Positive Psychology Makes Me Cringe Too

Cover Photo by Emma Peneder on Unsplash

About ten years ago, my sister sent me Martin Seligman’s TEDTalk. Dr. Seligman’s life’s work cannot be summarized in a paragraph, but I can tell you how it’s been distilled by pop culture because that was the reason I was seething when I saw the link.  

Thank you, I thought, another schmuck telling me to look at the bright side of things when I want to die. Sure, I will just look for the positive in life and be cured.

I am still not the biggest fan of the theory, but at least I do not incorrectly oversimplify it to it’s headline anymore. After doing my research, I recognize there were nuances the doctor just couldn’t get to in 5 minutes, but those nuances unravel a simple “smile more” into an entire physiological philosophy that can actually help many people lead more productive lives.  

This nuanced version is not how we understand Positive Psychology culturally. Armed with the pop-philosophy variant of it, I feel fashion and lifestyle bloggers have pushed the positivity concept to a limiting point, distilling it to extreme optimism:  

“Focus on the good in life only, always look for the bright side, and be grateful for what you have instead of thinking about what you don’t. Remove anyone who does not agree with this, as they are negative.” 

…or something very close to that.

Chances are you are following someone right now who is a great model of this attitude. However, you may also have noticed different results than those promised when you look at their pictures, depending on your day. Instead of  joy, you may actually experience Facebook Depression. We may deeply admire this person, but slowly we begin to envy their lifestyle and then we usually end up feeling awful about ourselves because we are comparing our accomplishments to a seemingly constant stream of their incredible feats. You went to a museum this Saturday? Well they went on a hike and then a museum and saved a puppy. You know you do not live their exact life, yet you may end up hating yourself for that exact reason.  

Photo by Ashley Whitlatch on Unsplash

After ten years of Positive Psychology permeating our culture I can honestly say, it’s not the positivity that makes us cringe, it’s feeling forced to compare our mundane to someone else’s seemingly constant joy.  

Our self-esteem feels threatened when we think we might be someone else’s downward comparison (when you compare yourself to someone doing worse than you). So you might double down and say, I just need to focus on being happy more, work harder, when, in the case of someone with depression, you’ve already overextended your ability for joy by working so hard to ignore your problem.  

What will happen if you take a person who is largely devoid of emotion and positive internal dialogue, maybe even partly due to those aforementioned comparisons or perhaps full on clinical depression? Well, if someone is in a general cathartic state, positive is not something that can be comprehended. How can you not feel worse, if the pop version of positivity culturally tells us that humans are capable of being their happiest only if using this one-for-all solution? That focusing on chasing joy will lead you to your best life? 

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

I cannot emphasize enough that this was not the original intention

The textbook version of positive psychology, however, is noticing those encounters that normally make us feel awful about ourselves and re-learning how to see them in another, brighter light. It’s not an objective rejection of reality or brushing things under the rug that truly should have been removed a while ago, but re-teaching our mind to assume the best instead of the worst in any situation. 

 Back to Dr. Seligman. Few people know that he came up with Positive Psychology as he was seeking to understand depression and other mental illnesses. He observed that people who experience the same event may end up describing it in a variety of ways depending on their general outlook of life, and those who were able to look at things in a positive light were less likely to be depressed. His goal wasn’t to create constant joy in people, but rather to make it a fundamental pillar (one of five, actually) of our well-being. 

In terms of psychology as a science, he simply wanted to highlight the good emotions we feel as much as we had previously highlighted and focused on the bad ones up to that point. Right now, we take only the things wrong with us and study solutions for them. Instead, he proposed, we should study the things that we do that make us feel good and use them as an example of good mental health. 

It’s not that Positive Psychology is unhelpful, it’s that for those dealing with Depression, imaging another thinking pattern or really having control over the chemicals in their brains is impossible. And the improper interpretation of Dr. Seligman’s idea created a social pressure to be nothing other than positive. 

Every person has to overcome hurdles. Some appear smaller to others, others are bigger than someone might let on. It is exactly at this cross-section of objectivity and relativity that mental health understanding currently lies in the public eye. Sympathy is still an uncommon commodity in a world where we recognize 1 in 4 will experience depression in their lifetime. We need to stop measuring our positive experiences up against someone else’s negative ones and vice-versa. We need to walk in one another’s mental shoes. 

Positive psychology is absolutely a must on the list of things that will help us manage the world us depressed folks see as gray all the time. Even if it’s just to help us view it as others do. It might be best to avoid comparing your gray day to someone’s rose colored glasses too. Be you, and be all of it. 

---

What do you think? Do I have it right? Did I misinterpret something? What’s been your experience with positive psychology? 

Cover Photo by Emma Peneder on Unsplash

A Year Of Following My Purpose AKA You Are Not Alone On Twitch

I am pretty sure I actually teared up when I streamed one day back in October 2017 and not one person came for forty minutes. I was talking to myself while researching a mental health topic, but no one was there to care that I was doing so. I think I actually said out loud: “who cares if I’m here, I should just give up.” Then, quietly, I resolved to keep researching, because I knew I would be doing the same thing if I was offline anyway.

At that exact moment someone popped into my chat and asked me what I was doing. I talked about my research topic and how happy I was to see this person chat with me because without interaction, I was just talking to myself about medical diagnosis, which I found to be ironic to say the least. We both laughed a bit. That was just about a year ago as of this writing.

I’ve learned more about my self-worth and image over the past year than in the preceding twenty-seven. I have learned to see myself as a person before I see myself as a streamer or a writer, where before I thought that what you do must define you. I’ve learned that you can be more than you can ever define yourself to be, because while public perception is close to what you put out, it is also completely nuanced.

I’ve also found out that people interact with each other based on their personal emotions and assumptions. Every struggle, every day for each person, is theirs and theirs alone. Every comment, every word we speak has little to do with the person we are speaking to and everything to do with the ongoing battle in our consciousness (and subconscious selves, if you’re into psychoanalytics).

Keeping all of that in mind, the one word that comes when I think of how to summarize it all, streaming, writing and discussing mental health online is: Community.

This has also been discussed ad nauseum as it is the cornerstone of Twitch but from October to October, it’s the one thing that stands out to me the most. Who reads my writing? My community. Who understands what my dysphoria truly feel like? My community. I started the project telling my husband: “If I cannot help just one person during every episode and with every piece of my writing, I will quit. But all I need to keep this up is one person.” That count’s a bit higher than one today, and I am grateful beyond words.

I frequently say that Mxiety is an idea of hope, which is bigger than the person who started it or any one person who supports it. It’s the belief that since we live in a time when the world doesn’t know how to feel about mental illness, it’s up to us to show them and take care of each other when no one else knows how. It what created Be The Light as our sign off.

Just over twelve months ago, I felt alone and scared, like no one was listening even though I was surrounded by all the love my incredible husband and friends could offer. I felt stupid, yet angry, and most of all, I felt like I needed some kind of purpose. Maybe if I let others know what I knew, I could make them feel like this less often. And, I just wanted to stop seeing people with mental illness misunderstood and mistreated because of things they had little control over.

Never in my wildest dreams, when I sat sobbing three years ago on the floor of my bathroom, wishing I could die, did I ever realize that I could incubate a whole community. When I was driving and talking myself into not ending my life, I could not fathom the number of people who had done exactly the same and were looking for someone to tell them they are not alone. I thought of making something like Mxiety, but in that moment all of those people I could be helping were faceless and nameless, just me working behind the scenes to help someone.

I know I found some version of a calling, when I noticed that I would not shut up when someone asked me what I could do if I could start anything. I would launch into detail about my plans for a website, a live-stream, and finally getting myself to write consistently.

It took a community of like-minded people to confirm to me, beyond a doubt, that there is a friend out there on the internet for all of us. That people want to help each other, especially those who’s hardship was invisible. Seeing others like them made them finally feel as special as every one of us wants to feel in our lives.

These are no longer just “people out there with mental illness,” but friends and kind humans who are willing to help others after knowing for years what being alone feels like. It became a group of people who work everyday just to be a functioning version of themselves. They all have names, they all just want to be loved like anyone else and many of them (50+) have given me the honor of appearing to share their story live on air.

Those who come back to read and see more inspire me to keep learning, keep pushing and keep trying, even though some days I am painfully reminded that I need more knowledge, more experience, more time and more ...everything else.

After listening to over 50 stories, I can conclude that while each of us lives a different life, which informs how we handle our hardships, the hardships themselves –the human experience—it's the same.

So, if you haven’t yet, come share your story, because every single one of them matters, each one makes at least one person feel less alone. Doesn’t matter if you have thousands of people following you online, or you work as an accountant, you too can be the light for others.

If you do currently follow me and are reading this because that’s a thing you do, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking the dream of a girl crying in her car and making me feel better than I ever thought I could. You have made my dream a purpose.

If you are struggling today, please don’t end your journey on this earth with us. I know how bad it can hurt, but amidst that I found my passion. I believe you can get up and find yours. Or tell me to F**k off, what do I know?