The genesis of this is complicated. Bear with me.
There's a link on jezebel this afternoon to a medical blog in which the author excoriates Dr Christine Northrup (aka Oprah's Favorite GYN) for some of her more woo-woo New Age-y theories, such as uterine fibroids being caused by a woman's negative emotions (I don't have to argue any of my readers into realizing that's ridiculous, do I? thought not). The blog author goes as far as calling Dr Northrop misogynistic, because at the base one could claim that she is saying women's gyn problems are their own fault, that if they were just more spiritually evolved, they wouldn't be ill.
I admit I'm little bit touchy about this subject. A very very dear and very sweet friend (who is far more New Age-y than my massage-therapist-acupuncture-getting-yin-yoga-doing ass is), has been dabbling in so-called metaphysics, which includes the idea of drawing the energy you want to yourself with affirmations and positive thinking and so forth and so on. Which is all very well so far as it goes and if it helps her or anyone else, far be for me to scoff. But when she starts to veer into that health-problems-are-caused-by-your-negativity line of thought, I've had to politely but firmly tell her not to go there in front of me. As the mother of a son with a serious neuropsychiatric illness, the idea that he is somehow to blame for his own illness is deeply enraging to me. Now, my friend, of course, would never say, or think, that, but she also doesn't quite see, I don't think, how that is the logical conclusion to be taken if you extend the idea she *is* espousing. So we just agree not to go there with each other. I have a feeling that's how I'd have to approach a social engagement with Dr Northrup as well.
Anyway. So this led me to thinking about the whole concept of positive thinking and how other of my friends are also firmly in that camp. The glass half full contingent, we'll call them. I will admit that I myself, mired in a life-long mood- and anxiety disorder, might well be a candidate for Learning to Look on the Bright Side. However? I honestly--and I'm not making excuses here, I truly believe this--can make a case for the glass half empty being more healthy for me. I was raised with a certain set of expectations, as I guess we all are. Our parents imbue various attitudes in us, whether they intend to or not, and whether we want them to or not. And, basically, I was brought up to be very realistic, if by realistic we mean a believer in the whole-life-sucks-then-you-die aesthetic. No one ever told me life would be fair or that it wouldn't be hard. I was taught--by implication if not outright--that bad shit happens, you deal with it, and you go on. Perhaps that makes me more prone to depression or anxiety (or uterine fucking fibroids) than the normal person, but also? When things go well--because my default thinking is that they will not--I am the most delighted person you'd ever want to meet. And when I am presented with one of those transcendent little moments of joy that the universe sometimes drops into our laps, I treasure it in a way that I think people who just expect happiness do not.
One more tangent. A different very very dear friend recently said that I liked being unhappy which, when I disagreed, he ammended to my *not minding* when I'm unhappy. And that I very much agreed with. I have a full range of human emotions: sometimes I'm happy and sometimes I'm sad and sometimes I'm angry and sometimes I'm content and sometimes I'm wistful and sometimes I'm lonely and sometimes I'm envious and sometimes I'm giddy, along with hundreds of other shades of feeling, and I don't have any problem with feeling any of those things. The anti-negativity people would probably want me to think my way past any of the adjectives above that our culture tells us are bad feelings, but I don't necessarily want to. I don't want to behave in toxic, unwise, or inappropriate ways because of any of those "bad" (or good!) feelings, but I don't have any problem with feeling them. I like having emotions.
In summary, Oprah sucks. You're welcome.
xoxo
5 comments:
all this talk of glasses and their relative fullness has me thirsty for a harpoon ipa... ("an" harpoon ipa?)
one reason i'm a firm believer in the half-full philosophy is that i've observed time and time again that positive life solutions rarely occur to those who are in the midst of refusing to even allow for the possibility of one. which is to say, though i most definitely don't buy into the "you asked for it" implication as described in the discussion above either, i would absolutely say that the first step in getting out of any particular hole one might find oneself in is looking around for something to serve as a ladder, and not moping about the unfairness of finding oneself in the hole in the first place.
Mmmmm, beer.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. "refusing to even allow for the possibility of one" is one of the hallmarks of clinical depression. I can clearly remember, in the midst of a half hour uncontrolled crying session (um, December 1995), a helpless friend asking me what could "make it better" and my insistence that nothing *nothing* could make it better. Six weeks later I was on an SSRI and a month after that I could start to see the fallacy of that thinking. Six months after *that*, I was probably the happiest I'd been in my adult life. Better living through chemicals n all. I don't think you can "positive" your way out when your brain is that fucked up. At least I couldn't personally.
The nurture part of this experience is, for me , the Celtic one: "expect the worst, and you'll never be disappointed." Expecting the worst isn't the same as not allowing the possibility of a better outcome. It does enable you to savour the good moments very deeply.
On the experiential level: In my professional life, I have seen people utterly drunk on positive thinking to the extent that they simply could not see the rational hazards of the path they were on. If you can't or won't see a risk, you can't prepare for it and counter it with a better option. Optimism has its benefits, but not when it itself becomes a neurosis.
On the whole, I've found it's been more useful to be a card-carrying paranoid psychotic than to take optimism to the delusional extremes so often demanded by contemporary culture. It ain't popular, but it's sure been a useful survival skill.
Now just call off those spies you have following me...
But we can all agree that beer is good and Oprah sucks, right? Also, tinfoil hats. Tinfoil hats are good.
As long as we can drink beer under our tinfoil hats, sure. And I'm convinced Oprah sucks.
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