ILLUSION SELLERS

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

DEPENDENCE OF POSITIVE

There is no bad weather…

Words from a song

If happiness becomes an end in itself

then this is self-violence …

The article is not about positive psychology, but about those people. which parasitize on it (For those who inattentively read).

The desire to write this text arose after the client's next request "to get rid of unnecessary, interfering feelings with the help of psychotherapy." The article ended up being quite emotional.

Each period of history has its own "favorite" psychology. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, during the heyday of hysterical symptoms, psychoanalysis rightfully "reigned", depressive tendencies in the middle of the 20th century were well served by existential psychology. The current time - the heyday of narcissism - most accurately reflects, in my opinion, positive psychology. Positive psychology is essentially the psychology of narcissism.

Born in the mainstream of humanistic psychology, positive psychology was originally aimed at helping people achieve happiness.

If you briefly convey the essence of positive psychology, you get something like: “You need to see the positive in everything. Be an optimist! Look for the positive in everything”!

However, the beautiful slogans of positive psychologists such as: "Act as if you are already happy, and you will really become happier" (Dale Carnegie), "If suddenly life throws you another lemon, make strong tea and have fun." (Janusz Korczak), over time turned into illusions that distort reality.

At first glance, positive attitudes that are beautiful, on closer examination, turn out to be not so great. Literally and unambiguously perceived by fanatical half-fighters, they become psychic introjects that program a person into automatic methods of contact with reality.

Positive psychology, with an initially beautiful idea of happiness, over time, with the filing of psychologists who understood its ideas literally and simplistically, began to more and more persistently impose the value of happiness on a person at any cost, turning into the psychology of violent happiness. The dominance of the positive - not otherwise than the obsessive violence of the positive - ultimately leads to ignoring the person's feeling of his soul as a complex, multifaceted, versatile phenomenon. A person, fascinated by the ideas of positive psychology and practicing the psychology of happiness, voluntarily takes the path of self-violence. All the time, a happy person is a rather strange phenomenon, while a forcibly happy person evokes at least sympathy.

If you look at the nature of man and his psyche as something integral, natural, clearing the mind of social, moral and other evaluative attitudes, then it is easy to find that there is nothing superfluous, unnecessary in the human psyche. So, the division of feelings into good and bad, accepted in everyday consciousness, is the result of our evaluative consciousness. For the psyche itself, as a certain system, such a division does not exist. Each feeling is necessary and performs some important systemic function. For example, such a socially “bad” feeling as anger performs very important functions of development and protection. Anger and aggression are needed to compete, advance your interests, defend your desires, ideas, beliefs, and also to protect your personal autonomy and the boundaries of your self.

The narcissistic age with a focus on maximum achievement at any cost requires the individual to get rid of "unnecessary" feelings. Empathy, compassion, sadness, sadness, and other so-called "bad" qualities are out of the bounds of the soul.

The result of this “surgery of the soul” is a unipolar person: a happy person, a plus person.

At the same time, the number of depressions in society is steadily growing. Kind of nonsense. But this is only at first glance.

ILLUSION SELLERS

A simplified and perverse, one-sidedly understood positive psychology has become the bible for psychoactive psychologists and psychotherapists. Positively trained psychologists cheerfully broadcast that nothing is impossible. Psychologists and psychotherapists who do not hesitate to promise potential clients more are in the tops: there are no unsolvable problems, everything will work out!

The Internet is replete with psychogenic statements like: I will get rid of all the problems! The problems will go away by themselves!

As a result, these kind of psychotic promises:

• Mislead a potential consumer;
• Infantilize him;

They support unjustified hopes in a person, create illusions about reality through psychological myths created by psychologists themselves: “You can do anything! One has only to want, and there are no barriers to your desires! You can become anyone and anything you want! To do this, you just need to imagine, create an image of what you want!”.

As a result, psychology, instead of destroying myths, began to create them itself.

One of the most common myths I come across with clients is the myth about work. Here is its brief essence: If you don’t want to work, find a job you like! Therefore, it is very important to find just such a job. Some, the most persistent, devote their whole lives to such a search.

And this myth was not invented by clients, but by psychologists. To prove the veracity of this myth, psychologists themselves often cite an example about a child's play: they say, a child never gets tired playing! Yes, everything is so, but there is one very essential condition - the child does not play one game for a long time, he constantly switches from one game to another. I agree that work is different and it is very important to find one of those types of activity that will be more adequate to your abilities, desires, interests. But at the same time, any work, no matter what it is favorite (if only it is a job, not a hobby) is still work. And you will still get tired on it, you will still need to motivate yourself, stimulate, make I-efforts, with the only difference that your favorite job will have a "degree of self-violence" much less than that of your unloved one.

Positive psychogenic specialists, supporting positive myths in a person, directly fall into the infantile, mystical, magical part of the consumer's consciousness.

"I want and I will!" - this is the maintenance of a child's attitude towards life in a person, this is an excuse for his infantilism and an attempt to keep him from growing up and maturity, maintaining the unconditional intrinsic value of desires and devaluing responsibility.

Adult life requires a person to find a balance between "I want and need!"

In the personality of an adult, desires and obligations, freedom and responsibility are harmoniously combined. Back in the middle of the last century, E. Fromm proposed this balance formula: Freedom without responsibility is irresponsibility, responsibility without freedom is slavery.

Perhaps the most serious harm to positive psychology is that it:

- promotes the alienation of a person from his true self and maintains a false, illusory, one-sided image of I.

- Takes away from reality different, multifaceted, focusing only on plus-reality

And the reality is different, and not always positive, although it is sometimes difficult to accept. Remember: "Nature does not have bad weather!" However, no matter how much we talk, sing about it, the reality is that nature has different seasons and there is different weather. In addition to sunny days, there are cloudy and rainy, snowy and windy days. And the soul has different seasons and different weather. And this is the truth of the life of the soul and this is its reality.

Constant stimulation, constant urging on oneself, constant practice in "making the soul good weather" leads to a kind of rape of this very soul with a positive. “If you can't smile“from the inside,”smile at first automatically, with the facial muscles of your face. And behind them a smile will tighten!

The result of this kind of attitudes can be the experience of feelings of guilt and even depression. "If you didn't receive something, which you should have received in the end, it means that you are to blame. I tried badly. I didn’t search enough. Or something is wrong with me …"

The consequences of positive psychology can also be observed at the intergenerational level. In my opinion, the phenomenon of depression, lack of will and apathy in children is another pole of the strong-willed, positive attitude of their parents - purposeful, active, strong-willed, living with the attitude that there are no unsolvable problems! And if the problems have not yet been resolved, then you need to try harder!

There are unsolvable problems! And there are a lot of them. And in our life in general, and in psychotherapy in particular. Psychotherapy can really do a lot, but not everything! Psychotherapy is not omnipotent. Psychotherapy also has boundaries of the possible and the impossible. And not all psychological problems can be solved in principle. In addition, there are a number of problems that require a long time and effort for both the therapist and the client to solve. And this is reality. And if we do not accept this reality, then we support the distorted reality, support the illusions about reality, actively and persistently created and imposed on our consciousness by positive psychology.

Be different! Accept yourself different! Love yourself different!