Five reasons it was good they broke up with you
You know what I don’t like? Articles which use the phrase above as a title.
I mean, for the love of God. For the love of peppermint ice cream. For the love of Spongebob Squarepants why in the hell do people write that stuff? Who actually wipes the tears from their eyes, gazing into the cold white glow of their monitor on some wet dark post-rejection Tuesday and reads one of those articles and says ‘yes, there are upsides to them leaving me! I think I’m going to be okay now.’
Do you see any articles for amputees about the positives of losing an arm? Okay, no relationship should be like that, but the principal is the same. You lose something that was really good and there are articles out there on how it was good that you lost it.
After my boyfriend left me I immediately launched into a specially designed routine of NLP techniques and positive visualisations which involved strong bright colors, a sense of warmth and a skull-cleaving axe.
Okay, actually what I did was go silent. I felt bad. I called a friend but she wasn’t available so I left a message on her cell phone. She called me back an hour later. We talked. It made me feel better.
Positives and negatives
In life everything is positive or negative. Some things are so weakly aligned with these polarities that we think of them as neutral, and that’s okay. The other day I was reading a psychology text called Affluenza which is about the relationship between national rises in affluence and corresponding rises in emotional distress. It’s quite a disappointing book so I haven’t bothered with an Amazon link.
There are times when the author, James, is brilliantly insightful but these insights fall between hundreds of pages of questionable research and stating what everyone already knows. Still, one such insight is that the Chinese may well be happier than Americans despite an outlook on life which American psychology typically deems unhappy.
Not only are the Chinese obviously much poorer than Americans but they also lack the hallmarks of what US shrinks deem to be a happy mind: self-esteem, unrealistic positivity and delusion.
James points out that with the psychological comparison of these nations much is lost in translation, and his findings are therefore vague (which I, for one, can forgive).
What interested me is James’s assertion that American popular psychology, positive thinking (in other words much of the personal development industry) – sided with American ideology – concludes that Americans who are deluded are happier than those in touch with reality.
So, Americans need fantasy to be happy: facing the reality of living in the world’s most prosperous country will make them miserable.
Huh?
A world of positives
First world countries shelter their citizens from all things unpleasant as best they can and of course this is a wonderful thing that should be true for all countries. But this might well be where the galvanized perception comes from.
Seeing your life as being in a much better state than it actually is isn’t helpful. As I mentioned in this article what matters with your answers to life’s big questions is not how positive they seem, but how intelligent they are. A neutral or negative answer which sits well with you is better than a positive answer that doesn’t. Self-denial is not the means through which to become genuinely happy.
In fact we only emotionally grow through dealing with answers which make us uncomfortable. Do you want to serve your perceptions to be happy? Or would you rather master them to be happy?
First world citizens can easily fall into the trap of creating unrealistically positive realities for themselves and they do so because they have such high standards of living. People in lower standards of living learn to be more resilient against suffering, the rest of us do not. People in lower standards of living adapt to hardship, the rest of us avoid so much hardship that when it comes along we have to change it. Right now. However we can. And if that means framing it as a positive, so be it.
Hence we’ve reached a point where we idealise poverty (to an extent), call break-ups ‘chances to get in touch with who we are’ and believe that we fall down to learn to pick ourselves up again.
I believe in growth. I believe that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. But I do not believe that poverty is romantic, that my boyfriend breaking up me with out of the blue was a good thing or that we fall over in order to have a learning experience.
I do not believe negatives are positives.
‘Why not?’ you may ask: ‘what’s wrong with seeing everything as a positive?’ First, you’ll accept more and more ‘positive’ negatives coming into your life and none of them will sit well with you. Second, unless you’re psychotic you will have to start applying your clever re-framing tricks on negatives to positives. If you can make something bad look good it won’t be a stretch of the imagination to find you can make the positives in your life negatives. Suddenly nothing is bad and nothing is good. Cue apathy. Cue nihilism.
Dealing with the negatives
Negatives are inevitable and real, but we do not have to suffer for them. We can, at least, minimize our suffering – but not through making ourselves think that crap is gold.
You can make lemonade from lemons. You can search for a positive thing or two that has risen from the negative. This is making the best out of a bad situation. This is searching for genuine positives. It is not living in fantasy.
When my boyfriend left me I did not re-frame that event as a positive. I made the best of that bad situation and I searched for the positives that arose from it. This article is one of the ways I made the best out of it. The biggest (and probably only) positive I got out of it was time. I had plenty more time on my hands. Result? I changed my diet, I started learning speed reading, I practiced drawing, I cultivated more drive, I got better at rising early and, as you can see from the archives, I wrote more each day. About a month and a half on from that negative I am healthier and more productive than ever. None of this would have happened if I’d pretended that was a positive. You can be positive, crap can’t be.
If you liked this article and would like to make a donation to Reaching A Better Place please click below.
Related Articles:
Leave a Comment