#mondaymotivation is a twitter routine where people and organisations get all whoop whoop about how GREAT the beginning of the working week is. I work with small organisations to help create their social media strategy and know it can be useful to schedule a guaranteed-to-trend hashtag but unless it's truthful it's more than wasteful, it invites criticism.

My local college has been serving the community for a century offering excellent education in a Ward that is the joint first most deprived in London. It was recently sold to the Council in fairly strange circumstances - who are now going to demolish it to build houses. We have been promised that the College is simply relocating - and no doubt it will.

Many locals have been incensed by this and their detailed research has uncovered some alarming information about what looks like financial mismanagement of some description.  

All this is happening at a very high level and the day to day running of the College continues. Banners have been put up outside telling us to prepare for something wonderful and the social media is always good. But their #mondaymotivation post this morning was too revealing.

Another local organisation picked up on it and, to my joy, referenced an article debunking positive psychology. Then they referenced a blog that has been digging into the Colleges finances. 

“The Management Accounts up to 31 December 2016 indicate that the College will fall significantly short of its income target for the current year. The overall shortfall is expected to be in the region of £1.7 million.

Governors expressed concern at the dramatic change in financial forecasts compared to what was reported to the Board in October, where the then Management Accounts forecast a year-end surplus of £256k.”​ 

Oh dear.

I have no idea about what's really going on at the College but, from a psychological stance, this tweet exposes rather too much about the uncertainty and anxiety that college staff may be feeling.

The image seems based on purposefully alarming carnival entrances designed to let you know that you're entering a world where the usual rules don't apply. It's menacing and sinister and if you walk through the gaping mouth you are consenting to enter a world that you have been blatantly warned about. You give your consent for anything to occur, especially things that are frightening and disturbing, like being eaten up. The features are based on something that is human but horrifically distorted. Clowns are ambiguous: they're supposed to be hilarious and they're notoriously creepy. They say one thing and mean the opposite. The origin of clowning is in satire, where the Fool was able to tell hard truths to powerful people as long as he kept entertaining them. And everyone knows the narrative of the deeply unhappy clown.

I'm not going to say much about the nose on the gif other than that Freud would have a field day with it, and that my more analytical colleagues would have something to say about an unconscious reference to being conned. 

Positive thinking is clearly linked to denial. (Do a search for 'positive thinking denial'. The second image is of a clown with his fingers in his ears and his eyes tight shut.) Denial is a coping mechanism that allows us breathing space in which to adapt to new, unpleasant information, but refusing to accept that something is very wrong means that the world slips out of your control - like entering into a sinister carnival world. Cognitive dissonance makes the world seem confusing and threatening and, as any recovering addict will tell you, denial traps and isolates you, preventing change.

Positive thinking can result in the polar opposite of what we're told it's supposed to do, as it did today for the College. Their maniacally upbeat, ambivalently simple tweet has drawn some very serious attention that is way beyond what a social media team can be expected to deal with.

Organisationally, we always have to spin things to our advantage but this is a skilled and delicate job, one that requires complete awareness of reality and the avoidance of being seen to be misleading. Individually, attempting this kind of spin is more often than not denial at best, narcissism at worst. One way or another the truth shows itself, whether we know it or not. 




*I've not addressed the spelling mistake because it may be that the person who wrote the tweet doesn't speak English as a first language. And it adds to the post's incongruence.

There comes a point when you  have to take stock and say, “Things are bad.”
 
The beginning of the economic downturn saw a tedious increase in ‘experts’ telling us that positivity would make everything better. Thinking about what is good rather than bad and focusing on the good stuff really can build new neural pathways and change your attitude for the better. But it won't help if you want to walk across the road with your eyes shut.
 
Very quickly the suggestion that positivity can be helpful has turned into a demand. We live in a country where therapists are working with the DWP to make unemployed people go back to paid employment and where paid employment is suddenly perceived as a ‘positive health outcome.’  If you think that’s wonderful then you don’t care about evidence.
 
It is unethical, counterproductive and has no basis in fact. It speaks volumes about the desperation that many therapists are feeling.
 
Because you’re reading this it’s probable that you’re all too aware that things have been falling apart for some time. Many businesses can’t afford the materials and staff they need and so existing staff are working at the edges of their ability and capacity. Public services - the services we all use when we travel, get ill, expect an educated population or want our elderly relatives to have some kind of dignity – have been amputated. Things are falling apart. The most vulnerable amongst us have been telling us this for years. And now ordinary people who are not vulnerable are feeling it.
 

• Workplace bullying is at an all time high.  
• France is 30% more productive than we are.
• The suicide rate has gone stratospheric.
• Mental illness has increased significantly – and not just because of better awareness.
• Hate crimes are commonplace.

 
Cognitive dissonance is
 
 “the mental stress experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values; when performing an action that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, or values; or when confronted with new information that contradicts existing beliefs, ideas, and values.”
 
We all experience it from time to time but many of us are finding a home in this unbearable environment.
 
Demands for positivity have become authoritarian, insisting that we cut a smile into our face and do little dances of joy to demonstrate team spirit or something. Anyone saying, “My life is hard” is a shirker.  Anyone suggesting that motivational speeches don’t put food on the table is dismissed as unenthusiastic. People who want to care for a sick child are told that they must ‘arrange alternative childcare.’
 
How do you discern whether positivity indicates confidence or stupidity? Intelligence, good business strategy and the ability to avoid danger involves knowing when to cut our losses. The alternative is to continue staring at the sun, borrow unsustainable amounts of money, time and good will and crash disastrously.
 
Things are bad for most of us right now and, as adults, we need to look at facts rather than allow our prejudices and desires to rule us. Sterling is falling and the trend is downward. A 60-hour week is no longer unusual. (If you don’t work a 60 hour week that’s a good thing not an indication that you’re lazy.) Anxiety is twice as prevalent as depression. Our children are becoming more and more distressed.

If you’ve read my blog for a while you know I don’t like inspirational quotes and the pretence that everything will improve if we all just pull together and think happy thoughts. Now I’m saying that if you’re an ordinary person and you’re not feeling a bit crap that it’s likely that you’re ignoring something.
 
 

 This well-meaning attempt at positive psychology really sums up my mistrust of it.

I’m sure that the person who created it is rightly proud of their post-trauma achievements in the world and wanted to demonstrate that although they have experienced many more wounds since childhood they are now an adult, strong and capable and no longer felled by suffering.
 
But look at what is actually there.
 
A puppy has been shot with an arrow. S/he is nearly killed and certainly horrifically injured by it.

​Imagine a puppy being shot. 
 
Next to the puppy is an adult wolf. There are 22 arrows in her back. Her tail is between her legs and there is blood pooling beneath her. The caption is the equivalent of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger.”
 
What that puppy and the adult wolf need is emergency expert care. A lot of time, money and attention need to be spent on both of them. They need to be removed from danger, forever. In the UK that’s what animal shelters do: we don’t offer that to traumatised children or to many adults.
 
Apart from the obvious skill of the artist, the only thing I find useful in this image is that the wolf is looking at the unconscious puppy with something like compassion. As adults, that’s what we need to try to emulate for ourselves.

Often in therapy a person will try to look on the bright side, comparing themselves to starving children in Africa or drowning refugees and say, “Well, at least my life is better than theirs.” Perhaps. We can go on for many months saying, “Things aren’t so bad. I don't know why I'm getting these panic attacks/ feel so unhappy/ get so angry.” When the relationship between us is trusting enough and deep enough a client might remember a childhood trauma or relive it beyond their cognition – beyond it all being a memory – and really feel it again. They become vulnerable.
 
At this point a person can feel desperate for me to solve their problem, a problem that responsible adults did not treat with the respect or attention that was as necessary as food at that time. It can be heart-breaking to help the client understand that I cannot stand in the place of those adults from the past. My aim is to help the client find their own resources, from a place of vulnerability rather than from steel in the spine, to offer the love, care and comfort to their younger selves.
 
It is painful.
 
It is painful to acknowledge that we have been waiting all our lives for someone to do the right thing 50 years ago. It is painful to give up on that hope. It can be god-awful to know that we will never be rescued. It seems necessary to go through a period of protective cynicism, to say “Well fuck the world, then. What a bunch of shits everyone is.” And whilst this may have an element of truth to it we also need to move beyond cynicism and into a place of deep self-care.
 
Some clients will have spent time already speaking with their younger selves and found it beneficial. But when that speaking becomes listening, when it becomes a relationship of compassion between a frightened, injured little child and an empathic, loving, gentle adult then real healing can begin.
 
What doesn’t kill us can weaken us nearly to death and sometimes beyond it. Nietzsche, who coined the original phrase, spent the last years of his life in a catatonic state collapsing after witnessing a horse being thrashed almost to death. Nietzsche was a sensitive human being who, in addition to suffering widely debated medical conditions, experienced maddening horror when he witnessed cruelty.
 
You don’t have to turn into a wolf or become psychotic after trauma though there’s no blame if you do. Remaining fully human takes incredible bravery and hard work. Sadly, this kind of hard work doesn’t make you respectable. It just makes you a decent, loving, thoughtful, whole human being.