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Accepting your darkest emotions is the key to psychological health
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Make room for your emotions
Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet, compared emotions to unexpected visitors.
We're supposed to let them in and not hide from them, suppress them or pretend they do not exist.
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Gaining peace of mind
In a society that promotes gratitude and positivity, there is pressure to suppress or conceal negative feelings.
But psychological studies reveal that acceptance of your negative feelings promotes emotional resilience, with fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety.
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The magic of acceptance
Acceptance of negative emotions involves not trying to change how we feel but taking them for what they are.
Acceptance works because it blunts the emotional reactions to stressful events. In time, it can lead to positive psychological health.
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The urge to strive for happiness
Acceptance doesn't mean handing yourself over to a stressful, negative situation. We need to accept death, but we don't need to suffer through unfair treatment.
When we try only to think positively, we put ourselves in a striving state of mind, which is the opposite of calm contentment.
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Sadness as a Person
A study found that people feel less sad if the feeling of sadness is personified, as it leads to a certain distance between the person and the emotion.
Detached from Sadness
By imagining that Sadness is a person, the sad person becomes detached from his/her sadness.
They can picture the sadness to have human traits or mannerisms, leading to an internal regulation of that particular emotion.
Not for the other Emotions
While this approach of humanizing the emotion appears to work for sadness, it can make a happy person less happy, if that feeling is humanized.
Other complex emotions like guilt and embarrassment may have any kind of effect and are yet to be studied.
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Forced positivity
"Look on the bright side." Amid a pandemic and widespread social unrest, experts caution us against phrases like these that are not only unhelpful but also toxic.
While cultivatin...
Toxic positivity denies reality
Positivity makes people appear more well-adapted and popular with their peers.
The issue is not the people who are genuinely upbeat but when people are forced to appear positive in situations where it's not natural, like illness, homelessness, food insecurity, unemployment, or racial injustice.
Damaging effects of toxic positivity
Forcing positivity denies a very real sense of despair and hopelessness and alienates those who are struggling.
Internalizing these messages can also be damaging. We judge ourselves for feeling negative and then feel bad for feeling bad. It postpones any healing or move toward problem-solving.
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Mental resilience
Resilience is the ability to walk through bad experiences.
It generally means adapting well in the face of chronic or acute adversity.
Psychological flexibility
- Psychological flexibility gives us the ability to shift perspectives and actions when we’re experiencing discomfort or difficulty without feeling overwhelmed.
- Psychological flexibility means not avoiding difficult emotions, but accepting them as part of life.
- Psychological flexibility also means prioritizing what matters to you and concentrating of what is within your control, to reach your goals.
How to be more resilient
There are three elements you can focus on:
- Developing a set of coping mechanisms
- Nurturing the psychological flexibility to accept difficult emotions and knowing how and when to deploy your various coping strategies
- Being mindful of your values, so that you can continue to live a meaningful life in the face of adversity.