These were people who agreed with statements like “I will get out of this situation stronger than I was before”, “I do something productive every day”, “I use this situation to get closer to my loved ones” and “I am grateful for my life as it is”. These individuals have higher degrees of what we call “inner harmony”, which is a state of mind of persons who manage to accept both positive and negative aspects of their lives and integrate them into their lives. Inner harmony is often associated with calmness, acceptance, contentment, long-term happiness and life satisfaction.
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In my view, the process of incorporating negative emotions in our lives has been neglected in psychology over the past decades. Mainstream psychology has focused on personal deficits and psychopathology, and first generation positive psychology (what most people understand by positive psychology) has focused on positive emotions. Both have failed to integrate negative emotions into our lives. Such a failure prevents the development of psychological resilience, personal growth from challenges and it also prevents us from achieving a state of inner harmony. For this, we need to embrace both the negative and the positive aspects of life, instead of repressing the former. This is especially important in (but not restricted to) the context of a pandemic, where negative emotions are commonplace and difficult to avoid.
Reframing difficult situations
Central to this is a technique called reframing. This is an old resource in the philosopher’s toolbox and it basically consists in changing our perspective of a problem in order to reach useful ways of addressing it. This is because the way a problem is framed and therewith defined sometimes constrains how it can be addressed. An example of this is the treatment of tobacco addiction. It can be considered as a biological disease that needs to be medicated or as a psychological problem to be psychologically treated. When it comes to giving up smoking, psychotherapy is more effective than pharmacological therapy, as research has shown. Hence, at least today, it is more productive to see tobacco addiction as a psychological problem.
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Additionally, reframing has been discussed in psychology, in the context of stress. A difficult event can be perceived, for example, either as a threat or as a challenge. Reframing difficult events and their associated negative emotions is an alternative to repressing them. Especially when difficult events cannot be avoided, as was and still is the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to adopt healthy stress appraisal strategies.
