Overcoming negativity

In My Humble Opinion
1

If you recognize my username, you will know I harbor a great deal of negativity.

There are ways to do it, but each has its pitfalls. One wonders whether there is a process of doing it that’s compatible with self-care, or whether it must be a destructive act. Must one scourge oneself, as is the “great” Christian tradition?

In my case, I hold on to negative thoughts because they actually have a defensive force. The “real world” - that stern and unforgiving super-ego entity I often resent so much - seems to shrink back, and even reveal a few positive flashes to me if I get melodramatic enough that even I don’t buy what I’m saying or thinking.

As the logical mind needs to be driven past tolerance, so does the psyche. I don’t lift myself out of a really bad spell. The only option is to keep making it worse until I’m mentally and psychically exhausted. Then I have a chance to renew.

Other people’s experiences suggest to me that the most effective solutions are the simplest ones - one size fits all. For someone like me - who turns to fear, cynicism, and resentment as “defenses” even against fear, cynicism and resentment themselves - that is a poor prognosis. I will always be the exception and no one will ever really understand.

Take the lovely thought of “letting go.” It’s deceptively simple - supposed to be a Just-Do-It act. There’s no way to explain it, no way to found it on beliefs. You get no help letting go, and aren’t supposed to need any. Yet my psyche generates so much negative noise - emotional, logical, verbal garbage - that letting go would be like emptying your gas tank with an eye dropper as it’s being filled at the pump.

Then there’s the idea of daily practice or affirmation of positive beliefs. I’ve convinced myself that there’s no way for my personality to embrace that practice that is both effective and kind. If I am gentle, the message will have no weight; if I am cruel, the message will have no meaning. And I know no ways to be with myself except gentle or cruel.

Still, as cruel as it it is to let automatic negativity run wild over you, it is at least a passive cruelty - and ironically, one that cares how you feel. In my state of being, I might have to learn active cruelty - the ability to tell part of me, force part of me, to SHUT UP.

“For the next 10 minutes/hour/day we are going to PUNISH each negative impulse and DENY RELIEF. We will COMPLETE THE PROCEDURE, CHECK THE BOXES, and FOLLOW THE PROGRAM. This will HURT. But it will continue, if necessary, FOREVER.”

I’m not looking forward to that. Is there another way?

How do you care for yourself in the moment while growing day to day?

2

You are even being negative in the act of crushing your negativity! Goodness! If it’s a feedback loop and you are indeed enjoying being negative, why don’t you switch it around a bit? For ten minutes a day, do something totally positive and fun and don’t think negatively.

I seem to remember you’re a motorcycle rider. Why don’t you spend ten minutes each day

  • working on your bike if you have one
  • googling various bikes and equipment if you don’t. don’t tell yourself “I can’t afford that”. Make it your lottery day. “If I win the lottery, I will buy THIS bike. I will ride it HERE.”
  • if I am wrong about the bikes, you can think of most anything else you like.

Or do a little craft. Or write a little positive tale. Or, hell, masturbate. Anything that is totally positive.

It’s just for ten minutes and you can do anything for ten minutes, is what I say.

3

I already do those things. (I’m actually not a motorcyclist, but the analogies you give are good ones). They give temporary shots of positive feeling. They don’t build patterns of positive thought.

I am under the impression that the kind of activity that brings long term benefit, and starts positive habits, for negative people has to be systematic (uncaring about the individual), disciplined (uncaring about emotional states), and at least at first, forced. If there’s another, proven way of doing it, I want to know.

4

I understand. I’m dependent on negative energy. You are not alone.

5

It is difficult for me to explain. I am at heart a very positive person. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful that I have the right chemistry to be like this, and I know it’s not due to any moral mastery on my part.

But to build patterns of positive thought, or really to do anything, I’d say you require practice. And you do have to short-circuit those negative feedback loops. Just because I’m mostly positive doesn’t mean I never get into them, but I’ve had long experience and am pretty good at cuttting them short.

However, may I ask why you want to do this? Because you can’t do it just because you tell yourself to do so. You have to really want it, and you have to be willing to work for it.

You have to be willing to work for most anything in this life, and most likely the reward will be bittersweet…but the bitter doesn’t have to diminish the “sweet”.

6

It might be helpful if you could transcribe a typical train of thought that’s troubling you. That might help us help you.

But there is no need for violent thoughts to combat your negative thought.

The first thing you need to do, of course, is recognize that you’re having a negative thought. Without that awareness, there’s not much you can do.

From that point, there are several things you can do, together or in whatever combination works for you:

*Recognize that your thought is just that, a thought, with no more weight in reality than a daydream.

*Reframe the thought in a more positive light. Millions of kids starving in Africa? Wildy successful species! My gut is fat? My dimple is sexy! Three more months of dreary winter? Just 4 months until spring!

*Do something easy to disrupt the thought, then put your focus an something more positive.

*I personally love this one: “The fruit of negative emotion is endless ignorance and suffering. To realize this is to cultivate the opposite.”

*Ask yourself if your negative thoughts are based in reality or are just dark fantasies. CBT work is great for this.

7

This is better suited to IMHO than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

8

I have a lot of ideas but I’m at work so may not get it all out right now.

As you most surely know I’ve dealt with severe depression most of my life. My brain just tends to highlight the negative as well, so I know what you mean by that.

‘‘Letting Go’’ to me is not emptying your mind of thoughts, getting rid of thoughts, or combating thoughts. It is accepting them. You speak right now of these thoughts you want to rid yourself of. This is the hard-luck news for those of us blessed with a particular brain chemistry: you can’t get rid of them. Sure you can retrain certain thought patterns over time, but by and large, you’re stuck with the brain you’ve got.

So let’s assume for the moment your negative thoughts are here to stay. You can either rail against that fact for all eternity or you can accept that you’re having them, learn to name them, and accept that they mean absolutely nothing other than you are having negative thoughts. The most obvious way I can do this is think of a time when I was happy and try to remember those thoughts - at the time I viewed those thoughts as Absolute Truth, but obviously I’m miserable now so my thoughts of happiness were just a fleeting notion. So too are thoughts of misery. Think of the quadrillions of thoughts you’ve had over the course of your lifetime, and how many times they directly contradicted one another. Look, they’re just thoughts. They can’t dictate reality. They can’t be the foundation of any stable life.

Second, positive affirmations are lame, and research shows they aren’t terribly effective. But there are ways to think more optimistically without Stuart Smalleying your way through the day. People who are depressed tend to think in terms of the three Ps - pervasive, personal, and permanent.

‘‘This bad thing that happened affects my entire life.’’
‘‘This bad thing that happened is my fault.’’
‘‘This bad thing that happened will last forever.’’

Learned Optimism (there’s a good book by this name, which is where I’m getting this from) recognizes those thought patterns and learns to think of things differently.

‘‘This bad thing happened, but it only affects this one part of my life.’’
‘‘This bad thing happened, but it was probably due to a combination of factors.’’
‘‘This bad thing happened, but it’s temporary.’’

I love this definition of optimism because it doesn’t negate the reality that life sucks sometimes.

Ok that’s what I got for now.

9

That’s a challenge. I barely even need to think them anymore. It’s more like I’m growing them, like cancerous cells. It gets difficult to tell the rot from the healthy parts.

But I’ll try.

Oh, I always find evidence.

10

It’s definitely a challenge, but one that’s worth undertaking.

Yes, and you always will. The challenge is to find evidence to the contrary and then see which has more weight. Or to discard the negative automatically, and give the positive your full belief.

Keep in mind that often, we have the choice of two ways (probably more) to think about something. If our thoughts won’t effect the outcome anyway, why not choose the line of thinking that will benefit you the most?

11

Here’s a description - maybe too abstract, but it’s all I’m ready for just now - of the thought process I go through.

I feel a negative emotion.
I justify it, however weakly.
I ask, “If this were true, so what?”
I answer, “You would have to be strong enough to overcome it.”
I reply, “But there will be more.”
I answer, “I know. And you cannot always be strong. Some will get through. They will bring more. Unless you never stop fighting, they will win.”
I answer, “And they come from me. So I must never stop fighting myself.”
I ask, “But if you fight yourself, will you not damage yourself? As much or more than the negativity you feel?”
I answer, “Yes. I must be prepared to lose either way. To have no effect.”
I reply, “To be helpless.”
I answer, “Yes. I might as well be.”

12

This idea that I am my own worst enemy is crucial, I think. I feel a need for tireless, perfect, inhuman discipline in myself if defending against that enemy is to be worth doing. I associate discipline beyond the routines of everyday with cruelty, something crushing of humanity. So I feel part of me must be crushed - made to feel more and more pain, to suffer to psychic death.

13

Thank you for that description it’s a little vague on details, and a little hard to follow, but such is the way we think!

So that I understand, when you say that you are your own worst enemy, do you mean that your thoughts are your enemy? Are your thoughts part of who you are?

14

I’ll be refining it. Or I’ll try.

My negativity is my enemy, whether emotions or thoughts. And yes, it feels to me that it’s so finely woven in with logic and experience and perception that it is part of me.

I know, logically, stepping back, that I have my good days and my bad, my good feeling, thoughts, experiences and my bad. All, I suppose, help to form me. But the negativity is strong. It has volume, tenacity, the ability to grow and nourish on almost nothing.

15

Someone please tell me that this, is at least in part, toxic bullshit.

16

Got it. Been there, done that, got devoured by the t-shirt.

I think it’s a good thing that you can objectify it, and if you can see it as something separate from your identity, it will be much easier to deal with.

Here are a few things that you might want to try:

*Recognize it for what it is in the moment that it comes up. It’s like a certain event happened once in your life, and your mind taped it. Now every time certain triggers come up, the same old tape plays. You might think that it’s reality, but really, it’s just that same old tape. If you can recognize it when it starts, great. If you can identify the triggers, even better.

*As Anaamika mentioned, interrupting the thoughts is a great way to cope. What helped me was to stop thinking of the interruption as a distraction from reality, but to think of it as an interruption from the distraction, to return me to reality.

I probably didn’texplain that very well. :stuck_out_tongue:

*I love this: There are two wolves inside of us. One is loving nurturing, warm, and furry. The other is a voracious predator that will devour everything in its path.

Which one wins?

The one that you feed the most.

Your description above sounds like the bad wolf!

17

I can’t really relate to this way of thinking, so this may be way off base, but it seems to me you’re making this way too complicated. What I do if I’m feeling gloomy (which admittedly is rare, so ymmv) is think of one good thing about the situation – and there is nearly always something good if you only look. You don’t have to invalidate your other thoughts, just add in the positive ones as well. Make a habit of it. Have a negative thought: make up a positive one to balance it. Probably difficult at first, but practice makes perfect. This talk of violent thought suppression is nonsense.

18

I think this is akin to the “no pain no gain” philosophy that many people propose for exercise. In the long run, it only does harm and often turns people off exercising in the first place.

I’m having a difficult time following your posts. It’s poetry in a way, if dark and depressing poetry, but I can’t quite hunt the underlying metaphor down.

Having to violently supress anything in yourself should not be necessary. Every cloud has its silver lining. Even the darkest ones. You have got to short circuit the bad negative thoughts with good ones, even if they are also negative:

Let’s say your negative thought is “I suck at financial management.” I say this one because I have said it to myself in the past.

“I suck at financial management.”

Your conversation goes on to justify the negative thought and continue devaluing yourself. When i have these kinds of thoughts, I think,
“Well, I’ll just have to do better then. And I have done better. I’ve done X, Y, and Z, which is fiscally responsible. And then all of the bad times I’ve had, they have been good teachers. God knows I’ve learned from all of them and won’t at least make those mistakes again.”

And i remember I’m only human and I’m always learning and growing and what happens today may not happen tomorrow.

If you are given a coin, and you always turn it over to look at the tarnish, you will see nothing but the tarnish. You should STOP! before you turn it over and remind yourself, “I have a coin.” And only then look.

I read your other thread, the emotional vampire one. In it you mention you don’t have to work for a living. That’s just great! Why is that not a good thing? I don’t understand why you seem to think that’s a negative thing…it means you have time and possibly money to pursue your own interests. And someone mentioned volunteer work and you seemed to knock it down because you couldn’t possibly do it without self-interest. Face it! We all do good things because it makes us feel good. And therein lies the positive feedback loop to replace the negative feedback loop.

19

The OP has opened at least three threads that I know of on the topic of his issues. That seems a bit self indulgent.

Apparently **Beware of Doug **comes from family money and doesn’t need to work. Now what I have observed annecdotally from personal observations and from various articles and documentaries on the subject is that his feelings are not uncommon from people in similar situations.

Basically it’s like this. People always complain about “I could do [whatever] if only I had the money.” But then all of a sudden, they come into a big windfall. They’re still doing jack-shit, but now they don’t have the lack of money as an excuse. So they have these nagging feelings of guilt and self loathing at their inability to actually do anything with the money they didn’t really do anything to deserve. Plus how does one get a sense of pride or achievement if you never have to accomplish anything, even if it’s just tolerating a crap job 40 hours a week?

20

You do speak truth, msmith537. While I am by no means tied to my job, I do get some fulfillment out of it. I like my job, but I am not willing to put in the time to rise high in the organization. However I do my job well every single day, so when I go home I think “I got so much accomplished today.”

Then I get home and since I’m going back to school I do all my homework right away, right after dinner. I’m bringing down all As while working full time. Fulfillment right there.

But the OP doesn;'t work, doesn’t volunteer, doesn’t go to school. Doesn’t have a family, doesn’t have kids. Really, what is good that is happening in his life?

OP, you need to make things happen. You can’t just sit back and expect it to come to you. There’s a reason why we’re guaranteed the right to pursue happiness, not happiness itself.