The Positivity ‘movement’ – from blogs, opinion pieces to self-help bibles – is a means to foster compassion for yourself, to release yourself from whatever holds you in the spot or in repetitive cycles. But lately it feels like the worm has turned and it is being aimed towards material attainment – subsequently pointing the finger of blame inwards when we don’t ‘use positivity’ right. IE, when our exact picture doesn’t ‘manifest’ as we so determinedly painted it.
So, rather than an ally – a genuine supportive aid which many features of positive psychology can really help with in gently unhooking us from any conditioned/negative belief systems – there’s a doggedness to its deployment. We’re manufacturing a fake plastic positivity. Adhering, without discernment, to ‘rules’ of living positively. But they are broad strokes: guidelines, not absolute truths for all.
Does a ‘directed’ positivity, swallowed whole, work? Oftentimes, yes. But it is unsustainable, because it is skipping a vital component in the WHOLE picture. It is missing ‘you’. Your particulars, experience, circumstance, and who you essentially uniquely are. Instead, it wallpapers over anything ‘messy’, soldiering forward with Machiavellian force:
’’If I do this EXACTLY, I will get…’’.
‘Get’ becomes the operative word. And while these methods can initially remove the self-sabotage trigger of ‘deservedness’, if you don’t get to your decided destination, it becomes another stick you beat yourself with. You’ve done it ‘wrong’. You weren’t positive enough.
It’s a one dimensional approach to the reality of being alive. Being you. Because, while we can programme the mind, we can’t programme our humanity out of the picture.
Disappointment, grief, doubt and fear are unavoidable aspects of living. If we can allow them, rather than mislabel them ‘negative’ (signs of weakness/failure) we learn about ourselves. They are the roadmap we can use to make micro-adjustments based on the information they give us. Yet, in a fervent adoption of false ‘positivity’, they can be overpowered by an enforced narrative of pre-approved words. These natural reactions get categorised into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings. Measured for usefulness to the rigidly visualised ‘goal’.
But this is unreflective of any personal truth. We must feel free to express ourselves, without demonising certain feelings; locking them in the attic, shouting over them. You can’t mute them. Not forever. They will simmer and erupt. Trip you up. Not because they are bad, but because they are being smothered. To name them is the only way to relieve the pressure.
It’s natural to have doubt/fear. We can’t read the future; it is a conceptual place where even when we do all the ‘right’ things, we still have no ultimate control over how it will look. But doubt doesn’t have to own us. Maybe it will direct us towards another perspective, something we may have missed, if we ask it ‘Why?’ Fear recedes when we get into the habit of asking. The intensity is diffused, and your head is no longer the sentry at the gates, running riot trying to catch, conceal, and contort every fleeting thought. It can’t. It burns out.
The willingness to reflect on and engage with our ‘little pangs’ is paramount in learning what feels ‘right for us’, and by extension, who we actually (naturally) are. We learn to hear ourselves, to understand ourselves a little better. We recognise our reactions as signals to take heed of. A destructive negativity arises only when we identify solely with these feelings; when we treat them as some complete truth about ourselves, our abilities, our ‘place’ in life.
This is the opposite/equal reaction to latching onto positivity as the only truth. A swing of the pendulum.
These extremes deny the fact that each of us is a complex being, wherein two (and more!) contradicting things can exist. None strictly good or bad. Our collected life experience is complicated and evasive to linear reason, but extricating one part of us as ‘right’ is not reflective of any whole truth. We can’t just construct ourselves out of the parts we deem ‘positive’, or ‘useful’. Positivity needs its negativity to moderate it; to give you the opportunity to see gaps – insights you were blind to when soldiering on. To learn what ‘feels right’, rather than what we’re taught is the ‘right’ way, based on general rules and lists of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ thoughts. If we become the thought police, all our energies are directed towards control.
If we could just soften our grip, dissolve the hierarchies of power, where mind must control feelings, and vice versa. It’s a relationship, a conversation – not a battle to the death.
Reflection teaches us discernment. How to filter what we are taught to our own personal rhythm and values. Leading from Self and quietly making an impact on how we interact with ourselves, we naturally adjust how we interact with the world.
There is no general way to ‘get there’. There’s no general way ‘to be’. We can all foster genuine positivity by nurturing ourselves (through the bad and the good times) rather than enforcing a ‘hey, just gotta stay positive’ mantra upon ourselves. We have to allow pain to be felt and processed before a genuine feeling of positivity can naturally begin to arise.
Compassion releases us from judgement of ourselves – our worst fear when we attempt to venture inside.
If you can’t do this, imagine at first that you’re talking to a friend. You wouldn’t eviscerate them for making mistakes, you wouldn’t believe they were a lost cause or defined by their past. And you wouldn’t let them off the hook if they wanted to give up. You would comfort, encourage, and show them an angle they may have missed. That’s the sequence. No jumping ahead, no running away. Processing, recovering, continuing the walk onwards. Allowing yourself the time to do so.
Become yourself, don’t create yourself.
Make the world a better place by becoming more of you, not some edited programmed version of the ‘right’ thing to be. Find the merit in well-intended guidelines, without being bound by dogma. Ask the ‘why?’, and live your own answer. Only then can you resonate authentic positivity, allowing it to become something that emanates from you naturally, not something that is forced, fake, manufactured from a place within you that is disallowing your inner most truth to be expressed, processed, felt, come alive.
Support Our Campaign
We rely on the generosity of the public to fund our work and so far together we have achieved great things! Please do continue to support us so we can provide future generations in Ireland with the resources to recognise and talk about their emotions, and equip them to navigate the ever-changing world around them as they grow
