I confess that I enjoy making my patients laugh. One of the easiest ways to do so is to share my honest opinion: life absolutely sucks, a large proportion of the time.
And I mean it. I think it’s profoundly confusing, exhausting, emotionally painful, and excruciatingly boring to be human. Either that, or we numb ourselves to it. I think it’s hard to be a person. As a result of my cheerful pessimism, there is no faster way to piss me off than by saying the phrase:
Focus on the positive!
Whenever I hear this phrase, I always imagine a smiling young woman saying this to me, with some hideous GLIB in her voice. But I’ve certainly heard it from my share of irritating Boomers. If and when anyone ever tries to silver line shit for me, I have a strong urge to punch them.
But let’s think about this a little more methodically. What I want to do is draw a distinction between what folks generally mean by the phrase, “focus on the positive,” and what I think of as finding or cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty.
A pox on your “Focus on the positive”
“Focus on the positive” generally means something like…try to find something good in your life, and place your attention on that, and try not to place your attention on the bad things. On the one hand, this isn’t a completely misguided approach (despite my grumpiness). Negativity bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, and there’s a strong argument that evolution resulted in negativity bias due to its evolutionary advantage. You are more likely to survive if you spot problems and do something to either resolve them, or at least reduce their negative impacts. There isn’t a lot of evolutionary advantage to, say, taking deep breaths and relaxing your shoulders and feeling a surge of gratitude for you and your family’s and your pets’ good health.
On top of all of this, there is research that suggests that folks with depressive disorders both 1) tend to make more negative predictions about the future, and 2) are actually inaccurate in their predictions. Whether this is a chicken-or-the-egg issue is up for debate. While I would never tell a patient to “focus on the positive,” if someone in therapy enjoys a lot of great things in life (safety, material comfort, financial stability, a romantic partner and or friends and family, good health, etc.), and they spend every minute of every session complaining, I’m certainly going to draw attention to this. I tend to believe that mood precedes thought (not the other way around), and I would start to wonder if they had a depressed mood that needed help. I would also — if their negativity bias was super-duper strong — encourage them to try to at least catch their negative, complaining, or critical thoughts and try to not feed them further.
“See the inner nobility and beauty of all human beings”
This concept is offered as “a first principle of Buddhist psychology” by Jack Kornfield. And here’s what happened when I read it the first time: I rolled my eyes and put the book down and didn’t pick it back up for about ten years.
In my defense, I was going through a rough breakup, and the idea of seeing the “inner nobility and beauty” of my ex made me want to gag. And I’ve discovered that Kornfield maybe isn’t always the best teacher for me. He veers pretty close to “focus on the positive” sometimes, and I just don’t vibe with it.
But… Life happened. And somewhere along the line, I realized I’d never been taught to see the nobility and beauty in myself, and that made it near impossible to do so for other people. I also think it helped that I eventually encountered people who advocated not just for more typically feminine positive traits that align with this principle (compassion, kindness, love, etc.), but also for more typically masculine traits that align as well. Things like dignity, self-respect, honor, and ferocity are all traits I appreciate a great deal, and I’ve come to see them as perfectly aligned with Kornfield’s principle.
This is what I’ve come to think of as cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty. And one of the ways you can cultivate these qualities is by — surprise! — focusing on them in others and ourselves.
From an ethical and even a justice perspective, it’s important to clarify that this doesn’t entail naïveté or permissiveness. I can see and honor the dignity and value of even those in prison. And I can believe that some of them need to remain there to protect the public. I can see and honor the goodness and beauty of political opponents, and still firmly, actively oppose their efforts. Kornfield calls this sacred perception, and he describes it this way:
“To see with sacred perception does not mean we ignore the need for development and change in an individual. Sacred perception is one half of a paradox. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki remarked to a disciple, ‘You are perfect just the way you are. And…there is still room for improvement!’”
Marsha Linehan almost certainly borrowed from these principles when she developed some of her basic assumptions within Dialectical Behavior Therapy, including, “Everyone is doing the best they can,” and “Everyone could be doing better.”
If you’re interested in reading more on negativity bias, I recommend this article. I don’t love the use of the word overcome in the title, but I do think that negativity bias needs to be addressed. And if you’d like to dig deeper, I recommend this podcast episode by Kornfield.
And as always, this is your quick invitation to pause. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “Do I want or need to stay on a screen right now?” And if you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule some time off-screen to give yourself a break. Remember: breaks are good.
:)