Transcript of Edge Note: What if positivity is keeping you stuck?

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along. We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir Notes from a Certified Madwoman. Welcome to the Edge.

Welcome to Notes from the Edge. I'm your host, Lisa Lacey. This is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. What if positivity is keeping you stuck? I want to talk about something today that might make sense, might make some people uncomfortable. Especially in spiritual spaces. False positivity, spiritual bypassing, and the idea that if we acknowledge something painful, difficult, unfair, or simply not working, and then somehow we are being negative. And I don't believe that. Sometimes reality is not the reality we wanted. Sometimes the relationship did break our hearts. Sometimes the business did not work out, and sometimes People hurt us, and sometimes we make the wrong decisions. Our bodies change. People leave, abandon us. We suffer grief, loss. Some things we prayed for haven't happened yet or didn't happen. And looking directly at any of that does not make you negative. Perhaps you are just a realist and you cannot change reality you refuse to acknowledge. I believe in magic. I believe in intuition. I believe there are things happening all around us that we do not fully understand. At least I don't. I believe gratitude can change the way we experience our lives.

I believe hope matters. But none of those things require me to pretend. And pretending is not healing because life is hard. Not every minute, not every season, not for every person in exactly the same way. But we are human beings with human emotions. Which means at some point we are going to encounter suffering, grief, loss, disappointment, fear, rejection, heartbreak. Some stories of ours are more objectively more devastating than others. We do not need to pretend every hardship is equal, but emotional turmoil is part of being alive, and so is trauma. And trauma is incredibly personal. 2 people can experience what appears from the outside to be the exact same event and walk away carrying completely different experiences of it. So imagine 2 little girls. Both go to the park on a hot summer Sunday afternoon with their fathers. Both are holding an ice cream cone. It is summer. The pavement is hot. And both girls drop their ice cream. Same park, same Sunday, same hot cement, same melting ice cream. One little girl cries for a minute. Her father laughs, hugs her, buys her another one, and the next Sunday they go back to the park again.

10 years later, she's probably not even thinking about dropping that ice cream at all. If she ever thought about it again, maybe she remembers Sundays with her dad. Maybe she remembers feeling safe. Maybe she remembers being loved. Now imagine the second little girl. She drops the exact same ice cream cone, but she had to work to earn the money to buy it herself. It turns out that Sunday would be the last time she ever saw her father. And 10 years later, people cannot understand why she still remembers that ice cream hitting the hot pavement. It was just an ice cream, except it wasn't, not to her. The event may look the same from the outside. The experience internally was completely different. One became an ordinary child moment and the other became attached to loss. And that is why comparing trauma is useless. It is also why telling somebody just focus on the positive can sometimes do far more harm than good, because what exactly are we asking them to do? Ignore what happened? Pretend they are not angry, that they are not grieving? Find the lesson before they've even been allowed to feel the loss?

Everything does not immediately need a silver lining. Sometimes something hurts because it hurts, or it was wrong because it was wrong, and you need to sit in the truth before you start decorating it with meaning. That is where spiritual bypassing becomes dangerous. We can use beautiful language to avoid ugly realities. Everything happens for a reason. Your vibration attracted this. Just choose happiness. Forgive and forget. Think positively. Don't give energy to anything negative. Maybe. But maybe first we need to tell the damn truth, because acceptance is not the same thing as approval. Facing reality does not mean you like the reality, and acknowledging pain does not mean you intend to live inside it forever. There is another side to this. Staying permanently rooted in victimhood, resentment, anger, or comparison does not heal us either. There are things that have happened to me that I could have spent the rest of my life being angry about, and I could probably build a pretty convincing case for why I had every right to be angry. Justified anger. But eventually I would have to ask myself, is it protecting me? Is it keeping me in a prison? Because there's a difference between acknowledging that you were a victim of something and building your entire identity about remaining one.

There's a difference between feeling angry and allowing the anger to become permanently ingrained in who you are. And there's a difference between honoring your grief and deciding grief is the story. That's the only one you're ever allowed to tell. Healing asks something harder from us than positivity. It asks us to hold 2 truths at the same time. This happened and I am still here. This hurt me and I can heal. I did not deserve this, but I am responsible for what I do next. I cannot change yesterday. But I have enormous influence over tomorrow and how I feel and what I change. That is not spiritual bypassing, that is agency. Maybe real spirituality is not about floating above the human experience. Maybe it's about becoming brave enough to fully inhabit it— the beautiful parts, the brutal parts, the confusing parts, the parts we still cannot explain. Grief, joy, rage, and wonder, magic, all of it. Because transformation does not begin when we convince ourselves everything is wonderful. Transformation begins when we begin willing to look at our lives exactly as they are, not worse than they are, not better than they are, as they are.

In the now, what relationships exist today? What does your health look like today? What is happening financially today? What are you feeling? What are you tolerating? What are you avoiding? And what truth have you been trying to cover up with gratitude, affirmation, spirituality, productivity, addictions, work, relationships, or anything else? That keeps you from having to look directly at it. You do not have to hate your life to change your life. You do not have to become cynical to be realistic, and you do not have to stop believing in magic to admit that sometimes life hurts like hell. In fact, perhaps the magic begins there, at the very moment we stop asking reality to be something it is not. Because when I can finally say, this is where I am, I can ask the only question that actually changes anything. Where do I want to go from here? You cannot create tomorrow from the version of today you are pretending exists. You create tomorrow from the reality you are willing to face. And sometimes the most positive thing you can possibly do is tell yourself The truth. What are you performing in order to survive or just get by?

And what might setting that role, mask, or performance down do to lighten your load just a little bit and give you a much better ride? I'm Lisa Lacey, your host. When you find the answer to that, I will see you at the edge.