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THE DANGERS OF POSITIVE THINKING
Alternet - When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative. Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.
Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.
In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.
Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the book, you talk about going to be treated for breast cancer and being told to think positively. Was that what started you thinking about this?
Barbara Ehrenreich: That was my first exposure to positive thinking as an ideology. I was just astounded and dismayed by it. Here I was in a real crisis in my life, and people were trying to market pink ribbon teddy bears to me, and where I thought I would find sort of sisterly support on the Internet, I found instead the constant exhortations to be cheerful and to embrace my disease.
EW: What is the difference between being told to try and stay upbeat and to have a good attitude and positive thinking?
BE: I think it's a slippery slope. Once you start on how you have to face your problem with a good attitude, they start looking for justifications for that, and it became you actually get better only if you are upbeat, only if you visualize your recovery and so on. . .
EW: You write a lot about how positive thinking is in all aspects of life. Do you think this is the most insidious about it -- this idea of a disease being your fault?. . .
BE: The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one.
You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever. . . MORE
Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.
Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.
In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.
Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the book, you talk about going to be treated for breast cancer and being told to think positively. Was that what started you thinking about this?
Barbara Ehrenreich: That was my first exposure to positive thinking as an ideology. I was just astounded and dismayed by it. Here I was in a real crisis in my life, and people were trying to market pink ribbon teddy bears to me, and where I thought I would find sort of sisterly support on the Internet, I found instead the constant exhortations to be cheerful and to embrace my disease.
EW: What is the difference between being told to try and stay upbeat and to have a good attitude and positive thinking?
BE: I think it's a slippery slope. Once you start on how you have to face your problem with a good attitude, they start looking for justifications for that, and it became you actually get better only if you are upbeat, only if you visualize your recovery and so on. . .
EW: You write a lot about how positive thinking is in all aspects of life. Do you think this is the most insidious about it -- this idea of a disease being your fault?. . .
BE: The second big place where I encountered all this was in the kind of motivational services that are offered to laid-off white-collar workers, where every networking event or seminar you get the same message about how it's really your attitude that is going to determine if you're going to get a job and probably has something to do with why you lost that last one.
You take people who have been really victimized, and I use that word advisedly, with cancer and with lay-offs from unaccountable corporations. And then you tell them, "Well, you just have to change the way you think." And that's very clever. . . MORE
3 Comments:
The joke is that cancer is a nutritional disease caused by corporate pollution and other misbehavior. Radiation, chemotherapy. amd amputation;cancer doesn't kill patients, the treatment does. However it's extremely profitable in the cabcer business. Get your shots chumps. Natural selection, as Darwin would say.
Have you read John Sarno's books, such as Healing Back Pain. He argues, to some extent, that positive thinking may make us sick, in that positive thinking means repressing fear, anger, anxiety. Though he's not trained in neuro-science, he's describing the findings of neuro-science and explains that the brain deprives oxygen to certain tissues or nerves in an attempt to protect itself from negative emotions. I can't understand why the brain goes to such elaborate devices, but in part it's because we're trained to think positively and be nice little children. The brain has been conditioned and is doing what it's been taught. Fortunately, the treatment doesn't require confronting everyone or everything that makes us angry; it does require us training our brains to grow up, in effect. I don't think the idea will catch on, though, because there's no opportunity for profit in this approach to healing. Sarno tells his back-pain patients to give up physical therapy and pharmaceuticals and thinks most of us can manage without psychotherapy, and most definitely no pink ribbons. Somehow I can't see us putting black ribbons on everything in sight to remind our brains to accept fear, anxiety, anger instead of throwing them off on our bodies or to move to the bigger picture, some other sector of society. Positive-thinking is much more capitalistic-friendly.
Good stuff.
It is not so much training the brain. When a person can identify how they are generating inner tension through their behaviors and thoughts, they then can begin to redirect out of those patterns and create new patterns that are more open or allowing or flexible. The Sarno TMS disorder is at the core cause and effect. If we think and behave in closed-off, non-allowing, unflexible ways, we generate inner tension that our nervous system manifest into pain and other symptoms. A little work and paying attention in this area will pay huge dividends in a body that feels good.
Monte Hueftle
www.runningpain.com
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