Written by: Charlotte Parish, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
At the start of the Pandemic, I posted a video on my social media on Grounding Techniques; How to ground yourself when feeling overwhelmed. I myself was feeling overwhelmed by the situation, by the constant media information, and by the lack of uncertainty in the World. As time went on, I remember a massive influx on social media of posts encouraging positive thinking ‘not every day is great but great things happen every day’, ‘it’s always your choice to be in peace or to be in stress’, ‘to be happy you must let go of what’s gone. Be grateful for what remains. Look forward to what’s coming next.’ These quotes still flood my feed every day.
These quotes represent a pervasive societal pressure to ‘look on the bright side’ and to think positively, to appreciate the small things in order to live a happy life. The wider implication of this is that if you are not doing this you are not coping, you are unhappy and you are failing. If you can’t look on the bright side there’s an implicit indictment of your worth, you are unable to do something that society is demanding of you – you are unable to cope.
We are facing a huge mental health crisis in the UK. We have faced a collective trauma, and often this collective trauma can be discounted due to its very nature. We all experienced the same situation. This is not accurate. Everyone experienced their own version of the situation, and therefore had their own individual experience, with their own unique approach.
All these quotes pay lip service to living in the moment, to being present and how do you do this without acknowledging all your emotions? I remember at the time feeling a huge amount of guilt reading those posts and at the same time anger. I didn’t want to feel grateful. I felt horrible. I didn’t want to be in the situation we were in, it was a frightening, out of control, overwhelming situation. I felt guilty for not feeling grateful for extra time with my family and enjoying it in abundance, for not enjoying the sunshine and garden games and for not rejoicing in hearing the birds singing and no traffic noise. I felt guilty for the fact that I was never going to get this time again and I wasn’t enjoying it because these were the messages I was receiving daily – that I should be enjoying these things, making the most of all the positives. I felt angry for outside pressure to enjoy a situation I really wasn’t enjoying, a situation deep down I wasn’t sure all those other people were really enjoying that much either.
Very early on in the first lockdown I caught Covid, and became extremely unwell, having to isolate from my family for nearly two weeks. I was alone, unable to breathe, unable to see anyone and having to make decisions about whether to go to the hospital, alone. Being taken to hospital in an ambulance, alone, and then being brought home again, to isolate, alone.
I often think back to that time, on my experience of that first lockdown, and of how it shaped my feeling. I am also acutely aware of how at the time I listened to others saying they were ok, more than ok enjoying the sun, enjoying a break from ‘real life’; being grateful for the little things, and maybe they really were. Yet as I hear them talk about that time in retrospect, I hear a different narrative. One of confinement, of not wanting to go back, and I wonder how that translates to positive thinking. I wonder how often the expression of ‘negative’ emotions can be perceived as ‘not coping’, as a weakness or vulnerability or even more than this, feeling these emotions.
Making the best of a situation is, of course a necessity in adverse situations. To be able to see the positives in difficult times builds resilience and enables strength, it also enables individuals to continue to survive. And in order to thrive? In order to thrive we must be able to both see the positive and harness those positive emotions and allow ourselves to feel our less comfortable emotions whilst recognising that in doing so we are not failing, quite the opposite. By allowing ourselves to feel emotion that is uncomfortable we are accounting for the discomfort we experience and in doing so we begin to process this. This process allows us to live authentically and in the present in a way that living with a permanently positive outlook suppresses and masks.
Being encouraged by others to be grateful for ‘the little things’ evoked an anger in me that I know was a reaction to a discount of my feeling of being trapped. It is possible to enjoy being in the garden, whilst at the same time feeling utterly trapped by not being able to step outside of your garden gate. Knowing you are unable to live the life you want and be allowed space to grieve that life is valid and healthy. I consider myself lucky to have an awareness and understanding of where my feeling of being trapped and lack of control stems from. I have an awareness and understanding that although I was feeling trapped in that situation, I was experiencing a lack of control from a trauma in my past. Luck is a spurious word to use as I have engaged in years of my own personal psychotherapy and hard work in order to enable this process.
For me, only accessing the positive aspects of the external situation would have been really damaging, I was experiencing emotion that was not socially positive, and I understood this, yet even for me the expression of this felt uncomfortable at times.
Having an awareness of why you find specific emotions difficult can lead to an understanding of what has made those emotions difficult and allow you to process them to enable emotional wellbeing. If positivity is one sided, and suppresses more difficult emotions, then it is in danger of becoming toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is positivity that focuses solely on the good, suppressing anything that could be construed as ‘negative.’ Negative emotions are a social construct. Emotions are not positive or negative. Emotions are how we as human beings react to the environment around us. Some emotions are more difficult for us as individuals to understand as we have not been taught to tolerate them, or we have been taught that they are not acceptable.
This might all sound a bit, well negative! If you are one of those people who does think positively why would you begin to start thinking around your positive thinking?! Well…if you can think positively, and be aware and feel all your emotions, understand your more difficult emotions, and then access your positive emotions and thoughts then great, you are emotionally well rounded and healthy. However, if you are using positive thinking and positive emotions to bypass anything emotionally difficult then you may want to investigate what that difficulty is. At first, this may feel uncomfortable, and as you work with a trained therapist with whom you feel safe you may begin to understand a lot more about yourself and begin to access more of yourself. Once you can feel all your emotions, even the difficult ones, your positive emotional experiences will be more heightened as well.
There is a whole industry that both survives on the notion of positive thinking and allows individuals who contribute to that industry to make huge amounts of money from what they say.
I wonder how meeting individuals where they are, rather than pushing them to be in a place where society would like them to be, would enable more people to feel able to express their true feeling.
Charlotte Parish, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Charlotte runs Start Something Counselling and Psychotherapy, a private practice in Hove UK. She has a BSc (Hons) and MSc in Psychology and has completed advanced training in Transactional Analysis (TA) Psychotherapy. TA is a theory of personality, social interaction and communication.
Charlotte has extensive clinical experience working with individuals who are dependent on substances and alcohol and understands the complex interaction between substance use and emotional discomfort.
Using TA, alongside other psychotherapeutic modalities Charlotte enables clients across presentations to become more aware of their internal world and together they are able to build awareness and understanding in order to facilitate change.
