Two Things Can Be True At The Same Time | Joanne Grobbelaar

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Two Things Can Be True at the Same Time

I’m writing this at the start of August, in the middle of tying things off. Projects finished or handed over, the team briefed, clients looked after, everything set up, so I can step away for three weeks and come back raring to go again. I committed to finish the year strong, and I know I can’t do that running on fumes.

Here’s the part I nearly left out of this little update. This has been a really low stretch of my personal life. Possibly one of the hardest there’s been. At exactly the same time it’s been the most demanding, expansive run my work has ever had, and one of the most joyful, wrapped inside a summer full of people, gorgeousness, love and long tables. Both of those sentences run true. Neither one is the well-mannered cover story for the other.

In my work, I experience what I am writing about today. Sometimes, we decide that when life hands us something heavy, we forfeit the right to the good stuff. That leaning into joy while we’re hurting is somehow a betrayal of the hurt. It isn’t. 

Learning to hold two truths at once is one of the most useful things you ever teach yourself, and I’ve written before about harder things I’ve walked through, so this isn’t me theorising from the sidelines.

Why we think we have to pick one truth

There’s a story running underneath a lot of us that says feelings should be tidy. Grief in one box, joy in another, and you only get to open one at a time. So when the worst is happening, we brace and tell ourselves that celebrating can wait until the hard times have passed.

The trouble is that the hard time doesn’t always pass on schedule. Some seasons the hard thing sits with you for months. If you’ve decided you’re not allowed anything good until it lifts, you’ve quietly signed up to put your whole life on hold, sometimes for a very long time. The joy you’re denying yourself is often the exact thing that would have helped you carry the weight in the first place.

Your brain is built for both, and the research backs it

This isn’t a mindset slogan. It’s closer to how emotions can actually work.

Psychologists call it dialectical thinking, the idea that two things that look like opposites can both be true and valid at once. It sits right at the centre of the therapy Marsha Linehan developed, where the whole practice is holding acceptance and change in the same hand rather than picking a side. You can accept exactly where you are and be working to change it. You can be devastated and still functioning. Both, at the same time.

Then there’s the work on post-traumatic growth (note, I am not a trauma expert!), a term the psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun gave us. They’ve spent decades documenting something people in hard seasons already sense, that real growth and real suffering are not mutually exclusive. The growth doesn’t arrive instead of the pain. It tends to arrive alongside it, often through the struggle rather than in spite of it. I have experienced that first-hand, and it can be really tricky to navigate, and for some people in your inner circle to witness.

And there’s a whole body of research on mixed emotions, the bittersweet, that keeps landing on the same finding. People who can feel the good and the bad together, instead of flattening one to make room for the other, those people tend to cope better through difficulty. Being able to hold both isn’t a sign you’re not taking the hard thing seriously. It’s your system doing what it was designed to do.

The good didn’t cancel the low. They both grew out of the same place

There’s a lazy version of this idea that I absolutely don’t believe. The lazy version says the bad thing was secretly a gift, that it all happened for a reason, that you should feel appreciative of the scar. I’m not saying that. Some things are simply hard and stay hard, and dressing them up as blessings is its own kind of dishonesty.

What I am saying is… When I was at my lowest, the people around me, my team, my community, the women I get to work with, gathered in. Not to rescue me. Nobody can do that, and honestly the ones who try tend to get in the way. What they did was quieter and better than rescue. They kept holding out invitations. A dinner. A piece of work worth getting excited about. A room I was welcome in exactly as I was.

They kept the door to joy open and left it to me to decide when to walk through. So the highs weren’t a distraction from the low, and they weren’t a reward for surviving it either. They came out of the same place, at the same time, and I let them.

The poison we drink and call loyalty

Here’s the bit I’d gently push on, in myself as much as in anyone else.

Sometimes we refuse the good on purpose. We stay down in it, partly because coming up feels disloyal to the pain, and partly, if we’re honest, because staying down feels like it’s making a point to someone. Look how bad this is. Look what this did to me. There’s a strange righteousness in it.

You know the old saying about resentment being like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to suffer. Refusing your own joy to make a point works the same way. The only person who goes without the dinner, the win, the good afternoon is you. Whoever you’re imagining you’re punishing is off living their life, unbothered, while you sit in a dark you chose for yourself. There’s no strength in that. It’s a slow drinking of metaphoric poison dressed up as principle.

Going deep into a hard season, doing the actual work of it instead of dashing past it, that’s the resilient road. It’s the road I’d never talk anyone out of. But refusing every good thing on the way through is not the same as doing the work. More often it’s a way of avoiding it.

What this looks like at work

This isn’t only a personal-life idea. It turns up in businesses and careers constantly, we just don’t tend to name it.

It’s the founder closing the biggest contract of her life the same week her dad goes into hospital, feeling like a monster for being proud of the deal. It’s the person who lands the promotion she’d worked years for during the worst month of her marriage and can’t let herself enjoy the announcement. It’s the creative producing the best work of her career in a stretch she’d never want to live through again. It’s a whole team celebrating a launch while one of them is quietly falling apart, everyone tiptoeing because joy suddenly feels rude.

In every one of those scenarios, the instinct can be to pick. Mute the good so the bad gets its due respect. But the deal is still good. The promotion is still earned. And the work you made in that awful season is some of the best you’ve ever done. Letting yourself have the pockets of joy doesn’t shrink what’s hard. It means you’re living your whole life instead of a censored version of it.

Stop. Pause. Then head for base camp

The reason most of us can’t do this in the moment is that we never step out of the moment long enough to see it. We’re too far inside one feeling to notice there are two.

That’s the whole case for building your self-awareness, and it’s why I keep going on about the small stuff. Stop. Pause. Even a few seconds of standing back from your own experience is usually enough to catch it. There are two true things here, not one. I don’t have to file the day under good or bad. I can let it be both.

When I actually need to do this, rather than just silently agree to it, I go to base camp. For me that’s Flip The Thinking, the toolkit I built for exactly these moments, when your head has stuck on one story and can’t see the other one standing right next to it. Base camp isn’t where you live. It’s where you go to get your rebalance, catch your breath and remember which way is up before the next stretch of the road. Then you go again.

If this summer has taught me anything, it’s that the two-truths flex is available to every one of us, but only if we’re awake enough to embrace it when we need to. Build the awareness first. Most of the rest gets more possible once that’s in place.

If your head has been stuck on one story lately and you can’t find the other truth sitting right beside it, start with Flip The Thinking. It’s the toolkit I reach for first, and it’s on my website.

Get the Flip The Thinking toolkit at joannegrobbelaar.com.

Joanne Grobbelaar is a Manchester-based resilience architect, business consultant, and coach who helps people build steady, resilient careers and businesses and live forward on their own terms.

Frequently asked questions

Can two opposing things really be true at the same time?

Yes. Psychologists call it dialectical thinking. The recognition that two things which seem to contradict each other can both be valid at once. You can be grieving and grateful, struggling and succeeding, exhausted and fulfilled. Holding both, instead of forcing yourself to choose one, tends to make hard seasons more bearable rather than less.

Is it wrong to feel happy when I’m going through something painful?

No, and the guilt around it is worth looking at directly. Allowing yourself times of happiness during a hard time doesn’t diminish the pain or disrespect it. Refusing joy rarely honours the difficult thing. Usually it just stacks a second loss on top of the first. You’re allowed both.

How do I let myself enjoy the good without feeling guilty?

Start by naming both truths, even if it’s only to yourself. Stop, pause, and separate the two experiences rather than blending them into one verdict on your whole life. Noticing that you’re holding a hard thing and a good thing at the same time, instead of choosing between them, takes a lot of the guilt out of the good. Tools like Flip The Thinking exist to help you make that shift when your mind has focused on a single story.

What does it mean to hold two truths, and why does it matter for resilience?

Holding two truths is the ability to accept difficult and positive realities at the same time without cancelling either one out. It matters for resilience because existence seldom arrives one experience at a time. The hard and the good usually overlap. People who can sit with mixed emotions, rather than flattening them into a single mood, tend to recover and adapt more steadily.

RESOURCES AND NEXT STEPS

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