Getting comfortable with being happy.
We believe pain and sadness without a second thought. When we’re hurting, we don’t question if it’s real. When someone does something to upset us, we don’t usually wait and see before allowing ourselves to feel that emotion.
Yet, when something good happens — when something is done to make us smile or bring us joy, we’re skeptical. We question the motive and wonder if it will last. We may allow ourselves to feel brief moments of joy or gratitude, but we’re often then waiting for the other shoe to drop. We move on to looking for the bad that we feel is sure to follow.
Under the guise of being realistic, we question everything positive that happens in our lives. We can meet a genuinely good, kind person of admirable integrity, and we’ll spend time searching for what’s wrong with them. We don’t believe it. We call them ‘too good to be true.’ And sometimes they are. That saying exists for a reason. But, sometimes they’re not. We engage in self-sabotage and block our own blessings out of an inability to simply accept them.
Disappointment is a beast of a heartache.
Maybe this is why we’re so hesitant to believe in the goodness that we see. We don’t want to get our hopes up only to be let down. The higher you go, the further and harder the fall. So, we keep our emotions at ground level.
Perhaps we’re just so used to the bad things happening that good things feel foreign. It’s difficult for us to even recognize let alone accept when something positive comes our way. Some of us have struggled through life. We’ve struggled with loss, unfortunate circumstances and heinous acts that have been committed against us. And it seems like just when we might catch a break, it all falls apart, again.
Negativity is accepted without reservation because it’s familiar.
Our minds, but especially our hearts remember the last person who did something we thought they’d never do. We remember that last time we hoped and worked for an achievement, only to fall short. We’ve been kicked while we were down and suffered unfair, unwarranted outcomes. We’re used to it raining on even our most modest parades.
