I am
on the losing side of a battle: Positive thinking is going down.
It
may seem heretical for a positive thinker to write that. But
it is time to come to grips: Cognitive therapists are churning
out studies on why positive thinking may risk your health and
happiness. Popular books appeal to “people who can’t
stand positive thinking.” Fashion and style sections of
newspapers celebrate “the grace of melancholy.”
In perhaps the greatest indignity, Donald Trump has become optimism’s
unwanted poster child, as he extols the work of Norman Vincent
Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking.
But
if America loses its smiley-faced coffee mugs and ethic of better
tomorrows -- ?themes extolled by presidents ranging from Ronald
Reagan (“nothing is impossible”) to Barack Obama
(“yes, we can”)? -- ?we also risk losing a basic
part of what makes our nation work.
Consider
online banter. The level of invective is bottomless on Twitter,
comments sections, and virtually everywhere in the perpetual
open-mic night of digital culture. Americans once turned to
books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and
Influence People (1936) to learn how to behave appropriately
in professional environments and get things done inside large
organizations. (Key insight: agreeable people win). Yet our
generation is almost hostile to the lessons of civility held
by the previous one.
The
original positive thinkers were actually a cohort of mystics,
freethinkers, proto-psychologists, and religious seekers in
New England in the mid-to-late 19th century. Their movement
was often called New Thought, and they believed that thoughts,
in some greater or lesser measure, affected health, happiness,
fortunes, and relationships.
Remember
the oft-mocked mantra “Day by day, in every way, I am
getting better and better”? It was a confidence-boosting
formula popularized in the early 1920s by French hypnotherapist
Emile Coué. Although Coué won thousands of followers,
critics mocked his method for its singsong simplicity. Today
he is forgotten. But placebo researchers at Harvard Medical
School recently validated one of the mind theorist’s most
important insights.
In
January 2014, a medical school study reported that migraine
sufferers responded better to medication when given positive
information about a drug. While working as a pharmacist in the
early 1900s in northwestern France, Coué, too, found
that patients benefited more from their medication when he spoke
in praise of a formula, which led to his famous mantra. He believed
it could stimulate the same positive mental forces he saw among
his patients.
More
than a century later, the Harvard paper, while echoing Coué’s
original insight, made no mention of the therapist. Coue’s
work is known to one of the study’s architects, Ted Kaptchuk,
who directs Harvard’s program in placebo research. “Of
course I know about Coué,” he told me, agreeing
that the migraine study could coalesce with the mind pioneer’s
observations.
Contemporary
neuroscience has suggested that persistent thoughts possess
biologic influence. This is seen in the field of brain study
called neuroplasticity, which has gained prominence in the early
twenty-first century. Researchers at UCLA and elsewhere have
discovered that people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder
(OCD) can alter neural pathways through a sustained program
of redirected thought. Research psychiatrist Jeffrey M. Schwartz
teaches people with OCD to divert their thoughts away from intrusive
or ritualistic impulses. His regimen? -- ?and this is vital
-- ?specifies that the redirected thought must be focused on
something that is enjoyable, whether music, physical activity,
eating, and so on.
The
same insight existed instinctively -- ?and with virtually the
same methods and exercises -- ?in early New Thought. In 1911,
American minister and philosopher John Herman Randall issued
a series of pamphlets that explored the ideas of the new mental
therapeutics. Without the benefit of brain scans, he prescribed
the same program, calling it thought substitution.
For
me, positive thinking is personal. My journey into positive-mind
philosophy began in my early adolescence in the late 1970s.
My family made an ill-fated move from our bungalow-sized home
in Queens, New York, to a bigger house on nearby Long Island.
It was a place we could not afford. After moving in, my father
lost his job and we took to warming the house with kerosene
heaters and wearing secondhand clothing. One night I overheard
my mother saying that we might qualify for food stamps. When
the financial strains drove my parents to divorce, we were in
danger of losing our home
Seeking
guidance, I devoured the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
Talmudic guide to character, “Ethics of the Fathers.”
These works asserted that our outlook could make a concrete
difference in our lives. “Nerve us with incessant affirmatives,”
Emerson wrote. “Be of good countenance,” the great
rabbis intoned. I prayed, visualized better tomorrows, and became
a determined self-improver. I threw myself into attempts to
earn money delivering newspapers and hauling junk to a local
recycling plant. I divided my time between high school in the
morning and drama classes in the afternoon. I handwrote college
applications and sent letters to financial aid officers.
As
it happens, we managed to piece together our finances and keep
our home. Positive thinking did not miraculously solve all of
our problems. But I emerged from the period believing that a
set of interior guideposts and principles had contributed to
the solution. If my thoughts didn’t change reality, they
helped navigate it.
For
all of its staying power, the philosophy of positive thinking
is also riddled with inconsistencies and pitfalls. Over the
past two decades, I have watched some of the best people in
the positive-thinking movement -- ?that is, members of New Thought
churches or positivity-based support groups -- ?depart or distance
themselves after experiencing how an ill-conceived program of
affirmative thought can effectively blame a sick or suffering
person for their ills.
A support-group
leader for female survivors of sexual abuse? -- ?and someone
who had spent many years within a positive-thinking metaphysical
church? -- ?wrote to me in 2012. She said that she had experienced
both sides of the positive-thinking equation, witnessing how
survivors could ably use a program of mental therapeutics to
rebuild their sense of self, but also observing the kind of
burden that affirmative-thinking nostrums could visit upon those
recovering from trauma. She continued:
She
wondered: “Is there room for a positive-thinking model
that doesn’t include blame and single-model definitions
of success?” I take the attitude that such a model can
exist. But for positive thinking to reach maturity, its followers
must take fuller stock of the movement’s flaws, particularly
the attachment to a single, all-encompassing theory of life,
which is to say, the Law of Attraction, recently popularized
in The Secret. While the mind does possess influences
that are not yet fully understood, and that are palpably felt
by many people, the idea of a mental super-law binds New Thought
to a paradigm of extremist self-responsibility, which cannot
be defended to its limits.
The
wish to depict the universe as the ultimate result of mentality
contradicts our overwhelming experience of living under mechanics,
chance and physical limitations. Until this fatal mistake? --
?this reliance on a single metaphysical law of cause and effect
-- ?is corrected, the positive-thinking movement will continue
to seem ethically unserious.
But
if affirmative thought can be understood as one ray of light,
one vital method and outlook within life’s deep forest
of forces and causes, the positive-thinking paradigm may experience
a new form of relevance in the early twenty-first century. God
knows we need it.
