Dr. Gabor Maté has written a must-read book, When the Body Says No – The Cost of Hidden Stress. The book presents overwhelming research that concludes that all the baggage that we have buried deep within our brains has a huge cost. Maté explains that this cost is often in the form of a wide range of diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, etc.
The author encourages his readers to get in touch with their subconscious stories as a critical aspect of self-knowledge. Too often, people resist taking a deep dive into their stories for fear that this will cause them pain, so they mask their reality by thinking positively. According to Maté, this is unhealthy and that a dose of negative thinking would be beneficial. Maté writes, “Many people are blocked from self-knowledge and personal growth by the myth they feel compelled to hold on to, of having a “happy childhood”. A little negative thinking would empower them to see through the self-delusion that helps keep them stuck in self-harming behavioral patterns”. He continues by adding “If we gain the ability to look into ourselves with honesty, compassion and with unclouded vision, we can identify the ways we need to take care of ourselves. We can see the areas of the self formerly hidden in the dark”.
The book makes a strong statement -“The first step in retracing our way to health is to abandon our attachment to what is called positive thinking…As an antidote to terminal optimism, I have recommended the power of negative thinking…As soon as we qualify the word thinking with the adjective positive, we exclude those parts of reality that strike us as “negative”…Genuine positive thinking begins by including all our reality. It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ourselves to face the full truth, whatever that full truth may turn out to be…As Dr. Michael Kerr points out, compulsive optimism is one of the ways we bind our anxiety to avoid confronting it…A lack of essential information about ourselves and our situation is one of the major sources of stress”.
Our hidden stories originate during childhood. Maté states, “Frequently an adult’s recollections of life in her family of origin fail to consider the hidden price the child had to pay for the parents’ approval and acceptance…At work here is a kind of “false memory syndrome” in reverse: on the conscious level, people often remember only the happy parts of childhood. Even if troubling incidents are recalled, the emotional aspects of those events are suppressed. Parental love is legitimately remembered, but the child’s feelings of not being understood or supported emotionally are not”.
The solution is to tune into our real, authentic stories. “Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence”…Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment…The power of “negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-colored glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key”.
Maté believes that much of our anxiety is caused by trying to be someone other than our authentic self. “Most of our tensions and our frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not, ” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness – the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of”.
In conclusion, Mat♪ writes, “Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work. We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive. Genuine positive thinking – or, more deeply, positive being – empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth“.