On bright-siding.

On Saturday my mom was telling me a story about something upsetting that happened. She was still feeling unsettled and I immediately did the thing to her that I get so mad at her for doing to me.

Luckily I only did it in my head. I’ve been playing with this particular pattern, so I caught myself before letting the words tumble out.

In my head, I had been thinking: Well, at least since that upsetting thing happened last night, it probably won’t happen again this weekend and so you won’t have to worry about it. i.e. I know you’re feeling really raw and emotional and scared, but just stop. Because… check out this shiny new perspective and cheer up! Yayyy!

I know exactly how unhelpful this is because of how annoyed I get when someone tries to bright-side my own suffering.

You know, when you’re really upset about something and someone says “Well, at least–” And then some variation of “…check out the rainbow following this storm, blahblahblah.” Spare me.

But the worse thing, the thing that causes me much more struggling and stuck, is the way I do this to myself. Because then it’s basically unconscious, and the effect is that instead of acknowledging the pain of a situation, I hightail myself away from experiencing the here and now, skipping ahead to some future positive reframe.

Having a positive outlook usually sounds like a good thing. And I doubt I’d trade mine in for gloom and doom.

I can only imagine how useful this perspective would be to my grandmother coming of age during the depression and losing loved ones in world wars. And then later raising six kids on a shoestring. And then losing my grandfather much too soon. And and and. And life provides plenty of occasions where resilience is adaptive.

And there can be a shadow.

Like when optimism is really just disguised avoidance. When I unconsciously force a positive outlook on myself at the wrong stage of the self-work process, it’s more like frosting over… well, something that one generally doesn’t frost.

Because I skip the step of acknowledging my own suffering, the negative emotion goes unprocessed and gunks up my system. It’s me trying to skip the step of meeting myself where I am. The more I work on my stuff, the more I recognize this as THE pivotal step.

A few weeks before this conversation with my mom, I’d had an epiphany. I was feeling really frustrated with my own rainbow-spouting optimism, and suddenly I saw so clearly how, when it comes to this pattern, I am my mother’s daughter and she is her mother’s daughter.

We are a family of bright-siders.

And once I spotted the pattern, I immediately started wondering about how I could play with it. And then I immediately started playing with it by considering the benefits of this particular pattern.

Like that resilience. My grandmother is so beautifully resilient. And I’ve always appreciated inheriting that quality, finding it in myself.

SCREEEEEEEEEEECH. (Sound of wheels halting inside my head.) Wait. The benefits?! Did I really leap that quickly into bright-siding myself again? Yes. I did. It’s a pattern.

But then I actually started laughing.

Later on in the conversation with my mom, I shared with her where my (sick?) mind had gone when she was telling me her story. And when I told her the story of my recent epiphany, we laughed so hard together. Probably because we are bright-siders. Good to know.