Why being positive isn’t always the answer

If being told, “don’t worry, be happy, makes you want to scream, then here’s validation that being positive isn’t always the answer.

Show notes

In this podcast episode, we delve into the concept of toxic positivity, which pressures people to show only positive emotions while suppressing negative ones.

We stress the importance of acknowledging genuine emotions, while emphasizing the need to find hope, process negative emotions, and create meaning from adversity. Denying life’s challenges is unrealistic. What’s more, negative emotions are a part of growth. Stepping out of your comfort zone can be uncomfortable but it’s necessary to make progress in life.

Finally, we conclude that forcing yourself to be constantly happy is not helpful. There’s a key difference between a genuinely positive outlook and the pressure to think positively when there’s nothing to be positive about.

Some things to clarify: It was also Viktor Frankel who coined the term tragic optimism. This episode could have been retitled, an homage to Viktor.

And although he was an author, I should have stated his correct title, which is that of an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force.

Transcript

Kate: Welcome to the Midlife Spotlight podcast. I’m Kate Campion –

Sara: and I’m Sara Garska –

Kate: and we’re certified life coaches obsessed with helping you find joy in this next act of your life. Whether it’s reviving your midlife marriage, losing weight, or scratching that “what next” itch, we’re here to share our experience and expertise with you.

This podcast is a weekly dose of YOU time, where you get the tools and tricks to improve your health and happiness. Talking to you is so much fun, so thanks for tuning in. Let’s get started.

Kate: Hi there and welcome to Midlife Spotlight. The show that helps you enjoy your next act. I’m Kate Campion

Sara: and I’m Sara Garska.

Kate: And in today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring the idea that being overly focused on only displaying positive emotions, what we call toxic positivity, might lead to denial or suppression of genuine feelings.

There’s a middle ground between maintaining a positive outlook while also acknowledging and being true to one’s authentic emotions and experiences.

So Sara, this topic came up because you mentioned recently in your life and work that you’ve experienced this kind of what you described as a cult of thinking positive.

Sara: Yeah, so I know we’re going to go into it more, but I think it starts with the law of attraction and that so what I noticed with some clients and some people is this fear of thinking or saying anything negative or feeling something negative that it’s going to make things happen. And that’s not the way you and I see it. Yes, for sure, and we’ve addressed it before and we’ll probably address it forever, there is benefit to being positive. But when we believe that’s the only way we can be, I think it can be detrimental. I call it putting a happy face band aid on something. It’s like, it’s not going to fix it. It’s just going to look good for a moment.

Kate: I was just thinking of our last episode. I think you referred to it as living in happy, happy land.

Sara: Yeah, that’s a good way. And when we described what it looks like when somebody’s feeling negative, but they’re nodding and have a smile on their face, we all know that look. And I don’t think that’s helpful.

And so that’s what, you know, when I mentioned this to you, is like, let’s clear this up for people that the difference between, you know, having a general positive outlook versus what you call toxic positivity.

Kate: So that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to unpack this idea and we’re going to look at it in the context of dealing with negative emotions, particularly around stressful or distressing events.

So when you talked about that culture of thinking positive and pushing away negative feelings, that is what we mean when we talk about toxic positivity.

Now I have to say I have an aversion to the word toxic, I think it’s much overused. But that is kind of the term that is used to describe this.

So it’s the idea or the pressure that a person can only display positive emotions and that they need to suppress, and I think the key word here is suppress, any negative emotions, feelings or reactions to experiences.

Now why this is bad is first of all it denies that shit happens and that life hurts. Right?

Sara: Yeah, because we talked about that before last week. It’s like, yeah, sometimes life is not happy, happy land.

Kate: No, bad things happen and there’s no one, I don’t think there’s anyone that goes into life and exits life without having gone through some bad things.

So just saying that bad things don’t happen is ridiculous. Secondly, it’s denying your own feelings and it also puts pressure on yourself.

So I’m going to unpack this a little bit more too. So first of all, we will probably all experience death of someone, for example, things like that happen right out of the blue.

Bad things happen. A lot of us will experience divorce. It might be our own divorce. It might be the divorce of our parents.

It could even be the divorce of our children and their relationships which would cause a change to how things are.

Those are big bad things that happen. But little bad things happen all the time too. Accidents. I don’t know. Of course, as soon as I start to think of little things, I can’t think of any.

Sara: Illness, yes, you know, your cancer. mean, you know, out of the, you were so young, you could not have anticipated that at all.

Kate: No, and I’ll talk a little bit about that later, actually, because positive thinking was definitely something that came up when I had cancer.

But Victor Frankel, he’s, he’s an amazing, was an amazing writer who survived through the concentration camps. he wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. And he, he uses a few sayings. There’s a few sayings from his book that are widely known that talk about the construction of meaning that I’ll talk about later.

But the thing that came up for me when I was thinking about denying that bad things happen and that life can hurt is that he said “an abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
So let’s think about this. If somebody in your life dies, it’s normal to have an abnormal reaction, eg grieve in whatever way that looks like for you.

Sara Right. Yeah, I sometimes I will say to clients around things, we don’t want to be people who don’t grieve when someone we love dies. I mean, or when a pet dies, you know, or we don’t want or if our child suffers somehow, we don’t want to be people that don’t have feelings. Yeah, it feels like crap when shit happens. But we don’t want to be a person that doesn’t feel it.

Kate: Exactly.

Sara: Cause then we’d be a sociopath..

Kate: 100%. Thanks for bringing that in. If we were just like feeling okay about bad things that happened, that would be abnormal.

Sara: Yeah, that’s a problem.

Kate: Yeah. So if somebody actually comes to you who is feeling distressed and feels bad about being distressed in the situation that they are in is abnormal and when you tell them their response is actually perfectly normal given the context. So I think that’s one thing that I would say against this idea of positive thinking.

I also think, as well as my dislike of the word toxic, I also have a dislike of the word gaslighting.
But it so exists. I mean, gaslighting is so real. And when you deny your own feelings, you gaslight yourself. You know, if you’re sitting there suffering and you’re telling yourself that you’re okay, you are denying the validity of your own experience.

You are telling yourself that you cannot trust yourself and that what you feel isn’t real. And so that is just like, to me, that is such an important thing to recognize and respect in myself.

Emotions are indicators. I actually talked about this in our previous episode. Our emotions say, do more of this, or less of this. If you are feeling bad about a situation and you’re trying to tell yourself that you should just feel good, then you are not honoring what that bad feeling is trying to tell you about what you need to do or who you need to be or what it is around that.

So that’s another key thing. And what it leads to is you don’t pay attention to the signal.

Also, what you resist, you know, this is another little one of those sayings, but another very true one, what you resist persists.

The more that you resist feeling an emotion, the more it will continue to make itself heard until you’re actually able to give it time and attention and process it.

And then the third thing I said that it led to about putting pressure on yourself, like this is something I feel really strongly about, is that if somebody has got a life threatening illness or whatever, telling them to think positive else they would die, which is what some people said to me, is the most insane and cruel thing to do to anybody.

Because you know what? It’s, again, it would be abnormal to just be thinking good about this experience that you’re having.

It would be completely abnormal to say, I must feel positive. I must feel I feel like I’m going to survive. I must feel like I’m being OK. Well, then you feel like you’re to blame for what’s happening.

Sara: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. Even worse is it’s in a not so subtle way saying, Oh, maybe you caused it because you weren’t thinking right. Yeah, I can remember. And I was much younger, like in my 30s and a friend that I had back then had cancer was going through it.
And she’s like, that was the thing that pissed her off the most was when people said anything about positive thinking. Yeah, it’s like it just so that’s not what to say to somebody.

Kate: No, and the funny thing I was just today, I was reading online news, which I try not to do because I don’t really like the news, but it said the headline was cancer taught me to be positive or something ridiculous.

And you know, I’ve thought about that too. And this might not sound very, I don’t know how this will sound, but basically, yes, cancer can make you feel positive if you survive. But most people that end up dying from it probably don’t feel that positive about it, right?

So like any traumatic event, once you actually get through it and you’re able to process it, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later, then that’s different from, oh, I had cancer, so I learned to be positive because to me that headline was doing exactly what we just said. It was essentially saying, oh, you’ve got to make good out of a bad situation when you’re in it, when you’re in it.
The key thing I want to say is when you’re in it.

So I thought a lot about where these ideas actually come from because I do think that they come from some quite legitimate ways of thinking and ways of being, but that they’ve been twisted a little bit with popular culture.

So you mentioned in the beginning, you know, the law of attraction, for example, and I think like both you and I believe in manifestation and, there is definitely an idea within that that you kind of have to stay a vibrational match for what you want.

So, you know, if, for example, if for example you want, let’s take the ridiculous example, you know, live a millionaire, do an Amanda Frances and go and stay in a high end hotel and sit, I mean, sit in the pool and drink the drinks and, you know, act as though you belong there until you feel like you do belong there.

So, I think that that idea of like matching emotions or feelings with with desired outcomes has kind of been twisted to that like positive vibe only.

Sara: Right.

Kate: Yeah. is just my own thinking. I think that’s kind of where it’s come from. You know, if you want good things to happen to you, you have to think good.

Sara: Yeah, the whole vibrational scale, like if you’re feeling, know, because that’s kind of popular or has been popular, like if you’re feeling, you know, something lower like anger or something, how do you bring it up? And it might sound kind of like a nitpicking like, well, isn’t that what you and you do in coaching? You try to help people process or emotions so they feel better, which is true. That’s what we do. Like, but I think the difference is, and, know, we can impact little bit is, yeah, but we’re, we talk about processing the negative feelings, feeling them.

Kate: 100% yeah.

Sara: Letting them kind of clear, then you can be more intentional about what you’re thinking about. Yeah. But what we see, and if, is people that just act like that didn’t exist.

Oh, now I’ve got it. Like, I’m not, I’m not allowed to feel anger. It will, like, keep me from getting this thing that I want. I’m not allowed to feel this. I have to push it away.

Kate: That’s where I was going from the very beginning. And I think, I think the actual reality is being a vibrational match is a lot more complicated than that sort of level. And so people have just kind of like focused on that surface level.

Sara: Right.

Kate: And then the second thing with that is another really common belief that I think feeds into this toxic positivity is that idea about happiness being a choice. And when I thought about that, I thought actually, I think it’s more your response to something is a choice.

And this is, I’m going to quote my friend Viktor Frankl again who said that one about the abnormal things because the other really well known saying of his is, between stimulus and response there’s a space. And in that space is a power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom.

So in plain speak really what that’s saying is something bad or something happens to you and you respond to what that is. But there’s actually bit of a gap, right? I mean, I could. I don’t know. I could go downstairs and scream at my husband.

That would be a stimulus, an unusual one, but you know, it could happen. If I were to do that, there would be a moment, might only be a millisecond where he would make a choice.

Now, knowing our marriage, he’d probably say, what’s happened to you? Are you okay?

Sara: What does Sara do?

Kate: Or he could be like, don’t, you know, like, there’s so many different ways that a person can respond to something that happens. And there is actually a gap where a choice is made, regardless of that choice is subconscious or not. And the thing is we can learn to, I’m going to say, slow down time in some ways, and that when something happens, we can learn strategies that enable us to be more considered and logical in our response rather than just act on autopilot.

I think that’s what I’m trying to say is there’s a difference between saying choose happy. I even think it used to be a slogan on a TV, on a t-shirt, years ago.

There’s a difference between saying happiness is a choice and actually saying your response is a choice. So your response is a choice, but you can’t always choose to be happy in every situation. That would just be weird.

Sara: I just think it’s a weird goal, period, because I look at happiness more as a byproduct. Like we can’t make it happen. But we do things and we get that feeling sometimes and it feels wonderful. And I think because we’re human, we’re like, it’s sort of like coming across some chocolate or maybe like in back in the day across some honey or berries. It’s like, whoo, this feels really good and happiness feels good.

When we make it a goal, like, which I think is a little bit toxic positivity, we’re like, oh, we need to stay happy all the time. I don’t think we’re really happy. We’re pretending to be happy. And I think that’s the difference. And I think when you give up the idea of this happiness, like being the goal, that’s when you really, yes, you’re going to have some negative emotion. But you’re also going to have some joy and you’ll get the things on the other end.

Kate: Yeah, totally. And the third sort of like origin of this belief again in Kate Campion’s opinion is that concept of like everything happens for a reason.

So that’s another one that people sort of shove out when there’s bad things that happen. And what I want to say about that, and I’ll unpack it a little later as well, is that you can make meaning from situations. So it might not be that everything happens for a reason, but it more, more might be after that event has happened, you are able to process it in a way that you can take meaning from it.

And I think also that to me that really ties into people’s need to feel control in their lives. I think I mentioned before my background was actually in social anthropology.

One of the books that we used to study was called Witchcraft of the Azande. And it was about how everything that happened that they couldn’t control, they blamed on witchcraft because what that was doing was it was saying there is always a reason for what happens.

And if there is a reason, there can be for a way of stopping that thing happening so we can have control. Right?

So, you know, I think where this toxic positivity has really come from is, it’s like I said, this sort of mismatch or maybe oversimplification of some actually really key ideas about how it means to live.
But they’ve been filtered in such a way where it’s just like, you’ve got to feel good all the time. You’ve got to choose happy. You’ve got to say that everything’s, everything happened for a reason.
Well, know, Well, I’m not, I don’t want to hurt anyone, so I’m not going to use any examples specifically, but I can certainly think of things terrible things that happen to people that there is no reason for.

Sara: Yeah, as we’re having this conversation, think, yeah, like you said shit happens, and it just does, it’s going to happen to everybody, and maybe that’s the biggest disservice of kind of the positive thinking things, that people feel bad when bad things happen to them, that they think it’s, and now that you’re saying that, I had a conversation with my coach this week because at 61, things on my body are not always perfect anymore.

And I was telling her, I was like, I don’t even like going to the doctor or the dentist or the eye doctor because I feel like I’ve done something wrong.

And, you know, so we coached on that because it was like, I haven’t done anything. I haven’t done anything wrong to, I’m sitting here with my Coke bottle glasses because I have wonky eyes that don’t work together and I didn’t do anything to cause it. But I’ve been oddly feeling guilty about it. What did I do that I’m having this eye problem? And when I got to my own doctor last year, he was just like, no, you’re just getting older.

Then I was like, oh, I am doing something. Something’s wrong. And so I found a new doctor that does vision therapy and she’s like, oh no, you have an actual eye problem that you’ve probably had since childhood.

I’m like, oh, I didn’t cause it. haven’t anything wrong. And so I love this conversation because I think because we’ve gotten so used to this idea that, oh, we need to think positive that when something does happen, we can feel kind of guilty about it. For no good reason.

Kate: Guilt and putting that blame on yourself, that you somehow did something to cause this just not helpful at all.

So what is helpful, I guess, is where we go to with this. There are a couple of things and the first one is hope. I think hope is a really beautiful emotion and when you’re in a difficult situation, having hope for a different future is really key.

I’ve sort of said myself, when I had cancer, like there was a little line from an Emily Dickinson poem or something and it said something like hope is a thing with feathers. It’s a poem. And I had that poem written down and I would just repeat it to myself all the time. All I have to do is have some hope.

Sometimes actually knowing facts of situations can be helpful. Again, sorry to keep it on the cancer thing, but a lot of people, a lot of fear around cancer comes from not knowing actual facts.
Sometimes the facts might not be hopeful. But… Someone said something to me once and it really stuck with me. Yeah, through my cancer journey and she said, all it takes is one person to, I was like, oh my goodness, so many people have died from this. You know, such a small percentage have made it. And she goes, it only takes one. Like only one person needs to have survived this for it to be possible for you as well.

So that was something that gave me hope as well. The other thing that can give you hope when things feel really bad is actively constructing a vision for your future.
Even if that’s just daydreaming or if that’s way more intentional, like actually scripting out, you know, your future self in five years and what she’s doing and things like that.
So those are the things. In fact, now that I just said that a little saying, you know, when something bad often would happen to us, like I’d say, will this matter, five minutes from now, five months from now, five years from now, just just the ability to try and put it into perspective.

So hope is one.

The second strategy that’s useful is to look at if there’s a story that’s happening underneath the negative emotions. This is something coaching can definitely help with.
I don’t know if you want to talk about that.

Sara: Stories. Well, we all have our stories. I was thinking as you were talking, being intentional about how we think about things, but that idea that we had talked about to feel the negative emotion first, that thing taking the hit that you had talked about, I had brought it up with Marcus Aurelius last episode and you brought it up with Victor Frankl. And we’re going to get – I’m going to use the word triggered. Something’s going to happen. We’re going to feel something and that’s okay.

We don’t have to push that away. We can let it be there. Actually, let it be there. It’s only going to be there for, you know, less than two minutes.

And then when the immediate, you know, bad feeling is past, you know, whether it’s a diagnosis or hearing, you know, like someone doesn’t want to see you anymore or, you know, whatever it is, then you can decide like, okay, how do I want to be?

But when we’re talking about like, what gives you hope for me, it’s always like, I can’t control everything around me.

Like, I really can’t. And it’s really going to, I’m just going to repeat something you’ve said. the one thing I can control, some of the most of the time, all the time, but I can control my response to it.
That’s what’s really giving me hope. also just that, you know, treating these things like they’re, whatever comes up, it’s just like neutral.

You know, not putting. Yes, and I’m kind of tripping over my words, but I’m going to stick with it.
Right. When something comes up and we feel that pain or that anger or the grief or that hit, we feel it. And then we can decide how we want to go forward. And you know, if we’re here, like, this is kind of a cliche, but you know, if we’re here, we have 100% overcome everything that has come up for us.

And you know, that gives me hope. I guess if I’m just going to say that if there’s one advantage to being older, it’s that you do realize how resilient you are.
And that gives me hope. I’m just like, I have overcome a lot. And you know, and I love that about me.

Kate: I was just thinking as well. Like in our previous episode when we talked, when I said that about the story that can sit underneath the negative emotions.
In our previous episode, we talked about when you got divorced and the stories or limiting, you know, what we call the limiting beliefs, but in some ways limiting beliefs and stories, you know, that came up for you.

So like, let’s say something really bad has happened, like you have got divorced. It’s like, okay, am I upset because I’m divorced or am I getting divorced or am I upset because of the story I’m now telling myself about how my life is going to be, you know?

And what does this mean about me? What does this mean about my future? And so that is one of the things that can be really useful is and coaching definitely helps with that, like if people struggle with working out what their stories are.

And the third thing is tragic, what’s called, funnily enough, tragic optimism. I think this is a positive psychology term.

Sara: I haven’t used this term, so I can’t wait.

Kate: Just wait until, you know, pop it out in conversation. With positive psychology, I do want to say I think the founder of it was actually making comment the other day that he wished in some ways that he’d called it something different, like the science of wellbeing or something, because he said that whole positive psychology idea has gotten in the way, you know, like people’s misinterpretation that it just means about being happy all the time. It’s gotten in the way of some of the actual things that it’s focused on and tragic optimism is one of them.

So when we talk about tragic optimism, the definition is having a belief that you can still have a happy, contented, hopeful life in the middle of tragedy, Rather than running from negative emotions and experiences, tragic optimists embrace this to gain a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

Now, on a super superficial level, I remember a few years ago there was a lot of research that came out about how people that had children were less happy than people that didn’t have children. I don’t know if they’ve ever made it over your way.

Sara: Oh yeah, I’ve heard that. And was a big thing. I want to say like, I don’t know, 40, 50 years ago, I think from Dear, it was Dear Abby. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Abby.

Kate: Yes.

Sara: Yes, but I think and readers, I keep thinking I’m a blogger, but listeners, you feel free to write.
But I think it was Dear Abby, did a poll and people were like, yeah, I think my life would have been better without kids.

Kate: Yeah. Well, the thing is, a lot of people’s day to day happiness is least. When they are involved in caring for children, I mean, you know, you think back to when you had a baby, for example, and you’re absolutely sleep deprived and like losing it all over the place and thinking, oh my goodness, I can’t do this.

So, you know, and everything that comes around that, like no one’s feeling happy then, but they get a sense of purpose and they get a sense of meaning from it.

And that’s what I talked about a little bit earlier when I said that everything happens for a reason idea is useful after the event has happened to create a sense of meaning for yourself that enables you to move forward with purpose and to use you for an example. You said in our previous episode on getting divorced in your 50s that the woman that you are now, in fact, more so the woman you are becoming, the woman that you can see yourself about to step into. That Sara was never going to come out married. So you can look back with your tragic, well you can look back and you can say I can make some meaning from my divorce because actually this is what it enabled for me.

I think people can put a lot of pressure on themselves to say it’s okay that this has happened, it’s going to work out, like give yourself the time for that to make itself known.

I’m dealing with in my life now that I can’t make sense of. So one day they might make sense to me and that’ll feel great when it does.

Sara: I love that. I think this is such an important topic and I didn’t, know, when we started first, you know, for the people listening. We don’t always know everywhere this is going to go. I mean, we have good notes. We kind of know what we’re doing.

But, you know, sometimes we go these places and I feel like my mind is expanded listening to that. It’s because it’s, yeah, that idea. So I want to kind of clarify because I had not heard the term tragic optimism before. so when you were telling it, so I want to clarify what it is because I’m not totally clear on it.

So is it like if someone’s gone through something bad, like, we’ll go back to me in my divorce. So is tragic optimism me thinking, oh, this is going to be good for me somehow?

Kate: I’m going through this a little bit. You can still feel hope that something might come out of this. This is really tough for me right now. Something good might come out of this. I’m going to cling on to that, that there might be some benefit of this to me in this horrible experience.

Sara: Okay, so it’s not that the optimism is tragic.

Kate: No

Sara: I think you’re going through something that’s tragic or not pleasant and you’re optimistic about it. Yeah. So tragic optimism isn’t a bad thing.

Kate: No, no, no, no, no.

Sara: That’s a good strategy. Yes, that’s the part I’m confused about. It’s just a bad name for something that’s…

Kate: It’s a funny name.

Sara: Yeah, because I thought it was going to be something totally different, being optimistic when there’s no hope and like…

Kate: No, no, that’s…

Sara: That’s not you’re saying.

Kate: I was just thinking as well to use Victor Frankel again. He talked about how a woman in the concentration camp and when she went to die, how when she took her children she comforted her children or something. So she made meaning and purpose of like giving, giving, soothing them I guess or just like helping them through that’s how she was able to go through that situation.
I’m thinking like this is this is really showing my age. Do you remember the movie Titanic and there was a scene in there with the steerage passengers…

Sara: I had a daughter who was a young teenager so we saw it six times.

Kate: So there was a scene that’s always stuck with me so I wonder if you remember it since you watched it six times and it was the one in which steerage passengers tucked up their children.
So they knew that the boat was going to down. So they knew the boat was going to go down. They knew that they were actually all going to die.

They did not share that with their children. Instead, they put them to bed and they like did that. I don’t know. To me, that’s to me, that’s kind of a bit of an example of tragic optimism as well, because this terrible situation is happening.

But you are choosing to do something with it that is connecting to a deeper purpose than your own immediate feelings of happiness, sadness.

I’m going to be this way in this situation because this is going to provide comfort to my child.
And an example I thought about was we have this thing, I think it’s global, called the Oxfam Trailwalker. And it’s when people walk 100 kilometers. And so a couple of years ago, my husband and I were staying in the place where this walk, I don’t know what 100 kilometers will be, 60 miles, but they walk it all in one go. Don’t stop. Walk through the night. It takes hours.

Sara: That’s a long walk.

Kate: And my husband and I were going for a nice little run when we saw all these people walk through the route, you know, which crossed paths with us who were just coming off, coming near the end.

And they looked like death. They just like, they did not look happy. There were like people that were like, I don’t know, they were so inside themselves. It was like, you know, they just got, completely retreated into themselves. Yeah, it did not look like a fun experience.

Funnily enough, it was something that we’d thought about doing. And after that, was like, hell’s no, I’m never doing that.

But you know, they were doing that painful experience for a greater cause, right? So I guess, tied in with that idea is maybe like a bit of a concept of choosing to sacrifice something for a bigger purpose.

And so can you look at this event that’s happened to you for a bigger purpose. I’m thinking here, like people that do find out that they’re dying for or people whose children or partners might get a particularly rare disease and then they might feel motivated to then put money into raising awareness around that or put money into research around it.

So, you know, it’s kind of like that way that you can find some meaning in the situation that you that you find yourself in that might be bigger than your own self.

Sara: Okay, that makes a lot clearer.

Kate: I hope that makes sense now. Yeah, so I guess thinking about these things like we’ve talked about it is actually important to experience negative emotions. I think it’s particularly important because growth is uncomfortable. It is always uncomfortable when you go and do something new for the first time.

It can be physically uncomfortable or mentally uncomfortable. But pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is by definition uncomfortable.

And so if you cannot deal with your experiences, your negative experiences, then you will never, well it sounds very deterministic, but it will be a lot more challenging to grow, if you can’t be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And I’ve got a saying from somewhere along the line, they talked about life being like a game and this is something that I’ve used in less challenging situations than some of the ones I’ve mentioned, but one sort of still required me to, you know, display some resilience and gratitude, is almost to imagine like I’m in a computer game.

And we all know that when you’re in a computer game, there’s multiple levels, right? And every time you go to a new level, there is a new boss to conquer.

There is someone that you have to defeat and you have to defeat that person before you get to the next level.

So it’s not like the happy, happy joy joy skipping through the levels with their flowers and rainbows. They actually have to be able to conquer what it is that sits at that level to move past. And so that’s like something I’ve used in my own life – ok I feel really uncomfortable with this, I’ve got to move past this if I want to move to the next level.

Sara: That’s a helpful analogy.

Kate: Yeah, just think of it like a computer game and you’re playing a particular level and you’ve just got to beat the boss and when you get to the boss, you know, beat the boss, then you get to go to the next level and then there’ll be another boss and that’s okay because every time you get better and better, which does tie into the thing about resilience.

So, I guess my takeaway from these things is toxic positivity, like being forced to feel happy or feeling like you have to feel happy is not actually helpful.

Emotions exist for a reason. Pay attention to what they’re telling you. When you are going through difficult circumstances, think about how you can actually keep hopeful and when the time is right, see if you can find meaning from them.

Don’t push yourself though to find meaning in it straight away. That’s not the answer either. And I just want to say that, you know, if you do need help with any of these areas, head to the show notes and book a call with Sara or myself and find out how we can support you with this. So, is there anything you want to add before we wrap up?

Sara: Just like as always, like when you lead the topic, I always feel like I’m also learning and you know, I love it when you’ve introduced new ideas. And this one to me I think will be so helpful to our listeners because it is confusing. There is so much out there about thinking positive and that was my concern when I brought it up to you that there’s so many people that think they have to think positive to be healthy, to be happy, to find love.

And it’s like, yeah, we want to, but I love defining the idea. The difference between a positive general positive outlook and thinking positive when it’s not appropriate.

Kate: Yeah.

Sara: Yeah. so thank you, Kate.

Kate: That was great. Thank you.

Kate: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode. If you loved what you heard, you can leave a review so we know to keep more of it coming. You can also visit our website at midlifespotlight.com and learn a little bit more about us. We love connecting with you and can’t wait to see you next week.