Whenever it doesn’t work to accept life on life’s terms and feel our sadness, our line has gotten snagged on something deeper.

It’s a breeze to focus on outer actions; it’s a bear to face everything within. Evasion is a wily coyote. But let’s repeat: if we’re feeling stagnation, discouragement or depression because we’ve come to believe self-knowledge isn’t worth bupkis, we’re skimming over something important in some corner of ourselves. In relation to this, there are two decidedly different emotions, sadness versus depression, that will be helpful to sort out because of the way they affect our ability to relate to others.

In the most clear-cut cases, the two look nothing alike. We probably know this from our own individual past experiences with each. But sometimes they drop in at the same time, intermingling and overlapping. Sadness can make us believe there is no depression present. Or we might believe that our feelings of sadness and pain are purely norma. But we overlook destructive elements lurking nearby. What we need to do is tease out any unproductive depression—and why it’s here—in spite of the presence of reasonable and rational sadness.

So what’s the diff? In sadness, we accept a painful life situation as being something we don’t have the power to change. There’s no self-pity and we know this too shall pass. It feels like a healthy growing pain that’s free from hopelessness. We’re not superimposing emotions, nor hiding them or shifting them.

With depression, the outer situation might be the same, but the pain we feel bleeds beyond to other reasons. Perhaps we still can’t change things external to us, but we can change what’s going on inside us. To do that, we’d need to look at some emotions that we’d rather not have to face, like hurts, resentments, envies, or our reaction to injustices.

But we’re powerless to change how we feel as long as we don’t fully understand what is going on. Depression, then, directly links with frustration and helplessness. Weird as it may seem, if we have a healthy attitude about a situation, we won’t feel helpless even if we’re powerless to change it. Depression crops up when we have a demand that something needs to change—pronto.

The log in our own eye that we fail to see is that there is always something we can change right now, which is our attitude. And that’s always, always, always an inside job. Whenever it doesn’t work to accep