I am really sick of people telling me that if I somehow had a better attitude, then everything would be better for me. I am sick of it for many reasons. First, it assumes that I do not already have a good attitude. Maybe I do, maybe I do not, but not one person who has counseled me, uninvited counseling, to have a positive attitude knew enough about my life to know whether or not I had a so-called positive attitude.
In the following TED talk, Stella Young describes another reason why I am sick of this so-called advice.
And that quote,
The only disability in life is a bad attitude,the reason that that’s bullshit is because it’s just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never.
I use a more aggressive example. I ask people if they believe that the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis would have survived if each of them had been more positive. Three days ago, when the last person who told me that all I need to do is to stop thinking about the past and have a positive attitude, I asked him that would have helped the six million Jews. He sincerely told me that those victims would not have died if they had maintained a better attitude.
Another criticism that people level at me–and does not seem related to positive attitudes–is that I have a victim mentality
. Hearing the above person tell me that the victims of the Holocaust would not have died if they had been most positive helped me realize that You have a victim mentality
and You just need a better attitude
are wrong for the same reason: both of those statements blame the victims for the bad things that other people did to them.
To say that every Jew who died would have lived if they had been positive is to ignore the horribly wrong actions of the people around the victim. Whether or not I have a positive attitude, the truth is that some people have done illegal and/or immoral things that hurt me. If I speak the truth that I have been the victim of bad acts, that does not mean I have a victim mentality. It only means I am speaking the truth.
If you want to focus on my attitude but not acknowledge the illegal actions that have damaged my life, then you are no different than they guy who claims that positive attitudes would have saved the victims of the Holocaust.
