Which has ways it connects to the "gratitude excercises" issue too: a lot of the people who have very negative reactions to the idea are those who have had Positivity Demanded of them at great length (which I tentatively get the sense is not something that happened to you so much? You more had abusive parental negativity shoved at you 24/7? I could be wrong!), who were NOT ALLOWED to have/express negative feelings or to be upset?

So, ahahaha, this is actually also one I have... sideways problems with? In that:

• I didn't have any good models of conflict resolution (or... any, really)
  
• I got a whole bunch of the Catholic "you shouldn't ask [G-d] for things", compounded by my father being terrible (telling us to stop wasting his time, which was worth £x/minute, etc etc)
  
• we could have whatever feelings we liked as long as they were quiet, but if we ever e.g. went to our father with "sibling was hurting me" or whatever, we'd all get lined up and hit for disturbing him; positive interaction/emotion also wasn't okay if it was noisy (and dinner had to be on the table at 7pm sharp so the radio could go on for the thing that started at 7.02 and played for 15 minutes, during which we had to eat in absolute silence or ditto get yelled at)
  
• as a result, the times that I tried to express negative feelings at school about e.g. being put on a team captained by my worst bullies, 8-year-old me thought that anything more detailed than "no, I don't want to" would get them hit... and of course then my teacher called me a brat for stamping my foot and being petulant or whatever
  
• ... and my mother, though I don't fault her for this, really struggled with my middle brother being violent and noisy and how poorly I coped with this, such that I kind of wasn't allowed to express negative emotions about that either
  
• ... and didn't really challenge my father when he blamed her (or me) for being the source of all the arguments/disruption/etc, such that I very much got taught that saying or doing anything at all meant anything "bad" that happened was My Fault
  
• My Shitty Ex Dear Goodness
  
• oh, right, and of course throughout I kept being told that I was just saying I was in pain for attention, and that everybody got cramps, and was carefully and deliberately concealing my mental illnesses from healthcare providers firstly because I totally didn't have any and secondly because if I did that would make it even harder to get the physical stuff taken seriously instead of being dismissed as psychosomatic

... and so on and so forth. A lot of what I'm able to do these days in terms of saying "I'm not happy or okay about this" can be traced directly to the point at which I finally got the endometriosis diagnosis and abruptly started standing up for myself a lot more. And all the subsequent counselling. So... yeah, I have a bunch of difficulty expressing negativity, but a lot of it is in the context of internalising "I shouldn't feel anything at all" throughout a childhood and adolescence of severe chronic untreated depression/trauma, which is not quite the same thing, and also in a context of honestly being more afraid of having/expressing positive feelings, such that some of what's going on when I flinch away from people defending their right to hate their bodies is... the above-mentioned automatic interpretation that they're telling me that I'm not allowed to love mine, and if I think I do I'm deluded, and... you can see where that one goes.