Caregivers recovering from compassion fatigue will need to soften their critical and coercive self-talk and shift toward a more self-accepting and affirming language and tone. For many this is a difficult, tedious, and painstaking breaking-of-bad-habits process that can take years to complete. …show more content…
People who call themselves happy experience adversity and negative emotions as well, and some may achieve happiness by overcoming challenges and growing despite that adversity.
Positive emotions can be directly linked to negative emotions or difficult experiences as well. For instance, forgiveness and compassion are responses to being wronged. Creativity and flow involve taking risks, sometimes failing, and trying again. Awe, inspiration, serenity, and gratitude mean recognizing that you’re smaller than something else, or indebted to someone else. And generosity requires acknowledging other people’s needs and wants and sometimes putting aside your own desires.
The psychologists Jack Bauer and George Bonanno (2001) studied the connection between negative and positive emotions by interviewing people who’d lost spouses and tracking their positive and negative statements. Two years after the initial interviews, the people who’d made five positive comments to each negative one were the most successful in adjusting—better than those with all negative or all positive comments. Their success may have come from being aware of their sadness, but refusing to let it dominate their