TOXIC POSITIVITY
While it’s important to keep an optimistic outlook in life and in a time of a pandemic, especially in building emotional resilience, it is just as important to be practical & to see all sides of a situation objectively, & to accept the (negative) reality of challenging issues so that we can better prep for them, & so adequately manage their possible consequences.
What this means is that while it’s healthy to feel hopeful & to have faith, and to reframe challenges in a way that lets us see personal learnings & to experience gratitude, it’s conversely very unhealthy if we refuse to accept that we nonetheless feel scared, anxious & worried about the very same situation if things don’t work out. However, in this day and (social media) age of increased exposure to self-help remedies, it is almost expected of us to keep positive no matter what, and almost de rigeur that only keeping positive is the right way to live one’s life. We are always encouraged to always see the bright side, and to not open up about anything negative as thats not ‘positive thinking’.
However, what you resist, persists. You pretend the ‘bad’ emotion is not there, but it hovers around, like a pesky fly you’d rather not have to swat & hope it flies far away. Ignoring it with the hopes that it’ll just go away by itself tricks you into thinking you’ve made a choice, and thus exercised a measure of control, but in reality there IS no way to control whether it repeatedly comes back, buzzing, or flies away forever;
Conversely, what you accept, you intercept. Acknowledging its presence, and accepting that it’s there even though you don’t want it there, is incredibly empowering. You actually bring it into a personal space for you to be able to exercise more control over. You coax the emotional fly into a confined box where you get to decide how you want to deal with it. You DO have more control over your desired outcome.
It’s okay to feel a variety of conflicting emotions all at once, you CAN feel hopeful yet anxious at the same time. It is not contradictory, it’s what being human is all about, & it’s important to distinguish between our EMOTIONS versus our THOUGHTS.
Consistently trying to suppress our ‘bad’ feelings by silencing our ‘negative’ thoughts can lead many people to inadvertently fall into something called “toxic positivity”. This is defined as “the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, & invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.” It essentially means only focusing on positive things and rejecting anything that may trigger negative emotions. This is not only unsustainable, but psychologically very unhealthy.
In order not to have to deal with difficult emotions, some of us prefer to completely gloss over that feeling of discomfort, and immediately switch off to anything which might be viewed as negative. However, this only leads to unprocessed issues that if built up over time, that could lead to us feeling a sense of helplessness, loss of control, or worse still, depression or anxiety.
Do be aware if there is a tendency for you to do this, and if so, just know that it’s normal and okay. Instead, try to slowly start a practice of acknowledging ALL your thoughts and emotions as equally as you can handle. Tell yourself that it is temporary and that they shall each eventually pass. This is a core part of mindfulness, a practice I not only coach others in, but something that I myself practice daily. I highly encourage and recommend using it as a problem solving tool order to help us all better cope with life’s challenges. Accepting your difficult emotions compassionately, without judging them or yourself, actually helps with coping, and decreases the intensity of those very emotions. Also remind yourself that facing one’s biggest fears can actually diminish its impact and lessen how frightening it actually is in reality.
Once that is done, make a list of options that you could explore in order to solve, or deal with, the situation that is triggering the negative emotion, and then try them out for size, or choose the one that gives you the most peace or relief. Doing this actually allows you to start feeling a sense of control, encourages realistic hope, and instils a sense of empowerment. See how you want to, or can manage them, and decide how YOU get to control it for a change. Cage and swat that fly!
To further help, here is a table which shows better sentence alternatives I personally feel you could say to yourself, in contrast to the other ways we would otherwise tell ourselves in order to stay in (toxic) positivity. This was originally shared as a tool of what you could say to others, by psychotherapist Whitney Goodman.
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