Life will always have positive and negative sides. Always. The trick is to learn how to move through and honour both. But what does that even mean?
The Cambridge English Dictionary (and several others) defines the verb “Honour” as: to show great respect for someone or something.
It’s easy to honour the positives, they’re just so wonderful! The trouble is … er… “trouble”. When the negatives pop up, we humans are wired to notice them far more than we notice the positives – sounds bizarre, right? It’s an ancient survival mechanism that’s still trying to protect us when it really doesn’t need to. The fantastic thing is, we can do something about it!
Check out my Rest & Reset Blog Post Day 5 which has a simple but great way of overcoming this on a weekly basis. Or my Thought, Activity, Track of the Week Post from 10 January 2022. If you want to go deeper on moving through the negative, read on!
The Importance of Moving Through
“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!”
We’re Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen
This is the thing my lovelies! Michael Rosen totally KNOWS. These kids he’s created are going on an adventure to do something massive! They come up against all sorts of horrible, scary things that they simply must GO THROUGH: long wavy grass that is mega hard to get through and scratches legs, an ice-cold river, thick nasty mud, a big dark forest, a snowstorm, and then the MAHOOSIVE BEAR that chases them all the way home, back through all of the same horrible things!
Metaphor. For. Life.
Through various experiences in my life, I felt that “negative” emotions were bad or would bring unwanted attention, so I swung to the other extreme: my job was to make everyone happy when they were down. Painful, difficult things were to be avoided. I developed the ability to see troubles coming and work out ways to avoid or hide them. In fact, I got so practiced at this that it developed into Generalised Anxiety Disorder. This had me thinking up everything that might happen, and all the ways I could avoid or patch up whatever the trouble was. Constantly.
That, my friend, takes up a whole lot of physical AND mental energy and is utterly exhausting because it’s an impossible Hamster Wheel that you can’t get off because you think you’ll get flung out of everything you know and love.
Back to the Bear Hunt
Imagine trekking 20 miles out of your way to avoid going through the grass or mud, swimming upstream to avoid going through the river, or climbing every last tree in an effort to see your way through the forest or sitting inside the snowstorm with your eyes shut hoping you’ll stay warm.
When you eventually get to the Bear, you’ve zero clue how to find your way back because you didn’t allow yourself to go through / navigate the tough bits on the way in. O-oh.
The only way you know back is to take the longer, harder, rubbish-er routes that involve a LOT of time and energy, so you end up fit to drop before you ever get to the safety of your house, and the Bear gobbles you up.
You follow?
Somehow, you may have come to a point (like I did) where you do all you can to avoid going through the smaller rubbish bits because of the pain and suffering they cause. When it comes to the bigger bits, you have no real way of knowing how to navigate them and they often end up consuming you.
They consumed me.
The worst part was that I wasn’t aware of how this had happened, or that I could move through it in other ways. When I got to rock bottom, I stumbled on a way out through research, coaching, and psychotherapy. One of my key learnings sounds utterly obvious, but I’d lost sight of it: these hard things would happen, and it was ok, healing even, to feel them. Here’s how…
Feeling
“I see your pain, and it’s big. I also see your courage, and it’s bigger. You can do hard things.” Untamed, by Glennon Doyle Melton
Collectively the British “stiff upper lip” left an awful legacy of shaming the feeling and expression of feelings. It was seen as a vulnerability and that meant weakness. Never show weakness. Today you’re more likely to hear: “Stay strong!” We’re still culturally limping toward recognising, understanding, and being ok with our own vulnerable emotions. And if we can’t find the courage to be ok with our own feelings, how can we help others with theirs? So, the cycle (Hamster Wheel) continues.
Feeling “negative” emotions can be unpleasant at best, horrific at worst – I know – and who wants to put themselves through that, right? As already illustrated, the more we resist these feelings, the more they become a problem for our brain-box. The huge effort and energy required to avoid or resist them can manifest in all sorts of ways, physical and mental. It creates levels of stress that our human bodies were never designed to deal with on a constant basis and that pressure builds, sometimes to bursting point.
I experienced vocal nodules, vertigo, stomach illnesses, tension headaches, nausea, was hospitalised with some random brain pain that caused my arms to swell, and Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
My therapy, coaching, and extensive research taught me to let myself feel those feelings in the small situations so that when faced with the bigger ones, I know what it feels like and that it’s ok because it won’t be there forever – it will come and it will go. My therapy homework was to watch sad films in a safe space which fully kick-started the healing: my courage began to grow and I was able to face negative situations with more ease.
The immense bonus here is that when you get comfortable with your own feelings, you’re way more able to help those around you! Ripple effect transformation 101!
But how do we honour those feelings and not wallow in them?
Honouring
If you’ve still got the book of “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt”, take a look at Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations. Each of those children portrays/feels a different emotion through each stage of the journey. They move through each of the smaller obstacles in their own way, without avoiding them, and allow each other to do the same. They help themselves; they help each other.
They honour (show great respect) for each situation and their associated feelings, and those of each other.
This, in turn, allows them to recognise and learn from each feeling, so they have the knowledge and understanding to deal with the big stuff / Bear, both individually and collectively, when it appears.
But they run away from the big stuff/Bear!
Well yes, they do! Bears are huge, it’s totally normal to want to run away and hide at these times. But because they’ve honoured the feelings of the earlier journey, they have strong reference points to go back to that help them navigate their way through the most difficult situation! And it’s a darn sight quicker than swimming upstream / resisting / repressing the feelings!
When they get home, they’re still shattered, but they know that they can leave the Bear/big stuff outside and go and rest under the duvet – that’s genius and so incredibly important! Feeling will always require time and energy, giving ourselves time and space to rest and process what happened is another essential part of honouring it.
Once you allow yourself time and space to do that, you can go downstairs to see if the Bear is still at your door. It’s very often not there, not in the same way, and you have brain-space to choose whether you engage with that particular issue again – the children decide not to! But if you must, you also have the brain-space to choose how you will deal with it.
The next piece of the puzzle in navigating the negative is meeting your own needs without feeling guilty or ashamed, and that, my Wonderful, is in my next blog: How To Meet Your Own Needs (Without Being Selfish)!
Support For Your Own Journey
The Thought, Activity, Track of The Week Post for 10 January is a great place to support you a little further with this journey.
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It’s time to stop resisting the negative and learn how to navigate it with understanding and courage!
If not now, then when?
Love & blessings, Jax.