I hate positive mantras with a passion. Or rather, I hate empty positive mantras with a passion. It’s been a bugaboo all my life–positive affirmations that had no basis in reality. I know that there have been studies that say that positive affirmations are, ahem, a positive thing and that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT, which I hate) uses them, but I disagree vehemently. And in Googling it, I found this article that pretty much says exactly what I was going to write, so go read that instead.
Only kidding. Come back. Please! I was reading one of my stories this morning, Care and Feeding, which has a subsection of Ask a Teacher. There is one teacher who responds who I think gives the most schlocky advice ever–and sees things from a cis het white male (liberal, yes, but still) point of view. I’m not saying he’s all of those things, but that’s how he comes across.
I read the question about how to help a child deal with bullies using positive mantras (CRINGE) and then started reading the response without checking who wrote it. As I continued, I knew. It was him. Not only because of his writing style, but because of his positivity bullshit, which is a big component of his responses.
Side note: America is so caught up in toxic positivity and believing that we have much more control in our personal lives than we actually do. “We can think it into being” is such bullshit and a neat way to keep people perpetually oppressed. Your life is shitty? It’s your fault because you didn’t believe hard enough.
Side Note to the Side Note: This is one of my issues with Christianity. Anything goes wrong, it’s your fault. You should pray to God to help you, but if He doesn’t, then you just didn’t believe enough. There’s no accountability there. Much like toxic positivity. It’s a neat trick as it puts all the blame on the person and not on, say society.
I will give him credit for ‘What is wrong with you?” as a response to bullies. I don’t have a problem with that one. But the ones like, “My future is bright. Bullies can’t stand that.” and “You tease me because you fear me.”? Hard no. Not only because it’s not true, but because that’s just going to make the beatdown/ostracization worse.
Want to know what worked best for me? When a girl in my high school teased me every day in homeroom, I tried to ignore her. I was also given that as advice, and, guess what? It never worked. So when this girl teased me (and I still remember her name and face) for months on end, I snapped. I grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back, and told her that I would fucking kill her if she ever bothered me again. She tried to scoff and say that I looked foolish, but I saw the fear in her eyes. I replied that she was the fool as I let her head go.
She never bothered me again. I wished the takeaway from that would have been that I could stand up for myself and not be pushed around. Instead, I was mortified that I had lost control and castigated myself for years after that.
Decades ago, K (my BFF) and I were at a bar, grousing about platitudes. Why? Who knows? That’s just how we roll. I really hate ‘that which does not kill you makes you stronger’, in part because it’s so smarmy, but mostly because it’s flat-out untrue. Like when women used to say it was different when you had your own kids (that I would automatically love them). Which is bullshit, right? Obvious bullshit! There are plenty of people who hate their own children and/or abuse them.
Likewise, people get broken all the time without dying. There are many walking wounded, so it’s obvious that something can be horrible in total. It’s such a weirdly American thing to insist that everything has to have an upside or a lesson. That’s the gist t o my rant, and K agreed with me. We decided to workshop how to make it better while having a few drinks. What could go wrong?
The first thing we thought of was ‘that which does not kill you does not make life better’ or something similarly clunky. It had the essence of what I was trying to say, but it was poorly worded. We hashed it out for at least twenty more minutes before we landed on ‘that which does not kill you still fucking sucks’. I loved it and immediately adopted it as my mantra.
Here’s the thing. I try to stick to the truth as much as possible. Because I grew up with being gaslit and people rotconning our shared history, it was important that I held on to what I knew to be true. So, the typical positive affirmations felt as if I was gaslighting myself, which was not where I wanted to be.
In the article I included above, they said much the same thing. They pointed out that positive affirmations helped those who already had a high self-esteem (which the teacher I mentioned definitely seems to have), and it’s only modestly helpful to them. For people with low self-esteem, it can be harmful if it’s completely unrealistic because of cognitive dissonance. I’d also stipulate that someone with a sense of self can tell when they’re being bullshitted, even if the bullshitter is themselves.
This is exactly how I feel about positive affirmations. Look. I’ve shed some of my negativity since miraculously coming back to life. I think I’m cute AF and I have no qualms about saying it. My body is, indeed, a temple, and I’m in awe of what it got me through. Those are real, so, yes, I can say those with no hesitation. But, saying I’m the most lovable person in the world or that I can be anything I want to be just makes me roll my eyes since it’s empirically not true.
The latter is one that really annoys the fuck out of me; it always have. It was clear since I was a young child that it wasn’t true. I mean, there was no way I could be a basketball player or president, for example. And no amount of rah-rahing could change that. We all have our limitations, and I think it’s actively cruel to encourage people to do things they can’t do. In fact, I would say that’s delusional.
It was relief to read an article that articulated the inchoate feelings I had about positive affirmations/mantras. It can be tough to go against the positivity tide, but that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.