Postive, Negative, Stuck

There’s been a social media trend the last few years that’s overflowed into our IRL relationships: positive v. negative.

We use the terms to refer to people, emotions, thinking, and vibes. Ultimately, these are meaningless labels that serve to dismiss our own (and others’) emotions. The labels also support avoidance of the kinds of conflict that can ultimately foster healing and greater intimacy in our relationships. The ways we’ve started using positive and negative also has the potential to shame those struggling with their mental health.

Comfort is lovely on a slow morning, curled up with blankets, warm beverage in hand; but it can often work against us when living our lives. When we limit our choices to those that provide comfort, we prevent growth. We prevent ourselves from learning new things. We prevent opportunities for true intimacy. We prevent opportunities to challenge ourselves. We prevent ourselves from seeing our full potential.

We justify discomfort as a path to growth when we talk about trying new activities or experiences. It’s often less acceptable when we’re talking about emotions. We’re living in a time when many of us work very hard to avoid discomfort, as we may not have been taught how to effectively cope with it at different points in our lives.

Maybe we had loved ones who taught us that feelings were scary. Maybe our loved ones did not have the capacity for discomfort themselves, so dismissed our emotions. Maybe we were raised in an environment in which acknowledging discomfort risked our livelihoods or social standing.

Then there’s the macro-level influence: “positive thinking” is being sold to us as a fix all for problems—a modern day snake oil.

Let’s start with emotions. Oftentimes when people are identifying “negative” emotions, they choose anger, sadness, anxiety, guilt, shame, and stress. When people share emotions they label as “positive,” they typically choose happiness, excitement, and love.

We tend to label emotions as negative when they create discomfort for ourselves or others and positive when they are emotions that don’t cause discomfort.

When we label emotions as positive or negative, we block ourselves from engaging with them in ways that support greater understanding of ourselves and personal growth. How do we engage them?

One method I share with my clients is to treat emotions like messengers—messengers who aren’t very effective communicators.

Try this: When you start to experience an emotion, think of it as a knock at the proverbial door. Answer it. See who is there—what’s the messenger’s name? Then, as it’s an unexpected visitor, ask why it came by? What does it have for you/want to tell you?

Remember: emotions are not the best communicators. You may have to dig a little bit to get to the reason they are coming by. Emotions are never invalid, but they may not send the message they intend to send.

We have so much to learn from engaging with these emotions, rather than hiding from them. Practicing on the more comfortable emotions allows for us to start building the skill. Get used to not having answers right away. It might take some practice, but getting into the practice of engaging with emotions is the goal.

Now for those negative people….

Just like emotions, people are not inherently positive or negative. Life isn’t a Disney movie. We are complex individuals. In season 2 of The White Lotus, Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya character has a scene in which she panics and forces a tarot reader out of her hotel room for being “negative” after she told Tanya that her husband was having an affair.

We do this in our own lives, too. We often label people who say things we don’t want to hear or who make us uncomfortable as negative.

Before I continue, it’s important to clarify that when I talk about feeling uncomfortable or hearing things we don’t want to hear, I’m not referring to abusive behaviors, grooming, or intentionally harmful comments.

Labeling the person as negative allows for us to avoid our own uncomfortable emotions and outsource the management of those emotions. If we “get rid of” or invalidate the source of the discomfort, we also don’t need to validate our own emotions.

The other side of this is: we often label people who are struggling with their own mental health as negative. Many of the behaviors or interactions we have with others—and even our own thinking—that we label negative are the symptoms of mental health concerns. Other times what we label as negative are reasonable reactions to difficult life circumstances.

The catch is: we often do it while touting how much we support people who struggle with their mental health. Labeling people who struggle with their mental health as negative functions to shame them for their mental health symptoms, which is not supportive of mental health. That kind of shaming also doesn’t encourage struggling individuals to get the support they need.

We are not obligated to keep people in our lives who will not or cannot respect our boundaries. We are not obligated to keep people in our lives who cause us hurt. We also do not have to be dismissive of their struggles while we move away from them.