When Positive Thinking Doesn’t Work

I hate positive thinking emergencies. They creep up on me at my worst moments.

I stand at cliff’s edge, vicious barbarian armies closing in on me. In front of me lies the ocean. Even if I were to survive the sharp rocks that stud the cliffside, there is a sea monster waiting below, his gaping maw revealing rows upon rows of pointy teeth. I feel panic grip my chest, my throat. My hands shake. Then out of nowhere, I feel the hand of my co-worker gently squeeze my shoulder. “Try to think positive thinking,” he says, meaningfully and with sincere sympathy.

“That’s it!” I think and begin to hum The sun will come out tomorrow all the while clicking your heels thinking, “There’s no time like 5:00 pm. There’s no time like 5:00 pm.” The brutish hordes halt, suddenly confused. Leviathan starts to whimper like a kicked puppy. I have done it! I have vanquished my enemies with the mere power of my thoughts. I rise up, leap onto my desk, and give a mighty war cry. It’s an epiphany!

Or not.

Sometimes I think positive thinking should be renamed denial. In the throes of an anxiety attack, in the vast ocean of grief, or the tar pits of shame and depression, positive thinking, as it is suggested by so many well-intentioned Job’s comforters, is a band-aid that doesn’t stick.

Worse, when we try to stand on the Word or proclaim affirmations and they simply fall into the void, we are left feeling inadequate and unworthy. It is easy for Christians to offer each other truisms instead of empathy. God is in control. Worry is a sin. God is good all the time. All the time God is good. And did you know that God says to not be afraid 365 times in the Bible? Often we use these phrases as a way to distance ourselves from other people’s pain, afraid it will remind us of our own. And someone who is genuinely suffering from anxiety will feel ashamed because apparently they aren’t Christianing hard enough.

So here is my observation about this phenomenon and positive thinking.

Many of us have a tendency to separate our heads from our hearts. We are walking, talking brains, dragging our hearts behind us as an inconvenient afterthought. This is why we can declare God’s faithfulness all we want, but still feel utterly abandoned. Or why we can look around us, assessing the security fortress of our home, and still be waiting for the bad guys to break down the door.

Please don’t misunderstand. I am not suggesting that it doesn’t matter what we say or think. But our minds are more complex than that. A fully alive human thinks…and feels. Unfortunately, the two trains of thought and emotion are often going in opposite directions. Saying we are happy when we are not does not make us happy. It makes us a hypocrite.

There are two ways of knowing.

Our minds run on two different train tracks. One is analytical; the other is emotional. Memories only occur when those tracks cross. We must have experiential knowledge that things are going to be ok. Think about it all we want, but our body knows better. The deep wagon train wheels carve grooves in our neural pathways and we remember all the times it went badly, remember the pain of rejection and abuse. And those wheels are buried to the axle on the roads in our mind. Jumping them takes time, effort, and some seriously good times.

It says in Proverbs that as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

Interesting that we must think with our hearts. This is why, despite our reading Bible verses or telling ourselves that life will be good, our hearts are not following along. If our heart is in exile, it is even worse. Up to this point, we have been constructing a reality, a belief system with our body, soul, and spirit. To dismantle anxiety or shame, both of which are possible, requires teaching our body what it means to feel loved, to feel confident, and to have a sense of well-being.

Sometimes this requires calling professional troops. But I created this blog in part to share tools in my admittedly limited arsenal called imaginative prayer. Our imagination sparks both sides of the thinking/feeling conundrum. Prayer engages the spirit. Exercising the imagination comes easier for some than others, so I am gradually creating a series of prayerful imaginative experiences for our hearts to live out in the presence of God. It is all a part of renewing the mind, the dianoia, which includes the imagination, whose job is to engage the heart.

Instead of attempting positive thinking, take a little time to assess your heart.

Can you locate it? How does your heart feel? How do you picture it? My own heart has appeared at different times in my imagination as inaccessible behind three-inch aquarium glass, a brittle glass heart, and a bloody mess as if it was removed in an awful surgery.

Each of those has served as an important metaphor for my emotions. So take your fragile, hidden, or bruised heart into your hands. Today, you are going to begin to teach your heart to rest. Ask Jesus to hold your heart for you and imagine Him carefully taking it from your hands. He takes your heart, which he loves, and He puts it to rest, without care or sorrow, in the very heart of His Heart.

Your heart, the very center of who you are, is hidden in Him.

Spend time like this and you will find that your heart has begun the process of beating in time with his. Your positive thinking will come because you have Christ within, not because you mouth happy words.

Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.
By this we shall know that we are of the truth and reassure our heart before him;
for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything.

John 3:18-20

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Declutter Your Soul with Imaginative Prayer