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    Nkh004Kristin Wong
    6/24/16 12:49pm

    I’m all for this. Not everything can be fixed right away. Sometimes things just need to suck for a bit.

    Illustration for article titled
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      welltheresthatNkh004
      6/24/16 1:54pm

      Oddly I think of this episode a lot when encountering sadness in others.

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    MrsASRKristin Wong
    6/24/16 12:38pm

    This sounds wonderful. I don’t really care for the modern idea that we should always be either happy or neutral, and if you’re not, you need medication/help. It’s perfectly ok to feel sad. Sometimes that’s exactly the right reaction to a particular situation. I’m not sure why we feel the need to deny our body and mind the chance to slow down, and to appreciate loss or some other sadness inducing state.

    It’s like I tell my husband, who is prone to rather morose moods. ‘You don’t have to smile today. I love you no matter what you feel.’ Acceptance goes a long way in this world.

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    sg1969Kristin Wong
    6/24/16 1:08pm

    I once saw someone go up to someone else who was crying. He tried to cheer him up saying “come on, can’t be that bad?”.

    Turns out the guy had just lost his parents in a car crash...

    so yeah... don’t be “that guy”

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    Arthur VincieKristin Wong
    6/24/16 5:48pm

    This is great. Sometimes I just need to feel mad or sad, and then when someone pops in with “everything happens for a reason” or some other happy horseshit, I just want to push them off a cliff. Within a few hours or so I process what I need to process and then move back into default “solve problem” mode.

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    JamesinCaliforniaKristin Wong
    6/25/16 11:06am

    Sadness is an aspect of being/becoming human. It is healthy and necessary; it is an expression of a heavy sense of physicality in the face of either an actual or perceived loss and comes with all of the emotions all of us recognize and own. The best way another can help is to show up: the act of just being with the person and not actively working to distract from the other’s sadness. Feeling sad has its own timeline, agenda, and complexity, and attempts to cheer someone up are usually expressions of the attempted cheer-er’s discomfort with loss or sadness.

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    frankthepirateKristin Wong
    6/24/16 1:13pm
    Illustration for article titled

    There’s a touching scene in Pixar’s Inside Out that plays with this concept (and is one of the major insights that drives the climax).

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