Keeping A Positive Outlook When Things Look Bleak
The famous Willie Nelson once put the power of positive thinking into the simplest terms. “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones,” he described, “you’ll start having positive results.” Much science and philosophy exists which suggests that the mind can manifest what it sets an intention for. Positive thinking can and often does yield positive results. At time, positive thinking is an attempt at bypassing negative situations, which makes positive thinking inauthentic. Most other times, however, positive thinking has a deserved place in someone’s recovery life. Recovery is never a guarantee that life will never have negative circumstances again. You start to feel good in recovery, really good, so much better than you have felt in years that you start to think nothing bad could ever happen again. Unfortunately, life does happen on what is called “life’s terms”. Fortunately, recovery equips us to be present for all of those terms, to be challenged by them and confronted by them, but to walk through them victoriously. One of the ways we make it through life when things look bleak is by keeping a positive outlook. No matter what happens in our life, good or bad, positive or negative, we do not have to pick up a drink or a drug.
Innumerable circumstances are out of control in our lives. Realistically, the world is full of pain and suffering. Taking on the weight of the world through our personal lives or the lives of others is too much of a burden to bear. First, we have to connect with what is truly ours in our life and find gratitude for what is ours in our life. For example, if we are in recovery from drug and/or alcohol addiction, we can be grateful for our sobriety and maintained abstinence. If we are in recovery from a behavioral health disorder or a mental health disorder, we can be grateful for our periods of remission from difficult symptoms and the way our lives have changed. Beyond our experiences with recovery, we can find gratitude for our health, our relationships, and other parts of our lives which have grown.
For everything else, we can have two things: faith and hope. We can believe that life has the potential to get better, for ourselves and for everyone else. In that small mustard seed, we can find great comfort, which instantly changes our outlook from positive to negative. Life comes in ebbs and flows, ups and downs, good and bad. We can see this as an obnoxious, unrelenting roller coaster, or we can see this as a true balance which gives our life stability. Within the good there is bad. Within the bad there is good. If we maintain a positive outlook, we can get through the toughest of times, into the good times, and come out the other side, ready to deal with the tough times again.
You don’t have to live in shame or hiding of bipolar disorder, or any other mental illness. The sooner you can find acceptance, the sooner you can find healing. Your recovery path must be unique to you and your needs. O’Connor Professional Group offers concierge behavioral health services, custom curating your treatment path to fit your needs. Call us today for information on our treatment and recovery services: 617.910.3940
