Contents
Psychology
Some people try to ignore negative emotions because they are unsettling and painful, but absolutely necessary to adapt and respond effectively to life difficulties. The human species has evolved, in part, thanks to these mental mechanisms and denying them brings no psychological advantage.
Buenaventura del Charco, psychologist and professor at the University of Granada, is “tired” of the flourishes that are uploaded to the net: ‘How to be happy when everything goes wrong’, ‘Train your brain to be more optimistic’, ‘Be more happy in 13 steps’… The Internet is full of revealing articles that promise happiness open bar, regardless of the reality of each person. It seems that being happy is no longer a privilege but, in recent times, it has practically become a social obligation.
Now he has just published ‘Until the balls of positive thinking’, and it is not surprising that this book, in which it is dispatched at ease against positive thinking, begins with a quote that reads as follows: «It’s like a big painted poop glitter: it dazzles you from afar, but you get closer and you want to vomit ».
Before going into the subject, it could be said that he has stripped himself of all pretty words and calls each thing by its name or, at least, the name that he thinks it deserves. “Fuck the hell …”, “Positive thinking is good shit”, “Life is a bitch sometimes”, “… instead of being an asshole” … are you so fed up with many trumpeting positive thinking?
It is true that I speak in a forceful way and say many swear words, although I do not think that for this reason the book becomes vulgar or ordinary (like, and saving the differences in Pérez-Reverte or Camilo José Cela, you can observe many bad words ). Simply, these terms express a feeling of deep satiety, as a health psychologist I have the honor of accompanying day after day people who face their problems and miseries, and when you observe that this supposed positive thinking is only adding guilt (after all if they are bad it is their fault, because they are not being “positive” and they want to see the bad thing) I am very indignant.
There is also a declaration of intent from an aesthetic point of view: positive thinking is offered in a ‘naive’ format and very cute visually, and I wanted to make it very clear that I wanted to present a psychology that is perhaps crude and even a bit Donkey sometimes, but that is real and honest. Almost no one says in their head “I’m playing the fool”, we say to ourselves “I’m playing the asshole or the idiot” and I think that speaking to the reader in this way helps to convey empathy and reality to the book. Finally, and I have to admit it, I am a rather unsubtle person and a bit “navajera”, and I speak with curse words, and authenticity (saying things as I feel and believe them), is one of my personal maxims.
If I say “If you wish good things, these will happen”, what goes through your head?
Well, I think it is a message that, beyond the absurd, is terribly cruel. If a misfortune happens to you, it is because you have not really or properly wished for good things to happen to you, then it is your fault. I have even heard it said that “only those who really want to live are saved from cancer” and I think that to hold a patient responsible for the evolution of an oncological pathology you have to be quite a bastard.
On the other hand, it is something that we would love it to be like that, but all this crap of the law of attraction or that the cosmos conspires in our favor, are more part of the spiritual (although, from my humble opinion a spirituality very based on the ritualistic and the superstition than in a deep religiosity) than of psychology.
Do you think that “covering up” the discomfort makes us more interesting beings?
This is an excellent reflection. The first and obvious thing when you think about this is the cowardice of keeping the crap under the rug so as not to have to face it (although it is normal, the fear of facing certain personal demons and issues we all have), but it also has a lot to do with it. do with the pressure that people have to want to fit in and be accepted. This is very difficult to face, since we are social animals where love is a necessity as basic as food or rest, in fact I firmly believe that if you scratch behind almost all the actions of the human being you will find an attempt to «be worthy of be loved “(and those who do not fit this label will do so in” avoid being hurt “).
Could it be said that we show our best face for a posture that has settled in our lives since social networks exist?
This desire to appear good to others has existed since the beginning of time, already in the Golden Age you see Quevedo making jokes about the poor man who wants to look like a nobleman and throws breadcrumbs on his clothes to look like he has eaten when he is stiff of hunger, but social networks have been a catalyst for this, because it is a process that takes 24 hours (we don’t even stop pretending in privacy) and because it has made it very explicit: the ‘likes’ you can even count them. To this must be added other processes such as the continuous comparison with other people in our environment, its design that is very thought to hook us to that external validation … Of course, social networks are contributing significantly to the economic improvement of the lives of hundreds of psychologists by destroying people’s self-esteem.
What is the use, then, of being wrong?
First of all, clarify one thing: being bad is not an option, it is simply the logical response to when life hits us, something that sometimes takes a liking to and happens with excessive frequency or intensity. When this happens, we need to accept the reality of what is happening to us, because if we do not accept reality we cannot face it and change it, in addition, for this, we need to observe the crudeness of what happens to us, because we can only change something that we understand, and to understand it, we have to become aware, feel the inherent emotional discomfort and have a composition of the situation.
In addition, pain is an adaptive mechanism that pushes us to change, it is a biological “alarm” that makes it clear that we have to confront someone and cause changes. Only through this are activated what we popularly call “forces of weakness” which is where the capacity for real change emerges, and not from a sweetened slogan with little drawings.
There is a very widespread expression that is to say that there are no bad emotions, but that all are good. What do you have to say to this?
Emotions are what they are: a biological response over which we have no control (our body simply reacts by generating them) to what happens to us to indicate an emotional need (sadness to overcome the loss, anger to defend ourselves, anxiety to escape , guilt to repair what we have done wrong …) and creates a state that “pushes us to action” in that sense.
If you see it from this Darwinian perspective, they are tremendously adaptive, since it is a compass that marks the north of what we need. I always tell my patients that we cannot decide what happens to us or how something makes us feel, we can only choose the honesty with which we are going to treat ourselves in it.
Finally, we cannot suppress emotions for long even if we do not like them, it is like wanting to suppress pooping because it smells bad and it is dirty: we are designed to work that way and we cannot go against our biological design. If we do, I assure you that nothing will turn out well because we will get sick or it will end up in the worst possible way and time.
He studied Psychology at the University of Granada, where he made the curricular adaptation to clinical psychology, graduating in 2010. There he also collaborates as a research assistant in the psychophysiological records laboratory of the Faculty of Psychology under the direction of Jaime Vila Castelar.