Theresa Hedrick-Hopkins, PhD

How I Learned to Spiral Up

I walked into my final PhD residency about as broken down as a body can get and still be walking. My best friend had died. My lupus had relapsed. I was just months out from spine surgery. And I still had a dissertation to finish and defend—the last mile of a road I had been on for years.

I remember sitting in that room, exhausted before the day even started, and feeling like I had nothing left to give it. Grief will do that. So will a body that has turned on itself. So will pain that never fully clocks out. I was not looking for a breakthrough. I was just trying to get through the next hour without falling apart in front of people I had worked so hard to prove myself to.

What actually got me through was not willpower. It was a shift I did not expect: positive psychology.

Up to that point, I had studied it academically. I had not yet needed it personally. But somewhere in the middle of that residency, I started doing something small and deliberate. Instead of cataloging everything that was going wrong—which, by then, was a very long list—I started tracking what was going right.

Not in a vague, feel-good way. Actually tracking it. Naming it. Writing it down.

It sounds almost too simple to matter. It mattered more than almost anything else I did that week. I had been spiraling down, and for the first time in a long time, I felt myself start to spiral up instead.

Not because the grief lifted or the pain disappeared. It didn't. But because I was no longer giving every ounce of my attention to what was breaking me, and I had started giving some of it back to what was holding me up.

That practice carried me through the rest of my PhD, through years of finishing a dissertation while managing a chronic illness that does not care about deadlines. It is also what turned into a calling. It is why I coach people through their own resilience now and why I do the work I do around burnout and compassion fatigue.

I did not come to this work from a textbook. I came to it from a hotel room at a residency, doing everything I could to hold myself together.

Here is the part I want to be really clear about, because it is the part people get wrong most often: positive psychology is not about always being happy.

It is not “look on the bright side” or “just keep smiling.” That is called toxic positivity, and it is not the same thing. Toxic positivity asks you to skip the hard part. Positive psychology asks you to survive it without flattening it, without pretending it away.

We are not supposed to be unbothered. We are supposed to be tested, bent, and still know we are resilient enough not to break.

There is a real difference between those two things, and I did not understand it until I was living inside it.

Genuine resilience sounds less like “everything happens for a reason” and more like, “I am hurting, and I am still going to get up.”

It is being honest enough to say the hard thing out loud and grounded enough not to set up camp there. It is sitting with the struggle long enough to actually learn something from it instead of rushing past it to a version of yourself that has it all figured out.

Where I live, we would say it is about finding the “lesson and the blessin’” in every situation.

Not instead of the pain.

Alongside it.

I do not think I would have made it through that residency without that shift in how I was paying attention. I do not think I would be doing the work I do now, either.

Grief did not go away because I got better at gratitude. My health did not stop being complicated because I started noticing what was going right.

What changed was that I stopped being only “a person things were happening to” and started being a person who got to decide what to do with what was left.

If you are in your own version of that hotel room right now—tested, bent, and not sure you can take much more—I am not going to tell you to look on the bright side.

I am going to tell you this instead:

You are allowed to be hurting and still be building something.

Start small. Notice one thing today that is holding you up, even if it is tiny, even if it feels silly to write down. Then notice another one tomorrow.

I sometimes use the phrase “Kiss the Edge,” a term once taught to me by an old therapist. For me, it represents the place where growth and fear meet.

The edge is uncomfortable.

It is the dissertation you are not sure you can finish. The organization you are afraid to start. The conversation you do not know how to have. The dream that feels a little too big. The opportunity that makes your stomach flip because part of you knows you could fail.

Positive psychology does not promise that you will never fall. It gives us tools that make stepping toward the edge possible.

Hope says there may be another path.

Resilience says falling does not have to be the end.

Self-efficacy says, “I can learn.”

Optimism says the future is not already written.

Connection reminds us that we do not have to walk there alone.

Purpose gives us a reason to take the step.

And gratitude reminds us to look around while we are doing it.

That is the power of positive psychology in my life.

It did not create a life without grief, failure, stress, fear, or disappointment. It gave me a different way to live inside that life.

To notice the good without denying the bad.

To find meaning in difficult things.

To invest in people.

To laugh often.

To practice kindness randomly and generously.

To remember my why.

To believe that resilience can be strengthened.

To keep growing.

And perhaps most importantly, to understand that flourishing is not about creating a perfect life. It is about learning how to fully inhabit an imperfect one.

That is a life worth practicing.

And that is how you learn to spiral up.