#Blessed

In this episode I explore how we are conditioned to deal with negative emotions in our culture and faith structure.  Many times we are told to count our blessings and be positive.  Toxic positivity is a common response to the hard stuff of life and can be very damaging for us.  Join me as I explore this concept.

Thanks so much for taking the time to listen today. The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns. This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony. Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul; considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences. Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul. It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives. I look forward to what is to come, what future stops we’ll take along the journey together. I’ll see you at the next stop.

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Transcript

# Blessed - Episode 6

The life of our soul is a journey with many twists and turns.  This journey has times of discovery, growth, disruption, examination, perplexity, and harmony.  Soul Sojourn is a podcast that plans to explore this journey of the soul;  considering the different segments of the journey, the different stops we make along the way, and the divergent paths that we can take as unique people with distinctive life experiences.  Soul Sojourn hopes to provide room for diverse expressions of faith and welcomes questions and doubts about the journey of the soul.  It recognizes that so often there is mystery in life and faith, questions that have no answers, and deep levels of uncertainty and precarity that are present in our lives. 

Hi, my name is Jenn Pedersen and welcome to Soul Sojourn. In this episode I’m going to consider how do we deal with big emotions in our lives, and more specifically how we deal with the hard stuff,  the trials of life?  How do we respond to challenges in our lives? How are we conditioned to respond?  What messages have we received from our culture, our faith structures, our families about how we are supposed to respond to emotions in life - the positive and the challenging, the good, the bad, and the meh?

I grew up in a Stoic Swedish tradition where expressing big emotions was not really welcomed and in some if not most situations throughout my childhood - discouraged.  I don’t fit well within a stoic structure - I’m loud and bossy (I am a firstborn), I feel things big and have a lot of opinions - I’m a 4 on the enneagram whose core emotion is sadness - I’m pretty comfortable with embracing grief, as a musician I love sad songs.  I don’t like to stuff my feelings, I like to express them, dwell in them for a bit, process them and eventually move through them. I recently had a friend tell me she thinks I should become a “death doula” - which is someone that helps dying individuals and their family move through the process of dying and grieving. I still want to ask this friend more about why she said this to me, but honestly it sounds like a wonderful endeavor to me - not something a lot of people would think sounds like a interesting or desirable role for their vocational life - But I’ve now done some research on this type of role  and have considered exploring it.  I worked for about 7 years with residents in a large nursing facility and really enjoyed my work with hospice patients as a musician who came in and sang to them and talked with them in their last days.  

As you may have gathered through this podcast, authenticity and self-expression are very important to me.  I’m an EFNJ on the Myers Briggs - which means I’m extraverted, intuitive, feeling and judging.  I’ve always had big feelings and been very extraverted.  As I look back, my intuition has always been present in my life - but due to the conditioning of my religious background with the strong Calvinist roots that told me my intuition was not trustworthy, I largely ignored or suppressed my intuition.  I’m actively focused on changing this in my life and learning how to listen to and trust my intuition.  And yes I tend to have strong opinions - I jump to snap judgments pretty quickly in many situations and at times have to walk those back and apologize for being too judgmental of people and situations.

I think I was a lot and continue to be a lot for my quiet, Scandinavian family.  Throughout my childhood I often felt I was just too much.  I sometimes wondered if I was adopted, because I felt so different from the rest of my family, but I look a lot like my parents and siblings so I’m pretty sure that theory does not have any validity.  And as I’ve learned about being an Enneagram 4 - I’ve learned this feeling of not quite fitting in, of being different is very common for type 4s. I still struggle with this feeling of being too much and I can still feel very different from many around me, but am learning to accept and embrace who I am - who I was created to be instead of embracing the toxic inner dialogue that has been a part of much of my life that has told me to calm down, quit being so much, quit feeling so much, and be more measured and controlled.    

In our culture we are pretty uncomfortable with big emotions and so uncomfortable with expressing sorrow and negative emotions.  Kate Bowler on her podcast about Toxic positivity said “We live in a culture of toxic positivity which is the pressure to only display positive emotions while suppressing our negative emotions, feelings, reactions, or experiences.  It’s the idea that no matter how difficult things may get, we must maintain a positive mindset. We’re often told to choose joy, to find the silver lining, to count our blessings. There is often a subtext to our interactions that tells us that if we can’t find our way to the happier side of life then there is something wrong with us.  We so quickly are encouraged to find the lessons and blessings in the challenges that we face in life.”  This has certainly been my experience in our culture at large and even more so within the fundamentalist religious system. 

Susan David, a psychologist calls toxic positivity a tyranny of positivity. And tells the story of her dying father sobbing after a visit from church leaders who told him that he was dying of cancer because he did not have enough faith.  I’ve heard this same notion expressed in my own years of involvement in the church.  This idea that our healing is based on the level of faith we have in God is such a harmful message.  I struggled with these feelings before our son had his surgery to receive a cochlear implant, thinking that if I just had enough faith God would heal his deafness and I’ve struggled with this type of thinking numerous types over the years as I’ve prayed for healing for our son with autism.  In our situation this type of faith toxic positivity made me feel like I was not a good enough Christian and made me question God’s love for me.  And for Susan’s family and other families I have known personally facing a terminal diagnosis, this false notion, this tyranny of positivity has led to devastating consequences in financial and relational ways.  

Susan speaks of toxic positivity as living in the world as we wish it was rather than how it is. She explores this issue in her book entitled “Emotional Agility”. She writes about the fact that we push away difficult emotions, we stuff them and refuse to deal with them and as a result we get “hooked” by the very emotions that we are trying to suppress.  When we are hooked on our emotions and bottle them but those emotions bubble up and come out in other, often negative ways.  Or we brood - we sit in our emotions and dwell on them in unhealthy ways and get stuck in that space which disrupts our ability to connect with others around us.  

Anger is one emotion that we often stuff - particularly women who are conditioned to believe that expressing our anger is not okay.  Anger is a foundational aspect of moral courage.  When we are open to the feeling of anger, we become more likely to use our voice to speak out against injustice in our world.  I recently put a new sign up in my kitchen near my coffee station - which says “Fueled by Coffee, Feminism, and Outrage”.  I want to learn to allow and acknowledge my justified anger that the world is not as it should be and then use that anger as motivation to be whatever small part of the solution I can be in my corner of the world.  

There is much to be angry, sad and frustrated about in our world - I recently heard someone say that if you’re not troubled and angered by what’s going on in the world you’re not awake.  There is systemic injustice present in our world, there is hunger and disease - we’re more aware of disease now than ever before in my life as we live in the ongoing Covid pandemic.  There are mass shootings every day in our country, there are leaders seeking to pass laws with hateful motives to silence certain groups of people, leaders who at their core want people who are different, who hold different values than they do to go away.   We are in the midst of an economic crisis where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing.  Climate change is an issue that is affecting us all - severe weather is more and more common.  In 2018 I lived through a tornado hitting my town and directly impacting my home and so many others are being impacted by severe weather events and rising tides which are a result of climate change.  Here’s another topic that many fundamentalists refuse to acknowledge - but that’s another larger conversation - one for another podcast.  

In the midst of all of this and the access we have to news from around the world which is completely overwhelming, living in a state of constant positivity is simply inauthentic.  But that’s what many are driven toward.  

Toxic positivity is fundamentally unhelpful. Difficult emotions are born of the realities of life - of all the things and more that I just listed. If we are honest and real - there’s a lot to grieve in life, a lot to be concerned about, a lot to be fearful about.  There is a huge push in our culture to express gratitude, but in the midst of difficult emotions just pushing those emotions aside and flipping to the I should be thankful script and forcing ourselves to consider all the ways in which we are so blessed is very unhelpful.  It’s in this script that we get into comparing our lives to others and saying, “At least” - at least I have a roof over my head, at least I have a caring husband, at least I have a job, - at least, at least, at least.  

Kate Bowler writes of these at leasts in her book “Everything Happens for A Reason & Other Lies I’ve Loved”.  Kate was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer in her 30s.  She had a 2 year and was given 2 years to live.  And people said things to her like “At least you’re at a top-rated medical facility.  At least you’re trying the new drug.  At least you have the financial and intellectual resources to deal with this.”  

But when we discount the difficult things that we all experience there are ramifications for our emotional and physical wellbeing. 

There are many examples of how I’ve seen toxic positivity at work in my life:  

• When we face significant health challenges, I’ve heard many Christians talk about all the amazing blessings that God provided them as they were going through their challenges - every tiny good thing that happens to come their way is put in the “Blessings of God” column.  There can be a hyper spiritualizing of every little thing down to getting a ride to a hotel and meeting a friendly person at the hotel who said a nice thing.  I recently heard someone talk in this way and they used the term blessing over and over again as they shared about their experience, but never really acknowledged how terrifying the situation was - how difficult it was to go through a very significant health challenge with a close family member.  I think we are conditioned in our larger culture and the Christian culture to push down the fears and sorrow and so completely focus on the positive - to me if feels like an untrue expression of reality.  Some of this can be attributed to personality types - not everyone deals with their feelings in the same way, some choose to ignore their feelings all together - but is this truly how they really want to live their lives or how they have been told they have to live their lives. 
  • And within the Christian culture there is a particular expectation of women to put on a happy, pleasant demeanor - to not be difficult or outspoken and to just be positive and bring forth good and bountiful things in our lives without complaining or making any objections to what’s going on around us - often while being treated as less than and ultimately being demeaned by the theology of our faith structures.    
• I’ve seen toxic positivity in the things we say to others as they face challenges - As a mom to kids with disabilities I’ve had sooo many people say to me something along the lines of “God knew you were an extra special mom and that you would handle this so well, so God gave you these children to care for.”  In my head, when people say this to me I often think, and increasingly I say this out loud - “I’d rather not be special in this way and I sure wish God didn’t have such confidence in me.”  If you have friends with challenges like this in their lives - whether they have a child with autism or are battling cancer or chronic illness or have lost a family member or friend - please do not say this to them.  Just be present for them and acknowledge how hard what they are going through truly is.
• So many people will say “Everything happens for a reason”.  We are conditioned to say this - to try to make people feel better, and our brains are wired to try to make everything meaningful.  But when tough things happen in life - this is really not helpful or encouraging.  When you are in the midst of a challenge in your life, you don’t want to hear about the lesson God is going to teach you through it or the encouragement you will be to others by showing how faithful you remain even as hard stuff comes your way.
• I recently had an ankle surgery and during my recovery period I started to question if the surgery had been successful.  As I expressed this concern to others, I had so many people say to me “Oh don’t think that way, just be positive.”  Here is another example of toxic positivity - that I couldn’t just express my fears that I had gone through a surgery and all that entailed and that it was for nothing.  As it turns out - I was correct - the surgery was unsuccessful - I was part of the 20% that the doctor said it would not work for.  Scientifically speaking, I don’t think that me being more positive during my recovery was going to change the facts of the statistics.  When people repeatedly told me to stop being negative, to just be positive I felt unseen and dismissed. I felt like my pain and frustration were being invalidated. 
• I’ve been involved in leading worship in the church for almost 30 years and I can count on one hand the number of services I’ve been a part of that actually involved expressing sorrow and grief and acknowledging the hard stuff in our lives.  Many times worship services can feel like a pep rally - filled with messages of positivity and triumph. And as a person who plans services, it’s difficult to even find songs with a more serious note among contemporary worship music so they are not often included.  But where does all this leave those who are struggling in the pews.  I had a season of sadness early in my life as a mom as I was processing the challenges of the disabilities present in my sons’ lives when I walked away from worship Sunday after Sunday feeling completely unseen and annoyed. And as a worship leader at the time, I also felt like a complete fake singing and leading songs of triumph and victory.  I felt that the whole experience was not applicable to me and I wanted to stop going to church.  This lack of willingness to talk about sad things in the church is an expression of this theology of toxic positivity embedded in our understanding of how things should be.  
  • In her book “Prayer in the Night” Tish Harrison Warren writes.  “Psalms of lament - both communal and individual - are the most common type of psalm in the Psalter.  They voice disappointment, anger, sadness, pain, deep confusion, and loss.  If our gathered worship expresses only unadulterated trust, confidence, victory, and renewal, we are learning to be less honest with God than the Scriptures themselves are.”   
• As I’ve been on my faith journey and come into different church traditions over the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve found churches that follow the church calendar and observe Lent.  Lent is the 40 days leading up to Easter and begins with Ash Wednesday.  Many churches who observe Lent have an Ash Wednesday service to mark the beginning of the season, and also have a Maundy Thursday and Good Friday service in the week leading up to Easter.  Each of these services has a more somber tone, acknowledging the reality of our own mortality, and the sorrow and pain and grief that was present for Jesus and his followers.  These services are some of my favorites through the year now, because they are a place to acknowledge pain and hard things.   

American Christians are so uncomfortable with sorrow and grief. As a person who has spent a lot of time studying the Bible, I find this so interesting because the Bible is full of difficult stories, full of sorrow and lament. There are so many passages of lament and sorrow found throughout the Bible.  There’s an entire book of the Bible about lament and sorrow called Lamentations.  The story of Job is full of lament and major life challenges (and examples of how friends should not respond to other’s challenges). About ⅓ to ⅔  of the book of Psalms, the songbook of the Bible are songs of lament.

There is lament woven through the stories in both the old and new testaments - in the story of Abraham and Sarah as they long for a child, in the story of Joseph as he is sold into slavery and taken away from his family, in the story of the Israelites living in bondage in Egypt  - following Moses as they left Egypt but then wandering in the desert for 40 years as they longed for the land God had promised them.  There is lament throughout the stories of the prophets - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jonah just to name a few.  And certainly there are stories of sorrow and grief in the New Testament. The beginning of Jesus’ life is painted with sorrow and grief and his parents flee from Herod and as Herod kills all the infant boys from Bethlehem.   As I release this podcast, we are in the midst of Holy week - a story of great sorrow and pain found in the New Testament - one that has a triumphant ending, but that doesn’t negate the pain and depth of emotional angst that was experienced by not only Jesus but so many of his followers as he was crucified.  

Sorrow, grief, pain, fear, disappointment, anxiety, and loss are a part of all of our lives.  We all have our challenges large and small and have friends and family who are struggling with cancer, chronic pain, depression, job less, disconnection from others, and so much more.  And we have access to news from around the world about loss and war and famine and natural disasters and government unrest.  Because of all of this swirling around us I believe it’s as important as ever to reject the scripts of toxic positivity and allow for honesty and authenticity in sharing what’s grieving our souls.  

Honestly expressing our sorrow, grief, and disappointment is a healthy and helpful exercise.  I wonder if part of the reason we have such an issue with depression and anxiety in our country is because we don’t often allow space in our lives for expressing our sorrow, disappointment and grief.  In the Christian tradition we have a model of dealing with disappointment and grief called lament.  Lament is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. Throughout the Bible we have abundant examples of God’s people crying out in lament - pouring out their worries and concerns, their losses and questions and doubts before the Lord.  And the amazing thing about these many passages throughout the Bible is God’s response - God doesn’t shut them down and tell the people to just be happy and count their blessings, God’s heart breaks with people who are hurting and God chooses to be aligned and present with suffering people.  Jesus modeled this in his life as he walked with the marginalized - the women, the lepers, the tax collectors - He chose to do life with the outsiders of the time, with those who had much to mourn and grieve, those who were lamenting their lives.

Lament is a topic I’ve explored a lot.  I have a pile of books on lament sitting by me as I write this - books I’ve read over the past 5 years.  Books that have been an encouragement and safe place for me to face the sorrow present in my soul.  As I walk into a new season of authenticity and wholeness I am embracing lament, sorrow, and even anger in my life - I am seeking to be open to the emotions that rise up in myself -whether they are positive or negative and ask some thoughtful questions about my emotions. What are you here for?  How can I allow space for you?  What is your purpose in my life?  What are you trying to move me toward?  

And I am trying to make space for those in my life to do the same - even those who feel they must be radically positive all the time.  I’m trying to offer a safe place for those I interact with to share authentically about what struggles they are facing and encourage all people that we can share the hard stuff as well as the good stuff with one another.  I think that’s what true connection in life should be about - freedom to be who we are and share our joys and our struggles with one another without fear that we’ll be judged for being too negative.

As I close today I’d like to share another blessing from Kate Bowler, an author and theologian who speaks so beautifully about this topic.  

This is  “A Blessing for Telling the Truth, No Matter How Bitter or Sweet”

Blessed are you, resisting the urge to reframe, you who are sick and tired of silver linings.

Blessed are you, speaking honestly about what is right in front of you; this is hard, things might not get better, this really has gone horribly, there may not be a different way.

You who risk honesty, especially when the world around us craves a brightside.

Blessed are we in our gratitude and pain, our pleasures and our limitations.

May we feel ourselves answered by this language of love, 
changed where we can, and confirmed where we can’t.

But love, loved, loved all the same.

May we all know that no matter where we find ourselves today - whether we are feeling gratitude and joy or pain and sorrow, we are loved.  My hope for all of us is that we will have people in our lives and be people who allow for sorrow and pain to bubble up and be expressed without trying to fix it or pour shame on the hard stuff by requiring everyone to find the bright side or the lesson in suffering.

Thanks for listening today as I shared about toxic positivity.  Perhaps you’ve not considered this idea before, but I imagine now that you’ve heard this podcast you’ll begin to see it all around you.  As people respond to me with the narrative of toxic positivity I try to approach them with acceptance and grace - knowing that they are likely acting on the conditioning they have received from our culture and religion.  But my hope is that we can walk toward greater authenticity in life and have safe and caring places and people in your life where you can share the tough stuff along with the good.  On our next episode we’ll be exploring the topic of systems of oppression and I’ll be welcoming my 2nd guest co-host. Hope you’ll join me here  again next week on Soul Sojourn as we continue to explore the journey of soul. I look forward to what is to come, what stops we’ll take along the journey together.  I’ll see you at the next stop.