GETTING RID OF THE NEGATIVE
AUGUST 20, 2011. A significant amount of traditional therapy, and a whole lot of pop-culture psychology, involves “getting rid of negative material.” Baggage.
The theory behind it sounds good at first. It’s sort of like surgery. The doctor says, “You have this thing right here, and we’re going to take it out.”
But lo and behold, as the years roll on, it doesn’t seem to be turning out so well. One piece of “negative emotion” is sort of gone, and so is another piece, but other pieces, not seen before, have cropped up. Where is the end to it?
Clue: there is no end.
Why not?
Because when the goal is “getting rid of problems,” people dedicate themselves to it, and in that dedication they will keep finding (or inventing) negative material so THERE IS SOMETHING TO DO. Otherwise, the goal is useless.
Therefore, the goal becomes a long freight train heading down the tracks, and it keeps going—and keeps on going…
This was not seen clearly when modern therapy was first invented. Neurosis (in the generalized sense) was viewed more or less as a big tin can, and the negative material was inside. If you washed the can out, you were cured.
However, it’s not that simple.
Often, the patient in therapy becomes dimly aware (or not so dimly) that he can keep using the search for more problems as a shield and postponement against just making his life better. “I have more material to work through.”
The patient develops an ingrained habit, which is “looking for negative baggage.” It’s a reflex. The other part of the habit is explaining lack of success in life by: “The negative is keeping me from getting what I want.”
Again, it sounds right, but the theory just doesn’t work out.
There is an analogy in the medical world. “Germs cause disease, so we have to keep getting rid of germs to make you well.”
Actually, the solution there is non-medical. You have to make your immune system stronger.
In life, you have to expand your creative power, to create what you want.
The world is filled with people who have undergone therapy with the hope of ascending to a new level of happiness. A large percentage of them have never gotten what they showed up for. Instead, they’ve saddled themselves with a habit: they continue to search for negative material that can explain why they aren’t happy.
All of this engenders a loss of energy over time.
From a more expansive point of view, it’s obvious that, in a scientific rational age, humans would invent a theory of behavior that would define happiness as the elimination of unhappiness. It’s neat and precise and simple. It’s straightforward. Discover what constitutes unhappiness in the mind and remove it.
However, adopting a rational position doesn’t always ensure success. That’s a lesson that needs to be learned. The kind of logic that applies so well when you are analyzing an argument won’t work in the same way when you assess the human being as a whole.
As I discovered long ago in my consulting work with clients, the creative aspect of a person will always assert itself in one way or another. You can’t discount it or block it out or pretend it doesn’t exist.
For example, at the most profound level, a person creates problems if he decides he has a reason to. Not only that, he creates the basic mindset that views reality as “problems that need to be solved.”
I’m not making an academic point here. This is as real as rocks and trees. You can seemingly neutralize all sorts of problems…and more will crop up. The TENDENCY to have problems is, at bottom, a creative decision, in the same way that a playwright or a director will sculpt and shape a stage play to have a certain kind of mood, atmosphere, and plot.
So I decided to work directly with that creative impulse in people. That’s where the core and crux of a life resides. (I had seen that for myself, in 1961, when I started painting.)
In that creative core—that’s where a person will build his own private status quo.
Tearing down a few bricks from it won’t do the trick. He’ll just rebuild it.
Because, like it or not, he’s an artist.
You can’t change things by scrubbing out a few areas in his paintings. He’s still a painter, and he still has ideas about what he wants to put on the canvas.
Again, from a rational point of view, it might seem that you should get a person to change his thoughts about what he wants to paint.
“Paint more positively!” “Instead of painting THIS, paint THAT.”
But the results from such an approach yield disappointing results.
Instead, you need to acquaint a person, more thoroughly, with his creative power. You need to have him do things (exercises and techniques) that put him, more consciously, in the driver’s seat of his own power. That’s been my approach.
When you do that, the person can undertake a personal revolution of a kind. He can feel and experience more energy, he can use more energy, he can tap into his imagination, he can see wider realities, he can create in ways he’s forgotten about, he can see, first-hand, that problems are just one “mode” or style of creating. Because he’s operating at the core of his own being and power.
There is a guideline here: when a person is creating with enough power, and knows he is, he will, by his own choice, find deeper desires he wants to fulfill—and he will create that fulfillment in the world.
At that point, the “negative” is just a vaporous illusion that breaks up and disintegrates like the plot of an old story he doesn’t want to tell anymore, because he’s bored with it.
That’s all it ever was.
It was a piece of HIS art, and HE tossed it aside because HE was ready for more, because HE could do much more, because HE took charge of his own creative power.
Jon Rappoport