How to Purge Negativity

A Guaranteed,* One-Step Program

Self-help programs feel onerous with twelve or twenty steps. You’re working on step number eight, and it fails because you forgot number seven.

Don’t let the multiple suggestions below fool you. Look at them as five alternatives, not five steps. There are two other techniques, called facing and replacing, but I don’t know how to do them. You’ll have to ask Lori Brown about those ones.

1. Visualization

Plunge a red-hot poker into your heart. Feel the sizzle when anger, resentment, and dread turn into steam. Watch them blow into the wind.

⚠ WARNING: Following this instruction literally will literally kill you. Please accomplish this purge figuratively. Also, don’t drink Clorox.

1. Resonance

Write your despair, disgust, and hopelessness on a stick. Use a sharpie on dry wood with the bark pulled off. Heave the stick into a woodland.

⚠ CAUTION: You might embarrass your spouse if you convince a family friend to employ this technique from the deck in your back yard. I speak from experience.

1. Confession

Seek the ear of a caring soul. Pour out your regrets, misgivings, and shame. Accept forgiveness.

⚠ CAUTION: Confess only to an invisible entity or a trusted professional. Confessing your insubordinate mindset to a boss could result in termination. I speak almost from experience.

1. Exaggeration

Turn irritation into drama. In other words, produce art. Edvard Munch probably painted The Scream after arriving by carriage in Oslo and discovering he left his luggage behind in Ådalsbruk.

⚠ CAUTION: Don’t exaggerate the overly critical attitude of a coworker into an archetypal poem about paternal rejection if the coworker reads poetry or has friends who might tell him about it. I might be speaking from experience.

1. Gratitude

Thank the Ultimate Presence for guilt, glumness, and fear. You learned a lot from them, right? Without pervasive gloom, there is no personal growth.

⚠ WARNING: If you pretend at more gratitude than appropriate to your attitude, you may bring on enough grief and horror to break your spirit.

Oh yeah, I forgot primal screaming, but what is there to say about that? It probably doesn’t work. Just ask my daughter. She used to accuse me of screaming. It never made anything better.

*To submit a money-back claim under the terms of the guarantee, write a seven-hundred-word essay on your failed attempt. Place the essay below as a comment. Within fourteen years, the author will contact you via private message with an email address to which you can reply with your physical address. If this story has earned $1.86 and was read by 19 people, then you will receive a check for ten cents.

Note to Illumination curator. Please categorize this story under “Self Improvement.”