Yes

by Maylin Ramos

Created on: July 30, 2011

Why would anyone choose to remain under traumatic stress when it can be easily erased; a perfect opportunity for a clean slate in life with the help of one pill? Ask those who truly need a fresh start if they wouldn’t take it. How many individuals would not be filled with gratitude when presented with such an incredible opportunity?

Examples

First, let’s present the main concern for character. Most believe that people are who they are based on traumatic experiences and that healing from those things would require that individual to become at a great loss of character. Explain this to someone who has been rapped at an early age and can’t seem to forget the past and occasionally relives it in the mind? Or how about a woman who has been abused by her ex-husband and is still not able to have a functional relationship ten years later? Or how about the child who was abandoned by her father and now has trouble relating with men?

Nature

It is absurd that anyone would be presented with the opportunity to behold the reversible instant of their life’s downfall and not grasp it with all might. Why ‘embrace’ a painfully traumatic experience in hopes of a positive outcome with no basis or need for it? Is emotional health and well-being not important enough?

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America, that author provides examples to how thinking positive all the time about everything even when presented with physical evidence that things will be otherwise, is neither intelligent, nor actually positive in nature. Also, according to Janyce Harayda, “No less important: A blurred line exists between innate optimism – which may be genetic — and the enforced optimism of disciplines like “positive psychology” and the “prosperity gospel.” To what extent are advocates of “positive thinking” creating an attitude and to what extent are tapping or reinforcing one that’s already there?” (1)

Fate versus destiny

Situations in nature are a mixture of; what happens to you, how you react to it, and what you do about it afterwards. However, humans are generally in control of their own destiny. “Fate ‘ the preordained course of your life that will occur because of or in spite of your actions. Destiny ‘ a set of predetermined events within your life that you take an active course in shaping.” (2)

Disease

“Empirical results from epidemiological studies on pain-depression comorbidity in primary care and population samples have shown that: (a) pain is as strongly associated with anxiety as with depressive disorders; (b) characteristics that most strongly predict depression are diffuseness of pain and the extent to which pain interferes with activities…” (3) Therefore, an individual’s emotional health has been directly correlated to the onset of physical and mental diseases.

WORK CITED

(1)    Harayda, Janyce. ‘Smile or Die’-Barbara Ehrenreich. 10/27/2009 http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/%E2%80%98smile-or-die%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-barbara-ehrenreich%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98bright-sided-how-the-relentless-promotion-of-positive-thinking-has-undermined-america%E2%80%99/

(2)    http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/difference-between-fate-and-destiny/

(3)    “The British Journal of Psychiatry”. 1996 http://www.pain-initiative-un.org/doc-center/en/docs/The%20Relationship%20Between%20Pain%20and%20Depression.pdf

Learn more about this author, Maylin Ramos.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.