I’ve wanted to write this series for a while, but haven’t felt ready until very recently.  I try to write from personal experience and I will say upfront that writing about your own negativity can be hard.  Negativity is not a nice trait, and to be effective at explaining it and helping others with it, you have to be willing to discuss your own areas of personal “not-nice-ness”, places that are tender and weak and that breed dark things.  It’s one thing to be told how to be positive by a persistently perky person, but if they’re just wired to “happy”, do they know what you face inside every day?  Do they know the pain of self-sabotage and difficult relationships and personally created hells?   

Everyone has areas of negativity that need to be dissolved for optimum health and happiness — some people have more than others.  How much negativity you have within you is based on a lot of factors. 

Here are risk areas for potential negativity.  I will list these as personal traits or past experiences for reasons I will explain later.  You might have one or a number of these, ranging from mild to strong in severity:

Abuse in your past (physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual).  This includes physical violence, sexual molestation, rape, emotional battery, mental assault, spiritual restriction/repression, ranging from an isolated incident to living in conditions where these things occurred for a long period of time.

Mental illness (either diagnosed in you or in a family member with whom you grew up).  This includes everything from depression to bipolar to various personality disorders.  Mental illness affects the mind, which includes perceptions.  A person acting under the influence of mental illness will not behave the way a normal mentally-healthy person will behave, and as a result, can do damage to those around them very easily, especially the young.  If we love that person, it can be even more damaging as we are more likely to internalize their actions.

Major loss (death, destruction of home or family).  Major loss, especially when young or still dependent, can cause a sense of “life being against you” or a fear of future loss.  Fear is a majorly debilitating form of negativity, especially when worry-based.

Poverty (lack of necessities, including a lack of love and nurturing).  Includes physical poverty in forms of not having enough food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, but also includes a lack of emotional support or mental engagement with others.  A lack of love and nurturing creates as much of an energetic impoverishment for some as being without food.

Stress (either from a traumatic event or traumatic surroundings).  Stress can be transitory or, in some circumstances, a way of life. 

Lack of mentoring from parents or other guides.  Most people are not taught how to monitor their thoughts or their emotions, about the connections between them, and how to divide what is real from what is merely perceived.  Without these skills, negativity breeds easily.

Natural mindset.  In the whole nature-versus-nurture argument, there are some things with which we are simply born.  I believe that some people are born with a potential for accumulating negativity.  It’s just “how you’re wired”.  This isn’t to say you can’t learn new skills, just that you have an affinity with darker energies that others never truly encounter or understand.  This is very normal for Witches, as we must work with Light and Shadow equally. 

Fixed personalities.  Includes both people who have serious trouble with change as well as people who are older and more set in their ways.  Everyone has a degree of “fixedness” in them.  Astrological charts can help you determine how “fixed” your personality might be — look at how many planets you have in Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius (give more weight to the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars being in fixed signs).  Combine a Fixed personality with other negative risk factors above, and you have someone who is likely going to stay in a negative rut unless jostled out.

Social conditioning.  Our media and entertainment industries are geared to make us focus on the negative.  The old line “If it bleeds, it leads” in mass communications classes is a good example.  Do not underestimate the effect of reading/hearing about deaths, rapes, missing children, natural disasters, political scandal, immoral activity, crimes, drugs, murders, and wars on the baseline psyche of human society.

Being unaware of negative potential.  Many negative people are unconscious of their own negativity, and what you do not know you are doing, you cannot change. 

Company of other people who are victims of negativity.  This tends to go hand in hand with being unaware of one’s own negative potential.  Negativity has a frequency, like any other kind of energy.  It doesn’t harmonize well with positive energy (unless the negative person can tap into and drain the positive energy from the “up” person — also known as a form of psychic vampirism).  But negativity harmonizes well with other negativity.  The phrase “misery loves company” speaks to this.  Negativity expands exponentially when combined with others’ negativity — hence the reason “bitch sessions” and “mob mentality” have very real power.

This list is by no means complete, though I do believe I’ve covered most bases.  Could you see yourself in any of these situations or statements?  Don’t be afraid to admit it to yourself — it’s okay.  You can’t be any worse than my count:  I had them all.

Let me shine a ray of hope for you.  Negativity is not an externally created state.  It is created and maintained within yourself.  If you feed and water negativity, it will grow as quickly as ivy or kudzu (a tenacious vine seen especially here in the South where I live).  If you can cut out the root, you can destroy it.  It does not have to take over your life and pull down your good memories in a tangle of fears and anxiety and anger and depression.  But like any vine, negativity must be tended with vigilance and without mercy or it will creep into all areas.  It can be hard to do that first clearing out of your own negativity — just as it’s hard to uproot an ivy patch — but once it’s done, minimal and regular checks to yank up negativity “creepers” becomes second nature.

I’m here to help you with your negativity, to help make your life better from the inside out.  In the next couple of weeks (and for longer, if I find more to say about the topic), I’ll be sharing with you my experiences of one of the most important pieces of magick you can work for yourself.  I’ll give you some tools — but remember, tools only do work if you actually use them.  I’ll share some insights about negativity and how you can recognize you’re getting “in that bad place”.  I’ll tell you some personal stories about my life and what created my “negativity set-point” and about the difficult relationship situations that showed me that I needed to change. 

If you are ready, joy awaits you.  I promise.

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).