Four Signs of Self Care Struggles: Forced Positivity
Part two of this four part series is a term called forced positivity or what psychologist Susan David called “toxic positivity.” Her work focuses on emotional agility and I would encourage you to read more about at her work on her website. From her work and my own experience as a therapist, this is a viewpoint in where the focus is only on the positive side of any experience. This narrow focus creates a binary experience of emotions; only positive and happy. It fails to take into account the vast and numerous emotions humans experience every second of everyday. It also make “negative emotions” more negative and fails to see the larger experience of being human in the world.
It’s Okay to Have Negative Emotions
Negative emotions won’t kill us even thought our physical body likes to provide a very different message. A wide range of emotions is the experience of being human. We have moments where we feel happy and content with our lives and feel like there is a flow to life. Something small or innocuous like a comment or minor fender bender can quickly have us seeing red. This quick shift along the emotional road can happen for a variety of reasons; past experiences, hormones, to whether we’ve eaten recently; a myriad of other influences.
It helps us become more fully formed human when we can acknowledge both the positive and not so positive emotions. Human are a complex range of many things. Because of this complexity, we can decide to engage in our emotions on whatever level that feels safe. We don’t need to hang out in a purely happy state and we don’t need to hang out in a purely negative state. While one feels really good and the other doesn’t, neither serves a healthy purpose. It makes us crave and desire one over the other and it robs us of a more robust emotional life. This emotional life connects us to powerful experiences with deeper meanings and healthy relationships.
Dual Experiences are Human
People are complex creatures and most likely the most complex in the world. We can see both the benefit of staying positive and acknowledging the negative emotion. We can believe multiple things at one time. We can hold contradictory options and engage in behaviors that don’t align with her values. These contradictions don’t make us good or bad; they make us the complex beings we are. It often does not make sense that we can hold multiple experiences at one time. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable and it can be confusing. As humans, while we are complex, we do like experiences to be understandable. Our brain craves stories that explain our experiences. It searches for simplicity to decrease the uncomfortable or undesirable. Our brain want things to be simple which can mean focusing on one specific story. This one store can mean focusing on only one emotional experience. Often this is staying in the positive because it feels good.
How Can I be Okay with the Negativity?
Being comfortable with negative emotions is a skill that requires work. When we can experience negative emotions, we can experience them like a short visit with a friend or family. We know going in that we are not going to stay long. We don’t plan on moving in, just a quick check in and possible update with plans to come back when it is convenient. Mindfulness is one way to build this skill. Through mindfulness we identify what is happening and acknowledge it. We can try to be with is for even short amounts of time, and like a short visit, we decide when we need to leave. We can always revisit, stay in touch through other ways, but we know we are not going to move in and make it a permanent living arrangement.
Next post we will discuss the third sign of problem solving as a way to be focused on others.
