There's a fine line between what you described and toxic positivity.

It's important not to ruminate on bad thoughts (when your proposal is a good replacement behavior), but it's also important not to bottle up natural human emotions as if they are unjustified or unreal.

A thought exercise: if it wasn't your behavior that caused your own despair, but your spouse's behaviors that caused you irritation / grief. Do you think it's better to paint a smile on yourself and ignore the underlying problem, or spend a few minutes feeling your emotions, describe the cause to your partner, then politely suggest a substitute behavior? The former builds resentment and bottles up strong emotions for an inevitable outburst down the road. The other diffuses the emotion, potentially alleviates the offending behavior, and doesn't betray what you authentically emote.

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sublinear 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're only only disagreeing in the premise of your reply, and not the substance of it.

The unnecessary emotion is the problem and that emotion is 100% caused by inexperience. The surest way to stay confused is to overindulge in the emotions blinding you. Worse would be wallowing in it with your partner.

Communicating the emotions first and then rambling your unfiltered thoughts will just cause more confusion. This is exactly how most couples fuck everything up. You should instead take the time to process the emotions on your own and then find the burning question underneath it all.

The more you do this, the less time you'll need to waste on the emotions and the more effective you'll be when you choose to speak or act.

	▲	dripdry45 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Or the more confused everything becomes, and it just gets bottled up because there’s too much going on, and the partner gets away with their bad behavior and never has to take responsibility for their actions. forming a habit involves taking an action and having a result. A consequence. Talking about it does not work for a lot of people. They need to be pavlov’d. Once those difficult emotions are cool, everyone can explain what you did and why, yes. I just don’t think that always waiting for things to “cool off“ is actually helpful, it robs people of the consequences of their actions. People need immediate consequences to reinforce behaviors.