Understanding Knee-Jerk Negativity
Do you ever find yourself expressing criticism or contrary opinions in an automatic sort of way? Perhaps you’ve observed yourself doing this on a regular basis with certain people or in specific situations? If you do this habitually, chances are you’ve noticed it impacts your well-being and the quality of connection you have with others. The more you find fault with a person or idea, the more negative your attitude becomes, and the more you find fault. You feel irritable. Every little thing seems to annoy you. You have lost your center and ability to find stillness. You might begin to wonder about your level of authenticity or honesty realizing that some of those negative comments didn't actually reflect your true feelings or opinions. What's happening?
At a most basic level, your animal body automatically moves away from aversive stimulus and toward pleasant stimulus. All day long you have these basic impulses. Without mindfulness and self-connection, the animal body will fill in the space with its default programming which is meant to help you survive. Left unchecked, your whole experience can become a series of lunges toward and pulls away from all you encounter. At a slightly more complex level, what is perceived as aversive, neutral, or pleasant is determined by psychological and social conditioning. It is the combination of these two layers that gives us the sense of knee-jerk negativity.
Such negativity can be stimulated by a variety of situations.
On one level, it can arise out of a drive to establish your sense of self. Habitual negative reactions might be a tragic attempt to define yourself by what you are not. Knee-jerk negativity may be an unconscious attempt to get and transmit clarity about who you are, part of a deep search for authenticity and integrity with yourself. This situation might be more obvious within your family of origin, or in a romantic partnership, where the unconscious fear of losing yourself might more easily be triggered.
Knee-jerk negativity can also be an unconscious attempt to set boundaries, in a context where your needs for choice and autonomy and perhaps even safety are not being met. Typical triggering scenarios might include getting unsolicited advice, perceiving a demand, or some form of exclusion.
Sometimes saying “no” or rejecting ideas from others is an unconscious attempt to gain an illusion of control over your life. Perhaps the very tension that you are using to “keep it together” in everyday life means others’ spontaneous offerings or suggestions “bounce off” you without even pausing to consider them. If so, you might feel more compassion towards yourself knowing that there are some survival strategies at work here, and probably some deep universal needs such as predictability and the sense of safety that comes with it.
Finally, like all human behaviors, if practiced often, negative reactions can pervade all or many of your life relationships and situations. In other words, it just becomes a habit devoid of meaning. You, might have even integrated it into a sense of self, saying things like: “That's just how/who I am,” “I enjoy playing Devil’s Advocate,” or, “I’m just a realist.”
Establishing a sense of self that is whole, integrated, and dynamic is a natural part of any evolving path, and setting life-serving boundaries is essential to care for your sense of safety and agency in the world.
However, like all unconscious strategies, doing this by expressing what you don't like and don't agree with will probably not get you much closer to living your authentic life, but rather will likely leave you feeling empty and listless, and disconnected from yourself and others.
True authenticity is based on the freedom and agency to notice the impulses and then decide what is truly satisfying and in alignment with your values.
Cultivating this level of awareness means pausing and finding stillness when you have the impulse to pull or push away through criticism and contrary opinions. In that stillness, you can feel the aversive feeling and ask yourself if acting on that feeling will help you create what you want in the moment.
If you feel uncomfortable with the idea of pausing during an interaction, remember that asking for a moment to take in what someone says not only gives them the sense that you are really listening, but also allows you to make a true choice about your response. In that pause, you might find that you can be curious about perspectives that seem contrary to your own. You might come out of a pause and ask a clarifying question and/or make a guess at the need or good intention behind what the other person is saying. Or you might come out of the pause with clarity about your own needs and values. You could then honor yourself and your listener and ask if they are interested in hearing your point of view.
If you notice that knee-jerk negativity arises in particular relationships or situations, you may want to explore this outside of the interactions first. Reflect on the underlying needs which are present for you in that situation and what other options you might have to attend to them. For example, if you identify that your sense of autonomy feels threatened in a given relationship, you might explore how to preempt the usual reactive interactions by stating your need and making a request of the other person. Or if you realize that your negative reaction is an unconscious attempt to set boundaries, you might take time to formulate the boundary and find a moment to state that before the next spontaneous interaction. Of course, even when you don’t know why a negative reaction is present you can always call a pause.
Indeed, the ability to find stillness and ask for a pause is one of the most important skills you can cultivate. This skill enables you to consistently make decisions that are in alignment with your values and your heart's longing, thereby reinforcing a sense of self-confidence. The ability to pause also empowers you to transform escalating arguments into collaborative conversations that can respect differences and take action from universal needs, enabling you to strengthen your connection with yourself and others.
Practice
This week pick something that you regularly react to with negativity. Some common examples might be: other drivers, smoke outside your office window, a co-worker with habits you dislike, your child pleading for more video game time, your partner not helping enough around the house, noise from the neighbors, etc. Choose one thing and set the intention to be still and simply notice your negative reaction and let the intensity of it pass in silence so that you can choose how you would most like to respond.
If in reading this Connection Gem, you identified a recurrent situation or relationship in which negativity arises for you, you might also use this week to reflect on what needs you are perceiving as unmet in that relationship or situation and how you’d like to address those differently.
