Is it bad to be always positive?

Car broke down? So much the better: while I wait for the tow truck, I have time for myself. Crush in the subway? Good luck, I missed human closeness so much. There are amazing people who perceive everything positively. As if there is something good in every trouble, and behind every drama there is a lesson in wisdom. These amazing people, «charged» with optimism, explain, sometimes with a strange smile, that you will be happier if you see only the positive side of everything. Is it really so?

Mistakes are instructive

“Our competitive society forces us to be efficient in all areas of life. You have to embellish even your resume so that it shows only a steady upward movement towards success,” says philosopher and psychoanalyst Monique David-Ménard. But the pressure is so strong that counseling often comes from people who are «shaped by the ideal of absolute success» when their lives suddenly collapse due to failure.

For all their positivity, they have not learned to experience periods of sadness and fall into melancholy. “It’s sad, because our difficulties and failures tell us a lot about ourselves,” she continues. For example, breaking up a relationship shows us that we were too invested in that relationship, or perhaps that we were willing to fail. Thanks to Freud, we now know that the opposing impulses — to life and to death, eros and thanatos — make up the richness and complexity of our soul. Paying attention to what went wrong is to reflect on our mistakes, weaknesses and fears, all those facets that make up the identity of our personality. “There is something very personal about how we find ourselves in the same dead end again,” confirms Monique David-Ménard. – And in this lies our freedom, “because in defeats we find material for the construction of our success.”

Emotions make sense

What are feelings and emotions for? These are signal lights in our minds, they say that something is happening to us,” explains Gestalt therapist Elena Shuvarikova. “When we are in danger, we feel fear; when we lose, we feel grief. And by forbidding ourselves to feel anything, we do not receive important information from the body. And thus we miss the opportunities of our own growth, we lose contact with ourselves. The task of psychotherapy is to give the client the opportunity to see how he was affected by the event, and what in his reaction refers to the situation in the past, in order to teach him to respond precisely to the current moment.

“Too much positive thinking prevents us from adjusting to the current situation”, — Elena Shuvarikova is sure. In order not to face what threatens or frightens us, we refuse to see what really worries us. We soften the situation in order to calm down for a while, but in fact we are moving towards disaster. After all, no matter how much you tell yourself that the road is straight, if there is a turn on it, you will fly out to the side of the road. Or, as the Indian guru Swami Prajnanpad taught, the right action is to “say yes to what is.” The ability to see the situation as it is allows you to find the right resources and make the right choice.

“Positive thoughts, like negative thoughts, are two dangerous, fruitless ways, Monique David-Ménard reflects. “Because of the former, we consider ourselves omnipotent, see life in a rosy color, believe that everything is possible, and the latter make us weak and set us up for failure.” In both cases, we are passive, we do not create or create anything, we do not give ourselves leverage to remake the world around us. We do not listen to our emotions, and the very word «emotion» goes back to the Latin exmovere — «to put forward, to excite»: this is what mobilizes us, pushes us to action.

Ambivalence makes you grow up

Sometimes the modern requirement to pretend that all is well is used to «neutralize» the interlocutor in a conversation that becomes tense. There is a famous phrase “Don’t tell me about the problem, but offer a solution to it”, which, unfortunately, many bosses like to repeat too much.

The trouble is, there is a reproach behind it: make an effort, be efficient, flexible, and live! Boris, 45, a sales employee, is indignant: “Our boss told us the “good” news: there will be no layoffs … provided that we agree to a pay cut. We were supposed to be happy.» Those who dared to hint at injustice were accused of undermining the team spirit. The situation is typical. Positive thinking denies complex thought processes. If we think complex, we take into account contradictory elements and are in a state of unstable equilibrium, when the choice is always relative and depends on the context. And there are no single right answers.

“Avoiding difficulties, looking at things only from the positive side is an infantile position,” Elena Shuvarikova believes. — Psychologists call tears and grief “growth vitamins.” We often tell clients: it is impossible to become an adult without recognizing what is, without parting with something, without crying out your own. And if we want to develop, to know ourselves, we cannot avoid encountering losses and pain. Of course, it is difficult, but inevitable and necessary. We cannot understand the whole diversity of the world without agreeing with its duality: it has both good and bad.

It’s natural to worry

“Positive thinking can bring psychological comfort, provided that we do not use it constantly,” says Monique David-Menard. — In times of economic hardship, we need a little more optimism. It helps to resist anxiety. But a positive perception of the situation can also be completely inappropriate, for example, when we do not want to hear complaints. Nothing offends an upset friend like a call to see the good in life.

Sometimes you need to let the desire to be unhappy go away on its own. By navigating between the ideal of efficiency and the fear of failure, we can create a model of success that allows for some failure.