Essay No. 8 - The Positivity Trap
Being positive has in our time become something that is not only appreciated, but often expected, and there is an unspoken stigma around not being so. As if a smile, a cheerful tone of voice, or an optimistic attitude were a sign of maturity, while gravity, doubt, or sadness signal that something is wrong. For many, this creates a constant pressure to perform, a feeling that one should be positive, and quite often we force ourselves into it, not because it is true but because it is considered better. At the same time, there is no doubt that genuine positivity is attractive. People who naturally radiate warmth, openness, and joy attract others, not because they say the right things, but because something in their presence feels lighter. It is not a technique, it is a state, and they often do not need to make an effort, it just is there in how they move through life. Around such people, others feel better.
The problem arises when we confuse natural being with a forced attitude, when positivity becomes something you do rather than something that arises, because then we have already started to move into the trap. We live in a world built on polarity. Positive and negative. Plus and minus. Yin and yang. There is nothing judgmental in it per se, it is just how energy, movement, and life work, it is the tension between the poles that creates flow, and somewhere in between a neutral state arises, a constant oscillation between extremes.
There is an old idea about this within the hermetic tradition, a collection of philosophical principles attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which has circulated in various forms through Western thought for over two millennia. One of the principles, that of polarity, states that everything in existence exists in pairs of opposites, and that the opposites are fundamentally the same phenomenon, only on different degrees of the same scale. Cold and warm are not two distinct things, just different points on one and the same temperature. The idea is that we as humans are here to explore these very poles, wealth and poverty, health and illness, to learn something through the experience of them that we would not otherwise have accessed. Those who have learned the lesson no longer need to pendulum as hard between the extremes and end up more in the middle, in the neutral state. Those who have not yet understood why a certain polarity recurs in life continue instead to hit their head against the same wall, over and over again, until the insight finally makes it no longer necessary.
One step beyond polarity is the idea of non-duality, not only that the poles are the same thing in different degrees, but that the division into poles is in itself a human construct, a way our consciousness organizes reality in order to function within it. Positive and negative, up and down, I and you, are labels that make the world manageable, but in the reality the concept of non-duality points to, there is no such division at all, only a single, undivided whole. It is almost impossible for a human mind to truly conceive of this, because the mind itself is built to differentiate. But it is worth bearing in mind nonetheless, as a reminder that the words positive and negative are only tools we use to function in everyday life, not truths about how reality is actually constituted.
We have learned that positive is good and negative is bad, that some emotions are desirable and others should be avoided, and certainly one can see how life takes on different characteristics depending on where one tends to find oneself. A positive spiral often carries with it lightness, that things fall into place, movement, vitality, a feeling of tailwind. A negative spiral feels heavier, more like a struggle, like walking against the wind.
This is what David Hawkins points to in his idea of power versus force, a distinction between two completely different ways of moving through life. Force, he argues, is power that operates through resistance, by pushing, controlling, or forcing an outcome, and it is always exhausting, because it is based on struggle against something. Power is its opposite, a force that operates effortlessly, that attracts rather than pushes, anchored in things like peace, love, and truth. Hawkins built an entire scale of human states based on this idea, a map of consciousness levels where emotions like shame, fear, and anger are low and operate through force, while courage, love, and joy are high and operate through power, with a clear breaking point somewhere in between. He believed that those who want to change their lives, or for that matter the world around them, rarely gain anything by pushing from the outside. The real change occurs by raising one's own inner level, because then the way one meets the world changes by itself, without struggle.
But this is where it becomes important to be precise, because positivity that arises naturally is not the same as positivity that is forced. When we try to force ourselves to think positively, maintain a positive attitude, or repeat positive affirmations while what we actually feel is something entirely different, we create an inner division. That is no longer positivity. That is masking.
This has been particularly prominent in a culture that has strongly emphasized "positive mindset," the idea that if you just think right, feel right, and focus right, you can achieve anything. Much of this is based on what is commonly called the law of attraction, the idea that what we direct our attention and emotions toward tends to attract more of the same, that like attracts like, not just in action but in vibration. Certainly, there is power in thoughts that are genuinely rooted in the body and feeling, but when positivity is used to avoid feeling what hurts, to avoid sadness, anger, hopelessness, or fatigue, then it becomes false. False positivity does not create lightness. It creates dissonance.
This is where the positivity trap closes. Then we send out something that is not true, dress ourselves in positivity while what is actually going on inside us is something completely different. This disguise is always revealed, not necessarily in words, but in what we radiate, above all in our energetic signature. It is always the honest feeling that carries the most information, no matter how well-articulated our positive words are.
This becomes especially clear in people who have completely internalized the idea that they ought to be positive. I have a friend who again and again believes there is something wrong with her when she doesn't feel happy, light, or positive. She judges herself harshly in those moments, blames herself, tries to correct herself into a "better" self. Right there, the positivity trap is seen in its most naked form, not because she is negative, but because she does not allow herself to be anything other than positive without judging it. When positivity becomes the norm, everything else becomes a failure.
I recognize this in myself too. There have been periods in my life where I have used affirmations, put up notes with positive words, said encouraging things to others even though I myself did not feel positive, sometimes to cheer up, sometimes to create atmosphere, sometimes because I believed it was right. Sometimes it actually serves its purpose, can be a social choice, a temporary strategy, a way of not burdening others with one's inner state at that moment. The problem does not arise there. It arises when it becomes unconscious or forced falseness, when positivity is used maniacally to avoid feeling, and when one begins to believe that there is something wrong with oneself as soon as the positive feeling is not there.
There are theories that say if you smile, it's contagious, that if you behave positively long enough, the state changes from within, and sure, temporarily it can work. It can be a plaster, a shortcut, a way to turn a state for the moment. But if it's used to avoid what's actually happening, it doesn't lead to a lasting positive being, but to increased fragmentation, because the most powerful change doesn't happen when we try to be positive, but when we stop being dishonest. When we allow the whole spectrum to exist and take responsibility for who we are and what we send out, without playing roles. This doesn't mean always saying exactly what you feel or dumping your inner state on others. It means stopping lying to yourself.
It is often said that our thinking creates our reality. Think positive. Stay positive. Your thoughts create your reality. Certainly, thinking influences, but what in practice shapes our lives are not the thoughts themselves, but how true they are in relation to what we actually feel. It is the feeling, the frequency, that always precedes the thought. Within this way of thinking, where Hawkins' scale is an example, emotions are seen not just as psychological states but as energies with different vibrational rates; heavy emotions like shame, guilt, and fear have a lower frequency, light emotions like love, joy, and peace have a higher one. Honesty about the feeling one actually carries is considered a high frequency even when the feeling itself is heavy, because truth carries a higher vibration than denial, while forced positivity, however bright it sounds, drops in frequency because it rests on a lie.
When a positive thought matches a genuinely positive feeling, when it is not forced or constructed, there is congruence. Then it carries power, then it is reflected back into life. But when the thought is positive and the feeling miserable, it is always the feeling that wins, then dissonance arises, and no matter how much one tries to think one's way through it, it is impossible to force a lasting shift.
I am not saying this to deny that some actually manage to turn their state around through positive impulses. I have done so myself many times, listened to music, quotes, books, words that pointed in another direction. Sometimes it has helped. Sometimes it has created a temporarily brighter state. But what lay beneath has always remained, no matter how well I managed to change the surface.
The real shift came only when I stopped trying to be positive and instead allowed what was to be, and the paradox is that the more I did that, the more positive I became, not as a strategy but as a consequence, not because life always felt easy, but because the resistance released. It is perhaps there that the positivity trap finally dissolves, not through better thoughts but through more honest presence. When we stop demanding a certain state from ourselves and instead meet what is, often what we have always tried to create arises, not forced, not conditioned, but as a natural being.
Positivity that truly carries weight is never conditional. It is not done to get something back, to be liked, or to create a certain response. It arises naturally when one no longer tries to manipulate one's state, and often shows itself only when we stop demanding of ourselves to be a certain way. When we force ourselves to be positive even when life feels like shit, even when we are sad, angry, or resigned, we often think we are bypassing the difficult. In reality, we are digging deeper into our own grave, because what we avoid does not disappear, it just packs tighter, becomes heavier, more compact.
The highest honesty is always the feeling that is actually there, and the highest wholeness lies not in replacing it with something "better" but in allowing it to fully exist. Feeling works best as a compass rather than a definitive answer. Fear, like fear-based thoughts, almost always comes from the ego, from an attempt to protect, control, or predict. Joy and inspiration, on the other hand, come from something deeper, what I would call one's true essence. The difference is not that one feeling is wrong and the other right, but that they point in different directions, and if you listen to which way they point without judging them, rather than suppressing them or forcing their opposite, they also tend to move through you faster, instead of getting stuck.
It is only when we stop pretending to be someone other than who we are in the moment that something begins to move.
The solution to the positivity trap is therefore not to become more positive. It is to become more truthful. To acknowledge what one actually feels, thinks, and is, without trying to improve it, justify it, or clothe it in more beautiful words. When we do that, the so-called negative emotions quickly lose their power; they are allowed to flow through instead of being held onto. As humans, we cannot resist the truth for very long; it is the resistance that takes energy, not the feeling itself. When honesty is allowed to take its place, something unexpected often arises, a lightness that is not forced, a warmth that is not artificial, and sometimes, only then, what we had always tried to create by being positive.