Sadness

Posted on: January 23, 2018

Katherine E. Watkins is a Santa Monica psychiatrist and senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation. The overall goal of her research is to improve the quality of care for individuals with behavioral health disorders, by developing, implementing, and evaluating innovative treatments and treatment models of health care delivery.

Many people when confronted with someone who is sad feel pressure to fix the person’s sadness and make it go away: to say or do just the right thing. I know that I did: I thought I was supposed to cheer up the person suffering, as though they had a problem to be solved. Eventually, I figured out that I could not “fix” someone’s sadness. Yet, the desire to make the sadness go away didn’t leave me. I also didn’t like feeling sad myself, and would try to avoid it through distractions. (more…)

Posted in: Fundamentals