One of the bigger difficulties I’ve had with mental health medicine is, a good bit of the time I have no idea what those providing me advice and direction mean when they say things. Part of this is due to pop-psychology appropriating terminology and misusing it to the point of meaninglessness, and part of this is due to a large cognitive blind spot that seems to prevent me from parsing certain concepts.
I think the concept I have struggled most with, both in terms of time spent and results (or lack thereof) achieved, is the idea of “focus on the positive”. This has never made sense to me on what I think is a very basic level. All the words are common English words, the sentence is grammatically correct1, and yet I cannot figure out how it is supposed to be applied in the real world. It may as well be the sentence I stole to be the title of this post2. Or, more accurately maybe, its like looking at an Escher print. At a glance, everything looks okay but if someone told you to replicate it in three dimensions, you’d be hard pressed.
My trouble with the concept is not acknowledging the brief moments of happiness and joy that flit by occasionally, it’s with giving what I see as undue value and significance to them. I kind of see it like this3 – on one side of a balance scale, you have the core of a neutron star4. On the other side you have a pebble5. I have been assured that focusing on how much lighter the neutron star feels now that there is a pebble on the other side is the path to healing. I think my difficulty understanding how this is supposed to work in the real world is fairly self-evident.
Coming at this from a sightly different angle, my MHP has pointed out that I have a strong pattern of black-and-white thinking. Not a lot of grey area. Things are either all bad or not bad at all. If things are bad, they’ve always been bad. I can’t really disagree with him on this. Additionally, I have noticed in myself a tendency to rely heavily on avoidance and denial as coping mechanisms. These two traits combined, I think, explain the difficulty I have with the concept of “focus on the positive”. The pebble doesn’t fix the problem, and if you acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, then it’s there and you have to do something about it.
The trick, apparently, is learning to acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, while simultaneously being grateful for the pebble, even if it’s effect is negligible.
I’m not there yet.
Edited to add – The other difficulty I have with focusing on the positive is the challenge of being on fire and trying to focus on anything other than being on fire, but that’s a different post.
- Or, at least its close enough to not interfere with the meaning of the sentence. ↩︎
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical, demonstrating that language has a structure entirely separate from meaning. ↩︎
- I don’t know if these analogies help communicate anything meaningful but it’s the only way I can think of to try explaining what goes on in my alleged brain. ↩︎
- The typical neutron star weighs between 1.5 and 2 solar masses. 1 solar mass = 1.9891 x 1030 kilograms. ↩︎
- 1 cubic centimeter of pea gravel weighs approximately 1.8 grams ↩︎
Hard for me to fully understand but I believe I have some idea of this challenge. I am impressed at how much you broke it down from a science point of view.
“The trick, apparently, is learning to acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, while simultaneously being grateful for the pebble, even if it’s effect is negligible.”
This reminds me of the serenity prayer with my preferred substitution of ‘brain’ for ‘god’.
Sounds like you are dealing with some tough times. I consider you one of the positive things that I focus on in my life. As I shift away from WOTC it would be great to catch up as my time is freeing up somewhat.
Have you heard of a book called “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking?” It’s available on Amazon, and it’s really fascinating. The author, psychologist Julie Norem, explains her investigation into the contrast between “dispositional pessimism” and “defensive pessimism.” Not in a one-is-better-than-the-other kind of way, but that they are two sides of the same coin, i.e., a methodology for coping in a world where things quite often go wrong. What you describe sounds a lot like defensive pessimism, albeit with a fucking metric buttload of trauma heaped on top of it.
I can loan the book to you via Kindle if you’re interested.
“The pebble doesn’t fix the problem, and if you acknowledge the existence of the neutron star, then it’s there and you have to do something about it.”
But what happens if focusing on the pebble makes the neutron star smaller? Achieving two goals at once can’t be a bad thing.