Life Is Good?

How many times does someone ask you how you are doing and you quickly respond with the typical affirmation that things are good? It’s almost a reflex. There’s an implicit notion that life should always be good. Even if things aren’t going well, we think we should be able to focus on the positive. I agree with this to some extent. It’s certainly not healthy to dwell on the negative, but I want to be a positive person to a fault. Perhaps you do, too.

I want so badly for my life to be going well, that I have taught myself to stuff my emotions. I don’t allow myself to feel things like fear or anger or sadness because I just want things to be good all the time. Rather than letting myself feel a natural range of emotions, I’ve labeled some feelings as good and some as bad. I’ve tried to prevent myself from ever feeling what I’ve determined are negative emotions.

Recently, however, I’ve started to challenge this whole mindset. I’m trying to allow myself a variety of feelings and to retrain myself to think that it’s actually good and healthy to feel all sorts of emotions.

An experience with a friend was one of the things that directed my attention to the importance of embracing a full range of emotions. This friend and her husband had been trying for a year to start a family, and the doctors had told them that they would not be able to get pregnant on their own. Before proceeding with fertility treatments, she joyously told me that they had surprisingly gotten pregnant naturally. Shortly thereafter she had a miscarriage. When we were discussing the rollercoaster that she had been on, we talked about how important it was to allow for the grieving process to occur. While many loving friends (including myself) offered the reassurance that they should focus on the positive fact that they had become pregnant on their own, I was also struck by how clear it was that this couple needed time to grieve. It was good for them to be sad and mourn the loss of this life instead of stuffing their emotions and just trying to conceive again. This was a far cry from my typical focus on the positive attitude.