This question brought most participants into a direct encounter with the very idea of a negative thought and the meaning perspective that drives that thought. When students and others answered, they often spoke from a very real place inside them. They intuited immediately the implication of "negative thought." Such thoughts turn our past mistakes and actions into a motivation for self-condemnation and even degradation. We think bad and even destructive things about ourselves, sometime even crippling things. Their answers tended to the spontaneous. Many came under the general idea, "I'd be really mad at myself." This response shows the rather exquisite subtlety of a meaning perspective in its defense of itself and the status quo of our identity. Even as the question breaks through into a questioning and critical reflection on a meaning perspective about such negative thoughts, the meaning perspective immediately turns the positive reflective response into a negative: "Thinking untrue negative thoughts about myself makes me a very bad person who deserves my anger if not outrage." The liberating possibilities of the critical moment caused by the question become another negative thought, and off we go again. We wind up right back where we began. It works like a positive self-justification of the negative.
Another common response came in this very declarative form: "That's impossible." When we discussed that response, it turned out that the speaker felt that the mistakes and actions of the past which didn't work out well deserved negative thinking. The meaning perspective works something like this:
Making a mistake means I have done something wrong. If it's wrong, then it's bad. If I do bad things, I must be a bad person. Bad persons deserve negative thoughts. That means that my negative thoughts are true.
Much of this fits into a previous discussion about the positive nature of mistakes. They can teach if we want to learn. If we want to punish ourselves, we only learn to think more and more negatively about ourselves. That's a choice we make even if it has become so automatic we forget that it remains a choice. If the negative meaning perspective makes the choice, we will see only the negative. If we experience the past through our becoming self, we will find those same occurrences, but we will see entirely different meanings. Our becoming self doesn't want to seek the past to innumerate our failures. We seek the past to learn the lessons that for which we have paid dearly. The "impossible" becomes the practical and the inevitable. When we tell the story of our past, we can transform ourselves from the bad guy to the hero and still report every detail honestly. In our terms here, we speak even more honestly than when we reported ourselves as the bad guy. All the difference comes in the storyteller's choices in the telling.
The last infrequent but still possible response came from students and others who spoke with emphasis: "That would be wonderful." This critical moment brings with it a vision or a feeling of a future in which mistakes become learning and simply form part of the development of life and the becoming self. The burden of negative thinking about ourselves is lifted. The energy needed to support that negativity becomes freed, and our liberation opens us to our present and our future in a way we had not perceived before. This represents the transformative. It may feel difficult in some ways, but in the end it feels gentle, natural, and wonderful. In the dominator model no gain happens without loss. In transformative learning, we lose nothing and gain everything.