Episode 07 – Sometimes, Things Suck – Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome to Twisted Thinking the podcast that helps you keep your thoughts flexible. My name is Kristin and today I’ve adapted a post that I wrote for the Twisted Thinking blog published on April 7th of 2022. That link is in the show notes if you’re interested. The subject of the post was sometimes, things suck.
And that might seem a little off brand for someone who focuses on the positive, but things aren’t always positive in life.
The death of a loved one, Injury or illness, loss of a job, ending of a relationship.
We can agree that these things aren’t usually positive experiences and that generally speaking, we don’t want them to happen no matter what good may come from them further down the road.
Later doesn’t matter because we have to deal with it now. A few weeks or months or even years is really immaterial.
But there are some people who would rather ignore the obvious suckage for lack of a better term of these kinds of events and encourage you to skip the acknowledgement part and then barrel on into finding the silver lining.
They’re usually well meaning, but they often say things like “oh everything happens for a reason.” or “It was meant to be” and then they expect that these platitudes are going to magically make you understand that there is a grand design and that makes it all OK.
I am not arguing the validity of those proverbs today, although I do want to get into them eventually, but what I do want to talk about is why I think some of us continuously do this and why, in my opinion, we really need to stop.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that many are stuck in this mindset because they, like me, either grew up in a church or are now regular churchgoers.
And the reason I say this is because in the church – at least traditional Christian churches – we’re conditioned to believe that any negative emotion regarding the trials and tribulations we’re faced with is sinful.
It’s blasphemous, and it’s unworthy because our religious text says we must suffer in order to get our ultimate reward.
I feel pretty confident in calling BS on that line of thinking.
I wholeheartedly agree there are lessons to be learned from all the things that happen in life, good and bad and obviously I support finding the positive in a bad situation since it’s the concept I’m building this podcast on.
But I also believe that attempting to minimize uncomfortable or painful emotions by telling people to get over it because it’s part of the grand plan is incredibly insulting and disrespectful of the person but also of Christ. Or any religion that’s based on love and compassion.
I’ll get further into that explanation in a minute, but first let me tell you a story.
I remember when I was 16, I had a best friend.
Not only was he my best friend, but he was also my first love, and we were taking those first very tentative steps towards becoming more than friends when he died.
It was as unexpected as it was awful. There’s no question about it. That singular event snowballed into an avalanche of bad decisions and errors in my life that are really hard to put a good spin on even now.
Did good things eventually come from that experience?
Sure, eventually.
Did people immediately start trying to make me feel better about his death?
Absolutely, almost everyone did.
And did it help is the real question and the answer is a resounding no.
It actually made it worse.
Their way of making me feel better was to force the idea that this 18-year-old kid dying was in some way a blessing to me, to his family, to his other friends and to the world as a whole, because everything happens for a reason.
They were implying that my feelings of pain and sadness were somehow a perversion of destiny and that I was wrong to even consider that the situation was terrible.
That mindset led to years of me feeling guilty about my grief and anger because — and because of that guilt, it took me much longer to come to terms with my loss and eventually to heal from it.
And so, this is where I want to address those people who have been like me, led to believe that we have to shut off our perfectly healthy and normal human emotions in order to be worthy for religious reasons.
Specifically, Christianity at this point. I would like to direct your attention to a scripture.
Perhaps you’ve never really paid attention to it, or maybe you’ve never realized the significance of it, but I’m almost positive you’ve heard it.
The book is John 11:35 and it’s King James and I’ll just go ahead and read it.
Scripture reads, “Jesus wept.”
Now most of us know that one right, it’s the shortest verse in the bible, but most of us only know it as that and not the story surrounding it.
So, the question becomes, why did Jesus weep?
The answer is easy.
Jesus wept because he was sad.
Now why was he sad?
Because his friend Lazarus had just died.
Now, to those of you not familiar with the end of the story, Jesus goes on to perform a miracle and raises Lazarus from the dead.
But I don’t think that this – that is the only thing we’re meant to learn here.
Everyone rushes to that bit, but they don’t take time to read and understand the significance of that teeny tiny verse at the beginning.
That small, overlooked verse is so important because in my opinion it shows that even though Jesus knew that his friend was going to live again, it didn’t matter. What was going to happen in 5 minutes or five days or five years, meant little to the sadness and grief that Jesus was feeling right then.
His friend was gone and so like any one of us would do, he cried.
Right?
So, to those who might persist, persist in delivering these outdated and ultimately unhelpful pieces of advice based solely on religion, I want to point out that even Jesus acknowledges that it is OK to feel things even if those things are “negative.” He sets 2 examples for us here. The first is when he takes the time to grieve before doing anything else, and the second one is that after he grieves, he performs a miracle.
Now he of course raises the dead, but in today’s age our miracle may just be getting out of bed or opening the curtains and letting the light in or going for a walk or even just laughing with a friend.
Now of course there are many out there who don’t accept religion as a basis for their actions, and that’s perfectly fine.
I’m not here to convert you, but science also backs up this theory, so for anyone who might want to explore the science behind why it’s bad to suppress or deny emotions, I’ll just link –
I’ll link just one of the hundreds of studies that back this up in the show notes. I’m not going to cite anything here, mostly because of time constraints, but I – I want to make sure that I point out there are also non-religious reasons to abandon this whole buck up and soldier on mentality and recognize it as as unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.
Whether you’re religious, spiritual, atheists, agnostic, whatever, it doesn’t matter to me, but your ability to deal with things that life throws you does.
I want you to be supported as you work through and understand your grief and eventually come to a place where you can make that experience work for you.
Because when we support people and their emotions while they deal with these unavoidable and sometimes unthinkable experiences, sort of a “feel, then deal” situation.
Then we’ll see them growing and learning rather than being beaten down and destroyed.
It can only do good things for our society and our world as a whole.
I’d like to know what you think about this. Do you think that the traditionalist way of dealing with undesirable events is best practice? Or do you agree with me? Let me know.
That’s all for today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, head over to https://www.podchaser.com/TwistedThinking and leave a review. It’s the best way to support the show. If something I said caught your attention and you want to continue the conversation, I invite you to join my discord server. It’s free and easy to use.
The show notes is where you’ll find the links to the studies I mentioned previously. Big thank you to my patrons without them none of this would be possible. Thank you so much for listening and until next time be blessed and stay twisted.