People tend to classify emotions as negative or positive as well as thoughts, when in reality there are no negative emotions, but emotional experiences that are unpleasant to feel or difficult to cope with. But if we classify an emotional experience as bad, when it appears, we will tend to reject it and we will surely consider it to appear negative in our lives. The problem is that emotions have a function and this is how sadness, fear, anxiety are legitimate responses and allow us to adapt to the environment. Therefore, they are not necessarily negative, they are universal emotions that we cannot avoid feeling and the appearance of these always wants to communicate something to us.
Let’s suppose that a person is fired from their job and, based on false positivism, the first thing they do is think that they don’t have to be sad, since, if they fired them from that position, it simply means that it wasn’t for them. False positivism does not allow emotions to travel in their usual course that arise genuinely in the face of certain events, nor does it raise the possibility of stopping for a moment to learn from these emotions, since any unpleasant feeling tends to be rejected, ignored or invalidated. .
False positivism leads us to an attitude of avoidance of the authentic human condition that is simply sometimes being well and other times not so much, since in our lives we will inexorably have to learn to go through all the experiences that the affective world offers us. This attitude can be dangerous, as it leads people to hide or disguise how they really feel.
‘Smile every day’ (“Smile every day”) we usually read it frequently on social networks but the healthy point would be to be clear that, If a situation triggers displeasure and consequently we feel a painful emotion, we must go through it. It will be positive and healthy to learn to manage all emotions, even the difficult ones, without denying them, since they can provide us with important information that can lead to beneficial changes in our lives. It is important to be realistic about how you may feel and to know that when you are faced with a stressful situation, it is normal to be anxious or worried.
It is essential to clarify that psychotherapeutic processes do not lead people to learn to think positively, but to learn to develop a dialectical mind, that is, a mind that can evaluate all situations from the dysfunctional and assertive of each moment. The objective of psychotherapy is not to eradicate unpleasant emotions but to learn to navigate them, since as I usually express to my patients, from psychotherapy I cannot guarantee a calm sea, but we can work to build a stronger ship.
Psychologist specialized in high performance and emotion management. (M.,N. 65,390) Director of SEPSIAT (Instagram: @melisamirabet)
Source: Ambito
