How to be less negative (without relying on being excessively positive)

A surprising shift in perspective

I never thought of myself as a ‘negative’ person until one day, a brave friend risked telling me something difficult but true about how he experienced me. He told me that sometimes found my dark outlook on the world was challenging to be around.

I was surprised.

I saw myself not as having a dark outlook or as being pessimistic, but instead I saw myself as battling actual circumstances as best I could, often losing but never staying down. If anything, I saw myself as optimistic!

Fortunately, on the day my friend said this to me, I could hear it and take it in, and I wondered for some time if he was right. Even though I didn’t immediately see the truth of what he was saying to me, I could tell it was genuine.

Recognising the language of survival

I could recognise that sometimes I spoke very cynically about the world and my experience of it, and sometimes I even spoke cynically about myself, but I didn’t consider myself pessimistic. I was still trying, wasn’t I? I got up every day and did what I needed to do, I didn’t expect anybody else to take responsibility for me, and I rolled with the punches when they came.

In this process of thinking about my friend’s words, I began to notice the language I used in thinking about myself and the world. I was concerned with ‘getting through’ things, ‘rolling with the punches’, and getting up whenever I was knocked down.

Seeing the world as a battleground

I was so used to life being a battle that, to me, it didn’t seem like a dark worldview. It was realistic, and I was making the best of it. But to someone else, in this case, my friend, joining me in that world for a while, it was evident that I lived in a harsh place. It was harsh because my inner child was still carrying a very deep core belief about what the world was. To him, it was a battleground, and I hadn’t yet really seen him around that.

It took someone else’s point of view to help me even consider that maybe the world wasn’t a battleground and that I had been colluding with my traumatised inner child in acting as if it was. Now, that wasn’t my fault, even though it was a painful realisation. I simply lacked the perspective I needed to see how reality didn’t line up with my feelings about it.

The root of the inner child's cynicism

My inner child was right; of course life was a battleground when I was growing up, and certainly that’s how my parents saw life. They created an antagonistic environment, and they allowed their hurtful beliefs about the world to dominate the atmosphere at home. As a result, I internalised them.

I wasn’t a negative person, I had an inner child who actually had a lot of dreams, desires, and aspirations, who was filled with love and gifts that he wanted to give the world, but who was disappointed by his parents so consistently that the only way he could protect his heart was to expect the worst. My inner child was carrying a lot of grief from this shattering of his dreams, and he needed parenting around the truth of who he was and what the world was really like.

Why negativity is a logical coping mechanism

It’s important to recognise as well that adult life can be exceptionally challenging, especially when we come from a history of trauma and neglect. Speaking about a ‘negative mindset’ is not intended to be a way of dismissing the reality of how hard our lives can be and how sometimes getting through certain circumstances is the best we can do.

Our inner children become overly negative as a way of coping with real circumstances. They might choose this because:

• They were consistently disappointed by the most important people in their lives and left to figure their way out of complicated emotional situations far beyond their stage of development.

• A lack of support means life is a lot harder for them than it should be. They don’t have the chance to see that this is not their fault but a result of poor familial support and a lack of love.

• A negative or cynical worldview is a way of ‘getting in front’ of disappointment. It can take the sting away from a bad event if you believe things tend to turn out badly.

The list goes on. What’s important to remember is that having a negative slant in how we see the world comes from experience; it’s a way in which we have been shaped. It is not a moral failing or a conscious choice.

We are also dealing with our highly traumatised nervous systems, which tend towards painful psycho-physiological states like depression and anxiety, which can make it very hard to make progress and seem to reinforce certain beliefs and thinking patterns.

Shifting from toxic positivity to realistic recovery

The path toward change doesn’t lie in a forced overcorrection to a manufactured sense of positivity. Finding our way out of excessive negativity involves becoming more realistic about the past and more pragmatic about the present. Often we had parents who projected an external locus of control – this means they believed that the cause of all their life circumstances and even their choices lay outside of themselves. This might have meant that they viewed the world as a sinister and treacherous place.

Getting our inner adult in place around our worldview and attitude towards circumstances and choices means recognising that the world and our nature are much more neutral and flexible than they are good or bad. And that’s why knowing how to deploy positivity in our mindset is important. It’s actually a practical strategy that’s got to be based on the truth about what happened to us, the ways in which our inner children are still deeply disappointed with the world, and how we might give them evidence of change. If we begin to pay attention to our inner child’s experience, we can begin to provide reparative experiences that address the painful negative beliefs we inherited.

For example, if we had a highly negative parent who taught us that we were powerless and the world was cruel, our inner child might benefit from being spoken to in a really realistic and encouraging way.

Committing to slow, compassionate change

Changing our attitude towards life is a really deep but important project. It’s slow, and involves being really realistic about the grief of carrying negative beliefs. We did not create our own suffering by carrying these beliefs – we were given beliefs and experiences that set us up for suffering. Affirming this to our inner child and being real about the grief whilst committing to the process of challenging excessively negative beliefs is done little by little over many, many years.

Our inner children need to be honoured for adopting a way of seeing the world that allowed them to survive and they also need to have their nature as children acknowledged by our presence and loving, patient intervention as inner parents. And it is so brave just to start.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.