10 What Must I Avoid?
Felicia had dug herself another hole, and this time it was a deep one. She wasn’t even sure that she would ever get out. Felicia had always been prone to negative thoughts. She could remember her black moods when growing up, something that her mom would always get on her about. And it was true. Felicia’s siblings and friends seemed to bounce through life with reasonable verve, seldom if ever beset with negative thoughts in the way that Felicia suffered. She usually recovered in time. Some event would snap her out of it, or some inner switch would flip. But this dark mood and the many negative thoughts it generated didn’t feel like it was going to go away. Felicia was frightened by her own thoughts.
Negatives
Do’s and don’ts. We grow both by identifying the positives to pursue, as the prior chapter did with how to think about yourself, and by avoiding the negatives, as this chapter will discuss. Much as discovering aspects of yourself can open fields of opportunity for growth, enrichment, and play, in the other direction negative thoughts about yourself can plague one’s day and depress one’s life. Simply believing that you’re not up to the task can keep you from even trying, when by trying you might succeed or at least learn something about yourself in the attempt that will help you adapt and grow. Beliefs such as no one likes you, that you have no friends, or that you can’t trust your employer, neighbor, or spouse can ruin existing relationships while foreclosing new ones. Bedrock beliefs about yourself, such as that you’re incorrigible, worthless, purposeless, and doomed, can color your whole life. Shudder to think of it, but wrong conceptions and mental habits can stunt and spoil a life.
Positives
To get a clearer picture on the impact of negative thinking, think for a moment about the opposite positive thinking. The power of positive thinking has been a popular theme in American life. New age practice characterizes it as manifesting, as if one’s positive energies and thoughts can spirit or will a new and better reality into existence. You don’t need to take it that far. When you are alert to the positive possibilities, you notice opportunities and even pursue them before they are there, discovering them in your pursuit. Align yourself with the patterns that tend to produce positive outcomes, such as a bright, inquisitive, energetic outlook, and positive outcomes may well come because they were there for the grasping all the time. You’ve seen it in others and felt it yourself before, when you seem to be moving in synchronicity with your opportunities and circumstances, leaving a kind of richness and resonance easily associated with your positive, discerning, accordant thoughts. You won’t reach that positive, fully aware state while burdened with negative thoughts.
Projection
Negative thinking about yourself can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We all have negative traits, forming a sort of shadow that follows us around. They may be indulgences, compulsions, or addictions, negative behaviors that we ignore because we’re not ready to reject them. They may be anger, jealousy, or hate, negative emotions that we suppress because we’re not ready to unravel their source. Or they may be pride, insecurity, or control, negative characteristics we find too useful to confront. When we ignore and suppress our negative traits, we project them onto the world, both onto others who then annoy us and onto our circumstances that we then condemn. If you find people around you to be spoiling your life and your circumstances to be your problem, then you may need to take a look at your negative thoughts, especially those suppressed attitudes and emotions that you may be harboring and projecting outward.
Narcissism
An extreme self-centeredness, or narcissism, is at the root of much negative thinking. When you become overly focused on yourself, you lose sight of others. Along with that loss of sight, you lose empathy or the ability to feel what others are feeling. Holding too grand a view of yourself in comparison to others will give you an air of arrogance. Overvaluing yourself in contrast to others, and considering only your own needs, interests, and desires, will lead you to manipulate others as objects for your own gain. Narcissistic personality can be deeply engrained, perhaps arising from childhood insecurities, frequent severe deprivations, or other longstanding or profound dynamics. Yet narcissistic traits are some of the easier to address in practice. Simply listening to others to share their concerns tends to lift one out of an unhealthy focus on oneself. Likewise, rather than burnishing and embellishing your personal excellence, consider valuing your ordinariness. What others find ordinary in you may mean more to them and to you than your excellence.
Procrastination
Procrastination is another mental stance or attitude to avoid. To procrastinate is to unduly delay what you could and should do now. Procrastination is putting off until tomorrow what is on your agenda to do today. Procrastination has at heart a laziness or indolence to it, as if things didn’t have any particular urgency because they didn’t particularly matter. Procrastination in that sense isn’t just a bad habit or practice but more so a bad way of thinking about oneself and one’s place in the world, giving oneself and the world a lower-than-deserved priority. Procrastination can be a problem in the home, at school, or in the workplace. But procrastination can be especially problematic when the issue is your negative attitude. Procrastinate over paying a bill or completing an assignment, and you’ll have more problems than you needed. But procrastinate over your bad attitude, and your problems will compound. If you’re going to carry a bias, make the bias toward action rather than inaction. Avoid procrastination by starting immediately what deserves a start. Momentum builds, killing procrastination.
Condemnation
Condemnation is one such negative thought and attitude. We are not just sensing beings but also judging beings. Discernment can be a good and necessary thing. Yet our capacity to quickly judge can lead us to quickly condemn. Conviction is one thing, while condemnation another thing. We rightly convict ourselves of poor attitudes and poorer character. That’s how reform begins, with a frank confession of our broken condition. But the next step after conviction is repentance, the turning away from the wrong. Yet a common practice is instead to move from conviction to condemnation. And we all know why: condemnation requires no repentance, no reform. When we condemn ourselves for the negative trait that we’ve discovered, we excuse ourselves from reform. When we stand fully and finally condemned rather than merely convicted, we leave ourselves with only the option of continuing in condemnation. Reject condemnation. Instead, stand on conviction, confession, and repentance.
Guilt
Guilt is another negative thought that leaves no clear path forward. Guilt, like self-condemnation, accepts blame without the necessity for reform. To label oneself guilty is to acknowledge the wrong. But to stop at guilt and to dwell on guilt is to arrest the proper movement. Judgment, sentence, mercy, and rehabilitation must quickly follow the guilty verdict. When you acknowledge your responsibility for a wrong, you must quickly move forward through repair and reform. The point of guilt is not to condemn the guilty. It is instead to move the guilty forward toward restoration in the innocent state we need to live freely, resonantly, creatively, and fully. Dwelling in guilt does not repair the wrong. Dwelling in guilt, while failing or refusing to move forward with apology, restitution, and rehabilitation, instead compounds the wrong. Both the victim of the wrong and the wrongdoer suffer when the wrongdoer holds onto the guilt without moving through the proper process. Guilt disables proper growth, reform, and restoration. It may even promote repetition of the wrong.
Shame
Shame is another crippling negative thought, akin to guilt. Shame takes the guilt and turns it inward upon the self. Guilt says that you did something wrong. Shame says that you are something wrong. Shame is pure condemnation of the self, no longer associated with the guilt that produced it. Providing restitution for the wrong and correcting the misbehavior addresses the guilt. But shame extends the wrong into treating the self as a wrongdoer. Shame turns the wrong action into a wrong identity. Shame is also both a private and public face. You can feel intense shame inwardly, condemning yourself. You can also feel intense shame when encountering others whom you believe know of your wrong and hold you in contempt for it, whether they do so or not. Shame can be a useful social control to discourage wrongdoing and encourage reform. But shame can also have a corrosive effect on the one who holds onto it as an identity. Don’t live in shame. Move through restitution and reform.
Victimhood
Other negative thoughts and stances arise when we respond inappropriately to challenges. Sometimes, with the occurrence of continual challenges, we may feel and even nurture a sense of victimhood. Wrongs are real, producing real victims. When a vehicle driver runs a red light, collides with another vehicle having the right of way, and seriously injures that other vehicle’s occupants, those occupants are victims of the careless driver’s wrong. They may have an arduous recovery. They need not, though, regard themselves internally as victims, taking on the internal identity of victimhood. A victim mentality cedes control of one’s inner life to circumstances. A victim mentality cedes responsibility to others and to one’s circumstances, disabling the victim of efficacy. Before long, the victim mentality even blames the victim’s own wrong thinking and wrong doing on others, losing all hope for the victim’s recognition, responsibility, growth, and reform. Avoid the path of self-pity and victimhood. It requires a long and difficult route home.
Helplessness
If guilt, condemnation, and shame were only episodic, we might not find them so burdensome. But as one wrong leads to another, we tend to accumulate their weight into a growing burden, until we’re asking what is wrong with me? Cycles of wrong, guilt, condemnation, and shame can gradually harden the heart, fixing in the mind that the self is fatally deficient and irredeemable. You may at some point begin to feel helpless, incorrigible, and condemned because apparently incapable of avoiding further wrongs. What’s the point, then, of even trying? Helplessness, though, is another negative stance to avoid. One must instead continue to climb upward, to at least try to center yourself, for the self you pursue is in that process of seeking awareness. The challenge with helplessness, though, is that further striving may only prove the point, with further failures. Indeed, we will fail again, no matter how hard we try. One needs a psychological and spiritual counterweight to the accumulation of wrongs. It is easier to get up again and continue to climb without carrying the weight of a lifetime of failures.
Unforgiveness
Your growing sense of helplessness can further lead to unforgiveness, that you cannot stop judging yourself. A traditional faith finds the counterweight in Christ’s grace. Christ deliberately and voluntarily took your wrongs and mine to the cross, where the condemnation from those wrongs died. His resurrection from death proved the powerlessness of condemnation. In Christ, we are free from condemnation and its consequence, which is death. One could argue that we must pay for our own wrongs, except that we never truly could. A wrong, once committed, exists. The creator of being, life, and consciousness would be the only one who could wipe the eternal slate clean, which is exactly what he did in Christ. By all means, confess, repent, and reform from your own wrongs. Doing so is an important part of the process. Yet to lift the load of accumulating wrongs, one needs to embrace that the transcendent one has done so through the sacrifice and resurrection of his Son. Your striving, as valuable as it is, won’t do. To relieve the weight of helplessness and its condemnation, lean instead on Christ. He will carry you through, where nothing else will.
Reflection
What is your most-common negative thought? What percentage of your thinking is negative compared to positive? Do you have a pessimistic rather than optimistic outlook? Can you trace your negative thinking to specific persons, conditions, or events? Can you discern what unconscious attitude or attribute in you may be triggering you to project it onto those persons, conditions, or events? Do you go beyond your proper conviction and confession for various wrongs, to condemning yourself? Do you feel guilty for long periods after realizing that you committed a wrong? Are you stopping at guilt rather than proceeding through confession, repentance, and restitution? Do you turn guilt into feelings of shame that you are a wrongdoer? Do you believe that others see you as shamefully unworthy? Do you, conversely, frequently see yourself as a victim of persons, situations, conditions, and events? Is your victimhood disabling you? Do you have feelings of helplessness over your poor character or negative attitudes and attributes? Do you carry the weight of accumulated wrongs? Have you embraced forgiveness for those wrongs in Jesus Christ?
Key Points
Negative thinking and attitudes can spoil growth and maturation.
Positive thinking, by contrast, can align and alert one to opportunities.
We tend to project our negative attitudes and attributes onto others.
Avoid condemning yourself beyond the helpful conviction of wrongs.
Don’t stop at guilt but move forward through restitution and reform.
Don’t turn the guilt of wrongs into the shame of being a wrongdoer.
Avoid victimhood when challenged by events and circumstances.
Don’t let an accumulation of wrongs lead to feelings of helplessness.
Answer the weight of accumulated wrongs by embracing Christ.
Avoid extreme self-centeredness that manipulates others.