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Why Forcing Myself To Be Positive Doesn’t Work
It never ends well for me when I try to force myself to be positive during hard times. It just adds to the stress I’m already feeling when it doesn’t work.
Even though it’s a popular tactic to trade a bad thought with a good one, and many seem to do it successfully, it leaves me unfulfilled. I find it has me not only ignore my negative side, but impose on it with a barrage of fake happiness.
When something painful happens and I feel like crap about it, I just want to feel that way and that’s it. Why do we force ourselves to be positive? I mean, I would love to feel that way all the time because it’s great, but I don’t enjoy forcing or faking it.
The missing piece
So I decided to experiment with this. I let myself feel down so I could explore that space to see if there was another way to bring positivity into my life without forcing it.
What I figured out is that I can’t conjure up positivity because I hadn’t created an environment within myself that allows it to grow naturally.
All this time, trying to jump straight to being positive had me miss the most vitally important first step in this entire process.
This missing piece is called acceptance, and it’s crucial for handling negative feelings and…
