Life can be bliss if you don’t deal with your negative patterns. If you ignore them and pretend like the problem is everyone else, it’s great. Wearing rose-colored glasses can be a coping skill we develop to protect ourselves from ourselves. Unfortunately, though, wearing rose-colored glasses doesn’t come without a cost. What happens when you wear rose-colored glasses?
1. Ignoring Your Feelings Is Bad.
You are like a pressure cooker. When you wear rose-colored glasses, it’s like shoving more things into the pot. Well, your pressure cooker can only hold so much. Put too much in it, and it explodes. When it does explode, it’s never a good time, and it’s messy.
For example, your job stresses you out a lot. Your jobs just fired a bunch of people, and your workload doubled. You tell yourself if you can just strong-arm your way through it. You will deal with your burnout later (this is adding things to your pressure cooker). You work full steam ahead for two weeks. You are proud of yourself for pushing through this.
Then your boss walks in and adds one more thing to your plate, and what feels like out of nowhere, you are busting into tears and threatening to quit. You spent two weeks pushing a lot of crap into your pressure cooker, and it needed to go somewhere, so it exploded. Your rose-colored glass told you that you could handle it, but your body was screaming SLOW DOWN. If you don’t listen to your body, it will find a way to make you listen.
If you don’t ignore your feelings and tend to them, your pressure cooker is more stable and won’t explode. You might experience uncomfortableness, but nothing like the intensity of the exploded pressure cooker.
2. You Live in Fantasy Land
Some people with rose-colored glasses, they live in a fantasy world. They have expectations of how something should go, and when it doesn’t they become enraged. For example, you are a gift giver. You love birthdays and all the holidays. You go all out. You decorate, buy the perfect gifts, and put a lot of effort into the day. You have this idea that everyone will gather around the table and notice every small detail, and one day they will do the same for your birthday. When your birthday rolls around, and you don’t get the same elaborate party, you become angry and stop speaking to your friends.
These glasses created a fantasy that stayed in your head. You never expressed your wishes, and you expected everyone to treat you the same effort you do to them. That’s not reality. We all have different ways of celebrating birthdays, and people don’t know what you expect of them unless you explicitly tell them.
3. Your Shit Stinks
In the words of OutKast
“I know you’d like to think your shit don’t stank, but lean a little bit closer, see Roses really smell like poo-poo-ooh”
When you don’t look at your unhealthy behavior/ patterns, or you see it and still choose to do nothing about it you will inevitably put it on someone else.
For example, Sam is tired of having date nights with other couples. She wants to spend someone one-on-one time with her partner. She doesn’t voice this to her partner; she believes her partner should know how she feels. So the next date night rolls around, and Sam’s partner sets up a date with another double date. Sam gets angry and yells at her partner, “you think I’m annoying, and you don’t love me.” Sam’s partner is blindsided and hurt by her words. Sam knows she holds things in and still blames her partner for not reading her mind.
In this example, Sam is hurting her relationship with her partner. She is choosing not to change her negative pattern, and it bleeds into the relationship. Her partner will never learn to read her mind and be stuck, always trying to manage Sam’s expectations without any insight into what they are because Sam continues to keep them inside. Sam’s shit stinks, but she keeps the rose-colored glasses on because in some way, the negative patterns continue to serve her. How does it serve her? Smelling your own shit isn’t fun, and if she avoids it, she protects herself. She doesn’t have to look at the harm she is causing not only to herself but to others. And that keeps her safe in her rose-colored world.
So if you want a healthy relationship with yourself and others, find the courage to go through the painful journey of looking at yourself without the rose-colored glasses. A good place to start is by going to therapy.
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