HOW POSITIVE THINKING HARMED MY HEALTH

My relationship with positive thinking began my first year our of college. I had returned home, lost,
depressed, and anxious. I didn't know what to do with my life, and I was unhappy living at home.
I was working as a waitress and answering phones at my father's office. I hated it. I was miserable.
I was too anxious to socialize with my friends from college, so most nights I stayed at home, missing college and wallowing in my misery.

And then my dad introduced me to Dennis Waitley. He was one of the pioneers of the positive thinking on tape movement...much along the lines of Norman Vincent Peale. I read his books, too. So I listened to my Dennis Waitley tapes every morning. They made me feel good! Inspired! They got me moving! They got me out of my negative thinking patterns enough for me to apply to nursing schools and move forward out of being unhappy and stuck.

And thus it started...I read every positive thinking and self help book I could find, in an effort to battle my severe anxiety and depression. I found meditation by reading The Relaxation Response. I found Positive Visualization by Shakti Gawain...still a favorite of mine. I read Louise Hay and Wayne Dyer...
and there is more....these books helped me to function, to move forward, to set and achieve my goals despite the fact that I was anxious and depressed...they helped me cope..but they didn't cure my anxiety.

Several years later  I found the work of Abraham-Hicks. This work literally changed my life....I learned about the Law of Attraction, and how to use it...again, to obtain personal goals.. and I achieved them! It was amazing and transformative...but I still struggled with fairly debilitating anxiety, depression, and fragile health. But here is what happened..it backfired on me ...The Law of Attraction work is all about feeling..feeling good...the more you feel good, the more good things come to you...from my understanding negative feelings were to be quickly switched to positive feelings...they were to be changed, as quickly as possible, and ignored. And it harmed me...I stuffed my negative feelings. I ignored them. I started to experience weird physical symptoms...more frequent bouts of systemic candida, numbness and tingling in my hands and feet, dizziness, weakness, and fatigue...In short,
in an effort to be and think and feel positive I was scared to feel my negative feelings for fear they would thwart my desires and goals.

So as I was recovering from Chronic Fatigue, I learned more about feelings..they need to be felt, and oftentimes, a negative feeling is a call to action.. and often, only a small action is required...it could be responding differently to someone, making the smallest adjustment in my daily routine...so a negative feeling is a reminder, a tap on the shoulder to do something a little bit differently..a small adjustment made in the moment...and then the feeling recedes, the communication is complete, and, in the moment,
you feel better.

So when I was being treated for anxiety, and I saw many, many different therapists,  with the goal of my therapy being to calm me down enough so I could function in my daily life. Just like with the Chronic Fatigue, I had to calm my autonomic nervous system down.. and to this end I tried biofeedback, yoga,
breathing, meditation, hypnosis, self-hypnosis...and all of these calmed me down momentarily..it was not lasting...oh, and did I mention the years of reviewing my childhood, my cold and neglectful parents, my role as the youngest and most sensitive child in the family, various traumatic childhood experiences...over and over and over... I talked about these things...to no avail. Because none of these things addressed the root cause of my anxiety, or even why those of us who are highly sensitive people are more prone to it....