Alana Stewart is currently promoting her book about her 30-year friendship with the late Farrah Fawcett. While interviewing her, CNN’s Campbell Brown observed that Stewart doesn’t “sugarcoat” the difficulties Fawcett and those around her experienced in dealing with her terminal illness. Stewart said she was being consistent with the fact that Farrah didn’t sugarcoat her situation in the documentary she (Farrah) made about her battle with cancer.
Brown was being complimentary. “Sugarcoat” has a negative connotation – it means misrepresenting an undesirable objective fact in a positive direction. But when people are first diagnosed with a dread disease that has a low survival rate, they often do exactly that. They give themselves a pep talk (often a group process with family and friends) and say, “I’m going to beat this!” They convince themselves that they will be one of the few who overcome the disease.
Believing that we can will a health outcome isn’t quite the same as believing we can will a 7 or 11 in craps. Research has shown that an optimistic attitude can positively impact our health. At the very least, it makes us more likely to take the treatment steps that will maximize our chances for recovery. But probably more importantly, it’s a way to construct a personal reality that’s more pleasant to live in than the one that delivered the dire prognosis. In beta reality we can control the future.
But only within the boundaries of correction. This often takes the form, as it did in Farrah’s case, of a doctor’s visit in which the person is presented with test results that confirm their cancer has metastasized to vital organs. Most patients accept the objective facts about their condition at this point. Some do not, and continue to cling to their beta realities (“The tests could be wrong… There’s still a controversial alternative treatment I haven’t tried…”) until the ultimate correction: death.
- When we feel our fate is in our control, misrepresenting objective facts as more positive than they are is called finding the silver lining and is considered a good thing.
- When we are confronted with undesirable objective facts we can’t evade, the same activity is called sugarcoating and is considered a bad thing.
