Don’t Bash the Negativity

I’m often advised to focus on what I’m grateful for.

That little pearl of wisdom comes at me most often, when I feel the need to whine or complain for a few minutes.

I’m going to circle back to the perception of certain issues as positive or negative shortly, but first I’m going to talk about the seemingly wondrous nature of this tip that we should focus only on good things.

This tip sounds wonderful, on the face of it, and may work for some people, in some situations.

On the other hand it can reflect the arrogance of the one giving the advice…

It would be heartless, for instance, of me to tell a friend of mine, who is living on the street, to be grateful for what he has when everything he had was just stolen from him for about the 9th time in two months.

(True story).

It would be just as arrogant and heartless for anyone to tell me to not focus on the fact that my back hurts today, and was hurting enough in the night to wake me up at two in the morning! On top of that, we have company coming for dinner tonight.

No matter how much we HAVE for which to be grateful, right this minute I’m in pain. Not taking a moment to focus on my pain and to whine about it, internally, if I need to wouldn’t mean that the pain didn’t exist. It would simply mean that I was censoring my thoughts and being dishonest with myself about how and what I’m feeling.