Filtering positives:#2 negative thinking styles 

Have you ever had one of those days when it seems that every traffic light you come to is red? How is it that on the days when they are mostly green, we don’t even notice? It is human nature to filter out the positive. It requires a wilful commitment to see things positively.

Possibly many of you can think of a teacher, a leader or a boss who gave you the “ talk”. In this communication style, constructive criticism is sandwiched between positives, to soften the blow. “Joe, you are a really valued team member. There is probably not one person who can engage with others quite like you can. You’ve got a great record in sales and we appreciate that. Just need to chat with you about the time you are spending on out of work phone calls. It’s probably because you are such a social person that it’s hard to put in boundaries here but we’d like you to save your personal communication for out of work time.” A reasonable request? However, the “average Joe” will hear something like “Someone dobbed on me for chatting to Johnny about the match last week and now they’re scrutinizing me for every little thing.” He may also go home and announce “I had a crap day at work today: busted for talking on the phone to a friend in work time. Big Brother!!!”

Green lights, affirmations, flying pigs
Be honest, how often have you appraised your day negatively because of one or two things that went wrong, or even felt like they might go wrong? Have you ever slumped down and justified attitude or behaviour that’s less than glorious because of that ‘crap day. Have you ever offered a justification for someone so suffering? “Give daddy some space darling, he’s had a really hard day.” Maybe it was. Maybe we expect life to dish us out green lights and affirmations. Have we somehow internalized that things should be perfect in our lives? Maybe we have internalized that our performance needs to be perfect to be ok?

Filtering out the positive

Filtering out the positive is a negative thinking style that occurs when the negative is magnified to obscure the positive. It’s like a balloon blown up right in front of your nose that obscures the other positive things around you. This thinking style is often developed to cope with difficulty.  It’s a fear based maladaptive coping mechanism.

When you relate to someone who defaults to this thinking style, it’s very easy to join the gloom train because the information redirects your focus constantly to the negative, This also has a flow on effect to negative self talk and a critical attitude. Once the black spot on the white page is highlighted, it’s hard not to focus on it.

Big Picture Focus

It’s helpful to step back, as it were from that negative focus and look at the big picture.  Put yourself in neutral; as though you were noticing everything that happened and the context so you could make a report and journal it.  Funnily enough, positives appear, but they’ve been filtered out as they weren’t ‘the’ important ones your ‘search engine’ was looking for.

Recently I spoke to a person who had felt overlooked and unloved when her birthday came and went without fanfare. On further discussion, I found that she’d had phone calls and cards and visits but she didn’t feel loved as she didn’t receive the gifts she’d hoped for. That was her language of love and she could not read the other expressions as love until they were highlighted for her. (The 5 love Languages by Gary Chapman is a good read about this.)

Fear is Faith in reverse.
Job 3:25 speaks of a principle of inadvertently  believing for the negative through fear. That’s why the bible is pretty strong in teaching against fear….especially the sort of fear that necessarily means that you cannot see God’s Goodness because of it. When we filter out the positives we are choosing to focus on something other than His goodness and that never leads to a good place. 1John 4:18 speaks about the absence of fear if true love is present. That’s sobering. We bandy around terms like “anxiety” or “stressed out” when often it’s just fear, dressed up to look like it’s ok. Now lets face it, we all go there, but if the robber is dressed like an honest citizen you don’t perceive it.  If you are in fear, you cannot be in Faith in that area. You can still trust God while having residual fear thoughts, but unchecked anxiety will self perpetuate. It needs to be identified and challenged as such. More on that in another post.

Digging for gold
Developing a lifestyle of reflection and thankfulness helps us to put things in perspective. Fear is usually irrational. As we reflect on the goodness and blessing we can see, we find more. It’s like digging for gold instead of seeing only dirt. The good well outweighs the bad. The fear tends to hold less power when we change a negative focus and instead choose the positive.

Apply it, Own it

Thankfulness sees the horizon