Do you ever find yourself in a negative thinking pattern and think you can pull yourself right out with a “happy thought” if you think it enough times? That maybe you can flood the negative out?

I’ve tried this too many times.

We’ve all done this and we may find ourselves attempting to do it in the future but it’s not useful. So I’m going to talk about why we do it and some ways to work through it.

Often times people dislike their thoughts, well…they actually think it’s their feelings that they don’t like and that may be true but I hope you know by now that our feelings are created by our thoughts. Not the other way around. So they dislike their thoughts and start trying to change them in an attempt to feel better. They think that feeling discomfort is unbearable and then they want to quickly change their thought to something happy or good. So they’ll find a happy thought and make it work. The only problem with this is that they skipped a lot of the in-between transition that’s useful. They’ve skipped feeling the negative emotion fully and the in-between emotions and now they’re trying to make the happy stick.

This will work for a time but it will eventually end up not working.

It’s a lot like the weather. When we wear shorts and step out to realize that the weather is much colder than we expected we don’t jump right into wearing a parka. We go grab a pair of pants, a light jacket or a sweater first. If we jumped right into the parka we would step outside and not feel the cold but we may have overdone it with the level of warmth that was needed for the temperature. So then the parka becomes a problem and we end up going back to where we started.

I’m not against getting to a happier place but I want to be sure, first, that I’ve found the thought that I’m thinking that is causing the negative emotion. Then I want to be sure I am experiencing the emotion fully so I can gauge what adjustment I might make to get to the next degree of thinking. Going right to the parka won’t be useful just like going right to the happy thought won’t serve you the most.

It’s like, when we’re waiting for a spot in the grocery store parking lot and someone else comes and swoops it up we may be upset at first. We might jump to thinking that the person is so rude and they shouldn’t do that.

I would definitely think that.

Then we want to realize that it’s not the person going into that spot that’s causing us anger. It’s our thoughts about their behavior. Now… you may not be able to immediately think….It’s ok that they took the spot I was waiting for and move merrily along. I personally want to dislike that behavior initially. But what I don’t want to do is get out of my car and demand that they get out of that spot and explain to them that I have been waiting here for 3 minutes.

I want to think. I don’t like that. That’s rude. Then I want to move to a thought like…”Oh well, I’m not going to let that ruin my day. There’s so much more than a parking spot here.” Then I might move to something else like…”They must not have seen me.” Or “They must be in a bigger hurry.”

I think sometimes thoughts are best done gradually. When we have a thought that’s causing us pain or negative emotions we may not want to or be able to jump right to a happy thought and that’s OK.

It’s important to feel the emotion fully. Be sure to identify the thought causing the emotion. Then decide what you’d like to do as a next step. This is where we start to move into emotional adulthood. We slow down, become mature with our thinking, take responsibility and learn to manage our thinking. Which in turn creates a person with managed emotions.

This is worth the effort. It may not happen overnight.