The Step Before Positive Thinking

Healing isn’t simply about learning to think positively.

For a long time, I thought there were positive thoughts and negative thoughts, good experiences and bad experiences, right things and wrong things.

But healing taught me there was another question I needed to ask first:

Is this healthy or unhealthy?

Because before I could teach myself to “think positively,” I had to understand what years of living in survival mode had taught my mind.

That’s the part I didn’t understand for most of my life.

Something unhealthy had happened to me. Actually, many unhealthy things had happened across different relationships, environments and seasons of my life.

What happened hurt me.

But eventually I discovered that healing wasn’t only about understanding what happened to me.

I needed to understand what living through it had taught my mind.

I didn’t know I was living in survival mode.

I didn’t know exactly when it began.

There wasn’t one event I could point to and say, “That’s the moment everything changed.”

I just knew that by my late 40s and early 50s, life had become incredibly difficult.

Eventually I stepped away from my job, much of my family and basically the life I had known.

For a while, my world became very small.

But for the first time, I was in my own space.

I felt safe there.

I could sit with the depression, the tears and the pain. I spent weeks doomscrolling. Memories flooded back. Triggers seemed constant.

I spent an enormous amount of time on social media and watching comedies simply trying to get through my days.

Then one day a video came across my feed.

Something made me stop.

Someone was describing something I felt but hadn’t known how to explain.

So I watched another.

And another.

I followed that person, and eventually my feed began showing me other people talking about things I recognized in myself.

At the time, I thought that was healing.

Eventually I got another job working remotely, and I began sharing my own healing journey.

Talking about what had happened was helping me.

I thought I was healing.

I didn’t realize I had only begun.

Then something changed.

The first thing I really noticed was my overthinking.

One Sunday, I was cleaning my house when suddenly I realized:

Wait. I haven’t overthought anything all weekend.

That was enormous for me.

Because overthinking had been such a normal part of my life that I hadn’t realized how much mental space it occupied until it wasn’t there anymore.

And that made me curious.

What am I doing differently?

I started paying attention.

The more changes I noticed, the more I wanted to understand them.

And eventually I realized something:

I was learning to think differently.

Not artificially positively.

Healthier.

My triggers were changing too.

At first, something from my past would surface and trigger an enormous emotional reaction.

But slowly, the same memories could return without creating the same response.

They were becoming exactly that:

memories.

They were things that had happened to me, but they no longer had the same power over what was happening inside of me today.

And something else fascinating began happening.

Memories continued surfacing even when they no longer triggered me.

For a while I wondered:

Why does my mind keep bringing this back? I thought I healed this.

Eventually I stopped asking what was wrong with me for remembering.

Instead, I became curious about what the memory might be showing me.

And that changed everything.

I stopped asking only who was right or wrong.

Instead, I started asking:

What was unhealthy here?

And suddenly I could see my life differently.

It wasn’t one person.

It wasn’t one relationship.

It wasn’t one job.

It wasn’t one traumatic experience.

There were patterns.

There were environments I kept trying to fit into.

Relationships I kept trying to fix.

Situations where I believed being “the bigger person” meant tolerating things that were hurting me.

Times I kept changing myself because I thought if I could just become easier, quieter, kinder, more understanding or more forgiving, eventually everything around me would become healthier.

But sometimes I wasn’t creating peace.

I was learning how to survive unhealthy environments.

And survival isn’t the same thing as living.

That realization changed the way I understood my entire healing journey.

Healing wasn’t just telling my story.

Talking about what happened helped me tremendously.

Being heard mattered.

Finding people whose experiences resonated with mine mattered.

Understanding trauma mattered.

But eventually I realized healing couldn’t end with:

“Look what happened to me.”

For me, the next question became:

“What did living through that teach my mind—and what do I want my mind to learn now?”

That’s where some of my deepest healing happened.

I began recognizing the survival patterns I had once believed were simply my personality.

The overthinking.

The catastrophizing.

The constant scanning.

The need to explain myself.

The fear of being misunderstood.

The emotional reactions.

The need to predict what might happen next.

And slowly, as I understood them differently, they began losing their grip on me.

I wasn’t forcing myself to “be positive.”

I was learning what healthy felt like.

And the healthier my thinking became, the less effort it seemed to require.

That’s why I believe there is a step before “think positive.”

You can’t always take a mind that has spent years protecting itself and simply tell it:

Think positively.

Sometimes you first have to understand why it learned to think the way it does.

What was it protecting you from?

What did you learn about yourself?

What did you learn about other people?

What did you learn about conflict?

Love?

Safety?

Rejection?

Failure?

Your own worth?

Then you can begin examining those lessons through a healthier lens.

Not:

“How do I make this negative thought positive?”

But:

“Is what my mind learned here actually healthy?”

That question changed my life.

You don’t survive trauma and automatically start living.

Sometimes you survive trauma by continuing to live in survival mode.

You function.

You work.

You raise children.

You have relationships.

You laugh.

You go places.

You accomplish things.

From the outside, you may look like you’re living.

But inside, your mind may still be surviving.

For me, healing became the journey from surviving life to actually living it.

And somewhere along that journey, I found God again.

Not simply believing God existed.

Not simply going to church.

I began learning what it meant to actually walk with God every day.

And that changed something else in me.

Peace.

The lessons didn’t stop.

Some were incredibly difficult.

But strangely, the harder some of those lessons became, the stronger my faith became too.

Because eventually I stopped believing that a difficult season meant God had abandoned me.

I began believing that whatever came next, I wouldn’t have to walk through it alone.

And maybe that’s the greatest difference between the woman who spent so much of her life surviving and the woman I am becoming now.

I used to believe peace meant nothing difficult was happening.

Now I know peace can exist while something difficult is happening.

Because healing didn’t erase my past.

It changed what my past was allowed to do inside of me.

My memories didn’t disappear.

My life didn’t become perfect.

Difficult things didn’t stop happening.

I became healthier.

And when my mind became healthier, I finally had room to stop surviving my life—

and start living it.