Smile, and more smile — Is life all about smiling?
(Toxic positivity)
Breathe in, breathe out, cool, calm, and relax yourself to stay away from anger, frustration, pain, and sadness. The sweet words like- it is just a phase, everything happens for a purpose, have hope, and just keep smiling, we keep hearing such pieces of positive advice every time we are going through an emotional upheaval. But is it pragmatically possible to ignore or block these negative feelings of aches, anger, and grief? Aren’t they also the essential elements of life that help us to be stronger? Isn’t life a journey of both pleasure and pain? If yes, then why shame or demean a person as a negative thinker if they are going through a phase of not being happy.
The pretense of being happy -
Everyone knows that life isn’t always a ray of sunshine but also the dark clouds of unpleasant emotions and experiences. We cannot ignore or avoid them as they are equally crucial for our resilience growth. Then why is it that a person going through traumatic times gets overloaded with positive advice to be happy and hopeful? On the contrary, why is not suggested to deal with it openly and honestly?
While going through the troubled water of life, you need to pause, grieve, vent out and give yourself time to recover before sailing back again. If you deny the very existence of these emotions that are not associated with happiness or positivity, then you’re living under a pretense of being happy even when struggling.
It is good to be a Positive thinker as you acknowledge all the emotive expressions of life with rationality and work on it to avoid getting stuck. But when this optimistic outlook starts going over the board, it becomes toxic. It becomes lethal when you start living with this belief that life is always a bed of roses with no thorns attached to it and intentionally keep a blind eye to all the thorns that are hurting you. You wait for the occurrence of the silver lining and feel guilty for feeling sad and angry. The discomfort in sharing your sorrows with others makes you a recluse and less empathetic to other person’s grief. The fear of failure ties your mind to trying new things in life and stumbling down your personal growth.
Such a thought process coerces you to camouflage your feelings to be happy all the time, even when your heart is bleeding. This suppressing, hiding, denying, or blocking of troubled emotions eventually impact your mental wellbeing. A mind becomes a perpetual hideout for all the pains and worries without any ventilator and gradually becomes a trickling time bomb ready to explode. The recent suicides of celebrities like Sushant Singh Rajput and Robert Williams are glaring reminders of how faking up a smile behind pain can be fatal.
Attaching a positive spin to the experiences in life, even those that are profoundly tragic, is not a positive outlook. For instance, telling a grieving person who has lost a loved one to move on or that everything happens for a reason is toxic positivism as you’re demeaning their grief. How can a grieving person look for a silver lining in the loss of their dear one? What they want is, time to recover and your care & support, not overdose on positivity.
How to Avoid Being a Toxic positive
Remove bars for feeling -
According to Tabitha Kirkland, a psychologist and associate teaching professor at the University of Washington’s Department of Psychology-True happiness doesn’t come from suppressing negative emotions and touting feel-good statements, but rather from leaning into what we’re authentically feeling in the moment and accepting all of our emotions, both positive and negative.
In nutshell, acknowledge whatever you feel (negative or positive) at that moment without being judgmental.
The stories of pain are stories of strength-
Happiness has no meaning if not balanced with sadness. If everything is a bed of roses, how will one test our real inner strength and work on self-improvement? Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors. For instance, the studies show that those kids who learn how to deal with their worries or hitches at the right time have better problem-solving skills and mental perseverance than others who avoid them.
Boys should not cry in pain, and girls should express their emotions submissively. These gender-based values of society lead men to suppress their emotions and women to feel pressured to display their real feelings. Cut down these falsified thoughts and learn to acknowledge the pain.
It is perfectly Ok to cry when you’re in distress, grieve in sorrow, and get angry when stressed out. But at the same time, give your recovery period a timeline to keep away from getting stuck with it forever. Kenji Miyazawa a Japanese novelist and poet well- define this -We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
Be a Healer
Sometimes people just want someone to listen and not to be advised. They almost heal by feeling heard without being judged. Be that positive listener. And, if you need that kind of healing find a person (a positive thinker not toxic or a therapist) to be heard and listen to yourself without any pretense.
Sometimes the happiest faces hide the saddest heart. Try not to be that happiest face, be the happiest heart by being honest with yourself.
So next time, when you talk to a person going through trauma, instead of overloading them with positive quotes, try telling them ‘Appreciate your efforts for coping with it’, or just stand silently as rocking support to them in their recovery. Be a positive honest listener not just to others but to yourself too.
Real happiness is achieved by facing the emotional upheavals in life and not by avoiding them.
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