About gratitude and positive thinking...

Moses with the ten commandments.

[Slightly updated April 8]. I came to think of what Miller has written about gratitude and positive thinking (something about encouragement, in society, therapy, by friends in social life etc., to feel gratitude and think positive even when there are no reasons for it, or how Miller wrote? As if one can decide what to feel either? As a sort of moral? A moral prescription? For which you are even admired and get accepted sometimes, and even are rewarded? And if you aren't grateful or positive thinking you get punished and maybe even rejected in some circumstances) and searched on it and found her article “What is hatred?” where she for instance writes:

“Hatred is only a feeling, albeit a very strong and assertive one. Like any other feeling, it is a sign of our vitality. So if we try to suppress it, there will be a price to pay. Hatred tries to tell us something about the injuries we have been subjected to, and also about ourselves, our values, our specific sensitivity. We must learn to pay heed to it and understand the message it conveys. If we can do that, we no longer need to fear hatred. If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.

The almost universal, but in fact highly destructive, injunction to forgive our ‘trespassers’ encourages such self-betrayal. Religion and traditional morality constantly prize forgiveness as a virtue, and in numerous forms of therapy it is erroneously recommended as a path to ‘healing.’ But it is easy to demonstrate that neither prayer nor auto-suggestive exercises in ‘positive thinking’ are able to counteract the body's justified and vital responses to humiliations and other injuries to our integrity inflicted on us in early childhood. The martyrs' crippling ailments are a clear indication of the price they had to pay for the denial of their feelings. So would it not be simpler to ask whom this hatred is directed at, and to recognize why it is in fact justified? Then we have a chance of living responsibly with our feelings, without denying them and paying for this ‘virtue’ with illnesses.

I would be suspicious if a therapist promised me that after treatment (and possibly thanks to forgiveness) I would be free of undesirable feelings like rage, anger, or hatred. What kind of person would I be if I could not react, temporarily at least, to injustice, presumption, evil, or arrogant idiocy with feelings of anger or rage?

Would that not be an amputation of my emotional life? If therapy really has helped me, then I should have access to ALL my feelings for the rest of my life, as well as conscious access to my own history as an explanation for the intensity of my responses. This would quickly temper that intensity without having serious physical consequences of the kind caused by the suppression of emotions that have remained unconscious.”

And I got a hit on an interview with her “Violence Kills Love: Spanking, the Fourth Commandment, and the Suppression of Authentic Emotions - Interview given by Alice Miller to Borut Petrovic Jesenovec in June 2005 for the magazine ONA (Slovenia)” where it for instance stands:

The interviewer: Positive thinking is just as harmful as religious injunctions to forgive and love those who hate us. Should we avoid new age self-help manuals?

AM: Yes, you are right. ‘Positive thinking’ is in no sense a remedy, as it is a form of self-deception, it is a flight from the truth and cannot help because the body knows better. In my recently published article on my website, ‘What is Hatred?’ I explain this point more extensively. I do the same in my latest book, which will soon be published in your language [‘The Body Never Lies’?].”

And see this article “Does Morality Harm Children? Alice Miller On Morality and Poisonous Pedagogy” by William L. Fridley. Yes, that about traditional morality! "Honor thy..."