Honesty Over Positivity: Healing Emotions

In this episode of Outside the Script, I talk about something I’ve been unpacking deeply over the last few. For years, my relationship has been with positivity, mindset work, and the personal development world.

For a long time, I believed that being positive was the goal. That if I stayed aligned, grateful, and high-vibe enough, life would unfold the right way.

But what I’ve realized is something very different.

Sometimes positivity becomes a band-aid for emotions we don’t feel safe enough to fully experience.

In this conversation, I share how I moved from emotional bypassing into emotional honesty—and why healing isn’t about becoming more positive… it’s about becoming more human.

If you’ve ever felt like you “should” be grateful while secretly struggling, this episode is for you.

Transcript

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Hello, everybody. Happy Wednesday. And welcome back to Outside the Script. I'm your host, Amanda Cukureo. And you know what? Today I want to talk about positivity, not in a motivational way, not in a look on the bright side way, but in an honest way. And like something that things that I've been processing and things I've been noticing in myself over, you know, probably like the good last year, maybe the last few. Um is for a long time I truly believe that if you're positive enough, everything would fall into place. That if you stayed aligned and grateful and trusting and high vibe and whatever language you want to use, life would respond in kind. And I don't think that belief came from a bad place, for sure. I mean, and all those, you know, it has changed my life, believing in, you know, the law of attraction and all those things. They have served me very well. Um, and it came from wanting to believe that I wasn't powerless, and it came from, you know, believing that I could shape my life, and I still do by in many ways. Like all these things are a foundation in my life. And it's helped me dream bigger, it's helped me create it, create miracles and many beautiful things. But what I didn't realize at the time is that positivity also became an identity thing. It's like I was always the positive one. I'm happy and sunny and always okay and creating my reality and aligned and all the things, and you'll still catch me sunny and happy. I am sunny and happy by default. But anything outside of that identity, like anger, sadness, fear, overwhelm, just didn't feel comfortable. It felt wrong. It felt like something I wasn't supposed to be experiencing. And when slowly without realizing it, I started labeling the emotions like positive emotions equal good, negative emotions equal bad. And as soon as something negative came out, my instinct wasn't to feel it, my instinct was to fix it, to reframe it, to find the lesson, to find the gold, to turn it to gratitude and to turn it into something more acceptable. And you know what, I still do that in a lot of ways. But what I didn't fully see, you know, at the time, and underneath it all, was it's like there was a lot of shame because if it was positive, then I was doing life correctly. But if there was like anger and sadness and fear and all those things, I felt like I was doing something wrong, like I was slipping, like, oh, I must be out of alignment. So how do I learn? So I learned how to like bypass my emotions very quickly, not intentionally, but then the the now I'm like realizing like there's like been years of suppression and bypassing. And I've come to understand this now that positivity in some way, like to it became like a a band-aid, not because it's bad, but because it was covering things that actually need to be, that needed to be felt, that needed to come up to the surface so I could actually feel them and process them. Because you can't actually think your way out of emotions because they'll just get lodged within your body. And you can't affirm your way, say it like out of grief, you can't reframe your way out of anger that has not been acknowledged. And at some point, your body needs to process that, what the mind is trying to skip over. And this has been a huge shift for me over the last years. I'm starting to realize because I'm not, I was not actually feeling everything, and I was bypassing a lot of things, and I don't think I was doing anything wrong. I think I was doing what a lot of us have been taught within this community is to stay positive, stay grateful, and stay in trust. And I'm learning something else now, is like I'm learning that I'm human, and humans don't feel good emotions all day, every day. They need to feel it all. And all of it needs somewhere to go. And so one of the biggest things that I have to unlearn is that is like this idea that if something bad has happened, oh, I must have created it. Oh, I manifested that. I have a thought, like the wrong thoughts, like, oh no, like that belief creates a lot of self-blame. And because now you're not just dealing with like life's happening, or you're like always questioning yourself on the inside of it. And I don't believe that's always true anymore. Like some things just happen, like life is just messy sometimes. Things happen beyond our control, beyond our scope of knowing. Um, and that doesn't mean that you did anything wrong. And this is where I've landed. I don't think that healing is becoming more positive. I think healing is becoming more honest. Honest about what you feel, what is happening, honest about what you control and what you can't control. Because when you're honest, you don't need to escape your emotions. You actually need to move through them. You can let the anger move, you can let the grief move, you can let the sadness move, you can let the fear move, you can let the uncertainty move, and without turning it into a story about worth. So those have been like big, huge lessons for me. And so maybe that's just what I really want to say today. And it's like you just don't have to be positive all the time to be okay. You don't have to reframe everything to survive, and you don't have to believe that every hard thing in your life is something you manifested incorrectly because sometimes you just feel what you feel. We are human, you are human, we are humans having a human experience, and that does not make you bad, you know? And yeah, and I think that's what I have been learning, and it's been a big one for me as well. And geez, what a gift to be alive and to be human and to feel it all. So that's it for today. Thank you for being here with me on Outside the Script. I am so grateful for everyone and each of you, and I love you. And if this resonated with you, share with somebody who needs to hear it. Um, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now, friends.