Positive thinking is embraced by many recovering addicts as a potential tool for sobriety. The term describes the process of changing your thought patterns in order to change your life. It hinges on the belief that if we put out positive energy into the world by framing our experiences in positive terms, we will feel better and act with more agency.
However, this approach has some significant limitations. Can positive thinking really help you avoid relapse?
‘Think positive! Your problem is that you always focus on the negative.’
I’ve heard a variation of these words hundreds of times throughout my adult life. When suffering from depression, I was advised to think positive. When I was in recovery from addiction, well-meaning friends implored me to just stop thinking anxious thoughts. That way, I wouldn’t end up using substances to drown them out.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t work. Positive thinking can seem like good advice, but in the end it is at best a plaster on the most complex kind of wound.
What’s wrong with positive thinking? Are there alternative ways to change your thoughts and avoid relapse?
The Problem With Positive Thinking
Research has shown that changing your thoughts can help change your emotions and behaviors. Shouldn’t this mean that positive thinking works?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Where positive thinking falls short is that this approach is not about changing your thoughts. Rather, it advises you to turn your mind away from those thoughts and replace them with others.
This may work to distract you from the thought momentarily, but you will get pulled back to it. Your emotions won’t change so easily and those feelings you’re trying to push away will come back stronger. Furthermore, no matter how much you might want to stop your negative thoughts, you can’t force yourself to believe the positive ones.
is also important to acknowledge that positive thinking isn’t always appropriate. After a tragedy, you do not want to think only positive thoughts, as that makes it difficult to mourn your loss. And when preparing for a crisis situation, you need to think about what might go wrong.
In other words, if you fall into a deep hole, thinking only of the positives will not help you get out of it.
This is why positive thinking cannot help you avoid relapse. It may keep you from wallowing right now, but when push comes to shove, the negative thoughts and feelings will flood right back.
However, the foundation of positive thinking is not entirely flawed.
Challenging Your Thoughts With CBT
I mentioned the research that shows that changing your thoughts can change your feelings and behaviors. This reality provides the basis for cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
CBT is a very practical and effective therapy that is widely used today. It provides skills which you can use to change your thinking. But it’s not about replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. Rather, it is about challenging the faulty thinking that is both a symptom of and contributor to mental illness.
For example, someone struggling with addiction might have the thought:
‘Everything I do hurts people I love.’
CBT teaches the person how to challenge the thought. The therapist asks what evidence they have for the thought. Then they ask what evidence they have that contradicts the thought, such as occasions on which they have helped others.
At this point, the thought can already be reframed as:
‘I have done things which hurt people I love.’
This statement does not have nearly as much sting as the previous one. Additional questions then take this even further. Why did you do those things? What mitigating factors were there? Do these instances truly say something about who you are as a person?
A New Way of Thinking
Positive thinking focuses on how positive or negative the thoughts are but doesn’t provide a new framework.
CBT works because it takes the person through a journey, slowly teaching them how to think in a different way. This new way of thinking does not deny reality or turn away from the negatives. In fact, it takes the person closer to reality, so that they no longer think of themselves as being defined by what the original thoughts said about them.
When it comes to avoiding relapse, CBT teaches the person the skills to take a moment to identify why they have the craving to use substances in this moment. The thought that arises can then be challenged rather than taken as the truth. This helps bring the person to the understanding that they don’t need to use substances to feel better.
Conclusion
The idea behind positive thinking is attractive to many people. Everyone would like to be able to only think positive thoughts. But it doesn’t go to the root of the issue. As such, it doesn’t work for most people as a tool to avoid relapse.
That does not mean that changing your thoughts can’t help you. With techniques taught by therapies like CBT, you can think differently about life by facing the tough thoughts head on and taking away their power.
