When you’re blindsided by divorce, even the cheeriest personalities can take a deep dive into despair.
What if it’s always been easier for you to obsess about what could go wrong rather than what’s right? And, now, everything seems to show you that there’s no way out, and you’re pretty much doomed, now that your husband is gone.
Whether you’re an optimist or a card-carrying pessimist, I have a few easy suggestions on how to cultivate optimism — or how to learn optimism for the first time.
Why would you want to see possibilities instead of defeat? Because your happiness, for the rest of your life, depends on it! The quality of people you attract into your life, the opportunities you’ll have (or lack of them), your resilience when there are bumps in the road . . . the way you think determines the ease or difficulty you’ll feel in every event of your life.
What if you’re a lifelong Eeyore?
When you look back, have you spent most of your life expecting for things to get worse? Have you been rejected, over and over, by the kinds of people, activities, and things you wanted most in life?
Maybe you also settled for a life partner that (if you level with yourself) you never really really wanted in the first place. But, you said yes, because you thought he was your only chance.
As often happens, maybe you developed your Eeyore nature early in life, in the messages you received from your family, or at school.
When you look back at it, you may have been groomed by life to be a pessimist, or to reject yourself because you didn’t get to be who you wanted to be.
So, now, divorce casts everything that went before into greater relief. You don’t even want to try. It feels so hard to rebound and to start over. There’s that underlying “why bother” feeling.
Even if you’ve been an eye-roller all your life (especially if), divorce is the ideal time to turn this around. In fact, it’s a wake-up call.
Cultivating optimism — even if you’ve been a pessimist all your life
If you’ve learned, through your experiences, that it’s smarter to give up before you even start, guess what? You can learn optimism, too.
You know how all of those disappointments in life chipped away at you and made it seem like a foregone conclusion that, even if things seemed good, you were headed for a fall?
Now, it’s up to you to consciously create an environment that’s so unfailingly positive and self-supportive that it’s a foregone conclusion that things will keep getting better, you’ll keep learning new things about how to make it better, and everything around you will start to conform to your new view of life.
Hating something? Wanting someone to stop dragging you down? Wish it were this way instead of that? Time to take control.
There’s an important step before you can start turning things around. First, you need to stop the negative momentum.
This is a great step for most “learned pessimists” because it doesn’t feel authentic to do a 180 and start being all positive affirmations, smiles, and rainbows.
But, you probably can accept the idea that maybe things aren’t quite as doomed as you think they are, so let’s look at a few ways to get daily life to feel less awful and to reset your typical reactions to things.
How to learn optimism (or at least become a little less doom-and-gloom)
Getting to “neutral”:
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Identify those messages that you tend to think about many times every day. We’re talking about the messages (in the news, in the kinds of tv programs you watch, or websites you visit, or social media stuff you gravitate toward) that feed into the “what’s the use” thinking that is already your usual. Would it feel better spending less time allowing those messages to reinforce themselves to you? The first step is awareness, and then you get to make the conscious choices.
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Focus on getting to neutral; zero on the number line rather than a negative number. Start asking yourself the question, “Do I absolutely know that this poison I’m thinking about is actually true? Do I absolutely, 100% know this? Could I be wrong, even if it feels unlikely?”
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Through combing out your thoughts, on a minute-to-minute basis (if necessary), your goal is to get to the place where, “Yeah, XYZ could be awful . . . or, maybe it’s not and my thoughts are just a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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Be aware of situations that plunge you back into self-rejection and coloring everything darkly. It’s illuminating to keep notes of what happened directly before you feel pitched into a dark mood. What are the situations? Who are the people? What were the buzzwords that got you going? What were the triggers? These are the people, situations, and things that you want to avoid. Let them set off alarms for you going forward. If you can’t immediately distance yourself, how can you talk yourself into a better place and minimize the fallout?
Want support in shifting to a point of view that supports you rather than shoots you down?
Learning to stop self-cursing (which is what negative thoughts do to you), is one of the most important things I coach clients on — with fast and measurable results.
Click here, and let me know that you read my blog about learned optimism and you want some help in making this change.
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