Positive thinking can only hurt

Psychologies: “Think positive and everything will be fine”… Does it work? What does psychology say?

Andrey Yudin: Let’s go in order. You and I need to distinguish between three things: magical thinking, positive thinking, and positive psychology. Believing that I directly change the world with my thoughts is magical thinking, a natural stage of cognitive development that we all go through in childhood. Over time, it is replaced by rational thinking. But adults can regress to earlier stages: for example, with severe anxiety, magical thinking gives us the illusion of control and helps at first, until logic kicks in. And positive thinking is a forced filtering of thoughts and emotions. This is not a healthy functioning of the psyche, but a concept born in the development of psychology and discarded as erroneous.

That is, psychologists have abandoned it?

Yes. In a science, especially a young one—namely, that is psychology, compared, say, with physics—it happens that a trend that was originally built on well-founded premises, expanding and acquiring new followers, gradually turns into something else. But the name remains the same, so that the supporters of this trend themselves are mistaken, believing that they belong to the original school. This has partly happened with positive psychology.

It was created by Martin Seligman in the late 90s as a counterweight to behaviorism and psychoanalysis aimed at eliminating pathologies. He asked himself the question: why are we trying to correct the wrong, instead of cultivating the right, and plug holes without giving guidance for development?

But the idea of ​​finding landmarks has nothing to do with self-programming for positive. The Seligman School is a search for real opportunities to bring yourself into a healthy state. And “positive thinking” is a vulgarized version of Seligman’s ideas. This approach invites us to program ourselves by ignoring the negative and artificially bringing in the positive through various self-hypnosis techniques such as affirmations and visualizations.

Does this mean that such techniques are harmful?

No. It’s just a tool. It all depends on what and by whom it is used. Visualization is healthy, it stimulates creative thinking. But this does not solve underlying problems or cure a personality disorder.

At the University of Waterloo in Canada, they studied the effect of affirmation phrases on self-esteem. Participants with high self-esteem increased their levels of optimism, while those with low self-esteem decreased by about the same amount. That is, affirmations do not increase optimism, but only reinforce an already existing trend: under their influence, people with low self-esteem fall even lower.

And my observations confirm this conclusion: among clients who are fond of positive thinking, the proportion of those who suffer from impaired contact with the emotional sphere, panic attacks and other psychosomatic disorders is much higher.

Is there any explanation for this connection?

Certainly. When we impose a ban on negative thoughts and feelings, they manifest bodily, somatization of anxiety begins: sweat, trembling, dizziness … So “positive thinking” can exacerbate the problem that they tried to solve with it.

So, it’s not worth fantasizing?

Costs! Designing the desired situation is helpful. When we take the time to sprout the future, to feel ourselves in it, it helps to touch our needs, to recognize them. And this is important, because most of the inhabitants of a modern city rarely fantasize, pay little attention to exploring their desires and often replace them with stereotypes: to be rich, to have a house, to make a career.

The bad thing is that personal growth gurus pervert this natural need to imagine the future and sell, in fact, magical thinking: imagine what you want, and it will appear. And if not, it’s his own fault, he had a bad idea. It is impossible to make a claim, the answer will be: go through another training.

But someone is happy…

It works at the placebo level: if a group of a hundred people visualize, then five of them will certainly succeed. But even without training, the same thing would happen. At the same time, 95 will probably lose faith in themselves or will go through new trainings endlessly, forgetting about what they started it for.

If not a guru, then who will help us build the future?

There is a coaching method based on a scientific foundation, schools, international associations. Coaches help clients formulate goals, promote awareness of needs. But they do not provide psychotherapeutic assistance.

How can we independently determine who to turn to – a coach or a psychotherapist?

If I am satisfied with my mental functioning, I have a feeling that life is going well, but there is unrealized potential, then this is for the coach. It will help to discover natural motivation and transform it into concrete steps and plans, determine success criteria and priorities. But if I am dissatisfied with life, I am not satisfied with relationships with others, I have depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, severe discomfort, then I should see a psychotherapist.

Many make the mistake of believing that the cause of all problems is that they are not being implemented enough. This is due to the fact that they are trained to look at themselves with a critical parental look: you haven’t worked hard enough, that’s why you feel bad. And they end up with coaches instead of therapists. In popular psychology, there is a class of messages like “love yourself, accept yourself, stop criticizing” – as if you can push yourself and get better, feel better. But it’s not.

Internal self-regulation is a process that works automatically, it is formed over decades in contact with other people. Trying to influence him arbitrarily is like dragging yourself by the hair like Munchausen. Therefore, a person who is dealing with a humiliating and critical inner voice needs painstaking work with a psychotherapist in order to grow a “good parent” inside himself and stop wasting energy on unconscious conflicts instead of productive activities.