Every thought, emotion, and behavior serves a purpose, even if we don’t like it.
The world we live in today is a world that praises and rewards positivity, even if it’s problematic, and ostracizes you when you’re feeling negative. We see this in online personalities encouraging you to ignore the bad and to chase the good, motivational quotes everywhere we look, and even Master’s degrees in Positive Psychology. We can spend our entire lives looking for our next positive emotion, and we naturally start to judge or turn away from any emotion or behavior that makes us feel uncomfortable or uncertain. When we never learn to work with negative emotions, behaviors, or thoughts, what happens when you’re forced to sit with them? Life forces a lot of uncomfortable emotions, behaviors, and thoughts onto us through personal, academic, or professional growth, loss of a loved one, failure, miscommunications, or severe symptoms of a medical or mental diagnosis, etc.
I do believe a level of resiliency can be found within always trying to find the positive within crap situations but that alone isn’t going to get us through the hardest parts of life. If you have lived your life similar to the way I described above, running away from negative emotions, I have a question:
How would your life be different if you believed that all thoughts, behaviors, and emotions served a purpose?
Humans are smart and can learn the rules of engagement without ever having to speak a word or be spoken to. We know that showing less negative emotions or behaviors makes us less difficult, more adaptable, less needy, less overreactive or sensitive, more of a team player, and more of a positive influence. We learn to judge negative thoughts or emotions rather than listen to them for their purpose. We decide that our negative sensations serve no purpose when clinically they most definitely do. If we flip the script and determine that all thoughts, behaviors, and emotions serve a purpose, we place ourselves on a neutral playing field with self, rather than a negative and judgemental playing field. We can allow ourselves to get curious about thoughts and behaviors without further complicating the emotion and learn more about our authentic selves versus the self we wish to portray to the world for safety.
Here are just a few examples of how changing old thought patterns can change your life:
After a fight with your significant other or loved one:
Original thought process: “I’m over it, I want to move on and act like this didn’t happen.”
New thought process: “I feel myself wanting to “get over” the argument without talking about it, where else in my life has bypassing tough conversations made life easier for me?
A loved one recently passed:
Original thought process: “It’s not worth it to spend time being sad, they would have wanted me to remember the good times with them and not be upset.”
New thought process: “I feel myself wanting to override all of my sadness with happier thoughts, where else has ignoring painful emotions served me in life?”
Feeling as though you should be over a traumatic event:
Original thought process: “That was a long time ago, those things should not bother me anymore and I should move on already.”
New thought process: “I’m finding that I don’t want to sit with some previous hurts or thoughts, when else in my life has it been rewarded for getting right back up after getting knocked down?”
To attempt to wrap this up in a pretty bow, if we understand that all emotions, thoughts, and behaviors serve a purpose we can understand that these emotions, thoughts, and behaviors were created as safety mechanisms for you earlier in your life. We have a chance to remove the self-judgment and gently process the discomfort. To take this a step further, if we understand why we do the things that we do and feel what we feel we can even step into a space of creating new behaviors and thoughts based on actual relief.
Suppose we reflect even more on the examples listed above. In that case, a lot of us can feel the emotional memory of our minds shutting us off from an uncomfortable thought or behavior, either through shame or avoidance. We can remember that those thoughts didn’t feel good and probably even worsened an already frustrating mood or situation. As opposed to the secondary thought process that asked questions of our past, we can feel the second thought process being more work, requiring introspection, and honesty, but there was a lack of feeling of judgment, shame, or isolation.
Remember, we were not born with problematic thoughts, behaviors, or coping skills. Life, people, and situations have given all of us an assortment of trauma and dysfunction that has taught us all different ways to manage that may not serve us in a healed or growing mindset
If you want to talk more about understanding that all sensations and thoughts have a purpose and how to re-create a healthier self-dialogue, you can contact me on my website and book a free 15-minute consultation to get started!
Stephanie Townsend, LMSW, CCTP, ART Practitioner
