positive thinking from self help books

[andy1992]

I know that positive thinking can often make a difference with SA.
But I found in self help books that the authors make it out to be the "be all and end all" for everything! For example, if you are failing in life it's mostly because you are too negative!
Well when i started off with positive thinking and stuff it helped quite a bit at first because I believed it would. After all the 'experts' are telling me this is the way to go. However I noticed that I started to think positive thoughts a lot of the time but manually and not naturally, even when I felt neutral or positive.. This ultimately drove me crazy because it didn't feel like it was my own mind speaking to myself, but was this artificial one that has been created from the self help franchise. An example, I'll say to myself the affirmation "I'm growing all the time" or something like that. it just doesn't feel like it's my thoughts or natural at all!It just got annoying and now I don't ever use such thoughts so much in the past few months.
Another aspect that I noticed was that the authors kind of made me feel guilty when I became negative. The idea of positive thinking is so strongly reccommended that whenever I think of times I felt negative, the authors made me feel like it was my fault for not being positive enough and not using all those affirmations when I became negative.
Has anyone else ever had this kind of outlook on positive thinking. Positive thinking can help in many cases, but it should somehow feel more natural in my opinion. I also think that sometimes it can be good to have some negativity as I find that after the negative period is over, I can then become more positive afterwards. I find this anyway.
Hope people understand me and my points I'm trying to get across. I'm terrible at explaining stuff like this!

[willow66]

i think the trick is to believe the affirmations as you say them, but i know what you mean. I think that the affirmations exist to make you accept certain thoughts and ways of viewing the world, you just have to accept them, which i guess is the tricky part.

[The_Fr33_Man]

Look up works by Nathaniel Branden, He talks about the psychology of self-esteem, and mentions many conditions such as SA and how to deal with it. And he's a genius.

I find positive thinking mainly evolves from rationalizing that what you feel is simply wrong and irrational. Bad feelings need not be, the world is a tabula rasa for anything to be accomplished, depression is merely an emotion, so is happiness, they both have the same weight and its your choice to follow both.

[slrrrrp]

I prefer realistic thinking: negative and positive thinking can both be bad news if they stray too far from reality.

Smile or Die is worth a read for an idea of the extremes of positive thinking.

[slrrrrp]

Originally Posted by The_Fr33_Man

Look up works by Nathaniel Branden, He talks about the psychology of self-esteem,

I don't know what that guy has written about self-esteem, but I'd prefer people to esteem their own individual actions rather than themselves - not for people to feel bad about it, but to do things differently: e.g. if I kept being insulting to people, I could hate myself for that, but it would be better if instead I hated being insulting and tried to change that behaviour.

Not sure if that makes any sense, but I'll post it anyway.