What do we do when life feels too good to be true? We often expect to embrace happiness when things are good, but the truth is many people struggle and feel triggered when things are going well. Many people ask themselves – is it too good to be true? In today’s episode I answer a question from a listener who is struggling with anxiety, fear, and overwhelm because they are afraid of “the other shoe dropping” during a happy time in their life. They faced many challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now that things are on the up and up, they find themselves afraid of everything falling apart. I discuss why we struggle to be happy, the importance of compassion, and how to navigate anxiety and other hard feelings when things feel too good to be true.

Timestamps

• Introduction: 0:05
• Listener Question: 2:04
• Outro: 27:29

For episode show notes, please visit: https://www.newviewadvice.com/121

For more free resources and to learn more about New View Advice, visit: https://www.newviewadvice.com/

Want to have a question answered? You can submit your question here: https://www.newviewadvice.com/ask-a-question

Welcome to New View Advice with Amanda Durocher.

Hey, beautiful soul. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is New View Advice. If

you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for

the healing journey. I don't believe I have all the answers you seek. I believe

you have all the answers. You just may need a new view and a little

help along the way. Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. Today,

I'm answering a listener question from someone who has struggled over the

past couple of years, and they're finding things to be going well in their life.

And they're finding that this is actually quite difficult for them, that they

have the fear of things being too good to be true, the fear of everything

falling apart, and they're having trouble enjoying the moment and being present. Instead,

they're struggling with a lot of anxiety, overwhelm, and fear.

And I love this question because I think we can all relate to this, and

I think it's one of the most fascinating things about humans is that we

struggle to be happy. We actually get really triggered when we're

happy. And happiness and peace and a period

of calm can be really triggering to us rather than a time of

enjoyment. And so I think this is such a great question that so many people

can relate to. And in this episode, we're going to talk about why do we

struggle with the idea of things being too good to be true rather than enjoying

the moment. And we're also gonna talk about ways to begin navigating

these difficult feelings that arise and how we can begin to

reassure ourselves that it's safe to be where we're at in the

present moment and how we can begin to alleviate those fears of the future.

So with that, I'm excited to jump into this question. But before we do, I

always like to mention that if you haven't already, I invite you to check out

my website, newviewadvice.com, where you can find more free resources for the

healing journey. This includes journal prompts, meditations. I have another series called

Reflections, and I have poems and just a bunch of stuff on

there to assist people on the healing journey and to help people to feel less

alone. And also on my website, you'll be able to find today's episode show

notes at nuvioadvice.com/12one. And with that,

let's jump on into discussing why do we fear when things seem too good to

be true.

Hi, Amanda. I recently came across your podcast, and I can't stop binging it.

I'm so grateful for the work you do. It's already been incredibly helpful to me.

I have a question. Since the COVID nineteen pandemic, my life has taken

some unexpected turns. To put it simply, it's been a rough ride. I

lost my job, had to move back in with my parents, and, unfortunately, I lost

touch with a lot of friends over the last few years. To be honest, it

was a really tough time for me. During that period, I began focusing on my

healing. I've made significant progress, and I'm definitely a different person now.

But I still struggle with a lot of anxiety. In the last few months, things

have started to shift for me. I found a job I really enjoy. I was

finally able to move out of my parents' house, and I've started meeting new people

who make me feel like I can truly be myself. It sounds great. Right? But

here's the problem. I'm finding it harder than I expected. I'm overwhelmed with

anxiety, constantly waiting for everything to fall apart. It's like I'm waiting for

the other shoe to drop. I find myself playing out worst case scenarios in my

head, and I often feel like everything I've worked for could be taken away from

me at any moment. Deep down, I know it's not true, but I also know

life can be unpredictable, and that terrifies me. I thought I'd feel happy now,

but instead, I just feel fearful and anxious. Any advice on how to navigate

this? Thank you for your question. As I mentioned in the intro, I think this

is such a great question that so many people can relate to. I also wanna

say thank you so much for your kind words about the podcast. I'm so grateful

you found it and that it has been something that you have

found bingeable. That's kind of a funny thing for me to hear because, not gonna

lie, I don't think I can binge my own podcast. So I'm like, props to

you. Thank you so much for listening. I really, really, really appreciate it. But

with that, let's talk about your question. I think this is a great question. I

actually had to think a lot about this question because I thought it was really

interesting how you mentioned the COVID nineteen pandemic in your

question. Because I have thought about how much that impacted us, but I

actually think that might be a real thing that's playing into your

question here. Because you mentioned in your question that

you also know life can be unpredictable, and that terrifies

you. And it sounds like when the COVID nineteen

pandemic happened, when the shutdowns happened, I'm not sure what happened in your personal life,

but it sounds like there was likely a fear of the unpredictable

happening. And now you're in a place in your life where you're finally getting back

on your feet, And that's such a beautiful thing. I wanna say that's amazing.

I'm so happy for you. I'm so happy that you have been able

to rebuild your life in some ways because it sounds like a lot of things

fell apart at one point in your life. And I think it's beautiful that you

haven't let that knock you down and that you've you've actually been building your life

from scratch in a way. Right? You got a new job. You are making new

friends. You were able to leave your parents' house for what I'm guessing is the

second time. You left after childhood, and then you moved back, and now you got

to leave again. So I just wanna say that, to me, that's amazing that

you were able to lift yourself back up. I think it shows your resilience

and your strength that you're able to overcome challenging

times. And I think that's such a part of life. Perseverance,

showing up when it's hard and just continuing to push forward and to move

forward in different ways. And I think that we forget that

sometimes. We think life is supposed to follow the road map that our minds

want it to follow. And as you mentioned, life's unpredictable. And I think

that's what makes life interesting, but it's also what makes life terrifying.

You mentioned struggling with anxiety, overwhelm, and fear.

Those make a lot of sense to me here. You went through a very

difficult time, and it sounds like you did a lot of inner work, a lot

of healing. Again, that's beautiful thing to have spent those years

doing. Not everybody does that. Not everybody chooses to grow. Not

everybody chooses a growth mindset when things become challenging. It

sounds to me like you were hit with difficult times, and you

were able to create good from that. That's what I view it as when we

choose to heal. We begin to look within. We begin to become friends with our

emotions. We begin to get to know ourselves. That is creating beauty

from difficulty. Many people come across the healing journey from a difficult

time. I haven't met a single person in my entire life who began healing

because their life was so good. I just haven't. I think that would be cool.

They're like, oh my god. My life's so good. I just wanna heal. That doesn't

tend to be the case. People come to healing and inner work when something difficult

often happens externally, and they're not able to solve it

externally. So the answer becomes an internal answer. And I mentioned that

because that sounds like the case for you. You've started healing when you were going

through these really difficult times. And so now that you're

stepping out of what I view as the cocoon, I mentioned it a

lot, but I view the healing journey like the journey of a caterpillar to a

butterfly where we're often a caterpillar and we're going about

life. And then something happens in our external life, and oftentimes, we

decide to go into that cocoon. And when we go into the cocoon, we change.

It's a metamorphosis period, and we break down entirely. And

when it comes to the healing journey, we look within. We begin to become

aware of who we are, how we got here. We look at childhood patterns.

We look at present day patterns. We look at our relationships,

and we begin to heal. But then there becomes a day

when we need to take that new version of ourselves and bring them out into

the world, and that's the journey of becoming the butterfly where we choose to

share this version of ourselves with the world. And we go through this process

multiple times. But when we are in the process of taking all that inner

work and that metamorphosis and sharing it with the world, we are like

opening a cocoon and becoming a butterfly. And that process is very

uncomfortable, and that sounds to me like what you are currently navigating.

Because when we fear things being too good to be true, it's often

because we're hitting what Gay Hendricks calls in the book The

Big Leap, which I do recommend for you. I'm not gonna give a synopsis of

the book. But in this book, he talks about how humans hit their upper limit

problem. So we have a capacity for how good things can

be, and we can continually increase this ability for

things to be good. But, actually, because of the way we have evolved over

time and our survival mode mechanisms, we actually hit an

upper limit, an amount of goodness we're willing to tolerate, and it

takes awareness and growth in order to stretch that

to more and more goodness in our life. But when we hit that upper limit,

it often triggers feelings like you're talking about, anxiety, overwhelm, and

fear. Because why we have that upper limit, as Gay Hendricks calls it,

or why we have that capacity for things to be good, why we

can get triggered by goodness, is truthfully because the past has

shown us different, and we're living in the past still. We're

using the past to tell us that things won't be good now because

we're looking back at the past for all the times that things didn't go

well, all the times those shoes dropped, as you mentioned in your

question. All those times things fell apart. And we do this because

we're trying to remain safe. And so when things get

good and when things get better and better, that is uncharted

territory, and it so often triggers within us that fear

of things not feeling safe. And for emotionally wounded people

and people who have gone through hard times, which I think is everybody, and traumatized

people, myself included in that, I don't know what your background is. But for

us, things have gone really, really bad at some point in our life, so we

are trying to remain safe. And by always

jumping to the bad scenario, we're able to, in

some way, feel safe within because if something bad

happened, it's like we were expecting it, so it wouldn't hit us so

hard. So we may remain feeling kinda yucky, but in a way, we feel

safe in that yuckiness, if that makes sense. But we

obviously don't wanna feel that way. We don't heal to feel yucky. We

heal because we feel how that healing and that inner work

improves our lives, how we can create that inner safety and an inner sense of

peace one step at a time. And so for you, I think

it's really important for you to ask yourself

what the fears are that are arising. Why are you so afraid

of things to be too good to be true, and why do you

struggle with the unpredictable element of

life? It's gonna be a different answer for everybody. For you, I was

wondering if when the COVID nineteen pandemic happened, if that was very shocking

for you, if that was shocking for your nervous system in some way, and if

all these things that happened afterwards just felt like knife wounds, you

know, like, stab, stab, stab, for lack of a better phrase,

and if that experience was a bit traumatizing

for you, if this snowball effect of painful experiences

is something that you're still afraid of happening again and if you just need to

offer yourself more love and compassion for going through that. Because I also found on

my own healing journey, I often go back to childhood when healing. I believe in

childhood wounds and or child work. I talk about that a lot on the podcast.

But many of the experiences we have today are triggered by something that goes

farther back than the present moment. But I also have found that I've

been wounded in my twenties and in my thirties. And as you

mentioned with the COVID nineteen pandemic, I had to be with that version of myself.

I was 28 in 2020 when the world changed,

and I have had to do my own healing around that and

grieving of where I thought life would go and where my life is

now and how I'll never get back those crazy years. And

I share that because maybe there's a part of you that's still

afraid or still holding on to something that you're ready to

let go of in regards to those past five years. And

one way that I recommend for letting go is to

spend some intentional time. I call it ceremony time, but you can call it whatever

you want. And finding a place in nature, finding some quiet time in

solitude, and just honoring the last five years you went through,

honoring who you were before and honoring who you are now, and seeing that

growth and reassuring yourself that you have grown and that you have your own

back and that you are a different person who, if something

happens again, that you have new tools to deal with

that. You know, you have been on a journey of growth, and it's important

to remind yourself of that. That if something unpredictable

happens, you are not who you were the last time an unpredictable thing

happened, or you're not who you were five years ago, ten years ago, or maybe

your unpredictable wound goes back to childhood, and you are a different person

now. And it is so important when healing to remind ourselves that and

to reassure those versions of us within. That's how I always

view it when I feel fear and panic come up, one of the first things

I do is I'm like, is this present me, or is this another

age? And I sit in meditation, and I allow that age to come

forward. I hope that makes sense. But oftentimes,

a part of me needs reassurance. A part of me who has

very real fears, has been very wounded, needs me

to reassure them that I am here. I am a safe person, and

I am capable of protecting them and also capable of that

resilience and that strength we talked about at the beginning of the episode. Because you

are a resilient person, you are a strong person. You're here listening to this

podcast, you have a growth mindset, and that is incredible. That's amazing.

You have the tools. You just may not always know it in the moment, but

you do have the tools. And if you don't have the tools right now, you

have the capability of finding the tools that will help you along the way. I

assure you of that. After everything I've been through, I have time and time again

found exactly what I needed to help me through the toughest times of my life.

It's not always easy, and it's not always overnight, but it's through

that perseverance we mentioned that we're able to continually find

what we need and to continually move forward and reassure ourselves that things are gonna

be okay. Life is unpredictable. And the other thing I wanted to mention here with

your question is I'm wondering if your anxiety, your overwhelm, and your

fear are connected to you feeling like you need to be in

control. Because when we are trying to

control life, that is when we can't

allow life to be as good as life can get. Because

when we try to control things, we are trying to keep ourselves safe inherently.

Because if we're controlling life, life is predictable. And when life is

predictable, we feel safe. We feel protected. We feel

like we have life on a leash is how I'm viewing it. Like, life

is a dog. You have it on a leash when you're in control. But when

we let go of control, it's like a dog off the leash,

and the dog's like, follow me. Follow me. And the dog is all happy, and

you're like, oh my god. You terrify me, dog. Where are you going?

That's the visual that came to my mind. But what you'll find if you follow

the happy go lucky dog off the leash is that dog,

a k life, is going to teach you how to let

go of control because you are not in control of life.

If you learned anything over the past five years, my guess is one thing you

learned is that you are not in control. Life has a funny

way of knocking us down when we try to control it.

And part of learning to be present with life and enjoying the present moment

is not attaching to really anything. You don't wanna attach to the really

good times, and you don't wanna attach to the really bad times. And by living

in the past and living in fear and anxiety, it sounds like you're attached to

that fear, and we wanna begin to let go of that fear. Because

the more you let go of the fear, the more you will enjoy

the present moment. Because I want you to enjoy your new job, enjoy your new

home, enjoy your new friends, but these anxieties and these fears are just

showing you that you're in uncharted territory and you're likely trying

to control life still. And as you are that butterfly coming

out of the cocoon that we talked about, you have to learn how to dance

with life in a new way. And now you might be thinking, Amanda, that sounds

all good and dandy, but how do I do that? It's gonna be different for

everybody, but one thing you can begin to do is

to bring more awareness and more compassion to these hard

feelings you're having. Your anxiety, your overwhelm, and your

fear are not there to punish you. They're there

to show you what you are afraid of so that you can

overcome that fear. You can look at that fear. You can see

where that fear really originated from. But I find that

anxiety, especially anxiety around the idea of things being too good to

be true, that anxiety is just showing us that we are

uncomfortable with this new way of being. We're uncomfortable,

and I think that's part of life. I believe we're always

gonna come across discomfort, and I think we're always

going to hit fear because both these things

arise when we do something new. And the only way you'll stop

feeling uncomfortable and you'll stop having fear, in my opinion, is

if you stop doing new things, if you stop growing.

And the older I get, I'm like, why else are we here? Aren't we

here to grow, to love, to learn, to live life

to the fullest? And that involves getting

uncomfortable, and there's absolutely nothing wrong

with the way you're feeling. So I wanted to offer you that

because how do you begin navigating these hard feelings? You reassure yourself that

there's nothing wrong with the way you're feeling. You let go of those inner

judgments. We wanna stop judging ourselves, and we want to

become curious with ourselves. Curiosity has a

compassionate tone to it. It also has a playful tone to

it. I think so many humans want certainty, but life

is never certain. We are thrown into

uncertainty the more we embrace life and the more we

allow life to guide us. I think that so many

times we're asked to take a leap of faith before we are certain

of the outcome. That is terrifying. That triggers

anxiety and overwhelm. You are in a period of

goodness. I view it. You're getting the fruits of your labor.

You have worked hard to be where you are. How do you allow yourself

to enjoy it? You reassure yourself that you

deserve where you are. Because, also, when we fear the

too good to be true, it's an unworthiness wound. We're like, am I

worthy of this much goodness? There's often a part of us that thinks we don't

deserve life to be that good, so that's why we struggle to believe life

can be that good. And it's this cycle of unworthiness and not

feeling like we're enough. And so if we don't think we're worthy of the

goodness and we don't think we're enough for that, we will just punish

ourselves and throw ourselves in a cycle of negative thoughts or anxious

thoughts because we are hitting that upper limit Gay

Hendricks talks about, or we're hitting that belief about ourselves. We're

hitting a belief about how good life can be. You know, that

happens in my life all the time. When things get really

good, I get really triggered. I relate to this question. I'm not

saying any of this is easy. I can struggle with anxiety myself. The

more I lean into the things I enjoy, the more anxious I can

become, for sure. It's a real human behavior. And when things

get good, we can malfunction is how I view it. My brain's like, cannot

compute so much goodness, and it, like, breaks. It's crazy. It's

crazy. It really is. It's crazy. And if you take anything from this

episode, I hope it's that you can soften around yourself. Because what tends to

happen and what I kinda see in your question is that we begin

to get really stressed and judgmental of ourselves when things aren't

going well or not going how we thought they would. We judge ourselves for

it. And as you mentioned, life is unpredictable, and it's

about, as I said, getting curious with yourself.

I'm uncomfortable here. What is triggered? Why am I

feeling this way? Why can't I allow myself to be happy?

And sometimes it'll be an easy answer, like,

oh, that's just an old way of being. I'm ready to let that go.

And sometimes the answer will be something much deeper, and

it'll be a really painful truth. I won't be like, oh, I don't wanna

look at that, Or, oh, I didn't think that was still there. But

as I hope you have learned through your own healing journey, the

more we process the past, the more we

become friends with our feelings, the more we're able to

dance with life rather than fight life. Because when

we try to control life or when we fear life or when we get really

judgmental and stressed, we're fighting life. And

spoiler alert, life is always gonna win. Life

is a force that is much more powerful

than our human minds and our human selves. And the more we can

begin to soften to life, which is just letting go of that

control we've talked about and letting go of attachment to the outcome of

things, the more we're able to appreciate the present

moment. And so for you with this question,

I think that, one, be kind to yourself. Be kind to

yourself. You did go through a rough five years. It may take some more time

for you to trust life again. You're rebuilding trust with life. That's

also what happens when this too good to be true wound comes up is that

life wasn't good, and you're stepping out of your comfort zone and you're like, life,

do you have my back? Like, what is happening here? And when we're

rebuilding trust with life, we're really rebuilding trust with ourselves. And as

you mentioned, life can be unpredictable. But what we learn through that unpredictability

is how to have our own back, how to have that strength, that courage, and

that perseverance to continue to move forward no

matter what life throws at us. I also invite you

to practice meditation. I think meditation is a beautiful

practice. And when I say meditation, I'm really talking about sitting and

contemplating a question. So my form of

meditation is sitting down and quiet. Sometimes I use a guided

meditation. Sometimes I don't. But really sitting down, getting to that

still place within through breath, and dropping in a question

and allowing myself to see what arises. That may be confusing

for some people, but it's a practice. And the

more we are able to be with ourselves and to be still with ourselves and

to be quiet with ourselves, the more we're able to get to

the truth of how we're feeling. And if meditation

is not your thing, I recommend journaling. I think you can have a question.

So say the question is, why do I fear everything

going away? Why do I fear everything falling apart? And allowing

yourself to free write that answer. And just keep writing.

You'll surprise yourself with what comes up. That's what I find time and time again

when we free write journal, not when we stay in the mind and we think,

what is that? And you you put your pen on the page and just keep

writing. And when we allow that free write to come through, so often the

answer can surprise us. When you're feeling really overwhelmed and

anxious, I also recommend you go out in nature. Nature is so healing. I

know it's winter. At least when I'm recording this episode, it's winter for most people.

I live in Arizona, so my winter is honestly the summer when it's a 20

degrees out and I can't go outside. So I can go outside now, but come

six months from now, we will see how sane I am when I can't

go outside so much. But finding ways to relax your

body. So when we are anxious, overwhelmed, and fearful, it is

finding ways to regulate your nervous system to calm down and to reassure yourself you

are safe. Because that is what I see here. The fear that keeps arising for

you is that you don't feel safe because you went through a time in your

life where it didn't feel safe. You lost a lot of things. And that's

why, as I mentioned earlier, there may be a grieving process that goes on because

you may have not fully allowed yourself to grieve what those five

years were like for you. Sometimes when we're in the midst of a period,

it's not till after it that we can grieve it or after it that we

can see it clearly because especially when we're on the healing journey, sometimes things are

really, really hard and we're healing in the moment something from the past. And then

when we move forward, we have to heal that moment, if that makes

sense. You know? For me, for an example in my life is I lived

with PTSD for a very long time. And when I

stopped having PTSD, at first, it was like, oh my gosh. I don't have PTSD

anymore. But then when I stopped having PTSD, after a couple weeks,

I then saw how much that PTSD had impacted my life in

a way I wasn't able to see when I was in the midst of it.

When I was in the midst of it, I couldn't see the devastating impact

that reliving the most horrible things in my life had on me. And

when I stopped having PTSD, then I had to go through a whole grieving

process about those years where I lived with PTSD. And it's a

very confusing cycle, and sometimes it feels like it will never end. But

with each layer and with each step, we gain more inner freedom

is how I view it. We're liberated from those difficult feelings, and we learn

how to process things in our own unique way. Because as I

mentioned, I mentioned meditation, journaling, nature. I also love baths. I

think those are great. And finding a creative element to help

you heal. But I mentioned all those things, but for each person, it's gonna be

individual. You're gonna find what helps you process things. You're gonna

find what helps you move through your own inner world. You're gonna find

what works best for you. And that's why I wish I

had all the answers, but I don't. Because I don't know your past, I don't

know your present, and I don't know where you're going. Spoiler with that one, nobody

knows where we're going. We can all think we know where we're going,

but that's part of the letting go of control is that we really

don't know what's around the corner, which is why we fear the shoe

dropping. But at every moment in time, we can either choose fear or

choose love. But what I mean by choose love is we can choose trust and

we could choose faith that no matter what's around the corner, we got this.

We got our back. We've learned and we've grown,

and we have the tools moving forward. And if we don't have them, we'll find

them. And in each moment, we can choose to feel unsupported by life because it's

so unpredictable that's so scary, or we can choose to feel supported by

life. And to know that life is a ride, it's not

a straight line, It's not linear. It's filled with loops

and curls and ups and downs. And sometimes in the moment, it's

incredibly challenging. But it's down the line that we get

to see our strength. We get to see our bravery. We get to see

the things we overcame. And from overcoming challenges

is where we build our self esteem, is where we build self respect, is where

we build self love for ourselves. It's truly where we learn to love

ourselves because we learn that we're not perfect, and we pull

ourselves off this pedestal we'll never reach, and we

learn to love ourselves right here, right now, and to be kind to ourselves.

So many of us grew up in critical environments or neglectful environments

or environments where we never felt good enough or worthy enough. And

it's through these challenging moments or it's through these moments that feel too good to

be true where we get to step up to the plate and we get to

reparent ourselves or we get to be our own best friend and we get to

reassure ourselves that we got this because you do. You do have

this. I know it doesn't always feel like that. I know your feelings can feel

overwhelming. I relate to overwhelming feelings. God, do I relate

to overwhelming feelings. But time and time again, it's slowing

down and just being kind to myself where I realize that the

anxiety and the fear I'm feeling are just that,

anxiety and fear, and that they're often teaching me something that I'm

afraid of, but that they don't have to run the show, and they can take

a back seat. And they're able to take a back seat the more I see

myself, the more I show up for myself, the more I love myself. I hope

something in this answer was helpful. I know I didn't have any concrete advice,

so I do hope something in this answer was helpful. And if anything, I hope

you take that you are not alone. There is nothing wrong with how you're feeling.

It is part of the human journey to be uncomfortable when things are really

good. And if you need a little permission today, I wanna give you

permission to lean into feeling good. And I am rooting for you and your

success and your happiness because, dang, you deserve it. I hope something

in the answer was helpful. Thank you so much for this question.

Thank you for joining me for another episode of New View Advice and for having

this conversation about why do we fear when things are too good to be true.

If you haven't already, I invite you to rate and subscribe to the podcast. Ratings

and reviews help to bring more people to the podcast and help me to continue

to grow, which is my goal for 2025. So if you enjoyed this episode, I

invite you to rate and review the podcast. Thank you again for joining me for

another episode of new view advice. As always, I hope I was able to offer

you new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love.

See you next time.