I have a friend who is a positive thinker and so prides himself on his excellent mental health. Interactions with him go like this. I notice something about the current political climate in our country and he counters with details about how everything will be OK. I call it OK washing but it has consequences far deeper than the happy go lucky attitude he wants to convey.
The current national situation is not only alarming to me but it brings up my torture at the hands of an abusive, sadistic father who was a pedophile who used his four daughters for his pleasure and for whatever he wanted for himself. He indulged in angry tirades around that house that could erupt at any minute. We all lived in fear of him and I in particular became a ghost – always sweet, never a peep coming out of me, no self. When I went through a lot of healing and excellent psychotherapy I uncovered very real feelings of annihilation. I was a roach he could step on to get rid of. Disposable, inconvenient, annoying, worthy of death if I stepped out of line or even said anything.
I dared not tell anyone outside the family what was going on. I hope dear reader can draw parallels between the current national situation where we are being told of justifiable brutality amid a national household of downright insanity. We were subjected to angry tirades from the podium. Whole groups are demonized as evil and the enemy from within that we should eliminate with force. And if you speak the truth about what you see, off with your head.
So when I am telling my friend “the house is burning down” and he says let’s get out the marshmallows, you can see why this would trigger a reaction. To his credit he is beginning to question some of this. It is he who gave us the image of the burning house. It is he who says “I do this to comfort myself.”
I love this person like a brother and both of us can be confronted about what we do that harms. There is no friendship as good as that. And he is a real gentleman – are there any of those left in the world?
Much has been written about the perils of positive thinking. But here are a few more ideas. If it is a child having this done to them, that child is left to suffer their own pain alone while the positive parent feels good. The child becomes the “sin eater” when that is the job of the parent.
The kid is left lonely and alone.
The child knows he will never be heard. This could actually be dangerous because the parent is deaf to anything being wrong.
Positive thinking numbs the practitioner like a drug. It creates unconsciousness, so the child lives with a parent who is “gone” and numb, akin to parents who use marijuana on a daily basis thinking it keeps them calm. But the kid knows Mommy isn’t there.