We’ve arrived at the revealing fourth post in my series on positive thinking. My journey deep into the heart of the positive thinking movement formed the basis for Chronic Resilience: 10 Sanity-Saving Strategies for Women Coping with the Stress of Illness. As you’ll see, positive thinking can sometimes turn sideways and have unintended consequences. If you’ve found yourself in the space I describe below, hang with me because we will arrive at the good, workable, hopeful, useful side of the mind-body movement.
If this is the first post you’ve come to, catch-up with our first three posts at the links below:
- Part 1: Where did ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ come from?
- Part 2: Mind-Body Goes Mainstream
- Part 3: The Seduction of Positive Thinking
Part 4
The Hunt for a Metaphysical Cure
When my doctor told me that I would need a kidney transplant, I found myself wholeheartedly believing that the mind could heal the body. I thought I could mend the damaged nephrons in my scared kidney with faith and a good dose of positive thinking. Hence, I went on the hunt for the magic positive thought, healer, meditation, whatever that could provide a cure, perfection, total absence of illness.
Where do you go when you have a problem? You sit on the floor of the self-help section at your local bookstore.
I read dozens of books with titles like, “The Miracle of Mind Dynamics: Obtain Complete Control of Your Destiny,” “You Can Heal Your Life,” “Creative Visualization: Using the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Life,” and so, so, so many more.
At least when I read “Eat Pray Love” I could sort of convince myself that I was reading a travel book. Yet, somehow, by the end, I was searching out meditation retreats in India.
My stash.
Each new book made me feel empowered and excited. I was doing something! I was taking control. Except, nothing changed. So I tried more techniques….
- I repeated mantras like, “I am healed mind, body, and soul.” I said them out loud, whispered them, meditated on them, and yes, even said them into a mirror like Steward Smaley from SNL. So. Embarrassing.
- I visualized my kidney efficiently filtering my blood.
- I created vision boards.
- I meditated using just about every technique you can imagine.
- I listened to relaxation tapes.
- I prayed. Yes, I begged.
- I replaced negative thoughts with positive ones.
- I wrote down what I was grateful for.
- I asked myself questions such as, ‘why are you punishing yourself?’ and journaled on the answers.
Still nothing changed.
Not true. Something had changed, I was now on the kidney transplant list and watching my renal function decline month-by-month.
I thought that maybe the negativity I believed to be responsible for my illness was is very, very deep-seated. It must have been related to my childhood or the surgeries I went through as an infant. Hence, I decided that I would need a professional’s help to get at whatever was making me sick, so I scooted off to therapy. I saw a traditional therapist, a spiritual counselor and finally a psychic. Oh, the psychic. Still nothing.
This made me conclude that it was so deep that I need to be unconscious and allow someone else to get at it, so I sought the assistance of a hypnotherapist. That experience, and the gurus that followed, are a series of posts in their own right, so I won’t go there here today. I’ll just say that that experience was my final wake-up call. A wake-up call that took too long to arrive.
I woke-up to the fact that I was in a cycle of addiction. There was the high of sliding a new book off the shelf with all of its promise, the low of no results followed by the search for the next high. I was hopping from one hope to the next without making any real progress.
I was left in a heap on the floor feeling hopeless, frustrated and utterly lost – of course, all of the things believed to make illness worse. I wasn’t doing myself any favors, only adding stress to an already stressful situation.
All of the philosophies and research indicate that the power to heal is within, but that means that we also caused our illness and are somehow refusing to heal. It is a ‘blame the victim’ mentality that is so close to home because the one that is doing the blaming is you.
I was ready to stop blaming myself for something I didn’t control. I was ready to let the shame, and guilt, and disappointment go. I decided to look deeper into what was so alluring about positive thinking and what I saw were some very BIG disconnection and misinformation.
Those revelations are coming in part 5 next week! We’ll look at the inherent disconnects in the mind-body message and why these can have the unintended consequence of STRESS.
Looking for practical ways to use the mind-body connection? Check out
Chronic Resilience: 10 Sanity-Saving Strategies for Women Coping with the Stress of Illness.
“I highly recommend this groundbreaking book!”
-Kris Carr, NY Times Bestselling Author