Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
PART 7 - Be Constructive
BALANCE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE
Bad things are good now and again, and good things are bad if you have too much of them. Forcing yourself to be positive 100% of the time because you have an image in your head of a happy-go-lucky, ultra-positive individual --who you want to be--can really stress you out and make you less happy with yourself.
I specifically put this ingredient last on the list because if you don't understand the other 7 you might not understand what I try to say here, or worse you could end up in a more difficult situation to pull out of. Go back and reread the other ingredients because they're crucial.
Life isn't black and white, it isn't all good and all bad, it isn't all positive and all negative, but for whatever reason these are the things we focus on most and we try to make sense of everything in polar terms. Let's face it, life is incredibly complex and it changes so rapidly that to attempt to understand and make a firm pattern out of it could prove futile--you can't accurately describe something as black or white, good or bad. Many of the things that, upon initial inspection, appear to be good for us come to harm us later and most of the bad things that happen to us in life end up being good for us because of how we change because of them. It's easy to get caught up first in the present--and to think that everything is so horrible because we are facing hard times right now--and second in the black and white, thinking that everything is so horrible because of our perspective. I tried to point this out in Part 4 and Part 5 that if you want to live happily in this life, you need to get comfortable with the idea that you don't know everything and your circumstances right now aren't how they will always be.
Instead of focusing so much effort on trying to figure out if something is good for you or bad for you, focus on balancing your life. Balance is a synonym for control--when things start to tip in a direction that you don't want them to, you compensate by making changes--you control the acts that create the stability.
Everyone goes through rough times and at one point or another you will have something horribly bad happen to you. No one escapes life without at least one incredibly bad thing happening to them, whether its being molested as a child, taken advantage of when you were defenseless, having to face some abnormality or disease, being cheated, beat up, abandoned, retaliated against, betrayed--the list goes on and on. The only people who don't have these things happen to them die before they are old enough to face them and I would argue that they got the worst fate of all because they never got to experience life. With all of these horrible things that happen to us it's a wonder that we are able to not only survive them but thrive in spite of them!
Happiness isn't as simple as only good things happening to us, happiness is being comfortable with the bad and good that happens to us. If you go through life thinking you'll get your fair share of the good you deserve, you'll be incredibly disappointed; and if you think you don't deserve all of the bad that you're getting, you might be wrong as well.
The 8th ingredient to my All-natural Anti-Depressant is to accept the positive and the negative. Don't be greedy, it will eat you alive! You will get exactly what you deserve in life based on what you fight to obtain or what you fight to defend; you will not get what you think you deserve, ever. Life is too complicated for you to know what you deserve and it is a waste of time and energy to look back and reflect on it until you have made it out of your depressed state. Instead of focusing on how and why you are in the situation you are in right now, focus on how you're going to get out.
Acceptance means you take what life gives you and you roll with it. To accept the positive things that happen to you is to realize that, "this may be the only positive thing that happens for a while, but that's okay, I'll enjoy it while it lasts." It means that you accept the negative things that happen to you because, in that moment, you have no control over the negative things. We live in a delayed-present. The positive and negative things that are happening to us right now were triggered by things in our past. Once the trigger is pulled you can't go back and untrigger it, at the present time you only have two options: accept them for what they are, or fight them by arguing, denying, beating yourself up over them, and ultimately prolonging your unhappiness.
When you accept the positive and the negative, you establish balance in your life. You let life happen the way it is supposed to happen and you free yourself to enjoy life and not be depressed. Happiness is in you, you just need to recognize it and stop suppressing it. The only thing that can prevent you from being happy is your own mind--your actions don't lead you to unhappiness, actions lead to different situations--true happiness is founded on the only thing you have complete control over 100% of the time: your conscious.
You can heal yourself. I know you can do it!
NEXT PART 9
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