When It’s Good to Feel Bad
We love binary thinking, don’t we?
It allows us to grasp one another, in a way that is organizing and safe. Binary thinking helps us simplify and make sense of our all too messy lives, and comprehend the incomprehensible.
And, binary thinking is also a trauma response.
When in survival, black-and-white thinking is incredibly helpful, propelling us to see threat, label it as bad, and aptly respond. This form of thinking gives us a sense of control; I can do x to keep me safe. And thank god for that.
I’m grateful for our brain and body's ability to see and label threats. I’m grateful for any nervous system response that keeps people safe in the face of harm.
But trauma has this way of lingering with us. We no longer feel safe in our bodies. The way in which we see and experience the world takes on a different shape. Binary thinking becomes mainstay, as an attempt to keep us safe in the (often) inaccurate evaluation of non-safety.
I often think how binary thinking is a byproduct of toxic capitalism—a collective trauma. It’s efficient, increases productivity, and gives everyone distinct measurements to assess their output. I accomplished a task, or I didn’t. I was successful, or I was a failure.
In the face of trauma, ambiguity feels too risky. To lay in the gray space of alternatives and unknowns, we might die. Our needs might not get met. We might fail to keep up with our culture’s churn and disperse. In the face of threat we reach for black-and-white measures, diminishing ambiguity, increasing a sense of control, producing safety.
We carry on. Cut off from complicated mosaics that are actually representative of our lives, disconnected from deeper truths.
In toxic capitalism, we have toxic positivity. An orientation to affect derived from binary thinking and centred on only ever feeling good.
On one end of the spectrum we have positive, good feelings to be revered. On the other end, negative, bad feelings to be avoided at all cost.
(After all, feeling bad isn’t conducive to productivity.)
When we label our emotions as good or bad, we place a value judgment on our emotions. And if we’re judging an emotion for being bad, we’re likely engaging in some form of avoidance, whether consciously or unconsciously.
This is my Roman Empire: we must feel our emotions with depth and flavour, as true feeling propels transformance or change. Our feelings are there for a reason. They are trying to tell us something.
Easily my most watched TED Talk (and don’t even get me started on her two-part series with Brené Brown), Dr. Susan David speaks to the gravity of welcoming all emotions to the table.
In her TED Talk, with over one million views, David shares her story growing up in apartheid, the impact of emotional avoidance in furthering harm, and the power of staying with the tough stuff in order to be with reality and elicit change.
“When we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
Dr. Susan David
I see this a lot in folks weathering white guilt, avoiding feelings of shame. Where the medicine is found in staying with shame long enough to propel movement toward deconstruction, liberation.
I see this in the stories of parents with adult children in therapy, who struggle to be with guilt. Opting for denial instead of acknowledgment and accountability; the needle never moves forward to repair their relationship.
I see this in grief work, where family and friends might struggle to hold others in their loss, anxious they’ll make it worse. Where healing for the bereaved might look like sharing in the stories surrounding their loved one, as to keep their effervescent presence ever alive.
As a side, notice how shame, guilt and anxiety keep us stuck? Hovering above our feeling selves, reaching for avoidance? Our shame, guilt and anxiety are clues, pointing us toward deeper, emotive work. Yet, we’ve learned to minimize, distract and numb from these experiences like the plague.
When we label certain emotions as bad, we bury them within ourselves and each other. Connections lost. Opportunity for greater intimacy, denied.
We remain at a stand still, falsely proclaiming, everything is great! I’m fine! It is what it is! Things could be worse!
Except, change doesn’t occur when we deny reality.
When we stay with life as it is (not how we’d prefer it to be) we access a rich chest of emotional experience. We access a life of meaning and depth, rather than floating on the surface.
This is what it means to access right affect: emotions that are painful, but right. To feel any other way would feel incomplete, wrong even.
Through right affect we access change. For all our emotions are telling us something; they’re clues, highlighting what we need and where we need to go.
In my first training with Diana Fosha, she shared a story of a man whose husband recently died. As he was gasping in loss, in the depth of his despair, he expressed, “this pain is excruciating, and I want more.”
I want more.
I think of the parent who lost their child, naming how much they hated it when friends and family avoided talking about their kids, fearing it would be too much to bear. All the while, that parent wants nothing more than to be reminded of their child. For grief is what gives their love a home. It’s excruciating, and, they want more.
When we feel sadness, despair, loss, are struck with grief, or when shame, guilt and anxiety bubble up to the surface, it doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. Perhaps it might serve as a sacred reminder, that something within us has gone terribly right.
“Discomfort is admission to a meaningful life.”
Dr. Susan David
Contemplation
What’s your orientation to “negative” feelings? Love ‘em? Do they sort of make your insides squish? Write down any beliefs or messages shared by family, friends, or within you communities.
How does your body respond to difficult feelings? Fatigue? Tension? A lump in your throat? Bracing your shoulders? Cringe?
What could it look like to embrace challenging feelings 1% more? Small, doable actions are the road to sustainable healing.
