Sitting in the sadness..

I wanted to talk about how it feels when things are just plain unfair, when nothing really seems to work out in your life, or when the statement "when it rains, it pours" is a complete understatement--where you've been in a monsoon for about 5 years at this point that you'd appreciate just a light rain.

It's a little different than my other posts, because it's not about changing your thinking, but rather accepting and not judging yourself. There are times when accepting that things suck and sitting in that feeling is the only genuine, real option that we have.

I have seen many patients that have been in therapy before and tell me how their last therapist just told them to think positive and that they were not able to. The good old "look at the bright side" seems to be great advice, and I can't say that I didn't get on this bandwagon at the beginning of my career. I have found that yes sometimes it does, but sometimes it can cause more harm than anything else. What we really need to do is pay attention to when our sadness stems from negative, irrational thoughts, compared to a normal response to something happening that is plain awful. When it's irrational thoughts, then by all means think positive, but when it's awful then give yourself full permission to feel awful--but do not catastrophize or make it worse than it actually is.

Example A: your house burned down--awful, Example B: you're in contract for your first house and the seller's attorney isn't answering your emails---frustrating, but not awful. We tend to make frustrating situations into awful ones in our heads. That is the problem. We are humans and have feelings and feeling upset, angry, etc is not something that is bad. When we feel upset, angry, etc and tell ourselves that the roof is caving in that is bad.

Avoiding what we perceive as negative emotions ends up costing us more in the long run. What we need to do more of is letting ourselves feel, and less of telling ourselves there is something wrong with that. When bad things happen to us, pretending that everything is okay, and that we should be happy that we're not homeless, or that other people have it worse, is extremely invalidating. Who cares if there are starving children halfway across the world when you are hungry--does that magically make food appear that will make you any less hungry? Nope. You can't keep justifying your feelings away. Things hurt because they mean something to us, and we need to be true to our values and what we hold as important in order to be our full genuine selves. We need to get through our pain to get over it, there aren't any shortcuts. Comforting ourselves through these painful emotions is the most powerful thing we can do to reach our goals. You need to sit in the sadness to gain the strength to get up and be truly happy.

I will end with this quote (who I don't remember who said it to give credit--sorry!) "I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons we'll never know all of them, but even if we don't have the power to choose where we came from we can still choose where we go from here." We can't control what happens to us or what will happen to us, but we can control the meaning we assign to it. We almost do get all the power because it's never the thing that bothers us, but what we tell ourselves about it that does. If some evil, mean person says that you're ugly and you are confident in yourself and know that you could win Miss America if you wanted to, then that statement means nothing to you. If you tell yourself that it's true, then all of a sudden you are the ugliest person in the world.

This doesn't mean make a really negative thing into a positive, but rather put things into perspective. Doing that saves you a lot of unnecessary pain, you have enough to worry about as it is without creating more problems for yourself.