Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call the “bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.

I’ve concluded that bittersweetness is not, as we tend to think, just a momentary feeling or event. It’s also a quiet force, a way of being, a storied tradition—as dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.

Keltner taught Docter and his team the functions of each major emotion: Fear keeps you safe. Anger protects you from getting taken advantage of. And Sadness—what does Sadness do? Keltner had explained that Sadness triggers compassion. It brings people together.

One of the cornerstones of Keltner’s research, which he summarized in his book Born to Be Good, is what he calls “the compassionate instinct”—the idea that we humans are wired to respond to each other’s troubles with care. Our nervous systems make little distinction between our own pain and the pain of others, it turns out; they react similarly to both. This instinct is as much a part of us as the desire to eat and breathe.

Keltner discovered another of its purposes: When we witness suffering, our vagus nerve makes us care. If you see a photo of a man wincing in pain, or a child weeping for her dying grandmother, your vagus nerve will fire. Keltner also found that people with especially strong vagus nerves—he calls them vagal superstars—are more likely to cooperate with others and to have strong friendships. They’re more likely (like Rolf) to intervene when they see someone being bullied, or to give up recess to tutor a classmate who’s struggling with math.

Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they’re vigilant types who take good care of their health. They’re strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They’re good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle. For an entrepreneur, the psychiatrist Amy Iversen told a publication called Management Today, the tendency to ruminate “can be channeled into obsessively thinking through a user experience, advertising strategy, or how to pitch a new idea, in the same way a creative could use this energy to memorise every line of a film script, or hone the finest detail of a play’s production.”

We often notice suffering (our own and that of others) but quickly dismiss it and thus do not allow ourselves to be emotionally touched or moved by the suffering.” But perhaps none of this is possible without first cultivating self-compassion. This may sound like the opposite of what you’d do to encourage humility. But many of us engage, without even realizing it, in a constant stream of negative self-talk: “You’re terrible at this.” “Why did you screw that up?” But, as Jazaieri observes, “There’s no empirical evidence to suggest that beating ourselves up will actually help us change our behavior; in fact, some data suggests that this type of criticism can move us away from our goals rather than towards them.” Conversely, the more gently we speak to ourselves, the more we’ll do the same for others. So the next time you hear that harsh internal voice, pause, take a breath—and try again. Speak to yourself with the same tenderness you’d extend to a beloved child—literally using the same terms of endearment and amount of reassurance that you’d shower on an adorable three-year-old.

Keltner—the psychologist-phenom with the golden locks, surfer aura, and sad eyes, who’d worked with Pete Docter and his band of Pixar filmmakers—has had plenty of cause to practice his own self-compassion. When I caught up with him recently, his youngest daughter had just left for college, leaving his home too quiet and empty. His mother was lonely, depressed, and had a heart condition. And Rolf, his adored younger brother, had died of colon cancer, at age fifty-six, after a long struggle with the disease. Keltner was reeling, and suffering a profound sense of rootlessness. He felt as if he were missing part of his soul. “There’s no doubt my life will be full of sadness for however many more decades I get,” he told me. “I’m not sure I’ll get a sense of place and community in this life.”

Alain has written on the wisdom of melancholy, and just as the Bittersweet Quiz would predict, his favorite word seems to be poignant. To him, it’s poignant that we tend to choose lovers who have the same difficult traits that our parents had. It’s poignant that we get cross with people when really we’re anxious that we don’t matter to them enough. And a Ferrari owner is not shallow and greedy, but animated by a poignant need for love.

Philosophers call this the “paradox of tragedy,” and they’ve puzzled over it for centuries. Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow, when the rest of the time we’ll do anything to avoid it? Now psychologists and neuroscientists are considering the question, too, and they’ve advanced various theories: A moonlit sonata can be therapeutic for people experiencing loss or depression; it can help us to accept negative emotions rather than ignoring or repressing them; it can show us that we’re not alone in our sorrows.

Yet the moonlight sonatas of the world don’t simply discharge our emotions; they elevate them. Also, it’s only sad music that elicits exalted states of communion and awe. Music conveying other negative emotions, such as fear and anger, produces no such effect. Even happy music produces fewer psychological rewards than sad music, concluded Sachs, Damasio, and Habibi. Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it’s sad music that makes us want to touch the sky.

The ancient Greeks called it pothos, which Plato defined as a yearning desire for something wonderful that we can’t have. Pothos was our thirst for everything good and beautiful. Humans were lowly beings imprisoned in matter, inspired by pothos to reach for a higher reality. The concept was associated with both love and death; in Greek myth, Pothos (Longing) was the brother of Himeros (Desire) and the son of Eros (Love). But because pothos had that quality of aching for the unattainable, the word was also used to describe the flowers placed on Grecian tombs. The state of longing strikes contemporary ears as passive, gloomy, and helpless, but pothos was understood to be an activating force. The young Alexander the Great described himself as “seized by pothos” as he sat on a riverbank and gazed into the distance; it was pothos that set Homer’s Odyssey in motion, with the shipwrecked Odysseus longing for home.

“Longing itself is divine,” writes the Hindu spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. True longing brings up spurts of bliss.”

At the heart of all these traditions is this pain of separation, the longing for reunion, and, occasionally, the transcendent achievement of it. But separation from what, exactly? From our soul mates, the location of whom is one of our great life tasks, the Platonic tradition suggests. From the womb, if you take a psychoanalytic view. From comfort in our own skin, usually because of some past hurt or trauma we’re struggling to heal.

The most famous Sufi poem, he said, The Masnavi, written by the thirteenth-century scholar Jalal al-Din Rumi, is all about longing: “Listen to the story told by the reed,” it begins, “of being separated….Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back.”

Borowiecki used linguistic analytic software to study 1,400 letters written by Mozart, Liszt, and Beethoven throughout their lives. He traced when their letters referred to positive emotions (using words like happiness) or negative ones (words like grief), and how these feelings related to the quantity and quality of the music they composed at the time. Borowiecki found that the artists’ negative emotions were not only correlated with but also predictive of their creative output. And not just any negative emotions had this effect. Just as scholars of minor key music found that sadness is the only negative emotion whose musical expression uplifts us (as we saw in chapter 2), Borowiecki found that it was also “the main negative feeling that drives creativity.” [Emphasis added.]

studies also show that flashes of insight are more likely to happen when we’re in a good mood. We also know that clinical depression—which we might think of as an emotional black hole obliterating all light—kills creativity. As Columbia University psychiatry professor Philip Muskin told The Atlantic magazine, “Creative people are not creative when they’re depressed.”

(The very word sacrifice is from the Latin sacer-ficere, which means “to make sacred.”)

The theft made international news; Scotland Yard was assigned to the case. After three long years of detective work, the police would eventually recover the violin, which had been handed off from one criminal group to another. But in the meantime, Min had used her insurance money to buy another, lesser instrument, and the violin market was bid up. Her Strad was now worth millions. She couldn’t afford to buy it back. It was purchased by an investor, in whose home it still sits. She descended into depression, stopped playing altogether. At the time of the theft, she’d been about to release an important album and launch a worldwide concert tour. It was meant to mark her arrival as one of the most talented violinists in the world. Instead she lay in bed, shattered. She stayed that way for years. The only headlines about Min Kym reported the news of her stolen instrument. Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.

She saw that the great love of her Strad had been real, but so were other things: a crippling perfectionism; a sense that she wasn’t allowed to be human; the realization that she had nothing to show for her life apart from her musical talent. She realized that she had other creative offerings to make. She decided to write her story.

“But I’ve been reborn. When one door closes, another opens—all the clichés about rebirth are true. There’s space now for a new me to emerge. It’s not something I would have chosen. I would have happily been a complete unit with my violin for the rest of my life. But when you do recover from any loss—when you heal, when your soul starts to heal from the shock—a new part grows, and that’s where I am now. I probably won’t ever be a soloist again. But I’ll take that loss and create new art forms with it.”

The tragedies that surrounded my mother became part of her; later, they became almost all of her. She was consumed by feelings of fear and unworthiness. But she managed to hold them at bay when I was a child. Looking back now, I see the signs of what was to come: how she panicked if I wandered steps away at the supermarket; how she forbade many normal childhood activities—climbing a tree, riding a horse—that she deemed too dangerous; how she said that she loved me so much that she would, if she could, wrap me up in cotton. She meant this as an expression of love. I understood that it was also a prison sentence.

Over time, I learned to mistrust the cease-fires. I started to approach our house after school with a stomachache, grew skilled at gauging her mood the moment I entered. I felt I mustn’t do anything to upset her equilibrium or trigger her rage. I became more aware of her childhood sorrows and of her present, gaping maw of emptiness. I started to dream of escape—of the day I’d go to college and be free of her. But I also longed to stay. She was still my mother. And I wanted desperately, more than I’ve ever wanted anything before or since, to fill the chasm inside her, to take away her hurt. I couldn’t think of my mother’s tears—which I often caused—without crying myself. As the youngest child, I mattered so much to her, I mattered too much, I mattered like the sun. To grow up was to condemn her to darkness.

Had she been struck down, at that time, by a ten-wheel truck, or a swift and incurable disease, I would have been one part relieved and three parts devastated; and for this there would have been funeral rituals, there would have been a language for the pain, a way for others to understand it. As it was, it never occurred to me to mourn her. Who would think to grieve a mother who was pulsatingly alive and daily appearing, Gorgon-like, at the other end of a dorm room telephone?

I couldn’t help comparing my mother, who carried the weight of the world on her anxious face, with Lexa’s mother, a filmmaker who’d come to pick her up the day before, wearing a slim leather jacket and an armful of silver bangles. I hated myself for noticing the difference between them.

Remember the linguistic origins of the word yearning: The place you suffer is the place you care. You hurt because you care. Therefore, the best response to pain is to dive deeper into your caring. Which is exactly the opposite of what most of us want to do. We want to avoid pain: to ward off the bitter by not caring quite so much about the sweet. But “to open your heart to pain is to open your heart to joy,” as the University of Nevada clinical psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes put it in a Psychology Today article he wrote called “From Loss to Love.” “In your pain you find your values, and in your values, you find your pain.”

Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, they’ve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuse—or whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes we’ll feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as “I should be over this,” “It’s all my fault,” and “Life is unfair.”

As Angelou’s story suggests, many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suffered. Angelou did this through writing, but the process takes many forms.

the “wounded healer,” a term coined by the psychologist Carl Jung in 1951, is one of humanity’s oldest archetypes. In Greek myth, the centaur Chiron was injured by a poisoned arrow that gave him terrible pain, but also curative powers. In shamanistic cultures, often healers must first undergo an initiation process involving great misery. In Judaism, the Messiah’s powers derive from his own suffering; he surrounds himself with the poor and the sick because he’s one of them. And in Christianity, Jesus is the wounded healer who cures bleeding women, hugs lepers, and dies on a cross to save us all.

There were many possible responses to this kind of family life. Denfeld’s mother, herself a victim of rape and violence, racked by guilt at having failed to protect her children, died by suicide. Denfeld’s brother tried to escape his history by becoming what Denfeld calls, in her searing essay “The Other Side of Loss,” “the king of normal.” He wore a button-down shirt, carried a pocket protector, tried to wipe away the stains of their childhood. He tried in vain, and he died by suicide, too. “I just wanted to be a good boy,” he said before he left.

Every laugh we share, every touch, is a reminder to me that reality can, indeed, change. From trauma rises the soul, incandescent and perfect. It was always there, waiting to be embraced….

The best way to heal yourself? Heal others. I don’t believe we can escape our past. My brother and mother tried it, and it didn’t work. We have to make friends with sadness. We have to hold our losses close, and carry them like beloved children. Only when we accept these terrible pains do we realize that the path across is the one that takes us through.

Franz Kafka was one of the great European novelists of the twentieth century. But there’s another story, this one written not by Kafka but about him, based on the memoirs of a woman named Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin, just before his death. In this story, Kafka takes a walk in the park, where he meets a tearful little girl who just lost her favorite doll. He tries and fails to help find the doll, then tells the girl that the doll must have taken a trip, and he, a doll postman, would send word from her. The next day, he brings the girl a letter, which he’d composed the night before. Don’t be sad, says the doll in the letter. “I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.” After that, Kafka gives the girl many such letters. The doll is going to school, meeting exciting new people. Her new life prevents her from returning, but she loves the girl, and always will. At their final meeting, Kafka gives the girl a doll, with an attached letter. He knows that this doll looks different from the lost one, so the letter says: “My travels have changed me.” The girl cherishes the gift for the rest of her life. And many decades later, she finds another letter stuffed into an overlooked cranny in the substitute doll. This one says: “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”

that she could no longer understand what I was saying well enough to interrogate it. I still long for my mother’s life to have unfolded differently, still wish that she’d loved herself, or even liked herself just a little. But I can’t change her past. And here in the present, I know that whatever wounds we’ve inflicted on each other, in her way she succeeded spectacularly as a mother: I never felt unworthy, the way she did. Quite the opposite. My mother told me constantly, ever since I was a child, that the days my siblings and I were born were the best days of her life, and I believed her. I still believe her. Everything is broken, everything is beautiful—everything, including love. And in the end, nothing could take away my mother’s love for me, or mine for her.

The original dominant American culture, established by the white settlers who arrived in New England, reflected the tenets of Calvinism, a religion in which heaven existed, but only for those predestined for it. Hell was a terrifying place, abundant descriptions of which gave many children chronic nightmares. The doctrine of predestination meant that there wasn’t much you could do to escape your assignment of either heaven or hell. But what you could do was show, by virtue of your ceaseless labor, that you were destined for the former. To do this, you had to till the land, clean the kitchen, and never seek pleasure for its own sake. There was no place for sorrow or joy—there was only the need to show that you were one of the winners, with a one-way ticket to heaven.

Today, Susan David teaches clients, including the United Nations, Google, and Ernst & Young, about “emotional agility,” which she defines as a process of “holding difficult emotions and thoughts loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to ignite change in your life.”

if we don’t allow ourselves difficult emotions, like sorrow and longing, then these feelings will undermine us at every turn. “Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger,” Susan told the audience in her popular TED Talk. “Psychologists call this amplification. Like that delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator—the more you try to ignore it…the greater its hold on you. You might think you’re in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you.

“Businesses are often trying to shape themselves to be safe, innovative, collaborative, and inclusive,” she told me. “But safety holds hands with fear; innovation holds hands with failure; collaboration holds hands with conflict; and inclusion holds hands with difference. These business outcomes depend on an openness to the bittersweet. Indeed, on normalizing bittersweet.”

The icon of a woman gazing longingly at the ocean is at the heart of fado music, which is the musical expression of saudade, the uniquely Portuguese word meaning (as we saw in chapter 2) an intimate, melancholic longing, laced with joy and sweetness. Saudade defines the city; it’s the namesake of countless cafés, pastry shops, and music bars; it’s the key to the Portuguese soul.

The nausea is related to these aspects of grief, but its true source, I think, is the realization that made my son cry on the last day of third grade: What once was will never be again.

My brother was eleven years my elder. He taught me how to ride a bike, he invented a game in which if I broke this absurd rule or that one, I’d have to go to “Proper School”—I can still see him at the phone in the family kitchen, pretending to talk to the teachers who ran the imaginary school. In the days after his death, all these memories crowded my mind at five in the morning. It all happened so many years ago. What once was will never be again.

By turning his experience into poetry, Issa invites us to the shared sorrow of being mortal, the communal longing of being human; he guides us to the love that I’ve always felt to be the unseen power source of all those sad songs with which we’ve inexplicably filled our playlists. This is the ultimate paradox: We transcend grief only when we realize that we’re connected with all the other humans who can’t transcend grief because they will always say, because we will always say: But even so, but even so.

Death became “shameful and forbidden,” as Philippe Ariès wrote in his account Western Attitudes Toward Death. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” Mourners began to shoulder an “ethical duty to enjoy oneself,” observed the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer in his work Death, Grief, and Mourning, and an “imperative to do nothing which might diminish the enjoyment of others.” They must “treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence,” and the rest of us “give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.”

But the only thing that consoled them was when we said that the pain of goodbye is part of life; that everyone feels it; that they would feel it again. This would seem a depressing reminder, but it had the opposite effect. When children (especially those growing up in relative comfort) grieve a loss, they’re crying in part because we’ve unwittingly taught them a delusion—that things are supposed to be whole; that real life is when things are going well; that disappointment, illness, and flies at the picnic are detours from the main road.

In 2012, she gave a popular TED Talk called “Older People Are Happier,” describing her surprising findings that older people tend to enjoy the attributes I just described. Of course, folk intuition has always held that age confers wisdom. But Carstensen upended generations of assumptions about why this might be so. As Atul Gawande describes in his insightful book Being Mortal, Carstensen found that the key isn’t age, per se, or the experience that comes with it, but rather the awareness of impermanence. It’s the knowledge that time is limited. It’s the sense of “but even so.”

She thought that the real answer was the state of poignancy, which the elderly visit much more than the young (and which, as we know, is the heart of bittersweetness). Poignancy, she told me, is the richest feeling humans experience, one that gives meaning to life—and it happens when you feel happy and sad at the same time. It’s the state you enter when you cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending. When we tear up at that beloved child splashing in a rain puddle, she explains, we aren’t simply happy: “We’re also appreciating, even if it’s not explicit, that this time of life will end; that good times pass as well as bad ones; that we’re all going to die in the end. I think that being comfortable with this is adaptive. That’s emotional development.”

A rabbi walks with a little boy down a path, and they come across a dead bird. The boy asks why the bird had to die. “All living things die,” explains the rabbi. “Will you die?” asks the boy. “Yes,” answers the rabbi. “Will I?” “Yes.” The boy looks distressed. “Why?” he asks urgently. “Because that’s what makes life precious,” says the rabbi.

A parent will mourn, of course. But “your grief of someone’s death or disease is only because they are yours. Even the overwhelming love you feel for your child comes in an attached or nonattached version. Loving your child for what he is, is one thing. And loving your child because he is yours, is another. Love without attachment is your love for your son because of what he is. Loving your son because he is yours is love with attachment.”

At first, I’m confused. If you truly believe that the soul lives on, that it’s all a near-infinite cycle of rebirth, shouldn’t this belief ease even the most grievous losses? But the doctrine of reincarnation doesn’t solve the pain of separation between two attached souls, Ami explains. “It’s unlikely those two souls will meet again. And who knows where one will land and where the other will land. And that is a true loss.”

the oldest problem, the deepest dream—the pain of separation, the desire for reunion. That’s the nub of human heartache and desire, regardless of your religion, birth country, personality.