Is Your Positivity Toxic? This Is How To Avoid It
Can Positive Thinking Be Negative?
Embracing an optimistic attitude towards life looks a bit like an obsession for me lately. The culture of positivity is a great profitable niche.
There are plenty of experts in optimism and positive thinking and lots of people share their experiences with overcoming the negativity.
I am no exception. I do truly believe that positive thinking can benefit our lives and I often share my thoughts about it. It doesn’t mean though that I ignore the negative in my life.
It is important to live through your emotions and feelings to understand yourself. Such painful life events like illnesses or loss of the darling ones can’t be avoided and ignored. F
acing the negative emotions, in this case, can be more beneficial rather than burying them deep and pretending you are alright. Unfortunately, we can’t live completely emotionally unattached life, which means that there will be unavoidable bad things happening in life.
Being pessimistic always came easier to me. There is always a reason to be sad about something, isn’t it? The World is rather a miserable place if you give it a thought and bad things outweigh the good ones.
When I have decided to change the way I was thinking, I made an informed decision because I was convinced of the change that I needed.
At first, I had to force myself to change focus on the good in life, but it’s a different thing. It’s like pushing a car stuck in a rut back on the road. When the mind gets comfortable in some sort of routine, it can be very hard to break that cycle.
Forcing yourself to try a positive life attitude if you don’t feel like it won’t do you any good. It helps when you make an effort to look inside yourself and face your emotions, fears, and beliefs.
The superficial attempts will not show any results. Of course, you can fake it till you make it, but you can save a lot of time if you allow yourself get to know yourself better.
This is the perfect illustration of the toxic positivity response to the life situations by Whitney Hawkins Goodman. The focus is on maintaining a positive attitude when you should actually allow yourself to experience negative feelings and go through them naturally. Feeling bad doesn’t mean that one becomes a bad person.
Positive thinking should support you and make you comfortable rather than serve as a mask with a fake smile to get through the day. If you don’t feel it or don’t believe in it — forcing yourself into that won’t help.
Accepting yourself the way you are — with all the negativity and positivity, is the first step to stop fighting your feelings and let go of what is weighing you down.
Positive thinking sure has its advantages, but if it leads to suppressing your feelings — you should ditch it straight away. Feelings are meant to be felt and worked through, not hidden.
Originally published at www.anashch.com.
