Hi all,
Tony, it's amazing how much can be conveyed without a word spoken. Far better than any empty platitudes, I'm sure you would agree.
I agree it is easier to be negative than positive. We see and experience so much hardship and suffering, it can overwhelm our ability to process the concept of anything good. Doubly so for those of us who have had people feeding us negative messages our whole lives.
As for people with negative world views or low confidence responding to motivated people, I think it's more complex than feeling that the motivated attitude is unachievable. It seems also unrealistic, shallow, forced and often downright fake. There is a resistance to that perception of dishonesty. You are right though, in my opinion, that motivation is a thing that works best introduced gradually, in an achievable way. I'm dogged in my approach to achieving big goals, I pull them apart, work out my first step, do it, then move on to the next. Too much of a big picture hampers progress and causes overwhelm, it's just one foot in front of the other. It's what my pessimistic nature can handle.
Sleepy, your words hit home for me, about having to problem solve for yourself from a very young age. I too have had to be very self-sufficient, and asking for help or admitting to vulnerability are crazy hard for me. Sitting with grief, also hard. I don't always try and throw up a positive at the end of speaking about a bad time, my reflex is to be planning immediately to fix it.
Allowing that tomorrow could be better is fine. But so is accepting that sometimes today just sucks. My psych and I have been talking about the value of simply feeling the negatives, experiencing them - hurt, sadness, etc. - is vital in healing. Hence why I've come so far in some ways, fixing my problems in that bull headed way of mine, but internally there is still a lot of conflict. I don't sit well with that stuff, I feel compelled to make the vulnerability go away. Some people do that by projecting false or toxic positivity instead of acknowledging the problem. This seems like a good space for us to just breathe, acknowledge that whether or not they could be worse, we do have our struggles and how we feel about them is valid. We are allowed to grieve or hurt and sit with those feelings before we can genuinely see the rainbows and lollipops or whatever.
Blue.
