The Therapy Edit - On how to feel more positive

Episode Date: November 15, 2021

I often think that gratitude should come with a small print, and here's why! Gratitude can shift moods, raise smiles and change lives, but what about all the other feelings that sit in its shadow?

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit. Today I want to talk about gratitude and positivity and not in the way that you might expect. Don't get me wrong, gratitude has literally been such a powerful tool this last year and a half for me. It has really helped transform some of those mundane moments or those moments where my mind has just gotten fixated or bogged down with the shoulds and the woods and the kuds and the focusing on the things that are going bad or the things that I feel are going wrong. And gratitude is such a powerful tool. But I think I want to talk for a little moment about some of the small print that I believe should come with gratitude and positivity. Now, I don't know about you, but there have been so many moments where I have felt, oh, this is so

hard, oh, this is so overwhelming, or I'm really struggling, and then comes in the gratitude and the positivity of, but I'm so grateful, but this is, you know, I'm so lucky to be safe and I'm and it's like, I suddenly have to caveat that one tricky emotion with a million other things to prove that I am grateful for the good things in my life. And I think we're increasingly doing this. I'm seeing it happen a lot as well on social media is people don't feel able to say about something being hard or tough without then kind of almost drowning that honesty

with this kind of cascade of gratitude. It's as if finding something hard says that we don't love our children when actually, you know, how about the and? This is my favourite word of the moment. My favourite word of the year is and, how something can be hard whilst we're grateful for it. You know, you can feel grateful and you can feel overwhelmed. You can feel sad and frustrated and also recognise the privilege that you have.

And I think it just seems to be that we're kind of overlooking, the complexity of human emotion when we say, but, you know, this is hard, but, I love them, but, it's okay, but, but, you know, and follow it with all of this positive stuff. And actually, it's almost like we're taking the attention from what was real and what was authentic and what was vulnerable. And we're covering it over with what feels more reassuring to other people and towards ourselves. It's almost that we're saying that, It's hard, but actually, you know, look at this. This is more important. It is okay. When really those two feelings have equal value. If you're feeling overwhelmed, you're all feeling overwhelmed.

You know, of course you're grateful. Of course you love your child. It's almost that we're needing to reassure ourselves and others that to find something hard or to find it overwhelming or to find it challenging somehow chips away at the truth of the love and the connection that we have for it. I think we are becoming so quick to shame ourselves for feelings that feel less and perfect. I suddenly realised at some point last year that I had been applying my perfectionism, my perfectionist traits to my emotion. You know, feeling grateful and feeling loving and feeling patient and feeling kind and calm are good feelings. Those are good feelings. Those are feelings I should be feeling. feeling angry, feeling frustrated, sad, overwhelmed, grieving for situations and circumstances. You know, those are bad feelings. I need less of those. When actually both, both of those,

both of those hard and the bad and the good and the sad, they are, this is the complexity of human emotion. This is your emotion. Therefore, it is valuable, even if it's unpleasant, even if you'd rather that past. It is valuable. So when you recognise yourself stating a feeling or talking about a feeling, just recognise when you might be using gratitude and positivity as kind of a stick to beat yourself around the bottom with. To shame yourself for feeling those feelings. So yes, positivity and gratitude are so powerful. They are so powerful. They lift us. It can feel like turning on the light and removing that kind of those blinkers almost to remind ourselves of our privilege or to remind ourselves of the good inner situation.

But it doesn't mean it doesn't have to be hard. Sometimes I talk about the moments at my washing machine when I'm just thinking, oh my goodness, the relentlessness of washing. It's just, you know, no sooner am I washing something than I see people walking around in those very same clothes, making them dirty. and I often approach the washing machine with this kind of, ugh, feeling. And sometimes I stand there and I think, and I bring gratitude into it, and I start thinking about how grateful I am to have a washing machine,

how grateful I am to be able to afford the water bill. It's a privilege. You know, how grateful I am to have those many little socks, to have those small kind of kids clothes, to have clothes at all. how grateful I am for those lives in my home that need those clothes how grateful I am for the roof over my head and suddenly yes it's mundane yes it is boring and actually those things are human response to the circumstance

I don't need to wipe them away with gratitude but sometimes I welcome gratitude to make me smile within it all so when you use gratitude if you are a fan of positive mental attitude and gratitude just be aware of those times when you might be using it to devalue very, very valid feelings that you are having about your circumstances and welcome the and welcome that and it can be hard and it can be good it can be mundane and it can be something that we feel privileged and grateful for and those two things neither one need to be more or less valid than the other

because what happens when we invalidate our own feelings? It's like when we say, you know, if we were to say to a child, you shouldn't be sad about that, be grateful. We're shutting down that emotion and then they're less likely to bring it to us in the future because mommy says I shouldn't be upset about that. So I'm not going to tell her. I still feel upset, but I'm not going to tell her. And it's like sometimes there's a little child inside of us that you're saying,

I'm scared, I'm tired, I'm hungry, overwhelmed. I'm exhausted. And there's a grown-up part of us that just turns around and says, be quiet, be grateful. Positive mental attitude. Look on the bright side. And that little child in us doesn't stop feeling. It doesn't stop feeling. It just stops feeling like that feeling is worth talking about. So also, another good thing that comes when we stop kind of using gratitude as a way of validating feelings is that we're far more likely to be able to talk to friends and to talk to people about, you know, the other side of it, which is so important. So as we are more able to validate the complexity of our own emotions and how we feel and sometimes they are massively opposing

and massively conflicting, but that's okay. It doesn't mean that, you know, overwhelm and gratitude can't reside together. But as we're more able to validate them in ourselves, we become less fearful of other people in validating them for us. We've all got those friends that will do, though. But look on the bright side, but look at the good things. And that can be helpful at times, but actually sometimes we just want to feel heard.

And we can start to offer that to ourselves. It can be hard and good. you can be overwhelmed and grateful you can love your child and find mothering really really hard sometimes that's not you failing that's not you being complicated that's you being a complex human being able to feel a whole realm of emotion at the same time listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe and review. You can find more from me on Instagram, Anna Martha. You might like to check out my two books called Mind Over Mother and Know Your Worth. I'm also the founder of the Mother Mind

Way, a platform full of guides, resources and a community with the sole focus on supporting mother's mental and emotional well-being. It's been lovely chatting with you. Speak soon.