Change your attitude?

This is an essay I wrote in a Facebook Note, and I felt it was also worth sharing.  The Note was titled:  Change your attitude?  In a way it could be applied to the theme of this blog in terms of victims' perspectives. 

Whenever anyone is negative about work, school, or the doldrums of life, it’s not unusual to hear someone say, “Change your attitude.”  It’s supposed to be a positive statement, but in my honest opinion, it’s not natural.  It’s not good to just change your attitude about anything negative or painful.  Try telling that to a Holocaust survivor and their terrible memories.  O, just change your attitude and learn to like the Nazis….no.

While on the point of the Holocaust, I remember listening to an inspirational tape by Earl Nightingale, and he was a Holocaust survivor who believed in changing one’s attitude.  I give him kudos because he underwent indescribable cruelty.  He talked about his experiences being vivisected by the Nazi scientists.  The Nazis could do virtually anything, but he realized they could not control his choice of thoughts.  He could either feel like crap while scalpels were cutting into him, or he could change his attitude toward the situation.  I don’t know how anyone could be happy while undergoing vivisection, but I couldn’t call him phony for “changing his attitude.”

I thought about this for awhile because I always thought it was flaky and insensitive to tell people to just change their attitudes.  Then something clicked.  Vivisection is unspeakable enough that medical schools ban its practice on animals.  It’s traumatic for a human.  With trauma, come the mind’s defenses to get through it.  In psychology, they are called ego-defense mechanisms.  Changing your attitude is an ego defense mechanism, specifically Reaction Formation.  In order for Nightingale to get through the torture, he had to form an alternative reaction.

Besides extremes like torture, we are expected to change our attitudes when faced with problems.  For instance, if you hate math, staring at your homework and grumbling for a few hours will not get it done quicker.  If you pretend to like it, it gets done quicker.  It may be fake, but it works, and it’s better than feeling miserable.

Though in some cases, changing your attitude is not the best idea.  Let’s say you work at a department store and you don’t believe in the store’s overburdening policy to force-sell credit cards on every customer, driving more people into debt.  Bosses and stupid posters say “Change your Attitude.”  The reason for this is to keep you in your place.  Retailers have high employee turnovers, so management wants to retain its subordinates by keeping them “happy.”  If you choose to change your attitude, then, OoooHHhh my goooshhhh I LOVE SELLING CREDIT CARDS TO THESE DEBT-LOVING CUSTOMERS……This isn’t the only option.  You can get another job.  Then maybe your boss can change his/her attitude about the employee turnover rate.

You shouldn’t have to change your attitude all the time.  Sometimes it’s a good thing, and other times, it’s not healthy.  If you are in the military, should you have to change your attitude toward killing?  If you are a rape victim, should you just change your attitude toward rape?  There’s always that flaky person who says, “You have a choice.  You can either feel horrible or you can change your attitude and think happy thoughts.”  Try telling that to child porn victim!  Changing your attitude is not the best idea, despite it being advertised as such – it’s not the only idea.

Your initial feelings and thoughts are your truest reactions to any situation.  Changing your attitude masks those honest feelings with alternative, secondary emotions that we make ourselves feel.  It can be an emotional crutch, but you don’t always need a crutch.  It represses or denies our real feelings.  If someone changes their attitude too often, emotional compromise becomes habitual and at some point, the person may be confused on what their natural feelings really were.  They have emotionally lied to themselves so long that they don’t even know what their real attitude is anymore.

Tom Sawyer changed his attitude toward painting a fence to deceive the neighborhood kids to help him finish the chore/punishment.  The idea is that he changed his attitude as a means of deception.  Tricking yourself into liking math will get you through your homework so you can play your video games sooner.  Although changing your attitude may help to an extent, but if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

Instead of creating attitudes to protect your true but vulnerable feelings, embrace your honest feelings.  Even though sadness may be horrible, it’s at least real.  Tears release toxins.  Anger is your mind’s alarm system, letting you know something is wrong.  Sweeping your problems under the carpet will build up over time.  Even though sadness and anger are painful, they are a part of your psyche.  Denying the fact that you hate certain things is ignoring part of your character.  Get to know yourself for how you really feel and think.  Self awareness is the first step of self-actualization.

Changing your attitude is not the best answer to life’s problems.  Learning to like a messy house will not keep the cockroaches away.  (Don’t learn to like the cockroaches, either).  Instead, look at the problem from different angles.  Don’t change your view.  Change your viewpoint.  By viewpoint, I mean an intangible standing point to view a scenario.  From there you can draw more than one judgment and develop many attitudes naturally.  Keep your first view, because all views equally exist, just like your attitudes whether you repress them or not.  Instead of thinking like someone else, you can think like many different people.  It’s multi-dimensional thinking.  Looking at situations from multiple angles enables analytical abilities.  Take into account the positive, negative, and neutral standpoints.  If you only think positively, then you are ruling out the negative, which is biased – not positive.

Here are my key points.

1. Changing attitude is Reaction Formation, an ego defense mechanism.
2. Like other ego-defense mechanisms, they can be good or bad.
3. Don’t change your attitude if you have other options.
4. Don’t change your view.  Change your viewpoint.
1. Look at things from multiple stances.
5. Your first feelings are your most honest.
6. If you can, embrace your feelings, and know yourself.

If you are traumatized, don’t pretend you aren’t.  If you hate stuff, you don’t have to pretend you love those things – unless you need to tackle the chores or homework, then just fake it for awhile.  If you have a problem, do something about it.

I’m just throwing this in here.  I once read that some murderer was happy while being executed.  While the lethal injection was being administered, he said, “This is awesome!”  Did he change his attitude or was that his real attitude?

Curious to note, when Earl Nightingale said he changed his attitude towards vivisection, he did not mention what his new attitude was.

©2015 Caroline Friehs

Originally posted to Facebook:  February 5, 2014

Posted to Blogspot:  October 3, 2015