How Sadness Unlocks Growth (and Self-Pity Sabotages Your Life) | (#141) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in relationships, attraction, success, and fulfillment. Now, here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology podcast. I’m David Tian, your host. In this episode, we’re diving into a topic that I hope will hit home for a lot of us, especially if you’ve ever found yourself feeling alone even in a crowd. We’re tackling a distinction that’s not just important. It’s essential, necessary for anyone on their journey to finding real lasting happiness, deep fulfillment, and even joy. I’m talking about understanding the difference between sadness and self-pity. [00:48.5]

Understanding the difference between the two isn’t just about feeling better for a moment or two. It’s about transforming how you walk through life, your whole experience of life. When you blur the line between sadness and self-pity, you’re likely to fall into a really horrible trap. It’s a trap where you start believing that your vulnerability, your genuine emotions are somehow not welcome in the world, that if you showed your true self, let’s say, the depths of your true feelings, you’d end up being pushed aside or misunderstood, or worse, outright rejected and abandoned and exiled.

That false belief is a fast track to shutting yourself off. You start building walls, not just around your heart, but around your entire being. And what happens next? That isolation you dread, it doesn’t just lurk around the corner. It moves in, sets up shop, so to speak. Before you know it, loneliness becomes not just a visitor, but a constant companion, and the sense of being alone feeds directly into the very feeling that you were trying to avoid in the first place, self-pity. [01:57.0]

By the end of this episode, you’ll not only be able to spot the crucial differences between these two emotional states, but you’ll also be able to navigate your way through sadness in a way that opens doors, not closes them.

Okay, so first, let’s look at sadness. Now, when I use the term sadness, I’m talking about this profound, sometimes gut-wrenching emotion that actually connects us to something much larger than ourselves. Susan Cain, the bestselling author of the book, Quiet, wrote another book relatively recently called Bittersweet, and in that book, she hit the nail on the head when she talked about these experiences as doorways to our higher selves. These are experiences of how I’m using the term sadness.

Think about the last time you lost someone close to you or even when you heard about someone else’s loss, that deep aching sadness wasn’t just some negative space in your heart. It was a testament to the love and connection that you felt for that person or that you can imagine that other one feeling for the person that they lost. [03:01.7]

In essence, love and sadness are two sides of the same coin. They come together because where there is deep love, there’s also the risk of profound loss. Whether it’s because of an accident, natural causes, or any unforeseen tragedy, sadness is our heart’s response to loss, a sign that we have loved deeply and truly.

Now let’s look at the other side of the spectrum and you find self-pity, and this is where things get murky. Self-pity isn’t about connecting to anything outside of ourselves, or honoring a loved one. It’s the “woe is me” attitude that traps us in our own headspace of victimhood. Instead of opening us up, it shuts us down. It isolates us, not just from others, but from our own potential for growth and healing. Self-pity keeps us stuck in a loop of unproductive thoughts and a spiral of destructive actions. It’s like being stuck in quicksand. The more you dwell on it, the deeper you sink. [04:06.3]

Let me give you an example to make this picture clearer. Okay, picture two guys both going through tough times. One man, let’s call him Tom, recently lost his father. He’s devastated, of course. He feels the sadness deeply. He cries a lot for many days and weeks in a row. He shares stories about his dad whenever he meets with those who are close to him. Through this long process, he starts to heal. He is sad, but he’s moving through his sadness in a way that accepts and even embraces the emotion, and by so doing, he’s honoring his dad’s memory and deepens his own capacity for love, and compassion and empathy. [04:49.7]

Now, the other guy, let’s call him Jerry–these are all random names—he also faces a tough time. He’s been through a breakup, can’t seem to get past it. I’ve met a lot of Jerrys. But instead of processing his sadness, he spirals into self-pity. He dwells on how he has been wronged, how he’s always the victim in relationships or in dating, and how he will never find happiness. Jerry ends up stuck, not because of the breakup itself, but because he’s wallowing in the emotion of self-pity rather than facing his sadness and then thereby growing from it.

Can you understand the difference? Tom is accepting and embracing his sadness, using it as a bridge to understanding and growth. Jerry, on the other hand, is drowning in self-pity, letting it isolate him from potential growth and deeper connections. So, it’s crucial to recognize these emotional states for what they are.

Sadness, especially the kind that ties back to our capacity to love and empathize, sadness is not just normal, it’s healthy. It’s a sign of our humanity, our ability to connect deeply with others to love and it’s a pathway, a gateway to healing. Self-pity, however, ends up being a dead end, spiraling deeper and lower and lower. It’s an emotional state that feeds in on itself, leading us away from growth, connection, and ultimately from our happiness. [06:18.5]

Okay, now let’s go one level deeper and notice how cultural expectations around masculinity come into play in all this. It’s no secret that from a young age, guys are bombarded with messages about what it means to be, quote-unquote, “strong,” and too often, that strength is tied to keeping a stiff upper lip, to not showing, quote-unquote, “weakness,” which in many cultures includes even showing emotions, but especially the emotion of sadness, and this is where things get all tangled up.

When society equates strength with emotional stoicism, it sends a message to men that vulnerability is a no-go zone or you’re just a weak boy. This isn’t just outdated, it’s actually objectively harmful for your mental and emotional health, and for your happiness and fulfillment, and for accessing joy. [07:11.6]

It creates confusion between experiencing healthy, empowering sadness, and wallowing in self-pity, because what society is telling you is anything that resembles sadness is “just don’t even go there.” These more subtle distinctions between sadness and self-pity simply get lumped in together and just labeled emotional. No wonder it’s so easy for young men to confuse sadness and self-pity. That whole category of emotions is just not available to them if they want to live up to the toxic masculinity of their culture.

Now, as you become more experienced in life, hopefully, you will have cared enough about things that you will have experienced sad things, and when those feelings of sadness which are healthy and understandable inevitably come up, as they do, because we’re human and not robots, these feelings of sadness can come out sideways as self-pity or even toxic shame, because not only do you feel like you shouldn’t be feeling sad, but then you feel shame and sadness that you feel sad. [08:16.4]

You feel sad that you’re sad, and even that secondary sadness is not available. You’re not supposed to be feeling that, and so you shove all of this cycle of emotions down, trying to get it down beneath the level of consciousness. No wonder most men aren’t good with these types of emotions.

Okay, let’s look at a case study that, hopefully, will bring this to life. Imagine Alex, a guy who has always been told to toughen up and not show any emotions, except maybe anger. That’s okay. When he goes through a rough patch, say, a job loss, he feels naturally sad, of course. But instead of acknowledging that sadness, and then working through it and sitting with it, he tries to simply push it aside to ignore it, to exile it, to, quote-unquote, “stay strong.” [08:58.4]

But those feelings don’t just disappear. They get suppressed and then eventually repressed. They simmer under the surface, morphing into self-pity, because he feels he shouldn’t be in this position in the first place. Because he has been conditioned to view his sadness as a form of weakness, he also feels a sense of shame about his situation, so it’s a one-two punch that keeps him stuck in a cycle of negative emotions.

This example, of course, isn’t unique. We see this all the time. It’s a story that plays out in countless ways for men across the globe, thanks to these sorts of toxic cultural scripts about what masculinity is supposed to be and how masculine emotional expression is supposed to be. The reality is feeling sad, of course, doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human, and the courage and willingness to experience the sadness makes you stronger, and showing that sadness, processing it openly without shame or without fear, is, of course, a form of courage and strength that requires bravery to face your emotions head on, to be vulnerable in a culture that often tells men they shouldn’t be. [10:06.1]

Now, it’s really important to distinguish between sadness and self-pity when it comes to vulnerability and I’ve devoted an entire other podcast episode to how, because many men can’t distinguish or don’t distinguish between self-pity and sadness, when they think of vulnerability, what they’re thinking of is displaying and expressing their self-pity.

Then when they expose their self-pity to a woman on a date and she is understandably turned off by it, because he’s not meeting his own needs himself, and in a bid to get her to meet his needs, he’s exposing his self-pity and hoping she will take compassion upon him and meet his needs for reassurance and security and encouragement, and significance and worthiness. In other words, to mother him. I explained how this is weaponizing vulnerability to manipulate others, because, in fact, vulnerability in the way that this guy understands it isn’t actually sadness. It’s self-pity. [11:06.7]

I just looked this up. This is Episode 71, so if that’s something you want to go deeper into, I highly recommend my own podcast Episode 71, which we have currently entitled “Why Voicing Your Insecurities Is a Form of Emotional Manipulation.”

Okay, so breaking free from these toxic cultural norms isn’t easy, but it’s necessary for your own happiness. It’s about redefining strength, to include the capacity for sadness for deep emotional expression. It’s about recognizing that processing sadness constructively is a primary pathway to growth, not some detour into weakness and, most importantly, it’s about understanding that pushing away sadness doesn’t make it disappear. It just dresses it up as self-pity, or morphs or distorts into self-pity or toxic shame, which doesn’t serve anyone. [11:58.5]

To the men listening, remember, allowing yourself to feel and express sadness isn’t just okay. It’s a sign of true strength and courage. It’s about embracing the full spectrum of human emotions, even self-pity. The thing to do with self-pity is not to shove it away or ignore it or exile it. It’s to acknowledge it, accept that it’s there and then grow from there.

Now, before we get into how to move out of self-pity, let me just first spend a little time impressing upon you how important the psychological and physiological impacts of sadness versus self-pity are. Understanding this can change how we handle our emotions in profound ways, so it’s important to fully comprehend the consequences of each.

Now, when I’m talking about embracing sadness, I’m not just waxing poetic or something. There’s solid science backing the idea that navigating through sadness can lead to significant psychological growth, heightened empathy, and deeper connections with others and with ourselves. [13:03.4]

Studies show that when individuals allow themselves to feel and express sadness, they often develop a greater capacity for understanding their own emotional landscapes, as well as those of the people around them. This is a pretty well-established finding, and this isn’t just about feeling better in the moment. It’s about building a more resilient and compassionate self over the long haul.

Studies have found that people who accept and express their sadness are more likely to engage in reflective and constructive thought processes. This introspection can lead to a better understanding of oneself, one’s values and one’s goals. It’s like sadness, when approached with a mindset of growth and understanding, actually acts as a catalyst for personal development. [13:50.7]

Now, going to the other side of the spectrum, let’s look at self-pity. When we look at self-pity, the story changes dramatically. Prolonged self-pity doesn’t just make you feel stuck. It has tangible negative measurable effects on your physical health. It increases stress, which we all know can lead to a whole host of issues, like high blood pressure, heart disease, overloading of cortisol in a weakened immune system.

But that’s not all. Self-pity can lead to social isolation. When you’re stuck in a woe is me mindset. You’re not exactly putting out the welcome mat for others and then this isolation spirals into depression, creating a feedback loop that’s hard to escape.

There’s a whole body of research supporting this, showing that individuals who dwell in self-pity are more likely to experience higher levels of stress and depression. Their mindset prevents them from seeing potential solutions to their problems, and can make them feel even more isolated from others than they really are, and then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because then they actually turn people off and socially isolate even more. [14:58.8]

Embracing sadness, though, works the opposite way. Embracing sadness actually strengthens your resilience. It’s like a muscle. Every time you allow yourself to feel sadness, to really sit with it and understand it and make space for it, you’re working out that resilience muscle. You’re learning that you can face tough emotions and come out the other side, and you confirm it every time it happens.

This doesn’t just apply to your emotional health either. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that facing emotional challenges head on, has positive effects on your physical health by reducing stress, improving your overall wellbeing, and increasing your own self confidence and self-reliance.

So, sadness, when embraced and processed in a healthy way, isn’t just an emotion to be feared or avoided. It’s an opportunity, an opportunity for growth, for deepening connections with others and ourselves, and for becoming a more compassionate empathetic person. Self-pity, while a natural response to certain situations, can become a trap if we wallow in it. It can isolate us, increase our stress levels, and spiral down into depression. [16:13.1]

No matter their physical strength, for many men, emotions are too much for them to handle. It’s why they can’t give women the deeper levels of emotional intimacy and connection that they crave. It’s why they fail to be the man that modern women desire most: a man with inner strength, a man who has mastered his emotions.

Find out how to master your emotions through David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program. The Emotional Mastery program is a step-by-step system that integrates the best of empirically-verified psychotherapy methods and reveals how to master your internal state and develop the inner strength that makes you naturally attractive, happy, and fulfilled.

Learn more about this transformational program by going to DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery.

That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

The key difference here is in how we approach these emotions. With sadness, if we lean into it, if we let it teach us and guide us, we emerge stronger and more connected. With self-pity, if we get stuck there, it leads to a downward spiral of isolation and stress. Remember, emotions aren’t just things that happen to us. They’re signals, opportunities for reflection and growth, how we respond to them, makes all the difference.

Now let’s look at a case of a common and natural response to sadness, which is crying and let’s see if we can understand this whole dynamic better by looking at this case. Yes, shedding tears when you’re sad, isn’t just a natural response. It’s a healthy one. When we cry in response to feeling sadness, our bodies release oxytocin and endorphins. These chemicals aren’t just feel-good hormones, which they are. They also play a crucial role in physically easing pain and reducing stress. So, by allowing ourselves to cry, we’re not just expressing our sadness. We’re actively participating in our own emotional healing process. [18:21.0]

Why is this so important for emotional growth and healing? Imagine you’re a surfer and your emotions are the wave—because the more experience you get with sadness, the more it will feel like you’re surfing waves. They’ll come and go. They don’t last forever. Riding these waves of sadness, allowing yourself to feel the waves, the tides as they come in fully and expressing them through crying, is like learning how to surf the waves.

You want to become in tune with the natural flow of your emotions and aim to navigate them with resilience, and the more experience you get, and the practice that you get, riding the waves of sadness as they come, as they ebb and flow, the more that you’ll be able to do it with a kind of grace. This approach to handling sadness, not just intellectually, but physically through crying, can deepen your emotional intelligence and promote healing and growth. [19:17.5]

On the flip side, suppressing or ignoring these waves of sadness, pretending they’re not there will lead to a lot of trouble. It’s like trying to force the ocean to be calm when it’s naturally not. You end up exerting a ton of energy to keep everything bottled up and exiled into your unconscious.

Eventually, those consciously suppressed emotions turn into unconsciously repressed emotions, and then because they’re in the unconscious, they’re that much harder to work on, to heal and grow from. This isn’t just about feeling sad and not showing it. It’s about not allowing yourself to feel sad at all. Denying your body and mind the release and relief that come from expressing those feelings. [20:03.0]

So, it’s simple. Crying in response to sadness is not a sign of weakness. It’s a powerful tool for emotional release and healing and growth. By allowing yourself to cry, to really feel and express your sadness, to hold the space for your sadness, you’re giving yourself a chance to release stress, alleviate pain, and embark on a path towards greater emotional growth and healing. By holding the space for your sadness, you’re also telling yourself that you’re worth it. It’s essential for your emotional wellbeing to ride the waves of your emotions, especially sadness.

All right, let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about how, practically, you can embrace sadness without falling into the quicksand of self-pity. It’s all about recognizing and honoring your feelings in a way that fosters growth and connection. I’ve got some practical tips and strategies that can help guide you through this process. [21:00.0]

First up is what I would call psychotherapeutic approaches. This isn’t just talking about your feelings. That can only help to a certain degree. It’s about diving deep with experiential approaches where you’re experiencing the emotional change in the session or through the therapeutic course, and existential approaches include IFS therapy (Internal Family Systems therapy) and Gestalt therapy.

These psychotherapeutic methods help you explore and understand your emotions on a more profound level, offering insights that can be truly transformative. It’s about getting to know all the different parts of yourself, even those that might feel uncomfortable or shameful, or painful at first.

Now, I’m a certified IFS therapy practitioner and I have training in many different therapy modalities, including Gestalt, but my private practice calendar gets full pretty fast, so I also offer therapeutic groups and those open up two or three times a year. If you are on my mailing list, look out for the announcement for that, if you’re interested in that. [22:00.5]

I also have many online courses that walk you through the therapeutic process at different stages, especially the big course Freedom U, which we do about once a year. I lead that one live. I also have powerful therapeutic processes inside my courses, Rock Solid Relationships, Lifestyle Mastery, and many other courses that are included in the Platinum Partnership, the all-access pass.

If any of these options interests you, you can find them on my website, DavidTianPhD.com, and then go to the top navigation and I have there the therapy and the coaching and the online courses. Obviously, I’m biased, but I kind of can’t help being biased here.

Okay, so let’s just move on to the next tip I would share, which is mindfulness meditation and mindfulness practices. By this I don’t mean New-Age fluff. It’s about being present with your emotions, observing them without judgment. It’s about giving yourself space to feel sadness without letting it define you. Mindfulness can help you notice when you’re slipping into self-pity, and then give you the tools to gently guide you back to a place of compassion and self-awareness. [23:07.4]

I have created a multiyear program called Emotional Mastery that does exactly this on mindfulness meditation and mindfulness practices, as well as a whole host of other powerful therapeutic tools that will help with going through the therapeutic process and just finding happiness and fulfillment overall in life, especially with your interpersonal relationships, relationships with other people.

Okay, journaling is another powerful tool. It can help you differentiate between feelings of sadness and self-pity, and the power therapeutically of journaling has been well-proven. Writing down your thoughts and emotions can provide clarity and insights that are hard to achieve any other way, and it’s a safe space to explore your inner world, to understand the nuances of your feelings and to get in touch with the dialogue that’s already naturally happening between the different parts of you inside. [24:01.7]

Now, here’s one that may be unusual, method acting. I highly recommend method-acting coaching or classes. Method-acting instruction isn’t just for aspiring actors. It’s a space where you’re encouraged to explore and express a range of emotions, including sadness. It’s about getting comfortable with your feelings, and giving yourself permission to fully experience and express them.

Look for those method-acting courses or coaching that have an openly-therapeutic element to them. Just a quick check on Google found quite a few, so it shouldn’t be that hard, because there is quite a bit of overlap between getting good at method acting and getting in touch with your feelings and with your body and the different parts of you.

Another area I’d recommend looking into his community. Community is crucial. Joining a group of likeminded people, engaging in activities that foster connection and empathy can make all the difference. By this I mean finding a tribe or community, a space where you can be authentic and feel supported, where you can share your journey with others who understand. I formed these therapeutic groups and other coaching groups partly for this very reason. [25:16.5]

Now, if you’re dating, pay attention to emotional maturity in your partner. Actively look for and screen for people who are self-aware and invested in their psychological growth. This can create a foundation of understanding and empathy that’s essential for a healthy relationship. For those who are already in relationships, consider couples counseling or therapy. It’s about investing in your partnership, ensuring that you’re both growing together, navigating the complexities of emotions as a team.

Now, each of these strategies offers a pathway to embrace sadness in a healthy, constructive way, steering clear of self-pity. It’s about building a toolkit that supports your emotional wellbeing, fostering resilience, and deepening connections with yourself and others. [26:04.7]

Remember, it’s not just about avoiding self-pity. We’re not trying to exile self-pity. We want to acknowledge when it’s there, understand and empathize with a part of you that’s feeling self-pity. But unlike sadness, self-pity doesn’t result in these feel-good hormones and emotions afterwards, and it’s definitely not pleasant in the moment, and it’s not an empowering or resourceful state. So, the part or parts of you feeling self-pity or actually in pain, and the first thing is to notice that they’re in the state of self-pity and not sadness, because that’s the first step to helping them out of the quicksand of self-pity.

Okay, so let’s bring this home with a real-life example, a real-life case study to illustrate everything we’ve been talking about. Okay, take the story of Marcus. Marcus came to me feeling stuck in a cycle of self-pity after a tough breakup. He thought that showing his sadness would make him weak, so he tried to toughen up and push those feelings away, but here’s the thing—those emotions actually didn’t disappear. They just went underground as he tried to exile them, turning into a constant background hum of self-pity that he couldn’t shake off. [27:16.7]

We began working together exploring mindfulness practices through my Emotional Mastery program and diving into experiential-therapy sessions. Marcus learn to sit with his sadness to make space for it to really feel it without judgment. He started journaling, pouring his thoughts and feelings onto the page, distinguishing between the hurt from the breakup and the self-pity that followed. Over time, Marcus began to see his sadness not as a sign of weakness, but as a part of his humanity, and a step towards healing and growth.

Then he took a leap and joined one of my therapeutic groups, focusing on emotional growth. Sharing his story listening to others, Marcus realized he wasn’t alone, and just that connection, that realization that his feelings were universal, started to shift something deep inside him. He began to see his capacity for sadness as an actual strength, an ability to connect deeply with others. [28:14.2]

A few months later, Marcus shared how embracing his sadness opened him up in ways he never expected. He formed deeper, more authentic relationships, both with his friends and in his dating life. He found a new sense of compassion, not just for others, but for himself, and Marcus’ journey from self-pity to embracing his sadness fully is a powerful testament to the transformative potential of facing our emotions head on.

Sadness is not an obstacle to be overcome, but a pathway to deeper understanding and connection. If we embrace sadness, learn from it, and let it guide us, it’ll lead us to a richer and more authentic life. [28:56.2]

Okay, so let’s recap what we’ve covered so far today. We started by untangling the key differences between sadness and self-pity, highlighting how critical it is to recognize and honor our sadness, without slipping into the quicksand of self-pity. We talked about the transformative power of sadness, how it can lead to psychological growth, increased empathy, and deeper connections with others, and we contrasted this with the isolating and destructive cycle of self-pity.

We went into strategies for embracing sadness in healthy ways, through a therapeutic process and psychotherapy, mindfulness, journaling, embracing a community of like-minded people, and even through the arts, like method acting. I shared Marcus’ story, showing the profound healing and growth that can come from facing our sadness head on and growing from it. [29:45.8]

Now, if we mistake self-pity for sadness and let ourselves wallow in self-pity, we’re not just stuck—I want to really impress this point—we’re actively moving backwards, isolating ourselves further, increasing our stress levels, and potentially spiraling into deeper states of depression. It’s like being in a dark room and choosing to blow out to the only candle we have rather than opening a window to let the light in. The consequences aren’t just unhappy. They’re life-limiting and soul-destroying.

But let’s flip that scenario. Imagine instead a future where we fully embrace sadness. This doesn’t mean that we’re sad all the time. Rather, we’re open and honest about our emotions when they arise. We use our sadness as a signal, a way to deepen our understanding of ourselves in our connections with others. We ride the waves of our sadness when it comes, knowing these waves of sadness will bring us closer to our authentic selves.

As a result, our connections become deeper, because they’re based on genuine understanding and shared vulnerability. Our emotional resilience is stronger, because we’ve exercised it, faced our sadness rather than running from it, and have shown it to ourselves that we can endure it, and our lives are richer, filled with the kind of profound joy that can only come from truly knowing and accepting all the different parts of ourselves. [31:12.4]

As we’re closing out today, I want to leave you with this thought. Embracing your sadness isn’t just about avoiding the pitfall of self-pity. It’s about stepping into a more authentic, connected and emotionally-rich life. It’s about turning the light on in that dark room and discovering that it’s filled with treasures and full of color just waiting to be uncovered. Remember, it’s not just okay to feel sad. It’s healthy, and what matters most is how we respond to our sadness.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this, hit a like or subscribe or follow on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to hear it. Leave a comment. Send a message. I feed off your feedback. If this has helped you in any way, please send it to anyone else that you think could benefit from it.

Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [32:05.2]

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