I was at a funeral last year and it struck me that it is acceptable to cry at a funeral if you were close to the person because the person was important to you. But if the person was not particularly close and you still feel like crying you may find yourself thinking that it is not OK because you were not close enough to them to justify feeling so overwhelmed and sad.

I am interested in the fact that we put such restrictions on when and how much we can feel sad. Only if we are close enough, only if the loss was big enough to justify it etc.

This flies in the face of the fact that sadness is just that. Sadness. It is the normal and natural feeling we have when we feel loss of something valuable to us, perhaps loved. There may be many reasons we feel sadness come up in us at a funeral of someone we were not particularly close to. It may be that it touches off memories of someone we were close to in the past. Or it may be that we saw someone else crying and that was enough to trigger our own sadness. Or it may be that we are feeling loss in some other area of our lives, other than loss of someone by death, i.e., loss of a job or moving to a new town and feeling sad about losing the old town. Having an argument with your spouse can make you feel sad about the distance it creates so you find yourself crying.

It is important here to distinguish between reasons we cry. We cry because we are sad. But we also cry because we feel overwhelmed by strong feeling such as anger and so we discharge it by crying it out, as if the tears wash the feeling away. It can seem like a relief afterward but this relief is due to the fact that we were becoming anxious/tense about the feeling becoming so intense. We felt overwhelmed and so cried to get rid of it. This is not as healthy as the tears from sadness.

Sadness does not have a calendar to it so as with all feelings, it doesn’t know that the death was a long time ago. It just knows that you feel sad right now.

You do not need to have a good reason to feel sad. Your psyche knows you feel sad so you will feel sad and then once the sadness has been felt in its entirety you will find the insight comes that helps you understand what it was about.

Emotions do not have reasons. The reasons come afterward to help us make sense of the feeling.

So sadness is a valuable emotion. It tells us how much we have valued something or someone we have now lost. This is important in loving relationships that we can know how much we have loved those we lose in death. Sadness tells us how much we love.

Gratitude is an old fashioned word that we don’t hear much in everyday conversation these days. Yet, it is the oil that greases the wheels of human relationships and makes us able to get on with each other so much more smoothly than we do without it.

Gratitude is simply thankfulness. I have noticed in some relationships people do not express gratitude for anything others do, but accept the kindness or thoughtfulness of others as if it is just a given, something to take for granted, that is always there. Some even seem to expect kindness and thoughtfulness and become annoyed when it is not readily available, but do not express gratitude for it when it is offered.

Being thankful is a way of recognising that what someone has done for us has been noticed and we are better for it. It recognises that the other person is important and offers them this recognition as a way to say, “I see what you do for me”. In effect this is like saying, “I see you and I value you”.

Close relationships are built on a capacity to accept another person in your life and allow them to affect you emotionally and psychologically.

Gratitude is a way to recognise that the other person has done something that has a beneficial effect on us, and we welcome this closeness. We welcome them into our lives.

Expressing gratitude for what others do for us is also a recognition that we are not islands, self-sufficient to ourselves, but need others and rely on others for much in our lives. These acts of gratitude may be for simple acts such as that someone has cooked a meal for us, or offered to drive us somewhere, or folded our clothes for us, or asked us if we would like a cup of tea/coffee.

Being grateful is a way of recognising the other person’s thoughtfulness, valuing it and letting them know that you understand you are better off because of them.

Often in long-term relationships it can easily slip into an acceptance that the other person in the relationship does what they will do and will continue doing what they do, and that we don’t have to keep thanking them for it. However, this can lead to the kindness, thoughtfulness and generosity of others becoming invisible and not being valued by either party. The solution is gratitude.

The type of gratitude I have in mind is regular small thanks for regular small things. Each time someone does something for you thank them for it. Thanks for making breakfast. Thanks for taking the bins out. Thanks for listening to me rant on. Thanks for tea. Thanks for doing that for me.

Thanks for reading.

We are often afraid of our anger, that feeling anger means we should be guilty. But what have you done by feeling it? Nothing. Feeling is not doing.

We frequently get feeling and acting mixed up as though feeling angry means we have been aggressive. Let’s get a few things straight. Anger is a feeling and aggression is an action or words. One is interior (anger), and the other is exterior (aggression).

The feelings we have are a normal part of being a human being. They are a physiological response we have to experience and so are an integral part of relating with other people, the world around us and our own inner experience.

Take for example, the sadness we have when we lose a person we love in death. This is a normal reaction and not something pathological. We grieve because we have lost someone we loved. The grief is an indicator of the depth of love in us for that person. In this way sadness is to be welcomed because as painful as it is, it is never the last word. Love is.

Often when we have lost someone in death there is also anger toward the loved person. So we feel sadness and anger and love, all mixed in or one after the other in close succession. This can be confusing and cause guilt in us as if we are being unfaithful to the person by being angry with them. We feel what we feel – no judgment. It just is. if you feel angry about them leaving you in death or for any other reason then that is what you feel. Once you feel it deeply enough you can get to the bottom of why you feel angry. Just give yourself enough time to feel all of it without loading it up with judgments.

Keep it simple. Feelings are OK because they are a natural process we experience as much as breathing is a natural process. Feelings are like our emotional skin to the world.

If we let feelings be themselves, feelings will come and go. I often hear people say (as a justification for not crying) “If I start I won’t stop”. This is not sadness talking, it is anxiety. Anxiety that you will be out of control if you let yourself feel sad. So we avoid it. This has the makings of depression if we sit on our feelings and won’t let them be felt.

This brings me to my last point. Experiencing is not expressing. This is the difference between anger and aggression. Anger is an experience, and aggression is an expression of the angry feeling. I am encouraging you to experience rather than express your anger or whatever other feelings you have

Notice in yourself how you relate with your own feelings. How much anxiety do you have about experiencing (not expressing) your feelings? Give yourself close attention so you notice the physical experiences that make up your feelings. This means practicing self-monitoring, or self-observation. If you don’t do it naturally, you may have to learn to do it by practicing is regularly, daily and just notice your inner sensations. What do I feel right now?

Take

Professor Emeritus Allen Frances MD, the distinguished US psychiatrist was Chair of the DSM-IV and writes in Psychology Today of his concern about the quality of changes made in DSM-V to mental disorder diagnostic categories and criteria that have been recently released in the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition).

He lists ten worst changes urging readers not to adopt these diagnoses in their work:

1) Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder: DSM 5 will turn temper tantrums into a mental disorder- a puzzling decision based on the work of only one research group. We have no idea whatever how this untested new diagnosis will play out in real life practice settings, but my fear is that it will exacerbate, not relieve, the already excessive and inappropriate use of medication in young children. During the past two decades, child psychiatry has already provoked three fads- a tripling of Attention Deficit Disorder, a more than twenty-times increase in Autistic Disorder, and a forty-times increase in childhood Bipolar Disorder. The field should have felt chastened by this sorry track record and should engage itself now in the crucial task of educating practitioners and the public about the difficulty of accurately diagnosing children and the risks of over- medicating them. DSM 5 should not be adding a new disorder likely to result in a new fad and even more inappropriate medication use in vulnerable children.

2) Normal grief will become Major Depressive Disorder, thus medicalizing and trivializing our expectable and necessary emotional reactions to the loss of a loved one and substituting pills and superficial medical rituals for the deep consolations of family, friends, religion, and the resiliency that comes with time and the acceptance of the limitations of life.

3) The everyday forgetting characteristic of old age will now be misdiagnosed as Minor Neurocognitive Disorder, creating a huge false positive population of people who are not at special risk for dementia. Since there is no effective treatment for this ‘condition’ (or for dementia), the label provides absolutely no benefit (while creating great anxiety) even for those at true risk for later developing dementia. It is a dead loss for the many who will be mislabeled.

4) DSM 5 will likely trigger a fad of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder leading to widespread misuse of stimulant drugs for performance enhancement and recreation and contributing to the already large illegal secondary market in diverted prescription drugs.

5) Excessive eating 12 times in 3 months is no longer just a manifestation of gluttony and the easy availability of really great tasting food. DSM 5 has instead turned it into a psychiatric illness called Binge Eating Disorder.

6) The changes in the DSM 5 definition of Autism will result in lowered rates- 10% according to estimates by the DSM 5 work group, perhaps 50% according to outside research groups. This reduction can be seen as beneficial in the sense that the diagnosis of Autism will be more accurate and specific- but advocates understandably fear a disruption in needed school services. Here the DSM 5 problem is not so much a bad decision, but the misleading promises that it will have no impact on rates of disorder or of service delivery. School services should be tied more to educational need, less to a controversial psychiatric diagnosis created for clinical (not educational) purposes and whose rate is so sensitive to small changes in definition and assessment.

7) First time substance abusers will be lumped in definitionally in with hard core addicts despite their very different treatment needs and prognosis and the stigma this will cause.

8) DSM 5 has created a slippery slope by introducing the concept of Behavioral Addictions that eventually can spread to make a mental disorder of everything we like to do a lot. Watch out for careless overdiagnosis of internet and sex addiction and the development of lucrative treatment programs to exploit these new markets.

9) DSM 5 obscures the already fuzzy boundary been Generalized Anxiety Disorder and the worries of everyday life. Small changes in definition can create millions of anxious new ‘patients’ and expand the already widespread practice of inappropriately prescribing addicting anti-anxiety medications.

10) DSM 5 has opened the gate even further to the already existing problem of misdiagnosis of PTSD in forensic settings.

Allen Frances hopes that DSM-5 will not result in increases in diagnoses that make normal behaviour into something pathological, for instance normal grief into Major Depressive Disorder.

Let’s hope we have some balance in the way it is adopted. However, knowing the human condition we will have excesses by practitioners keen to make a buck out of fads and treatment programs for what was once normal behaviour.

The longer I am a psychologist the wider the range of “normal” gets. DSM-5 seems to narrow it and make some normal behaviour into pathological.