This episode discusses the concept of Toxic Positivity. Positivity in and of itself isn’t bad, but when used in the wrong manner it can do harm and become toxic. This episode covers:
- What toxic positivity is
- How it can do harm to both ourselves and others
- How Susan David’s concept of Emotional Agility can help us find a middle-path
- Why emotional comparison is irrelevant
- How positivity isn’t bad, but it sit alongside compassion
Junto Institute Emotional Wheel: https://www.thejuntoinstitute.com/blog/the-junto-emotion-wheel-why-and-how-we-use-it
Kate refers to Susan David’s work on Emotional Agility. You can find her TED talk here: https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_david_the_gift_and_power_of_emotional_courage
Susan David also has a book on the topic. You can find that here: Emotional Agility Book on Amazon
*This post includes affiliate links.
Episode 136: Toxic Positivity & Emotional Agility
Welcome friends. Today I am talking toxic positivity. I have mentioned this to be my intention a couple of times over. I feel like this is a really important topic. Specifically my intention today is to introduce you to the concept of toxic positivity and to talk about healthier ways that we can approach the tough stuff in life. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this episode it’s the positivity must live alongside compassion. If you do want the show notes for this episode including the full written transcript, you can head to thrive.how/podcast136, and those are the number’s 1,3,6.
Welcome to Here to Thrive. I’m your host Kate Snowise. This is a podcast for people who are ready to step up and live a happier life. It’s for those of us who are dedicated to understanding ourselves and getting the best that we can out of this thing called life. It’s a mix of psychology and modern spiritual thought, always with a focus on practical advice so that you can take it back and apply it to your own life. I don’t believe we’re here to merely survive, I truly believe we’re here to thrive. So let’s get going.
Toxic positivity. It’s a term that I’ve seen coming out more and more frequently and it’s something that I’ve also experienced firsthand. I’ve also seen this coming up is the theme with my clients and just the conversations they’ve been bringing to our sessions in recent months, and so when something starts to get my attention like this I always feel called to dive deeper. That’s what we’re gonna do today. We’re taking that deeper dive into this concept of toxic positivity. Now you may have heard it, you may not have. You don’t need any understanding of this term. As I said to my husband what does the term toxic positivity mean to you and he immediately had that sense of understanding. We’ll talk more about a definition in this episode but I think it kind of…you get it. And let’s be honest, I don’t know anyone who hasn’t struggled in some way over the last six months. Yip it’s been six months since this Covidt thing hit us sideways people, and well it feels like collectively we’ve been on a roller coaster ride ever since. There’s been so many things popping up in our collective experience. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely one who encourages us to look for perspective shifts and to try and approach our stress as a challenge, but that goes hand in hand with not denying our very real human experience. That’s with the toxicity comes in, when we deny out very real human experience.
A couple of things, as a culture I personally think we are drowning in the positivity movement at the moment. You see it every which way you turn. Think happy thoughts. Positive vibes only. You know the memes right?! You get my drift. The problem is that many of us have now internalized these messages and now we’re labeling anything but positive emotions as bad or wrong. That’s the bit that I believe hurts us, so when I say that I’ve seen this popping up in my clients it’s via this level of self-judgment for not being positive all the time, which then leads to rumination, feeling like crap, self-denial…we don’t want that people!
Now I mentioned right at the start but this is personal to me I’ve had my own experience with toxic positivity, and as much as we apply it to ourselves and turn into the self-judgment we can also unintentionally hurt others with our positivity. I’ve definitely been on the receiving end of that, and it hurt people. To give you some context when I was diagnosed with breast cancer my sister in law, who had walked that breast cancer path ahead of me told me to watch out for the minimizers, and initially I had no idea what she was referring to, I’m like – minimizers? – what does she even mean? What I didn’t realize is that some people would try and push away my very real and raw pain. I can remember telling someone face to face that I’d recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and her response was to tap me on the shoulder and that kind of condescending way, you know what I’m talking about, and say “you’ve got this”. I can remember being legitimately dumbfounded. I felt like there had been no acknowledgement of my hurt, my fear, my struggle, but rather through that slap slap positive message she had inadvertently said to me – “this is too uncomfortable for me. Please put your pain somewhere else.” It was really isolating and it made me wanna like crawl into my little helmet shell and wrap up in a ball away from the world. It made me feel wrong for having shared something that was deeply personal and hard for me. It also made me feel unsafe in that relationship. That was an opportunity for us to become closer…for her to just sit with me in my discomfort, but instead it had turned into a situation where I felt my very real human experience was invalidated.
Now by no means do I think that she meant to do that. I think many of us don’t know what to say and difficult times with people and so we lean into the “oh just be positive” vibe. I’m going to give you some alternatives here today about how we can possibly do things differently so that we can really show up for both ourselves and others.
Thinking about positivity in the broader sphere of our culture, I do think it’s one of the reasons that many people are currently suffering in silence when it comes to their mental health struggles. A culture that glorifies positivity inadvertently shames us, and it leaves many people feeling like their pain or the struggle is unacceptable. So we turn that inward. That is what I hope that this episode can shine a light on. That’s not what we want to do people. We don’t want to shame each other for just being human. So my hope is that bringing this conversation to the airwaves that it just highlights the being human is hard sometimes and that all of our emotions are valid even the difficult and uncomfortable ones.
Does that mean we want to fall into a pit of despair and marinate in them? No. No no no. That’s not what I advise. But it’s also completely unhealthy to deny them and try and slap a happy sticker over them. Now if you’ve been listening to Here to Thrive for awhile, that is one of my favorite phrases. Please don’t just slap a happy stick out of your life and pretend that everything is okay. Where human, and part about human experience is to struggle, to wrestle, and to live with the hard stuff. The hard stuff that some of the greatest precursors to our growth, and to deny that being human is pretty hard sometimes is to miss the opportunity to experience the wholeness of life. So here we go. That was a a nice long ramble all to say let’s start talking more about how positivity can turn toxic.
Okay. Let’s start with this simple question – what is toxic positivity? When I was researching this episode I came across this quote and I think it is right on. “In a culture that celebrates positivity the overgeneralization of think positive to all situations can become decidedly toxic, as it denies the full human experience.” That’s from Margie Worrell. So toxic positivity. To me it is an overgeneralization of a happy optimistic state. It denies, minimizes and invalidates the entirety of the human emotional experience. It has the effect of disallowing certain human emotions and it causes us to stuff or repress the hard stuff. Toxic positivity doesn’t necessarily allow for the very real truth that sometimes life is hard.
So the under current that comes along with this toxic form of positivity is that if you aren’t being positive you’re doing something wrong. That doesn’t do anything for a mental health but instead just makes us feel guilty for being human. So in short I can be defined as toxic because it leads to harm.
So how does that hurt us? three particular things come to mind for me. Toxic positivity in my estimation leads to shame. It leads to us suppressing real emotions, and it leads to disconnection. You’ll see some of those things in the story I told you about my experience with being on the receiving end of toxic positivity. But let’s start with shame. Toxic positivity leaves us feeling guilty about how we feel, so by forcing a positive outlook onto our pain before a person is ready to move that way themselves, is to encourage them to really keep silent about their struggles. It pushes people to pretend there okay, when they’re not. You can think of it as kind of like a double layering of hard emotions. So now you feel like shit about feeling like shit. Or you feel guilty for feeling guilty. Or bad about feeling bad. You can see how that is like just throwing you down an emotional rabbit hole of tough emotions and is only going to magnify the experience. To feel shame about feeling very natural normal emotions only amplifies them.
So the second way that toxic positivity hurts us is that it encourages us to suppress real emotions. Now research indicates that denying our emotional experience only causes greater harm in the long run. I like to say that if we don’t express our emotions in a healthy way the tend to come out sideways, in the ways that we really don’t want them to. That might be a blow up, self-sabotage, anxiety, depression, unhealthy numbing, there aare so many ways that stuffing our emotions ultimately leads to harm. I’m sure if you think of your own experience and if you are prone to stuffing, you’ll be able to think of a time we in because you didn’t allow your emotions to be, they came out sideways. Maybe you a bitchy to your husband or snappy to your kids. Our emotional experience will come out sideways if we don’t allow it to be.
Now I used to be a stuffer. I get this. Oh my my. I was so good at stuffing my emotions that most the time I didn’t even recognize my own emotional experience. I still struggle to label my emotional experience at times and if I feel emotional I literally will take a step back and pull up an emotion wheel from online and try and find the language to help me understand how I’m feeling. I’d encourage you to do so as well. I will link in the show notes to a good emotional wheel.
But I’ve seen this tendency to suppress our emotions and my clients too and what I’ve noted is that it typically leads to burnout and exhaustion. We go way beyond our capability until we are scraping off the bottom of a barrel and that’s burnout people. We don’t want to go there. Finally it leads to disconnection. Toxic positivity puts a wall between us. We are a social species wired for connection with others. We need intimacy and now lives to feel warmed up inside. That doesn’t necessarily need to come from a romantic partner people. It is simply the connection that we need from other human beings that allow us to feel seen and heard. If we’re putting out a “positive vibes only” vibe into the world, were sending the message that we will only deal with the superficial human experience and are uncomfortable dealing with the real, raw struggles, of what it actually looks like to be human.
Now vulnerability in sharing the hard stuff as a precursor to connection. Check out Brene Brown’s stuff on that. And toxic positivity can easily thwart that ability to really meet the heart of someone else. The result? We end up feeling isolated and alone, and that our experience or feelings aren’t acceptable. Ugh. I don’t wanna just talk about the weather people. I really don’t. Superficial conversation meh…I need more than that, and so, so do most of us.
So what can we do about it? Now as I mentioned earlier I’m not gonna say that we should therefore go to the opposite extreme, and just wallow in our self-pity and allow ourselves to marinate and the hard and difficult emotions until they suck us under. I don’t think that’s healthy either, so when I say we need to be aware of toxic positivity, I am by no means encouraging that we go to the opposite extreme and fall into a pit of despair and potentially even a victim mindset. What I like instead is this idea of a middle path, so we were thinking about how to deal without real emotional experience my personal favorite teachings come from Susan David and they’re around the concept of Emotional agility. Now she has a great book called Emotional Agility and you can also watch her TED talk. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes. David talks about the three ways we can deal with our emotional experience. Now the first is what she terms bottling and this is the path of toxic positivity. This is the path I’m prone to. The denial of difficult emotions and stuffing them away. The opposite extreme and I’m sure we all know people who are prone to this as well, is brooding and this is when people amplify their difficult emotions and in many ways take something that is hard and make it even bigger and harder through concentrating so much more emotional energy into it. It’s the ruminators and don’t get me wrong, we all have a tendency to move across this spectrum depending on what we’re dealing with. Finally David gives us a middle path which is being emotionally agile, being emotionally flexible. So how do we apply the concept of emotional agility? It’s about recognizing that all of our emotions are valid, even the hard ones. She encourages us to look at our emotions as data, and I believe in being curious. I ask “why is this emotion showing up at this time?” “What can I learn from it?” “What is it indicating or highlighting for me right now?” There is so much we can learn from our emotions if we treat them like a data source. Now coming back to the fact that having a tendency to be a bottler I often struggle with the language to articulate how I’m feeling. If that is you too, I really encourage you, if you can acknowledge that you’re having some form of emotional experience to take a minute and pull up an emotion wheel or a list of emotion words and try and identify the ones that reflect how you’re feeling, because we have so much more nuanced than simply happy, sad, angry, mad. If can get deeper into the more refined definitions it can help a so much in understanding what that emotional experience is trying to highlight for us. Because in so many cases a difficult or tough emotion is a warning light. It’s showing us that something that is out of whack. This is why I believe that those who are really good at bottling often end up at burnout because they have denied so many emotions that have come up along the path to indicate that they were out of whack, until they get to the bottom of the barrel. There is nothing left. So our emotions can help us shape our experience. They are there to help us to live more powerfully. A warning light can show up in many ways. Perhaps we’re not being treated well in a relationship and that is unhealthy, so we feel resentment. Or perhaps we’re grieving, which simply indicates that we’ve lost something that meant so much to us. Tough emotions have the ability to teach us so so much, if we not afraid of them.
So emotional agility can help us with our own emotional experience, but when it comes to toxic positivity and our interactions with others…really I see our job as fellow humans to allow people to be where they are at. it’s not our job to fix or hurry along someone else’s emotional process. When I was sharing hard things with people, “Hey I’ve got breast cancer” I needed acceptance. I needed simply an acknowledgement of the struggle I was facing. I knew that no one else could fix that for me. I just wanted a place to feel safe and seen.
Another important point to note is that we don’t simple creatures people. We can experience multiple emotions at once, even when they appear contradictory. So for example we can be both deeply grateful that we have a job that helps us pay the bills, while still acknowledging that it’s not an ideal situation. We can be both overjoyed with the blessing of a big family while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed by the chaos that surrounds us. One emotion doesn’t automatically wipeout or overshadow the other. They can both call exist. We are complex and this is what it means to be human. I used to truly believe that if I was sad I couldn’t be happy but then when I lost my dad I realized that these moments of joy even in grief, and that those two things can coexist without minimizing the other experience.
I’ve also had clients say to me – “I’m blessed. I have no right to be sad when I look around at what I have and other people are struggling with so much worse.” Oh people please do not compare your pain to others. Our emotions are completely subjective and our lives and emotional experiences cannot be compared across situations and across people. This quote I found from The Indigo Project puts it perfectly into context for me: “Thinking you can’t be sad because someone may have it worse it’s like thinking you can’t be happy because someone might have it better.” So what, just because someone else has a better situation doesn’t mean that you have the right to be happy and joyful? Exactly people it’s the same.
Finally I think it’s important to note, what do we do if we notice us selves brooding? If we have fallen into that trap of amplifying the difficult stuff in our lives. Or if we dealing with a close friend or family member who you just feel like as a total brooder and are just magnifying their hard emotions. You absolutely can work with other people to help them see a positive perspective. What I would say though is it’s like it has a little asterix by it. But if you’re gonna do that you have to be willing to dive deep. This is not a superficial, slap a happy sticker, here’s a positive vibes only, can you take your difficult emotions and put them elsewhere please because I only accept positivity, type thing. You have to be willing to go into the depths with them. This is how you avoid the toxicity which is shaming, minimizing and denying their experience. It’s not that quick “chin up buttercup” sentiment thrown their way. It is deep human to human connection. We can acknowledge and allow someone else to have the full emotional experience before asking them questions that allow them to explore their experience and potentially look at different ways, to shift their perspective towards perhaps pulling them out of that brooding towards a more emotionally agile and positive response. But it’s about allowing yourself to go into the mud with them, and trudge around before you have the right to be able to bring in that positive lens.
Now this holds true with yourself too. If you want to live from a positive place you can’t just pretend everything is okay all the time and deny the rest of your emotions. The key is to dive into the emotions, to turn towards them, to be curious and look at what you can learn from them, and then to come back to your equilibrium. It’s about walking that middle path of emotional agility rather than getting stuck in either bottling or brooding.
Ugh…that was a lot, but I hope that the conversation has helped has helped you just to consider how positivity is showing up in our culture and how it’s showing up in your life. As we talked about it can become toxic when it denies ,minimizes, or invalidates the entirety of our human experience. It can lead to shame, us suppressing real emotions, which always come out sideways, and disconnection. Those are things we don’t want. It’s not the positivity is bad and we don’t want to go to the extreme of marinating and being swallowed up by our hard emotions, but there’s a time and place for positivity and it must in my opinion live right alongside acknowledgement and compassion. All of our emotions are valid, even the tough ones. All of your emotions are valid, and there is nothing wrong with you feeling them. You are not wrong or broken or bad. This what being human is.
Now I don’t want you to leave this episode feeling like you can’t be upbeat and positive. Hell yes. Holy crap the world needs more of that than ever, but I do think that it needs to live alongside a softening and an attunement to what it really means to be human, and that all of our lives and experiences are going to be tinged with suffering and struggle, and that is normal. We all need safe spaces where we can be seen and accepted even through the hard seasons. We have to allow others to feel the feelings before we try to rush them into a positive interpretation of their experience. When it comes to ourselves the powerful path is that middle road, where we neither allow ourselves to get stuck in the tough stuff, but we don’t deny our experience either. I love this idea that our emotions are data and we have so much to learn from them if we can be curious and simply allow them to be.
Thanks for being back with me Here to Thrive listers. Ugh such a joy to be here. It would mean so much to me if you could take those moments to leave at rating and a written review for Here to Thrive where you to listen. It makes such a big difference to who else will see the show and I read every last review so I appreciate you taking that time and working out how to do it. Sometimes it can take a moment. You should be able to find a short cut at thrive.how/review. We’ll be back week after next, we’re gonna be talking about technology addiction and like I mentioned earlier, holy crap. I feel like that has probably turned into one of the numbing options of choice over this unusual season in our collective lives, so I think it’s timely. But until then people keep thriving. Keep thriving.