Accentuate the Positive

We’ve all been there—stuck in a quality time situation with someone who is so deeply negative that it starts eating away at your sanity like someone is cheese-grating your brain. We’ve also all probably been the source of the brain grater. Negativity is a fucking bummer.

But so is life. And I consider complaining to be a sacred practice. It’s good to get the bad vibes out. Holding them in or pretending they aren’t there is just stuffing them down to deal with later, because what you resists, persists. So, how do we walk the line between venting or honoring our frustration and dwelling in it?

Like so many things, I think it starts with grace.

Grace, to me, is the inner voice of the archetypal loving parent. The parent that doesn’t get angry, that sees every mistake as a teachable moment, a bearer of life, and a bringer of unconditional love, a being with infinite forgiveness. This is the type of love we all crave that most of us are denied. It takes a being of exceptional healing to love like that, and most people aren’t doing their healing homework. I think many of us would love to embody that type of love, but when it comes to pouring that love outward, we often fall short. That’s ok. The best place to start practicing loving unconditionally is to you from you.

Reparenting yourself with grace means gently guiding yourself back to the right path every single time you veer off in the wrong direction and doing so with patience, with loving redirection, with understanding. Everyone knows what it feels like to make a mistake, everyone once experienced what it felt like to not know better—why do we berate ourselves so hard when we struggle through the grueling learning process that is Life? Because we were never taught any other way.

An emotionally immature person will meet a mistake with criticism, the more immature they are, the more toxic the criticism will be. Most of our parents and their parents and their parents were emotionally immature. People who haven’t unpacked their own harsh upbringing tend to think that the only way to teach people is to berate them into being better. I don’t think it’s as effective as they would like to believe. We become accustomed to a pattern of negative attention being the only attention we get.

I have heard so many people complain about this in regard to their superiors at work. I only hear from my boss when I’ve done something wrong, I never hear a peep when I’m doing a good job. I hear a lot of people say similar things about their partners, parents, and even friends. There’s this phenomenon on social media where if you were to get 100 positive comments on a post and 1 negative comment, you’d pay more attention to the 1 negative than the far more prevalent positive ones. This comes from that cycle of negative attention.

There are a lot of negative experiences in the world, and most of us have experienced way more trauma, mistreatment, exploitation, and struggle than we have peace, joy, love, abundance, or even simple contentment. The world isn’t set up for us to enjoy our lives. It’s by design. So our default setting is to accentuate the negative over the positive.

This is why cognitive behavioral therapy is so helpful to so many people, it’s main focus is retraining our thoughts in a positive, gentler, and more loving direction. Reframing our experiences as positive (even if that just means calling it a “learning experience” can drastically improve our confidence, our ability to access gratitude, and can make life feel a little bit more bearable. Knowing you have what it takes to get through tough times is seriously half the battle.

A negativity spiral can make a bad moment turn into a bad day, a bad week, a bad life before you know it. It can fuck with your executive functioning. It can exacerbate anxiety and depression. It can cause you to withdraw or others to withdraw from you. We’ve all encountered people (and have probably been this person at one point or another) who have a negative retort for every piece of advice, who bat away every compliment like a cat swatting at a fly. It’s frustrating for the person who’s stuck in the negativity spiral, it’s frustrating for the people who love them and are just trying to help.

So, how do we begin to redirect ourselves toward a more positive mindset? Catch the negative spiral. Pay attention to your thoughts. When you experience something negative in the world, try to notice your reaction to it. After the moment passes, how often are you returning to it in your mind? Are you simmering with rage, shame, or sadness? Are you obsessing over what you could have done but didn’t? What stories are you telling yourself about what happened? What is it triggering in you? What feelings are coming up? What is the spiral and what is true? Is there a way you can give someone the benefit of the doubt? Is there a positive spin you could put on the situation? Or if not positive, a more neutral spin? Can you bring yourself back to center? Can you let it go?

There is a lot to be unhappy about in life. There is so much suffering in the world, so much injustice. Accentuating the positive isn’t about ignoring that fact. It is so important to honor your feelings, even the less desirable ones, after all, the only way out is through. We have to express our feelings to be able to transcend them. Creating positive or neutral stories from some of our struggles is just a practice in restoring balance. Since childhood, many of our minds have been floating in a sea of negativity where we internalized messages like I am unworthy of love or nothing good ever happens to me or I am a burden. Accentuating the positive doesn’t sound like Life is perfect and I am happy no matter what happens to me, it’s more like I made a mistake but I am still loveable or I am a work in progress or shit fucking happens but this too shall pass.

Practice giving yourself credit for all the things you survived. Celebrate your wins like you would a friend’s, and if you wouldn’t celebrate a friend’s, work on that.