True Positivity: a Systematic Method from Cognitive Psychology to find Positivity and Meaning in Your Own Experiences.

“Think Positively!”

If you’ve ever received this advice from a friend you know how it feels. You mustered the courage to open up and share your deepest struggles. All they could do was butchering the complexity of your emotional life to a lack of positivity. You feel unheard, and even more lonely than before you talked to them.

Unfortunately, a lot of self-improvement advice does not go much beyond your friend’s.

The idea of “positive thinking” has been around for decades, but it seems that the concept was handed down as a mantra, with no clear explanation of why or how to do it. So people have been struggling and failing to “positively think” their own problems away, while feeling frauds and not gaining much insight in the process. Such was the frustration with positive thinking, that many lost faith. Entire schools of thoughts were born which opposed it.

Still, your best life moments are really those when you do see life in a positive light. Unfortunately, they seem unintentional and casual.

To solve this paradox, I will dissect for you one technique I use with my psychiatric patients. Its use is to nudge them to view their life events in a more positive light.

Actually it’s not even a technique. At its core, it’s the natural conclusion of learning how your own mind works. Let me tell you right now that the real prize from using it is not even thinking positively. It’s of getting more awareness and alignment with your true motivations and desires.

It doesn’t ask you to force yourself, or believe the unbelievable.

I call it True Positivity.

Where my ideas come from

I am an MD and psychiatrist from Europe. My daily routine consists of listening to people’s most intimate life struggles. I work with them to make things better. Most of the concepts come from cognitive behavioral therapy. (CBT) is result-driven form of psychological treatment, with a rich scientific literature supporting its value in treating depression, anxiety, and most psychological problems. I’ve added my personal elaboration to it based on my field observations of what works, and what doesn’t.

The basic premise is this: new self-help mindsets aimed at solving your problems are produced every day. They don’t always works, and the theoretical foundations are often shaky. On the contrary, professional psychotherapists create change on a daily basis for their patients. They use methods derived from large bodies of academic and clinical research. Why not directly digging in the source of what works?

What if you are not clinically ill, but just want to be a bit more positive? For psychotherapy to be effective, it must be firmly rooted in the universal laws of human mind. So even if it aims at treating patients, the principles stay the same, whether you’re ill or not.

What this article will entail

I dedicate the great deal of the article to explaining theory. This is purposeful. Once you understand how your mind works, the “how-to” itself will come as a natural consequence. You will also learn that understanding your function is the only way to actually change in the long run. A purely practical approach cannot possibly work when approaching your own psychology.

How your mind works, part I

Most of the moments making life worthy include a sense of possibility, and the experience of pleasant emotional states. You start most of your endeavors when you feel hopeful that things could improve, at least slightly. Even if you can’t fully eradicate negative emotional states from your experience, a life where the predominant emotions are anger, frustration, doubt, worry and the like, cannot be said to be a fulfilling one. So, if you consider living well a worthy goal, you need to be capable of experiencing pleasant emotional states.

But how does happiness, or any other emotion, happen?

While emotions seem casual, they are not. They are set in motion by our thinking and attitudes. I’ve written an entire article to explain this, so you might want to check it out first. Change the thought, and you change the emotion, in a cycle.

Unfortunately, you can’t think your way into a different thought by force or sheer willpower. Why? Because single thoughts don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, they are part of a net where they are all linked to other thoughts. The sum of them makes up your entire worldview. Like the game of Tetris, you cannot move a single thought, without moving other ones, too. We can say that your mental life is resilient, and resistant to change.

This happens because to safely navigate reality, you need to have to form a map of it through experience. This map must be consistent in time and circumstances to be reliable. If that didn’t happen, you would be live in a world you could not make sense of, at the mercy of random events. You would not be able to classify them and learn from your experience.

Therefore, when you think a new thought, a new cycle starts and evaluates its coherence with other thoughts. Your mind asks: does this thought make sense? Or is it in contradiction to my other ideas about the world? If it happens to be alien to your usual worldview, you experience anxiety, doubt. The thought is rejected, no matter how hard you try to think it.

We can say that the mind is semantic and call this the principle of coherence. That is, the mind’s preference to find a coherent meaning in events and conserve it through time.

Why classical “positive thinking” fails

This shows you why “positive thinking” does not work. When you try to think positively but still believe in the negativity of the situation, the new ideas don’t pass your mind’s semantic test. You disbelieve it and then abandon it. There is no way around this.

Even if you manage to think it for a while, you may experience cognitive dissonance. The latter is the alarm your mind uses to signal you that your worldview is being torn apart, and that this could put you in danger. Your primal defense towards the environment, the knowledge of the structure of your reality, is being threatened. Cognitive Dissonance is indeed unpleasant because its purpose is to motivate you to solve its cause, just like physical pain. In this case, the solution is to reject the thought that doesn’t make sense to your life.

Along the way, something else happens. Since willingly thinking something goes against the functioning of your mind, it fails. You begin to associate the efforts to think positive thoughts to frustration, an unpleasant emotion signaling you that your present strategy is not working. The next time you try, it triggers a new cycle and you experience frustration even quicker. Positive thinking, which started as a tool to feel better, now makes you feel worse. In time, frustration thus serves its function, and you quit. When you finally stop forcing positive thinking and just let go, you feel better. You might conclude that positive thinking is the source of feeling bad, that’s not the case. The fault is not in the specific thought itself, but in the incorrect usage of the mind. When you stop ding what doesn’t work, frustration and struggle disappear. You feel relieved. Any forced thought would share this same fate, not only positive thinking.

How is it then possible to change your thoughts, without threatening your mind’s coherence?

To answer I need to introduce you to the second principle of the mind, that of economy.

How your mind works, part II.

While the mind seeks coherence and sense, it also privileges the ideas and behaviors that present the best benefit to cost/ratio. Anything you do or think is what your mind sees as the most effective and efficient alternative available at the moment. You are willing to entertain new ideas, or try new behaviors, only if they hint to a reward in the future. Very often, the promise of avoiding a negative outcome is what drives it. The only moment that change can happens is when it becomes easier to think a thought or to perform a behavior, that not doing it. I call it the principle of economy.

Usually your best teacher is experience. When you see that the old ways don’t produce benefit anymore, you start doubting them and eventually change them. What a psychotherapist does is to help h guiding you to see when and if changing mind makes sense, and if your thoughts and behaviors help or harm you.

For example, why do you easily conform to your social group’s viewpoints? First, it makes sense to think that a group of people might know better than an individual. Thought this you gain security. Second, you also gain social acceptance and belonging. By not going your own way you avoid a possible social and personal cost, too.

Our belief systems are thus kept in place by a complex, never ending dance around the poles of coherence and economy. Each of the two forces sometimes seems to overpower the other, but never for too long.

Through the marriage of these forces, a new principle is born. That of teleology. Every thought, action and emotion must be have a sense to survive in your mind and life. It also needs to be beneficial. So everything you think, feel, and do must aims at a specific, relevant purpose. This purpose is not grand or ultimate. It simply is the satisfaction of your immediate emotional needs. In an evolutionary perspective, in the long run this helps you satisfying your biological and social needs. How this happens is not self-evident, and uncovering it requires active reflection. Gaining this awareness will form the basis of learning how to find value in most of your life situations.

How to use this knowledge to be more positive

If you want to be more positive, it’s because there exist a situation that you are unhappy with. We’ll start from there.

Undesirable situations fall in two categories. The first is those in which you played a part, and the second are those which are fully out of your own control.

To discriminate between them, a simple test is the following. Ask yourself if you could have said “no” to the situation, at least in theory.

For example, you feel dissatisfied with your group of friends being too superficial. Could you say “no” to it? Yes. So it’s a situation you have some control over.

Another example:

The economy is going down. Could you say no to it? No. This is a situation you have little or no control over.

Usually, the situations you have played a part in, are those which involve other human beings, since they imply two or more people to relate. We can also find here most events that develop through time. This is because the development of a situation through time requires you to at least allow it.

In the second group we can find most random and sudden events. We also find situations with a broad scope, which is usually beyond you. For example here we see societal, economical and natural phenomena.

This said, to tell which is which almost always requires a case-by-case analysis. Not always such a clear distinction is possible at first glance.

Being more positive in situations in which you played a part

Since your mind and behavior are always purposeful, most situations you find yourself in require your input to happen, even if this often happens passively or unknowingly. Coming to grips with your involvement in the causation of events in your life is important. It restores your sense of agency, opens your mind to possible solutions, and makes you feel better. But how can you allow something you don’t want to happen, without knowing it? The reason is that your mind’s mechanisms are always “on” despite whether you know it or not, similarly to your heart beating. Your mind’s sense of coherence works in the background of your conscious awareness. It is the plot to your life’s movie, and it is so familiar to you that you rarely question it. Guiding you to recognize this background is one of the aims of most schools of psychotherapy. Your principle of economy is also always in action. You naturally select pleasant, over painful, ideas. These are the source of most mental biases.

Since your mental life is purposeful, you would not put yourself into any situation if it didn’t make some sense, and if it didn’t present some advantage to do it.

Therefore, the technique to find the positive side in these situations is so simple that it’s not sexy at all. It simply requires to recognize the advantage and meaning you gain from the situation.

Next time you are in situation you’d prefer not to be in, ask yourself the questions:

What am I gaining by letting this happen?

What am I trading this for?

Which value/s and needs am I satisfying by letting this happen?

After, you can then ask:

Was letting this happen effective in satisfying my needs or values?

Was the tradeoff effective and valuable?

If the answer to the last two question was positive, congratulations. You found the true, positive side of the situation, and also gained a deeper awareness of your own motivations and values.

If it was negative, you can then ask, in order:

What did I lose from letting this situation happen?

Which value of mine got violated?

What could be a better way to accomplish my original aim or satisfy my need?

Is my original aim useful, at all?

Do I keep wanting to live by this value and priorities order?

Are there any other ways to do get the same need or value fulfilled?

This might seem very complicated. Let’s see some examples:

Example 1: You accepted to go to a boring family reunion, but you had to renounce time to work on your freelance business. The party sucks, you feel like you are wasting your time, but home is too far to go back, and it’s late. You should not have accepted to begin with. You chose to stay because your relatives care. While you are there though, you feel irritable, restless and angry at yourself. Unfortunately, you can’t seem to see any positive side in being there.

In this example you could observe a complete detachment from your sense of agency. You consequently feel trapped, and suffer.

What practical advantage did you get from going, and what sense did it make?

When your mother asked you to go, you felt guilty to say no. You know it’s important for her. You clearly participated to please your mother and traded your free time for the idea of her being content. You positive value there was support, care, and love for your mother. Your need was belonging. On the other hand, which value did you feel got violated? What did you lose by going? You lost precious time to make progress on your business. Your need for autonomy, and the value of personal accomplishment got lost. Making your mother’s happiness and the sense of belonging were a more urgent than autonomy and accomplishment.

What can you do now? You are stuck at the party, but since you now know your goal for being there, you can honor it. You can focus on spending quality time with your mother. Did your behavior accomplish your aim? Yes. Was the tradeoff worthy? It’s up to you to now decide. Last, you can question if putting others’ needs before your own is the only way to care for them.

You also notice that you are anxious about failing at your business. Going o the party succeeded in temporarily lowering you anxiety. As long as you are at the party, you can focus on using the opportunity to unwind. Do want to keep living by avoiding anxiety? No! Next time, you’ll know that you need to switch your values order.

Example 2: You selected your career path a long time ago, but you now feel unsatisfied. You are not learning anything new. You stopped growing. Back in the days, you had chosen it because of the prestige associated to your profession. You had also taken into account the promise of monetary security that job offered. So, your initial pursuits were social recognition and economic security. Did it deliver? You are now well-respected by your colleagues and you earn well, so it delivered. That’s your true positive. The situation is not perfect, but those aspects are something true and valuable that you can count on. And what are you losing now? You lack personal-growth, challenge and learning. Is the trade worthy? It was until some years before, but not anymore. You now clearly see that your values, needs and priorities have shifted. Made serene by knowing that your job is not leaving you empty handed, and knowing what to look for, you make plans to reorient your career path.

In both of these cases, you see that by finding your active role in the situation, you soothe yourself. You can also envision solutions which better fit your needs.

Dealing with events which are out of your control.

What about totally unpredictable, unwanted situations?

A car hits you. You get fired. Your spouse cheats on you.

After you’ve used the “no” test, or determined that the situation is not in your control, you ask the following questions, in order:

What have I lost through this event?

What values got violated by the event?

In which other way can I restore my value?

Usually, the pain experienced in an unwanted situation a sense of loss of something of value. You often feel like you have lost control over your life. Its true weight resides in the meaning that the event has for you, and not in the situation per se. Since you didn’t determine or allow the event, the meaning that it has for you can be found in your reaction to it. Because all mental acts are purposeful, so its your reaction, and its function is usually an attempt to restore what got lost. By questioning your reactions, you immediately bypass the event to focus on the subjective side of the equation.

Ask the following questions, in order:

What am I gaining through my reaction?

What value am I trying to accomplish?

Is it working?

If not, what reaction could better accomplish my value?

Through answering these questions, you increase agency, responsibility, acceptance, and wellbeing. Through understanding, you have a solid base to act and restore the lost value.

Let’s see some examples.

Example 1:You got laid off due to the bad economy. You start to seek other jobs. You know it’s nobody’s fault, deep down you keep thinking that is was unfair. You feel angry, resentful and powerless against “the Man”.What did you feel got lost? By not having a regular income anymore, your economical security is endangered. But you’re already facing that through job hunting. What is your reaction saying? By thinking it’s unfair, you are trying to cope with the fact that you feel devalued and vulnerable. You’ve not only lost your income but your sense of being of value and in control of your life. That’s why you suffer. Is this strategy working? Not really, because it implies you are passive. Maybe, you think, you can reassess your attitude and try to find more personal value in more stable things like your family and hobbies. You feel relieved. Spreading your means to find self-worth makes you more resilient. Even if you still worry about work, you feel more empowered and less at the mercy of circumstances.

Example 2: Your spouse broke up with you after years of marriage without giving you any explanation. You feel fooled, used, abandoned. You think that he’s always been an egotistical child, and you think you’ve been so stupid not to see that. How dared he do that to you! What have you lost? What values got violated? Losing love hurts and makes you feel lonely. That’s not way around it. What makes you feel fooled and used though is having losing your sense of respect and acceptance. What’s the purpose of your reaction? You globally labeled your ex as a child. While there might be some truth to that, maybe by lowering his image to that of an egotistical child, you’re disrespecting him back. Does this strategy work to restore your lost respect? Even if you yell at him, despite some initial relief, you’re still left with an open wound, and your personal value suffers. Calling him names is not making you feel that he respect now. Since you zeroed on what hurt, you can devise better actions to regain it. You can confront him on his behavior. You tell him that even if you’re not happy with the whole situation, what hurt you the most was his lack of respect for your need of closure. Just by telling this straight to him, you feel better and empowered, which ever his answer may be. You now don’t even need his respect anymore, since you now found your own self-respect. This is assertive behavior, and it flows from the clarity on what is really important to you. Even if you decide not to confront him, you now can enter new relationships more with more confidence.

Example 3: What about a car hitting you, or burglars robbing your home? The technique is the same. Enquire in your reaction to know what you perceive you’ve lost, and how you are trying to cope with it restore it. It could your health or wealth, or your sense of safety. Maybe you the possibility to live the full life you envisioned for yourself. What you feel you are lacking, is your motivator and value. What would be an effective way to bring it back into your life?

A note on trauma

Since traumatic events strongly violate the principles of economy and coherence, it can often be almost impossible to see a positive side. There is no sense, no reward, and very often just pain and bewilderment. Life is requiring your mind to work hard at recomposing sense and purpose. When this doesn’t happen at all, you have the cases of pathological trauma. The mind can’t seem to heal. The event remains unintegrated in a person’s consciousness and it goes on haunting them for years. The predominant emotions become vulnerability, powerlessness, and a sense of total passivity. For many trauma survivors, the event becomes the most important pillar of their existences, always fresh and unintegrated, always keeping its initial, destructive and alert-provoking power. Moving forward requires then specific therapeutic tools and a solid therapeutic relation to re-experience the safety, empathy and understanding that got lost.

Best practices

I suggest you start using the method gradually and organically as you go through your day. You will grow motivated without effort when you’ll see benefits in your life, so there is no need to force it. You just need to start experimenting. You also want to avoid making it a chore, which could make it unpleasant to do, thus reducing your willingness to keep going.

Begin by trying to see the principles of coherence and economy in action in your own experience. Start doing it in non stressful situations, to avoid being confused by your emotions. This by itself will give you a sound base to gain mastery over your own experience.

When you feel motivated, you can start with the actual technique by asking yourself questions. The best trigger to start enquiring is when you find yourself in a situation which you don’t feel good about. Start from mildly stressful events, and progress to more intense ones as you grow more confident with the technique. As you repeat this exercise in time, it will become more embedded in your thinking style.

It’s important to let yourself get motivated by noticing when and if the exercises are working, looking at your emotions and behaviors. We are looking for small, progressive improvement, rather than big leaps.

You can simply ask yourself:

Since I’ve been using True Positivity, do I feel a bit better?

Did I reduce the impact of negative events, or the resistance to them, even so slightly?

Am I slightly more able to cope with situations, see new solutions, and maybe even putting them into practice?

Do I feel like I understand myself and my own behaviors a bit better?

Realistic expectations

The good thing about CBT-derived exercises is that they usually offer immediate emotional relief. The greatest benefits come with repeated use, and time.

The power of self-help will seldom be equal to that of actual therapy. A therapist can spot your biases more easily and help you overcome your resistances. An of course, with self-help you lack the support and empathy that your therapist can give you.

FAQ

This seems very hard to do, does it work?

Self-reflection can seem hard at first. That is true with most new behaviors. At first you will need more time and attention to do it, but with time it will become more natural. When you will slip back in the old ways, remember that it’s simply your mind’s coherence and economy doing their job.

I feel offended by your examples. My pain is real, and you presented your examples in simplistic ways.

First, I’d ask you what you are trying to accomplish by being offended. Maybe you feel that I am not fully respecting your own pain. To answer you, my examples are purposefully simple. I wanted to give a clear, practical model that could suit different situations. Therefore, I could not go into extreme detail.

I don’t buy your explanations

Yes, I love a skeptical mind. I don’t want anyone to take what I write for granted. If you did, my work would have missed the point. Please check into your own experience and verify if it matches what I taught.

I don’t believe that all we do has a purpose, there is no free will etc…

While I love philosophy of mind, I suggest is that you trust your experience first, and then your ideas about it. I don’t know about free will, but you can try the method and see that you can really change you attitude, when you know how to do it. This should give free will some points.

Can I mix this with the Cognitive Journal?

Of course you can. Mix them as you want, because as far as you respect the functioning of your psychology, there is no “method” or right or wrong.

To conclude

While finding the positive can seem a simple trick, doing it right goes way beyond it. What you are actually doing is exploring your own experience and observing what part you are playing in your life. This empowers you and it’s the only way to take real, tangible responsibility. It lets you develop acceptance of events and of your own mental and emotional makeup. With acceptance as a foundation, you will be in a better position to change what’s not working.

I want to warn you again that I tried to present a simplified version of what’s done across several sessions of therapy, sometimes for months and years. Your mind is a complex net of meaning, usually what actually happens is not that linear, neither simple. Change requires several attempts, usually attacking problems from different points of views. The best mindset to have is viewing your experience and mind as phenomena to understand, rather than to forcefully attack. You are always told to “Just do it”, but your thoughts are what always come before “just doing it”. The right mental concepts, when applied correctly, can really make the difference in your emotional life. You’ve been thinking your thoughts for your entire life, so they must have served some purpose for you. Treat them with the same respect and compassion you’ll have for an old folk who tells his story. This way, they will become more malleable to being consciously influenced.

Exercises short version and strategy

First step: getting familiar with the principles of economy, coherence and teleology.

In everyday, non situations, ask yourself:

In which way is my mind trying to keep coherence?

What makes this behavior or thought the most sensed at the time?

In which ways am I thinking or doing what is economical?

What makes this behavior or thought the most convenient at the time?

What emotional purpose are my actions and thoughts serving?

Second step: True positivity

Pick a situation that you’d normally view negatively, whether as it happens or afterwards. Start by asking.

Could I prevent this situation from happening by saying “no” to it?

For situations that seem to require your participation to happen (you generally answered “yes” to the first question):

What am I gaining by letting this happen?

What am I trading this for?

Which value do I actually accomplish by letting this happen?

After you’ve gotten some answers, you can ask:

Does letting this happen really accomplish what I was trying to get?

Was the tradeoff advantageous?

If the answer is positive, congratulations, you’ve now found the real, positive side of the situation. If not, you can then ask:

What did I lose from letting this happen?

Which value of mine got violated?

You can then ask:

What could be a better way to accomplish my original aim?

In which other way can I satisfy my unsatisfied value?

Is my original aim valuable, at all?

Do I keep wanting to live by this value and priorities?

Is what you were trying to accomplish really the only way to satisfy my value and needs?

If the answers are negative, you can proceed to the next step. You ask the following questions, in order:

What have I lost through this event?

What values got violated by the event?

In which other way can I restore my value?

What am I gaining through my reaction?

What value am I trying to accomplish through my reaction?

Is it working?

If not, what reaction could better accomplish my value?

For situations that seem to to be out of your control (you generally answered “no” to the first question), ask the following questions:

What have I lost through this event?

What values got violated by the event?

In which other way can I restore my value?

What am I gaining through my reaction?

What value am I trying to accomplish?

Is it working?

If not, what reaction could better accomplish my value?