Self-medicating on self-help
…and the damage you can do to yourself with forced positive focus
If you’ve ever read a popular self-help book or two you’ll be very familiar with the concept of positive focus, which is where you essentially attempt to rewire your brain to see the positive side of things before getting into the negative, if at all. You’re pretty much tricking yourself into seeing only the silver lining but not the stormy cloud inside it.
This method has an incredible amount of value when it comes to everyday stuff and teaching yourself how to be less judgmental of others. You will have a much smoother life if you are not automatically seeing people as constantly acting against you, or only paying attention to the shitty things that are going on in your life. The concept itself is applied quite strongly in the tech industry, for example, whereby a key tenet of a retrospective (a meeting where the team reflects on its successes, failures, and what it can do to improve things) is to assume that everybody is doing the best they can with what they have.
Imagine a cyclist almost bumped into you when you were about to cross the road. Your first assumption might to be call all cyclists a bunch of inconsiderate assholes, and this guy is a phenomenal jerk for almost hitting you. Chances are he wasn’t planning to hit you specifically, or anyone for that matter, but he was in a hurry or he was unaware of the surroundings. Or maybe you were unaware of his approach. In this situation the immediate reaction was to blame and complain, and if you go back to that thought again but instead think “fuck, that was close! I should be more careful so I don’t get hit,” or “fuck, that was close! He should be more careful before he hits someone else,” you can see that the reaction was pretty much the same but without the cascade of hatred following it up.
This is good, no? It’s more tolerant, far less negative, and in terms of positive intent it’s reasonable and measured, to the point where it’s more positive than it was but tended more towards neutral. It’s something you’d forget about moments after it happened.
Where this can get particularly ugly though is when it essentially becomes a tool of oppression. Those self-help books and processes talk about positive focus while also discussing trauma, sexual abuse, domestic violence, body image, and all manner of conditions that you would find yourself taking to a therapist to work through, and that’s a really dangerous place to be forcing positive focus. The result can be that your pain and your trauma gets pushed deeper down because these methodologies are all talking about forgiveness and assuming the best intention, and they don’t care one iota about what it actually feels for you to be upset, only that you shouldn’t.
If you put it another way, it comes across as the spiritual version of victim blaming. For example, imagine being told “hey, he didn’t know what he was thinking at the time he hurt you! You need to cut him more slack,” or “you’re responsible for how you react, you’re the one who has the problem here.” And the problem is that it works really well because that kind of mindset is incredibly healthy when you’re not traumatised. Who doesn’t want a more forgiving and understanding world where nobody jumps to the worst possible conclusion every time something bad happens? When you’re dealing with that pain, though, it just feels like you’re being told to shut up, if you were more positive you wouldn’t be hurting so much.
I’ve personally felt this pretty strongly when reading some of Louise Hay’s works, which are phenomenal but can easily be a source of toxic thinking if you take it all as gospel. A common mantra in her writing is “we are all victims of victims,” and the meaning is that it does no good to judge someone for what they might have done to you, because they were in the same position once. What it sounds like is “you can’t blame this person for hurting you because they were hurt too,” which pretty much means that their pain cancels out yours, and you’re not allowed to express your feelings because you’re not the only victim in the story. In my own experience this knowledge, as well as my experiences with family in my youth, very strongly reinforced the idea that I’m just a burden, not belonging, never good enough, and that my own feelings really don’t matter compared to the feelings of my parents and siblings. You can imagine what it feels like when spiritual gurus and self-help books are telling you that you just need to forgive them for not knowing better, and be compassionate, and just let go, like all of that anger and rage inside you isn’t justified.
The same can be said for what Eckhart Tolle says about separating your issues from your real self. If you look hard enough into who you really are then all of that pain and suffering will suddenly not matter, because you know that it’s not you. And then you can meditate. It sounds so fucking simple, and in reality you’re just reading a success story that worked for the author but is incredibly unlikely to have a similar result for you (which makes perfect sense: you don’t change your life by reading a book).
This isn’t to say that the authors of those books intended their words to be read that way, but an author needs to be aware that the interpretation of their work is totally out of their hands once the book hits the shelf. It doesn’t matter what they meant any more, because they’re no longer in the position where they can directly correct your misunderstanding. The thing is, how exactly do you know if you’re taking it in the right way? I don’t think you can, I just think that you can’t self-medicate on new-age texts without having some kind of support for you to express all of that energy that stirs inside you as you turn the pages.
I might have written about this before, I can’t remember, but there is another kind of approach that is often at odds with forced positive focus but is not written about nearly as much. A lot of work with somatic therapy, gestalt therapy, pulsations and so on makes no attempt to deny that there is some serious darkness within you. It’s quite romantic to call it a shadow because, although it is the reflection of all of your pain and trauma and suffering, it is still you. The more you are aware of this shadow and how you behave when you’re fully inside it, the more you can do to respond in a much healthier way instead of becoming that victim of a victim. Of course, that means you have to actually look at and acknowledge your negative behaviours, and what happens when you’re in a triggered state, and you really can’t just blind it with forced positivity.
Oftentimes you can find a lot of beauty beneath this shadow because it’s an incredibly vulnerable place to be in, and through this kind of work you have so many opportunities to express those feelings you really wanted to be heard. You’re allowed to be whoever you want to be in that moment and only then can you start to bring in the genuine positive energy.
Of course, this isn’t to dismiss positive focus in its entirety because there are so many situations where you will be negative just for the sake of being negative, or not knowing any better. One excellent way to encourage a healthier outlook is to maintain a gratitude journal: commit to it for at least a month, and every morning or evening just write down a few things that happened in the day that you’re grateful for. It really doesn’t have to be anything big, it can be as simple as trying out a new perfume, or listening to your favourite song, or even allowing yourself to cry over something that upsets you. True beauty is found through the accumulation of thousands of those pleasant moments throughout your day, not just those epic occasions that happen every once in a while.
