No Need to Wilt in the ‘Be Positive’ Buzzword That Has Taken The World by Storm.
But hear me out first!
#1- Be Positive When All You Are Feeling is It's Downright Opposite — Nah!
‘Be positive’ seems to have become the buzzword in today’s mindset and self-help landscape. Contrary to popular belief, my take is that a feeling needs to be fully acknowledged before it can be released, especially if it is a negative emotion.
“What you resist, will not only persist but grow in size.”
— Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist)
One needs to sit with a low feeling and really experience it for a while instead of trying to push past it, deliberately.
Whatever we resist, persists.
I have experienced it first hand.
The simple act of sitting with a low mood and analysing the root cause of the feeling be it:
- an outburst of rage or anger,
- a downward spiral of sadness or gloom,
- a wave of grief or anxiety;
helps in reducing its intensity.
The feeling aches to be experienced by the soul.
The emotion yearns to be embraced by the heart.
The hurt longs to be witnessed by the self.
One. More. Time.
Then. Some. More.
Before. It. Chooses.
To. Ebb. Out. Of. You.
#2- Don’t Go All In, Into a Mode of Self Denial
Being too darn positive in the face of a crushing negative emotion is blatant self-denial.
It is akin to denying child that was bullied at school a good cry and a reassuring hug.
No amount of positive thinking jargon will do what a hug and a good cry will, in that moment.
All that ‘be positive’ jargon will fall flat on his face.
All he wants to do is get a comforting hug from his mama and vent his heart out.
He wants to bare the burdens he’s been carrying in his heart on the bus ride home.
He wants to let it all out.
All the emotions of being humiliated have got choked in his heart.
They need to be released from his brain.
After he has let it all out and indulged in carefree play with his favourite hamster and bunny for a good three hours, he will gravitate to his set point of normalcy.
It is a process. It must be followed through. But refusing to hear him out and shoving an overoptimistic canary coloured post-it message that screams ‘Be Positive’, on his face is such a no no.
#3- Give Yourself Time to Process the Hurt
It is for this very reason that the adage goes,
“Time heals all wounds.”
What has helped me deal with break-ups and setbacks has been the process of journaling.
Journaling is a sure shot method to compress the healing time from a couple of sad, brooding months to a crisp, short couple of days to a few weeks at most. Depending on the gravity of the hurt.
#4- Journaling is Such a Fantastic Tool For Collapsing Time and For Releasing the Impact of the Raw Emotion
If and when I have been humiliated, insulted, or not given my due, I release all my frustration and sadness onto reams of paper.
Even fingers to keyboard does the trick.
There is something so sacrosanct about the physical act of holding a pen in your hand and scribbling all your feelings down on a spiral note book.
It releases all the pent-up feelings that have got bottled in my system.
Research has shown that by naming the feeling, the stress response is reduced from the brain.
In psychological parlance, it is known as ‘name it to tame it.’
Recognising the emotion and labelling it translates the Big Emotion into Smaller Emotions. The brain is suddenly not so triggered any more.
It is a great coping mechanism for the mind.
After brain dumping all my emotions onto paper, I feel a sense of deep release.
All the toxicity has been channelised in the form of writing and I’m ready to start life on a clean slate.
I won’t say that the feeling disappears.
It. Definitely. Dissipates.
Big. Time.
Swoosh!
Ctrl + Alt + Del.
Vanished. Into. Thin. Air.
What happens is that its intensity is diminished to such a large extent, that I feel I have been stripped of the raw toxicity of the spurt of emotion.
By journaling, I’m able to collapse the time I would have taken to feel whole and healed again.
I’ve managed to compress time.
#5-What Happens After Journaling
Now I just have a residual 10 percent feeling left that lingers for a while. As I get on with my day to day tasks and activities, that feeling gets diluted and in a few days there is a spring in my step.
I wouldn’t have been able to come back to my emotional thermostatic point so quickly had I not unburdened my soul onto those sheets of paper.
Another offshoot of the exercise if that a few weeks later, I become objective towards the whole scenario.
I’m evaluating the whole situation with so much clarity of thought.
I’ve gleaned the wisdom and shed the negative emotion like snake skin.
It is not like I wouldn’t have been able to reach that level of objectivity.
But it would have taken way longer.
#6- You Acquire Layers of Resilience
Resilience is developed when we deal with challenges and learn lessons from the setbacks.
With journaling, the objectivity towards the setback happens much quicker.
We become our own wisest critic.
In two weeks, we are able to acquire layers of resilience and coping strength to move on with life.
Come back at life with full gusto.
For a human being, resilience is a very sought after trait. The one that helps them bounce back after all kinds of curveballs that life throws at them.
Resilient people are often the most successful ones.
It can be summarised that resilience can be inculcated by:
1) acknowledging negative emotions without trying to be positive,
2) sitting with the emotion for a while,
3)processing it by journaling about the whole situation that stirred the emotion up in the first place,
4) objectively evaluating the whole situation,
5) learning the lesson it was trying to teach us, and
6) moving on with life on a clean slate.
If you enjoyed this story, you may want to consider giving Shiitaal Budhrauj
a follow. An interesting read by me:
How Your Start to Discover Yourself by Writing Every Day
And also this:
