Pragmatic Optimism

I’m a pragmatist. My training and degrees are in mathematics. Bottom line for me is: Does this work?

I spent much of my life a pessimist—sure life sucked and always would for me. And it did. I worked on healing and was in intense pain while I did so. Life was scary and I hated myself and my relationships were not healthy.

It’s only in retrospect that I realized there was a whole other—and far easier and better—way to do things. That’s when I deliberately became an optimist. Now the healing that hadn’t been working started to work. Now my life began getting better. Now I found myself—finally!—moving forward. I actually began making real, concrete changes in my life that worked. I actually stopped being afraid. My life actually got good.

So I’m trying to look back and take apart what happened and describe it here.

1) I realized that I couldn’t force myself to do anything. I didn’t work that way. I had to WANT to do it and believe that I could. Which meant I needed to....

2) Work on believing in myself. That’s when I began making lists of successes in my life and what I was good at. Reasons to believe I could and would succeed. Which meant...

3) When there was something I needed to face or a change I needed to make, I looked at possible ways to do it and asked myself: Which step uses my strengths and talents? Which one feels like something I can do? That doesn’t mean the step was easy or fun, it means I chose the one that was EASIEST of possibly a bunch of difficult steps. And to motivate myself...

4) I knew that browbeating myself didn’t work. What would? Creating some kind of reward for myself each time I did something difficult. Example: When I went to see my therapist, on the way home—EVERY TIME—I would do something that made me smile—no matter how crappy I felt. I did that because otherwise I would never have kept going. Therapy was just too damn scary and hard if I didn’t build in some kind of reward. (And oh, yeah, as I’d get to the office, before I walked in, I’d take a deep breath and go over my list of reasons to believe I could succeed.) Even that wouldn’t have been enough if I didn’t.....

5) Visualize. I would imagine succeeding. I would imagine being free of the pain. I would imagine believing in myself. I would imagine standing up to the things that scared me. I would imagine being happy. And that helped give me the courage to go on. The funny thing is....

6) The more I did this—choosing to be an optimist, choosing to believe I could succeed, choosing to build in rewards—the easier things did get and the more progress I made. I actually began to be happy. First in short moments, then in minutes, hours, and finally days. Now, when faced with anything I don’t want to do I....

7) Imagine succeeding. Break it down into steps and ask myself which I can picture myself doing with the least resistance. Figure out how to make it fun OR how to build in some kind of reward. I focus on the good that could come out of the situation—no matter how awful it seems in that moment. And I do that because....

8) I’m a pragmatist. Of all the things I’ve tried, optimism is the only thing that ever worked. And I’ve faced awful things in my life. So terrible that I sometimes feel like: How can I be me when this happened to me? But I am. Because looking back, even in the depths of my pessimism, there was a part of me just too blasted stubborn to give up. There was a part of me determined to find a way to succeed—if only so I could thumb my nose at those who told me I never would.

The process of recovering from abuse will never be easy. I knew that early on. But I decided one day that just because other people had hurt me it didn’t mean I had to keep hurting myself. I decided that I didn’t give a damn what other people thought I should do or changes they thought I should make. I was going to heal MY way—which meant finding the least painful route through the process. I was going to believe I was going to be able to heal—no matter what anyone else believed, therapist or not. I was going to build rewards into every darned painful step of the way—so that I wouldn’t be tempted to stop because THAT would have been easier in the short run. I decided to focus on where I wanted to be with my life so that short term temporary satisfaction wouldn’t tempt me to give up on the steps I needed to take to get to where I wanted to be.

I couldn’t have made it, wouldn’t have made it without cold-bloodedly choosing to be an optimist. I’d have ended up dead—by my own hand. I say that bluntly with absolute certainty. What saved me was each time refusing to think of how and instead making lists of reasons not to. I look back and know how close I came—over and over and over again.

I’d still be stuck in the middle of the nightmare of what was once my life if I hadn’t found a way to build rewards into the process of growing and healing. I wouldn’t be where I am—happy NOW—if I hadn’t made a deliberate decision to find someway, no matter how hard it was, to find a reason to laugh at least 3 times a day, every day, no matter what was happening—and the worse the day, the more important it was to do this.

I hope this clarifies somewhat the things I was trying to say in my last couple of posts.

Sending blessings and safe and gentle (((((((hugs))))))),

April_optimist