Positive thinking was the worst thing for me on my healing journey. Maybe that sounds insane, but this culture of forced positivity is toxic, and always ‘looking on the bright side‘ is not healthy. I was going through some very scary, very serious things, and the “advice” I was being given by seemingly everyone was doing more harm than good. For example, there as a period of time that I was barely getting by in an old motel room, happily telling myself each day that it was “for a reason”, that it was just part of my “main character moment”, and even that it was “all a part of God’s plan”. When I look back on it now, I realize that all that toxic positivity mindset did for me was keep me accepting a shitty situation for too long, AND made me believe that I had a God that WANTED me to suffer. That my immense pain was something he wanted me to go through, and I was meant to have to choose buying dog food over my own food some days.. all because GOD LOVED ME?! No wonder I was so angry. I believed God/The Universe/source energy/whatever you call it wanted me to suffer, and I was okay with it.
Not only did this thinking cause anger in me that I kept trying to push down and ignore, but it also caused me to subconsiously seek out suffering, as if I was proving my loyalty to God. “See God?! I survived this too! Another test I’m so grateful to have recieved.”. I was essentially trauma bonding with God. And while I was so focused on finding the silver lining in the shitty situations I kept finding myself in, I was completely oblivious to all the actually good stuff that was happening. I stopped searching for ways out of the suffering and accepted it as my role in life, because as so many peers and professionals kept telling me, “everything happens for a reason”. It’s dangerous enough to accept suffering as a constant part of your life (some suffering is unavoidable obviously), but I was almost inviting it into my life as if I was collecting points in some sort of system that would eventually add up to a huge reward.
Typing this now, and looking at this way of thinking from an outsiders perspective, I feel both relief and immense sadness. Relief that I no longer see life, or God, in a way that requires constant pain and self abuse, but sadness that I spent so long feeling that way in the first place. I delayed a lot of good things in my life because of this mentality, and I know now that not a single one of those traumatic things happend “for a reason”, nor did I deserve or earn them in any way. It wasn’t “bad karma” that I was experiencing it, and it certainly wasn’t what God wanted for me. It simply happened, and I continued to survive after it, partly because of my semi-delusional thinking. But I most likely would have been in a better position today had I realized this a couple years sooner.
There are absolutely lessons to be learned in life. I believe that certain things appear in our lives deliberately, but I don’t believe suffering happens for a reason. If you are able to find a lesson in your pain or trauma, you’re amazing. But please know it’s not a requirement of human suvival. You can admit things suck sometimes, you can even hate how things are going. The key is not in sugar-coating it, it’s in accepting it. Replace the phrase “everything happens for a reason” with “this too shall pass”, and you’ll be a lot healthier, I promise.