Once you have located where the feeling is located, work on opening up your awareness and making contact with it or your inner child to work on letting it come to the surface to be felt and released.
You can also try journaling, thought often I do this in combination with a meditation as it allows me to get deeper into my journaling. If you don’t want to do a meditation beforehand, try taking a few deep centering breaths and allowing your mind to quiet and then start focusing on the feeling and write how it feels. Get detailed and then go with the flow as your subconcscious opens up to allow the emotion/memory to come out.
Failing any of that helping, I will have a good old fashioned cry. Sometimes there isn’t necessarily a specific memory or feeling to be processed, it is just old energy that has been stored inside you somatically and needs to be released. So I will put on a surefire movie that makes me cry, read a particularly heart breaking book moment, or sing/listen to a song that always gets me in my feels.
Another reason that I sometimes see is that you have gone through a big transition in life or let go of something or someone recently and not given yourself the grace period to mourn that loss. We often thing of mourning a loss as related to people or pets that have passed, but the truth is that you can mourn a lot of things in life. A future you had hoped for that is no longer possible, a dream you had worked towards that isn’t coming true, a friendship that is no longer in your life, someone not turning out the way you had envisioned, a long-term work situation that you have now said goodye to, etc….
When we face these big changes, it oftens comes with a sense of loss; a grief that wants to be felt and released. But with life being so busy and go go go all the time, we usually suck it up and move onto the next thing. But in doing so we deny our emotional body the chance to transition from one reality to another in a safe space and time to do so. This can lead to a part of us holding onto the past reality and carrying around a longing for closure or understanding. If this could be the case for you, try any of the above methods to let yourself work through it.
Have you experienced this before?
