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Comment by thephyber | Hacker News Reader

There's a fine line between what you described and toxic positivity.

It's important not to ruminate on bad thoughts (when your proposal is a good replacement behavior), but it's also important not to bottle up natural human emotions as if they are unjustified or unreal.

A thought exercise: if it wasn't your behavior that caused your own despair, but your spouse's behaviors that caused you irritation / grief. Do you think it's better to paint a smile on yourself and ignore the underlying problem, or spend a few minutes feeling your emotions, describe the cause to your partner, then politely suggest a substitute behavior? The former builds resentment and bottles up strong emotions for an inevitable outburst down the road. The other diffuses the emotion, potentially alleviates the offending behavior, and doesn't betray what you authentically emote.

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I think you're only only disagreeing in the premise of your reply, and not the substance of it.

The unnecessary emotion is the problem and that emotion is 100% caused by inexperience. The surest way to stay confused is to overindulge in the emotions blinding you. Worse would be wallowing in it with your partner.

Communicating the emotions first and then rambling your unfiltered thoughts will just cause more confusion. This is exactly how most couples fuck everything up. You should instead take the time to process the emotions on your own and then find the burning question underneath it all.

The more you do this, the less time you'll need to waste on the emotions and the more effective you'll be when you choose to speak or act.

Or the more confused everything becomes, and it just gets bottled up because there’s too much going on, and the partner gets away with their bad behavior and never has to take responsibility for their actions.

forming a habit involves taking an action and having a result. A consequence. Talking about it does not work for a lot of people. They need to be pavlov’d.

Once those difficult emotions are cool, everyone can explain what you did and why, yes. I just don’t think that always waiting for things to “cool off“ is actually helpful, it robs people of the consequences of their actions. People need immediate consequences to reinforce behaviors.

Indeed, and time also gives plausible deniability.. reacting live means the behaviour is present, evident. Three hours later it is easy to deflect reality and claim it was a misperception.

In your comment and the ones responding to you there's an assumption that your partner's behavior is the bigger problem compared to your reaction to it.

In my experience I've generally fucked things up precisely because my reaction was worse and inappropriate compared to what the partner did.

I think I am "lucky" in that my wife is amazing and I don't have to be on-guard again truly malicious and inappropriate behavior from her, so I have the "luxury" of focusing on controlling my own emotions and responses.

But then - WTF! How are people in relationships with people that you have to be so on-guard against?

Because they formed partnerships when they were young and didn't know any better. And then once things get going, it seems better to "go along to get along" than face the difficulty of change.

In the US, we also have ideologies that say that one partner is supposed to be subservient to the other based on gender roles, and that makes things even more insane.

I am not sure about either of these things. The typical HN person doesn't seem to be someone who partnered young or was raised in anything like a "traditional US ideology"...

It mainly seems like their parents failed to pass on any cultural wisdom. Go along to get along is fine, very different than your "partner" severely transgressing upon you.

It is a trade-off. The benefits seems to outweigh the downsides, but it can still be painful. But we can try to alleviate the problems by using our rational mind.

That's the point.

The grandparent said Rocket doesn't slip into despair, not tries not to slip.

That's unrealistic and tracks with toxic positivity. If everyone had the muscle to process their initial and secondary emotions in a calm manner, then airport bookshelves would be empty.

You even ask how people can get swept in such situations when the pathologies for trauma bonds and "s/he beats me because they love me" are pretty clear.

I agree with you on everything except I don't understand why you are labeling the healthy alternative "toxic".

I don't think I am.

I made a distinction between people who have the self-esteem muscle (healthy) and those who subscribe to unsustainable, toxic positivity (unhealthy).

Don't date I think is the lesson here.

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