You Can’t Make a Positive Change With Negative Emotions

Negative emotions are great for defining and identifying a problem.

We are angry when our personal boundaries are crossed. We’re depressed when in a draining relationship. Sad or rejected when others don’t want us or we suffer loss. Cranky when we’re tired.

There’s nothing wrong with feeling these emotions, they are natural and expected reactions to have. But they are all low energy, negative emotions. More importantly, when you start expressing them to others, they are almost always going to be a Display of Low Value of some sort.

Just think about it. Who wants to be with someone who is angry, depressed, emotionally hurt and irritable. Even more to the point, who wants to take their clothes off and get down and dirty with a morose whiny prick?  Vag-clang!

Now you can explode a huge wave of negative emotions at someone and get them to comply with your relationship demands successfully, but it will only be a short-term victory. You’ll buy a few days of peaceful compliance, but at the cost of slowly worsening your relationship happiness. Your partner starts to resent you more and more, as their love for you slowly gives away to far more negative emotions… like fear, pain and eventually hate.

Your endless expression of negative emotions simply makes the relationship worse.

The only true solution of negative problems, is by being positive. Just as negative emotions make things worse, positive emotions tend to make things better.

Calm insistence on good personal boundaries works better than victim puking rage. Being energetic and getting into positive action slowly wins the war over depression. Not wallowing in sadness when others don’t love us and getting out and finding those that do is the path to happiness. Sleep and relaxation trumps cranky and tired.

You cannot make a positive change with negative emotions.

Now this may all sound like Pollyanna playing the Glad Game, but it’s not quite that simple. This is the real world, where things are hard, life can be difficult, money is hard to make and true love is rare, precious and probably not for you.

Hang on…

How did that last sentence just feel?

When I said “This is the real world, where things are hard, life can be difficult, money is hard to make and true love is rare, precious and probably not for you.”  Did you just feel the weight of world smashing down upon you and want to give up even trying to be happy?

I bet you did.

That’s because feelings are infectious.

So stop trying to infect everyone around you with your crappy day. All that happens is your crappy day gets reflected right back to you and you feel worse for it.

Find some part of your life to start working on more positively and productively. In time you’ll find it grows stronger and happier, then those positive feelings start to infect other parts of your life and the people around you. Then your good days start getting reflected right back to you and you’ll feel the better for it.

Now this may all sound like Pollyanna playing the Glad Game…

…but you’ll find out soon enough that only most people respond positively to you being more positive. In fact some people will respond to you even worse than before. Those people are incredibly toxic to you and sometimes the best thing you can do is cut them from your life as much as possible. Sometimes that will be a very negative experience at the time, but ultimately a positive one over the long haul.

But even then, removal of a negative effect in your life doesn’t make you happy, it simply removes something making you unhappy. You still have to act positively to become happy in the aftermath of it.

Sometimes being positive in the face of negativity is the hardest thing in the world. But it’s the only thing that can result in a positive change.