Toxic Positivity: Emotionally Debilitating
The belief and encouragement of putting a positive spin on all experiences, even those that are profoundly tragic, is debilitating.
The way society is encouraging one another to live in delusion has been and will continue to be catastrophic. If you’re someone who responds to others' negative emotions with the advice to be grateful that your situation is not worse, please stop. And if you don’t understand why or how that could be harmful, I suggest reading my previous blog on invalidating feelings.
Toxic positivity silences emotions, demeans grief, removes the responsibility to learn how to manage our feelings, and ultimately, is setting up future generations to become completely unhinged.
If you couldn't already tell, I am extremely passionate about this topic. I felt this in such a real way last year and I constantly see it happening all around me and frankly, it's infuriating. Let there be no mistake, I am not suggesting that we should just allow people to wallow in their pity parties, to remain in the depths of emotional black holes, or to endorse negative thought loops that hold us ransom. I am, however, affirming the necessity of feeling all of our emotions and learning how to regulate them. Clearly expressed by Tanglaw Mental Health;
“toxic positivity is the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy and optimistic state in any situation—in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of genuine human emotional experience.”
While I appreciate gratitude practices and even promote them within my own coaching programs, tapping into gratitude is not always accessible in every moment - even if we pretend it is. In reality, shame is often developed from trying to practice gratitude at a time we aren’t open to it because it cultivates guilt and can make you feel like a failure. While it can certainly reframe how we look at the world, when it becomes a thing that we “have to do” it also becomes counter-productive.
If we take “traditionally masculine” men as an example, we see what this looks like generations down the road. Although encouraged for different reasons, not having a safe space to express feelings of sadness, shame, or vulnerability resulted in these men being incapable of acknowledging their feelings, let alone expressing them in healthy ways. Even if you don’t acknowledge or know how to deal with emotions, you still have them. This results in a person living in perpetual conflict between their emotions and their identity.
Now, women in particular, expect men to express how they feel, to participate in hard conversations, and to know how to communicate effectively because they are adults. But the reality is, that’s not easy for some men to do because they were never permitted to practice. They were not “allowed” to feel what they were feeling. The same goes for toxic positivity. If we as a society lean so heavily on positivity without stopping to feel our feelings we’ll never practice the tools needed to adequately navigate, express, and process our emotions.
Holding space for our emotional depth and all the emotions that create it, is required. We all need to learn how to regulate our emotions, how to deal with conflict, different perspectives, and that feeling hard things is actually a positive thing. We need to be teaching our children that differences among us are ok, including different feelings. Not everything is good, great, or perfect in this world, so why are we trying to create the illusion that it is?