The biggest price Positive Thinking junkies pay is this:
You can only have power in any situation if you are looking at what is so!
Why do I call positive thinkers junkies? Simple: they are, just like heroin addicts, unable to deal with the momentary feeling bad about anything, they need an escape from reality, at the expense of their life, their health, their relationships, their money.
When you are a positive thinker, your default context is that reality is just plain should not be the way it is.
For you it’s wrong, for me it is just what’s so… you are powerless, I am powerful.
Finding the silver lining is not available to you, until you see the reality of the situation. For example, yesterday I screwed up something and lost a lot of money. I saw what I did, I appreciated that this wasn’t a good time to lose money, and then I looked for a silver lining: it was a learning experience.
I always return to this two moments in my life. Seemingly insignificant moments, but turning points nevertheless.
The first one was when I saw a poster in a chiropractor’s office saying something like this: “In order to get to the next level, you need to give up who you have become.”
And the second was a poster with a dark sky with a tiny sliver of light showing through. The words said: turn your face to the light…
The first one is the principle of transformation: everything you are, everything you know is in your way of having what you want, what you are striving for. You need to give it up. Painful, frightening, but it’s so.
The second one is the idea of escape. Clinging to hope, clinging to “there is help”, clinging to being an effect, never a cause. The opposite of power, the opposite of transformation, the essence of positive thinking: the biggest enemy you have ever nurtured on your chest.