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Can Americans be too positive?
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Stone Santa Rosa Labyrinth in the Prayer Garden at First Baptist Church - Greenville, SC.
On a recent The Daily Show with John Stewart, cancer survivor and author Barbara Ehrenreich expressed her frustration with the culture of positivity that has developed in American society. She described the negative effects as ranging from corporate denial of economic realities to blaming the "victim" for health issues and accidents. She is clearly not a fan of the "Law of Attraction" made more widely known by the movie The Secret. After her diagnosis she went looking for support but found a steady stream of "think positive" recommendations from people who seemed unable to listen to any negative emotions. You can read more about Ehrenreich's "urgent call for a new commitment to realism" in her book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.
The type of positivity that Ehrenreich describes is a superficial one that is disconnected from reality. Does this mean that there is no benefit to any focus on the positive? No, many of us can attest from our own experience how much difference it can make to shift our attention to the good things in our lives. Keeping a gratitude journal or making gratitude the focus of your labyrinth walk can create positive changes in your outlook and your health. A key difference in this practice is its groundedness in reality. We can be so distracted by daily stresses and relentless messages saying we don't have enough that we forget to see what we do have.
Practicing gratitude does not mean ignoring the painful things in our lives. To be healthy we have to be able to express the full range of our emotions. Carol McClelland's book The Seasons of Change: Using Nature's Wisdom to Grow Through Life's Inevitable Ups and Downs is a great resource. It uses the four seasons to describe the natural rhythms that we need to go through, including the dark of winter. Our society tends to expect us to live in the bright of summer all the time. Ironically, by resisting our negative emotions we prolong our suffering and add an element of shame to the mix. Watch to see if you brush off someone's difficult emotions and try to take a moment to listen to them instead. Later you may both remember that moment with gratitude.
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