I can remember many years ago, a friend and I went to a massive Tony Robbins seminar in the US (the seminar being massive… Although Tony is very tall…) and coming away pumped up, with loads of new ways to make ourselves feel great and ensure there was no room at all in our lives for any unwanted feelings or anything negative at all.

A far cry from my teenage years of listening to The Smiths and Joy Division in my dark bedroom, moping about how rubbish I thought conventional life was (I was studying sociology and politics at the time) …

These day, I tend to promote the notion of introducing as much positivity into your life in a variety of ways, you see that, don’t you?

Today however, I wanted to promote negative feelings… “Uh-oh… Here he goes again…” Let me explain…

I was working one day, seeing therapy clients a few months after that US based seminar and was feeling a bit low about a few things happening in my life… I was undergoing some change in my circumstances and things were complex in my life in my opinion.

Seeing that I was a bit low, my friend that I had attended the Tony Robbins seminar with said to me “Come on Adam, remember what Tony says…” He then proceeded to do his ‘power move’ that he had learned at the seminar and began injecting well-being and positivity into his own life and attempting to cajole me into doing the same.

Good pal.

So, is there no place at all for any negative feelings? Should we not understand our feelings, understand negativity? To be more rounded, to have more empathy and know who we truly are?

I am not suggesting that we get bogged down with being a negative person that drives themself into the ground and detrimentally affects their life in all manner of ways. Just that we readily acknowledge that we cannot possibly walk through life doing a Cheshire cat impression… Man, that would look wierd.  

In the metaphor-laden fairytale Sleeping Beauty, her parents throw a joyous party to celebrate her long-awaited birth. They only have twelve place settings at the party table, so they invite twelve of the kingdom’s thirteen wise women. The thirteenth wise woman, who is ill-tempered and lives in a remote corner of the kingdom, is not invited to the party. By all accounts, she is a grumpy sort.

The twelve sisters bestow blessings on the baby, but the thirteenth — enraged at being excluded — curses the child to an early death, a sentence which one of the other twelve sisters manages to convert into a one-hundred year sleep. Thus, the name of the story…

As the parents did with twelve of the wise women, in life, in therapy, at work and in much more general terms these days… We eagerly invite the positive emotions — happiness, excitement, pleasure — into our lives. We do what we can to encourage them to stay. Regardless of how well we treat them, our positive feelings tend to be guests; they come and go.

The way that the parents treated the thirteenth sister is the way many of us treat sadness, temporary bouts of introspection  and other seemingly negative emotions. We are not so eager to invite negative emotions — sadness, anger, fear — into our lives. But like the thirteenth sister; they come anyway. And they do not take kindly to being excluded — avoided, ignored, or suppressed. Are we prepared to acknowledge these emotions and even to honour their wisdom — to give them a place at the table?

I am not suggesting that we turn over all of the seats at the table to negative emotions, to the exclusion of the positive ones. But to lay a place for negative emotions is a powerful gesture of inclusion, a way of embracing more completely the facets of human experience. Perhaps if the thirteenth sister had been invited, she would have offered Sleeping Beauty a healthy sense of skepticism alongside the sweetness bestowed by the other sisters, a sharp tongue to match her daintiness, or a groundedness beneath her angelic spirit. She may have been a more rounded individual…

You see, I think it is wise not to shun feelings, in fact to express ourselves honestly, let things out and not just aim for teeth sparkling joy-filled needless optimism 100% of the time… The lack of reality in such an existence may cause more problems… Then again, sitting in dark bedrooms with “heaven knows I’m miserable now” blasting loudly out of the stereo may also have it’s downside…

Wishing you a rounded day 😉