Steve_Bamlett_blog

Dedicated to my dear friend, Joanne.

The world of the mind and mental health self-care is plagued by binary thinking – none more disturbing than the trend named positive psychology. This school of psychology claims to aim at optimising human happiness by addressing negativity in feeling, thought and action and, in particular, by reducing what it believes to be a bias in the psychological cognition of people so programmed. It further theorises such biases in their environment to which programming is attribtable to life events such as those mimicked in Martin Seligman’s famous experiments on dogs when he tested the agency of the environment’s affordances of escape from pain and discomfort on dogs with differently entrained cognitive bias.

Seligman  invented a ‘Skinner box’ in which dogs with different controlled past experiences are tested for their tendency to seek an available escape route from electrical shocks applied to their paws or not. He operationalised differing cognitive bias by varying the controlled past experience of dogs.

Some were ‘trained’ in an environment where electric shock was inescapable. Others had no experience of shock while kept in an exact facsimile of the shock cage used for the others. Those dogs who had experienced inescapable shock did not seek escape from the box, which allowed such escape but cowered in fear. The ‘inexperienced’ dogs found the escape route almost immediately. The former had then acquired ‘learned helplessness,’ Seligman concluded. Seligman further extended his hypothesis by saying that animals, including human animals, learn to accept the negative and should be trained otherwise to test the affordances of their environment for ‘positive’ outcomes.

It takes minds capable of inventing such controlled experiments to believe in ‘positive psychology’ I’d assert, for positive psychology is a refined form of ‘blaming the victim’ for the fact of their experienced pain and / or victimisation. In its ultimate forms, it combines, with a kind of edited form of cognitive psychology, in order to suggest that the best escape from psychological pain (and indeed physical pain it is sometimes claimed) is to address the negative bias of one’s thinking. The aim is not stoicism in the face of pain but to question one’s own responsibility for being in pain in the first place.

Unsurprisingly the fightback against this reductive thinking has come from groups that experience oppression that is not of their own making, and the term ‘toxic positivity’ came originally it is argued (though I certainly used in my psychology and social work teaching well before that) from a book in 2011, The Queer Art of Failure, about how ‘failure’ and self-blames becomes embedded in oppressed groups. The book focused on the experience of queer people, and I am about to read it. The evidence from big data on Google searches seems to suggest that people are waking up to the suggestive similarity of this term to their experience in recent history.

Though the concept of unrealistic optimism had already been explored by psychologists at least as early as 1980, the term toxic positivity appeared in J. Halberstam’s 2011 The Queer Art of Failure^[136] (“…to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life”). Beginning in about 2019, the term toxic positivity became the subject of a greater number of Internet searches. By RCraig09 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132024763

The ways and means of blaming the victim are widespread. It is taken as read that the Israeli government has a case apparently that the people of Gaza have brought their present misery on themselves regardless of their view and responsibility for the terrorist violence which the IDF and the Israeli government claims to have sparked their retribution. The military action taken is so disproportionate that this seems a most extrene form of revenge, even if it were aimed at the true perpetrators of that terrible incident.

We all seek, I think, to deflect any guilt we feel about our own cruelties by turning guilt for their effect back on the victim. Queer people are used to this justification of queer-bashing, as are victims of domestic violence and abuse, and racism, Such phenomena fuelled the genre of Cowboys and Indian films in the 1950s USA, wherein savage ‘Red Indians’ became the repository of evil demanding that it be controlled, and if not that, eradicated.

The call to be positive is nearly always toxic, even when applied through kindly progressive mechanisms, such as life coaching proclaims its own practice to be, when based on cognitive and mindfulness programs rather than experience of oppression and means of countering it productively and safely. I say that last part because my dear friend Mike runs a programme of the latter kind aimed at liberation for the gay, lesbian, non-binary, trans and queer community. There are similar programmes for, and taught by survivors of domestic abuse, which take as their starting point,that one needs to recognise that some elements of one’s experience are NEGATIVE, and need to be understood as such, together with the learning that experiencing them brings.

The latter is important since the causes of ‘failure’ do not go away nor can they be escaped through a hatch, either physical, as in Seligman’s example, or psychological (by practicing positive thinking and feeling by reinterpreting one’s experience as not as bad as it seems on some cognitive scaling exercise). Let us not then fall for toxic positivity, especially if you are disabled by an environment not designed for you because your significance is secondary either from the nature of your defined being – the means by which women (or Arabs in Palestine even from when they were the majority population before British intervention) have long been oppressed – or by the size of your population, which quantities are necessarily biased by over-categorisation of the oppressed.

There is, in questions like this prompt, a presumption of ‘positive psychology’ and no doubt most answers will validate this approach. It is very persuasive to made believe that you are only a ‘loser’ if you think you are. So here is my protest, which I may extend if I review Halberstam’s book, now sitting on my Kindle.

All the best, lovely people. Never accept blame for the pain you feel. Those parts you can address can be explored – that is about SURVIVAL – but do not accept responsibility for the oppressive effects of the terrible self-confidence of oppressors, scaffolded as they are by bastions of their hegemonic myths of self-interest and the inevitability of an unjust status quo. They revel in psychological programs aimed at making people HAPPY in their allotted place.

With love

Steve xxxxxxx