Negativity and Perspective

What Keeps Us from Being Positive?

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right…think about such things.” —Philippians 4:8

Most of us know that negative thinking can make life worse. Negativity affects our relationships, our emotional health, and the way we experience the world around us. It can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet simply telling ourselves to “be more positive” often doesn’t work.

Why?

One reason is that negative thinking is a problem, but it often begins as a solution to a problem.

When a Solution Becomes a Problem

Sometimes we develop strategies to survive a crisis that are unhealthy, and then we keep using those strategies long after the crisis has passed.

When life becomes overwhelming, we find ways to get through it. Some of those strategies are good. Others may not be particularly healthy, but they help us survive something that, at the time, seems like too much to bear.

Historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations grow by responding successfully to challenges. Challenges are not necessarily bad. In fact, an appropriate challenge can call forth creativity and growth. But Toynbee also recognized that a challenge can simply be too much. A civilization can encounter something beyond its capacity to respond and break down.

Something similar can happen to individuals. Life brings challenges that stretch us and sometimes make us stronger. But there are also times when the challenges of life overwhelm our capacity for resilience. We experience loss, rejection, conflict, failure, betrayal, or a prolonged period in which one difficult thing seems to follow another.

When that happens, negativity itself can become a strategy for getting through life.

Negativity Can Protect Us from Pain

It is helpful to realize that negativity often begins as a solution to a problem.

If I don’t expect anything good to happen, then I won’t be disappointed when it doesn’t. If I assume people will let me down, I won’t be surprised when they do. If I anticipate everything that could go wrong, perhaps I can prepare myself for it.

In that sense, negativity can work. It can prevent certain kinds of pain.

But at what cost?

Imagine that I love playing basketball, but I hate the feeling of having a terrible game. I could solve that problem permanently. Before the next game, I could hit myself in the knee with a hammer hard enough that I couldn’t play basketball anymore.

I would never again have to experience the pain of playing badly.

Of course, I would also never experience the joy of playing well.

The solution would work, but the cost of the solution would be far greater than the problem it was intended to solve.

Negativity can work the same way. If I stop hoping, trusting, risking, or expecting anything good, I may protect myself from disappointment. But I also begin cutting myself off from much of what makes life good.

Negativity Narrows Our Field of Vision

Over time, negativity can become more than a reaction to particular circumstances. It can become a whole way of looking at the world.

We become increasingly attentive to things that confirm what we already believe. We notice every disappointment, every failure, every inconsiderate thing another person does, and every indication that something else is about to go wrong.

The negative things we see may be completely real. The problem is not necessarily that we are imagining them.

The problem is that they become all that we can see.

Life becomes smaller than God intended it to be. The disappointments are still there, but friendship, beauty, love, accomplishment, worship, service, recreation, learning, and the countless ordinary things for which we can be thankful gradually disappear from our field of vision.

Negativity Changes How We Interpret What Happens

Once negativity becomes a way of looking at life, it also begins shaping the meaning we give to events.

Suppose I work in a restaurant and several people call out, leaving me to cover for them. That is genuinely frustrating. But I might experience it as more than a frustrating day at work: Nobody cares about me. Everyone takes advantage of me. Everything always falls on me.

There may be real wrongdoing involved. Being positive does not require us to excuse bad behavior or pretend that injustice isn’t injustice.

But our suffering can become greater when every painful event becomes evidence for a much larger conclusion about our lives, other people, or the world.

The difficulty is no longer simply, This is a hard day. It becomes, This is what my life is like.

Negativity Can Reinforce Itself

Eventually, the strategy we developed to protect ourselves can begin producing some of the very experiences we feared.

If I expect rejection, I may become guarded. Being guarded makes closeness more difficult.

If I expect conflict, I may become defensive. Defensiveness can contribute to conflict.

If I expect people to disappoint me, I may become extremely sensitive to their failures while hardly noticing the things they do well.

And each new negative experience seems to prove that my original way of looking at life was correct.

The solution has become part of the problem.

Being Positive Doesn’t Mean Pretending Everything Is Good

This is why Philippians 4:8 is more profound than simply telling us to “think positively.”

The verse begins with “whatever is true.”

Christian positivity is not pretending that suffering isn’t real. It doesn’t require calling evil good, overlooking injustice, or denying genuine problems.

Instead, it means refusing to allow what is wrong to become the whole of reality.

Something painful may be true without being everything that is true.

Something has gone wrong—but many things remain good.

Someone has failed me—but that failure does not have to define every aspect of the relationship.

I may have experienced terrible disappointment—but my life contains more than the thing that disappointed me.

Expanding Life Again

If negativity has narrowed our lives, healing involves gradually expanding them again.

Rather than organizing our lives primarily around avoiding pain, we begin recovering the ability to pursue things that are good even though pursuing them involves risk. Relationships involve the possibility of disappointment. Meaningful work includes the possibility of failure. Loving other people makes us vulnerable to loss.

We cannot eliminate those risks without also eliminating much of what makes life worth living.

The goal, then, isn’t simply to stop being negative. In counseling, it can be much more helpful to ask why negativity became necessary in the first place. What was it protecting us from? What did it help us survive? And is the strategy that once protected us now keeping us from fully living?

Perhaps that is part of what it means to learn again to think about whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable—not by denying the painful parts of life, but by allowing ourselves once again to see the whole of it.