The tyranny of positive thinking

I have been reading an interesting conversation on one of the IF boards about the tyranny of positive thinking. I think it deserves more consideration.

There's a big movement in the mind/body/spirit world which says you create your own reality. The Secret is all about this in the form of the law of attraction. I absolutely believe that this is good stuff, up to a point. I mean, I'm sure we all know people who are very toxic and negative and always attract bad things and situations to themselves. My brother is one of those people. So, yes, I absolutely think being positive, and willing good things to come into your life, along with maintaining a sunny and upbeat disposition, can do wonders for your life.

But this gets translated by the general public and the media into a sort of frenzied hype, that because we create our own realities, we must therefore bring bad things upon ourselves. It's an extension of how the public misunderstands karma. Disabled? Diseased? You must have brought it upon yourself by being bad in a former lifetime/thinking bad and negative things. That all these things are punishments rained down upon us by the universe for not being good people. And of course, by extension, this means that our smug sisters-in-law or cousins or whoever who have everything going right for them, must be good people. Us = bad, them = good. It must be nice to be able to sit in judgement like that.

What they don't realize about karma, for example, is that we may have prayed fervently in our former life to be kind and non-judgemental, and in order for us to truly live this reality, we end up disabled. It is what we wanted, and could be a blessing, not a punishment. After all, how many truly kind and compassionate people are there in life who are also millionaire trust fund babies? Not that many. But I bet the kind and compassionate people are more spiritually evolved than those who get their own way all the time. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Or maybe our disability or disease is just a random thing - someone's car rammed into us because they were not paying attention. Did I attract the car to hit me? I don't think so. I don't think everything in life is preordained. Equally, I believe that cancer and other diseases like infertility do not strike because we are not positive about life. They happen. We didn't do it to ourselves. It isn't a punishment on us. Maybe it happened because humanity as a whole is polluting the planet, and we are more sensitive to this pollution than others. Maybe it is just a simple cell division that went wrong once, and then repeated itself. The flap of a butterfly's wings that turned into something major. It may even be a blessing in the long run, But because people can't see the blessing in disease until they go through it, all they can think is us = bad, and them = good.

The old black and white equation. Life comes down to a series of zeros and ones. Bad/good. Us/them. Right/wrong.

And of course, if the treatments for our disease are not working, it must be our fault for not being positive enough. Or not praying enough. Or whatever. There are some articles on this from the cancer world:

http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/all_page?item_id=7038

http://www.bcaction.org/Pages/LearnAboutUs/WelcomeToCancerland.html

However, is it correct to say that positive thinking has NO bearing on treatment outcomes? I'm not sure I can say that with any certainty, just like I couldn't say that my theory that my IF isn't a punishment is a load of hogwash. Life isn't certain, you see. It's all grayscale. Murky. Unfathomable. Not answerable by a yes or no answer. Or by 42 for that matter.

Where am I going with this rambling post? I think there's a middle way. I think there's room for positive thinking in the IF world. That we need to go into an IVF cycle hoping for and believing the best will happen. That it may have some small influence on the outcome, perhaps because we are relaxing while doing our positive thinking. But that it's not our fault if it doesn't work, nor is it a punishment handed out by a vengeful universe because we are bad or not as worthy as our fertile counterparts. It is what it is. Sucky. Life not going according to plan.

So, in other words, I retain the right to snap at you for telling me that I HAVE to remain positive. Equally, I'm going to do all I damn well can in order to TRY to remain positive.