Take 11: Vibes - The Good, The Bad, and 2020

​I have a really hard time with the “good vibes only” message.  As a therapist, something that I stress to my clients on an almost daily basis is that there is no such thing as a good emotion versus a bad emotion and by trying to cancel out emotions that do not feel good, you are preventing yourself from feeling feelings that are real.  All emotions are real and normal, and they all serve some sort of purpose for us in our lives. The wide breadth and range of the emotions that we experience is part of what makes the human experience so beautiful.  If we are trying to only find the “good vibes” and remain in happiness, excitement, and contentment, and therefore not allow ourselves to feel the depth of sadness or grief, or the intensity of our anger and frustration, we are denying ourselves the necessary experience of emotional responses to the world around us.  Without fully feeling the lows, we cannot even fully understand and experience the highs.  Additionally, I stress to my clients that facing, accepting, and feeling the feelings that are more uncomfortable and vulnerable shows greater strength than trying to live in a world with only sunshine, rainbows, and smiles. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know it is important for us to be able to push through the feelings that do not feel as great, but in order to do so in a healthy way, we have to do just that.  We have to push through.  There is no detour or shortcut for our emotions. We must feel them in order to move forward.
 
In trying to achieve a “good vibes only” persona or project it onto others through conversations and social media posts, you may be denying yourself and others a safe place to feel everything that they are feeling and may be preventing them from feeling safe enough to be vulnerable.  Additionally, you may be preventing yourself and others from having a deeper emotional relationship if you are trying to prevent the “negative” feelings from being part of your interactions.  Also, if you are projecting a message of the fact that success can happen by just shifting your emotions to a positive thought process, and that by just thinking positively you will manifest everything you want, you are not honoring the experiences that people have that may affect their ability to move forward and may not be recognizing how your own privilege may create blinders to their struggles and history. Again, you may be creating a situation in which those around you may not feel safe being vulnerable and may be judging themselves for not being able to just forget the hard and difficult things they are faced with.
 
If we are projecting the message that people should only experience good vibes (and that it is even possible to control the very natural emotional response system that our brains and bodies possess), we are not allowing ourselves and others to feel okay with the real human experience of emotions.  Bad things happen and if we are trying to only see the good things in our lives and avoiding the bad ones, we are also avoiding the natural responses that we have.  When our brains respond to stressors or triggers in a way that does not feel good to us (e.g. with sadness, anxiety, anger, or fear), it is telling us and maybe even warning us about trouble or threats.  We fight with family and friends, we go through stressful days at work, we lose important people throughout our journeys and we do not feel good about it.  Our uncomfortable emotional response to these events is telling us about how we should respond to it, and possibly that these things may be things we should want to avoid moving forward. I cannot tell you how often I have said to clients in sessions that I would be more worried if they were not sad when they got bad news, or found out about the passing of a loved one and that they become visibly relieved that they are told that the emotions are normal and real.  Sometimes being given permission to be sad, angry, and anxious is exactly the thing missing from their lives. Emotions are a basic part of our instinctual response to stimuli around us.  When we try to deny that response, we are throwing off the entire functionality of how the machine of our body and brains work and those emotions that we are pretending are not real are going to find their way out some way, and often in unhealthy ways including negative self-talk, bad habits, and isolation.  When we try to push the “good vibes” only message to our friends and family, we are telling them that they “shouldn’t” feel what they are feeling and that if only they could just make themselves happy, everything will be perfect.  When working with families and couples, there is nothing more triggering within a relationship than when someone is told that they “shouldn’t” feel a certain way, even if they are being told that with all good intentions. 
 
So, repeat after me.  It is completely okay to not be okay. If 2020 has taught us anything, it is that things are not always okay. Obviously mental illness, stress, and bad things always happen.  As I said above, all of these experiences are part of the human experience.  There is no one in this world who has never gone through bad things and who has not felt the intensity of all of the emotions that can be felt.  Some clients believe that others have gone through significantly tougher experiences throughout their lives and I notice that everyone is constantly comparing their pain and experiences to others in their sessions. I always remind them that there is no hierarchy of pain and that whatever pain they are experiencing is theirs to own and proudly wear both as an accomplishment of resilience, and as a way in which they define how they navigate through their world. And, as we have been living through 2020, that is no exception.  So many of my clients have been experiencing the chaos of this year in different ways and have had different ways in which a global pandemic, social injustice and unrest, significant political divisiveness, and so much more have affected them personally in different ways. That being said, so many of them are having the same emotional response to what is going on in our world and explore their experience of anxiety, sadness, worry, fear, stress, grief, depression, and so much more.  And while these emotional responses are not new to 2020, the intensity of them is different.  I cannot remember a time in which I have had so many clients presenting with similar emotions and the same emotional weight on their shoulders.  As a therapist, 2020 has been a difficult year in that I cannot always help clients to challenge thoughts about their triggers because many of their triggers are in fact rational, normal, and completely understandable.  We are living through history right now and understanding the magnitude of that will hopefully help us to also understand that all of the emotional responses that we are having are normal and understandable and so I stress this to my clients, that what we all are feeling is normal.  I help them to realize that what they are going through in their personal lives is heavy and would be heavy even without all of what 2020 has given us. When you combine our own personal struggles with all of 2020 and everything that is happening this year at a national and global level, our threshold has been broken, and our cups of what we can hold are overflowing.  Let’s own it.  Let’s admit that we are not okay and figure out ways to try to get through it.  Whether that is directing our energy into activism or into self-care or something completely different.  We cannot take away the triggers, we cannot pretend that the world around us does not feel like it is falling apart at times, but we can try to take control of what we can control, and try to make peace with our feelings and recognize that in feeling all the feelings, we are human and empathetic.  Instead of trying to challenge those feelings that are considered bad, let's accept the idea of “all vibes” and that it is completely okay to not be okay.