In some corners of the spiritual community, practitioners claim that in order to heal, you have to think “only positive thoughts” and feel only positive emotions. They preach “love and light” and even go so far as to tell trauma survivors that they have to stop thinking about the past because they’re lowering everyone else’s vibration.
Yeah. I’ve actually had that said to me when I tried to explain one of my triggers. “You aren’t welcome to talk about that here. You’re lowering the vibration of the entire group.”
The thing is, healing is not about ignoring or avoiding the negatives. It isn’t only about “love and light.” To heal, you have to learn to accept and acknowledge all aspects of yourself, even the difficult ones.
The Universe runs on balance. Whenever anything is out of balance, it has a ripple effect that impacts everything around it. That’s broadly true, and it’s also true for each individual being. If you are out of balance in any way, it affects your overall physical and mental health and, by extension, might affect the people around you, your work (if you work), and other things.
Healing, regardless of what you’re healing from, means regaining the balance that has been lost. Being all positive all the time is just as much of an imbalance as being all negative all the time. And being out of balance lowers your vibration far more than thinking negative thoughts or feeling emotions such as anger, sadness, or fear.
The people who proclaim that you are only allowed to think positive thoughts or else you’re lowering the vibration of yourself and everyone around you have a poor understanding of the concepts of balance and vibration. Too much positivity and “light” is just as detrimental as too much negativity and “darkness.
In order to progress in your healing journey, it’s important to learn to accept and embrace all aspects of yourself, whether people label them positive or negative. The very aspects that certain practitioners tell you to eliminate are the ones that are the most damaged by past abuse and rejection; how can rejecting them yourself possibly lead to healing?
Everything in the Universe, and the Universe itself, cannot exist without balance. You do not have to eliminate anything to heal; you only need to learn how to manage and balance your emotions and thoughts. Those who have told you otherwise, and those who have used the “only love and light and good vibes” rhetoric to shut you down or victim-blame you, are wrong.