This post is going to be a bit of stream of thought so please bear with me.
I (42F), have battled with (and coped with) depression for all of my adult life. It is something that I’ve had to navigate using therapy introspection and several other techniques to work my way through it. Most recently, I’ve been trying a technique that involved changing my outlook and mindset about things.
I won’t sugarcoat it, there are a lot of things in the world that suck right now and given my own worst impulses, I would hyper fixate on those things through a mix of pessimism, doom scrolling and anxiety. My current strategy is to do the exact opposite. While acknowledging the bad in the world, I’m trying to help my own mindset by finding the positives out there. Sometimes it’s something small, but each day I try to find something good to counter the bad.
Meanwhile, I am trying to fight my habit of immediately expecting the worst how to future outcomes. Things can get better and the problems of now don’t need to be the problems of the future.
My father (64m) has also gone through a philosophical change recently and I’ve noticed that he seems to be doing a lot of reading on Buddhism and he has spoken about the importance of detachment and not latching on the things that you can’t control. However, in practice I found that he has a tendency to automatically accentuate the negatives in all of our discussions. He will constantly dwell on all of the bad that’s going on to the point where he will try to counter the small nuggets of positivity. In a most recent case, he felt the need to interject and say that a small thing that I used as my daily nugget of positivity would be snuffed out shortly so it wasn’t worth viewing it as any sort of victory.
He has done this many times and I’ve started asking him politely to not dwell on these things in our conversations because I don’t want it to bring me down. I feel like I am genuinely making progress and coming to peace with things and this risks bringing me back to some of my old mindsets about things.
During our most recent conversation, I lost my cool and started yelling that he doesn’t need to try to counter every single positive thing I see in the world. I am allowed to try to find peace in my own way. We both immediately apologized to each other but I immediately felt guilty for yelling at him.
I’m asking him to allow me the space for my own mindset while I am asking him to hold off on his own and I can’t help but feel a little bit hypocritical in that. At the same time, I feel like I’m trying to do what I need to do to keep myself in a good headspace.
At the same time, I wonder what brought this mentality out in him. I noted above that. He has adopted a level of Buddhism in his philosophy, but this feels like it’s counter to it.
AITA for trying my best to be an optimist with a family member who is being a pessimist?
NAH. This sounds like a relationship where you both respect each other, even if your coping styles clash.
A lot of people who first get into Buddhist ideas interpret detachment as “don’t get too excited about things, because they’ll pass.” In practice, that can come across as downplaying positive moments, even if that’s not the intention.
As for the pessimism, I notice the same thing with my dad. I think by that age they’ve lived through enough cycles of crises and disappointments that they develop a sort of “brace for the worst” mindset. Many of them were also raised with the idea that optimism is naïve, so they instinctively try to temper it.