Toxic Positivity

You may have been hearing the term toxic positivity a lot lately. Over the last four years, life in human society has become a much, much more negative experience for people. In truth, for many people, life has become so emotionally hard to deal with that they’ve turned to all kinds of coping mechanisms to deal with it, and one of these coping mechanisms is toxic positivity. It is absolutely rampant today for this reason. Let’s look at what toxic positivity is, why it is a problem, and what to do about it.

What is toxic positivity?

A person who uses positivity as a coping mechanism uses positivity to deny, suppress, disown, reject, and run away from anything they consider negative. It is an extreme form of, let’s call it, avoidant resistance. This is toxic positivity. When someone is engaged in toxic positivity, they are using positivity like a buoy that they are desperately clinging to in order to keep themselves out of reality because subconsciously they think that they cannot handle the negative aspects of reality. It’s a form of willful denial.

Why has toxic positivity become more common in recent years?

As people around the globe are feeling more and more powerless to the negative, unwanted stressors that currently exist in human society, they are turning more and more to coping mechanisms. We usually adopt a coping mechanism when we believe that the situation that is causing us distress cannot be changed and cannot be eradicated. We can’t make it better, essentially. We believe that it is out of our control to eradicate the stressor, so we’re forced to manage with it, deal with it, and adapt to it.

How does toxic positivity differ from healthy positivity?

A person who has a positive mental attitude focuses on the positives in any situation, expects good outcomes, even expects things to turn out for the best, reframes negative things in a positive light, finds the silver lining, has an optimistic outlook on life, and focuses on the desired outcome. It is easy to see how this could be a beneficial way to approach life, but there can be a really, really big dark side to positivity when it is used as a coping mechanism. Healthy positivity works when a person is looking directly at and is taking in the full reality of any given situation, this includes what some people might label as negative realities, but positivity must be authentic, not a cover that is donned to hide or avoid anything negative. Toxic positivity is a fight against what is real.

What are the main problems caused by toxic positivity?

Because of all of this, we need to weed through the reasons why toxic positivity is a problem:

1. It distorts universal truths. It’s a reality that you live in a universe based off of the law of mirroring, also called The Law of Attraction. What this means is your external reality was designed to be a reflection of your personal vibration, but as per usual, the people who are promoting the idea of willful positive delusion are drastically oversimplifying what makes up your personal vibration and therefore why and how something shows up in your external life. Simply focusing your conscious mind on being perfectly well and on everyone around you being perfectly well does not overcompensate for embedded experiences like ancestral traumas.
2. Toxic positivity is a resistance, a dismissal, a suppression, an avoidance of negative thoughts, negative emotions, and negative realities. It is a pushing against what is unwanted. It is a refusal to accept something. It’s a war with what is. This means it requires a great deal of energy. There’s a lot of energy going into and towards the very thing that a person’s trying to avoid, and this means they will not only persist but will grow bigger until you cannot run from them anymore.
3. Toxic positivity is a form of denial, and as such, it will ruin your life. Denial is refusing to accept or admit to the truth or the reality of something unpleasant. It’s a powerfully unconscious state of being because to slip into denial, a person has to either stop seeing, feeling, and hearing any proof to contradict the positive, or they have to see the negative but negate it, nullify it, deny it, or minimize the impact it has on their life.
4. Toxic positivity will destroy your relationships. When you feel like you simply cannot deal with the pain you feel in response to someone else bringing up something negative or someone else’s negative emotions, you will deny that person’s reality and refuse to accept it as true or valid. You won’t respond to it. Instead, you minimize, invalidate, and refuse to deeply acknowledge what they are presenting you with. The person is not able to be seen, heard, felt, or understood by you; therefore, they can’t be in a relationship with you.
5. Toxic positivity shuts down authentic discussion and communication. When someone is engaged in toxic positivity, anything that is not positive is countered, is ignored, is shut down. There’s no space to come to that person who is engaged in toxic positivity with thoughts, insights, truth, or emotions that they would deem as negative.
6. Toxic positivity induces guilt and shame for feeling bad and for having negative truths. Toxic positivity rejects all difficult thoughts, perceptions, and emotions in favor of a cheerful, falsely positive state. It is an intense and enduring pressure to feel good no matter what is happening. It carries with it the message that the thoughts and the feelings that a person is thinking and feeling are unacceptable.
7. Toxic positivity causes an escalation of negativity in others. When someone copes with toxic positivity, it causes pain to the person, thus adding to the negativity of their life experience. Also, it is such an intense polarization that it tends to push people to the opposite polarity, which is negativity.
8. Toxic positivity prevents growth and personal expansion. It is in the acknowledging of the negatives, as well as the exploration of them, that we’re able to gain the awareness and insights necessary to define what we want, change, and go in the right direction.
9. Toxic positivity brings humanity ever so further into the emotional Dark Age. It is critical that we come out of this emotional Dark Age. We have to learn what emotions are, what purpose they serve, and how to respond to them. Toxic positivity makes an enemy of negative emotion.
10. Toxic positivity is a form of gaslighting. When something negative is happening, it creates a false narrative of reality that causes people to doubt their own estimation of what is real. It makes people feel mentally ill when they are not.

How does toxic positivity affect relationships?

Let’s imagine that you feel like you simply cannot deal with the pain you feel in response to someone else bringing up something negative or someone else’s negative emotions because it makes you think negative thoughts and feel negative emotions, something you think you can’t deal with. You will deny that person’s reality and refuse to accept it as true or valid. The person is not able to be seen, heard, felt, or understood by you; therefore, they can’t be in a relationship with you, and you will not respond in a way that accommodates for their negative reality. As a result, you cannot act in their best interests. What does this mean? It means you’re going to lose their trust. Trust is the holy grail of relationships. It is the thing that is to not ever be destroyed. Toxic positivity in a relationship makes a relationship impossible.

Can toxic positivity impact mental health?

Toxic positivity induces guilt and shame for feeling bad and for having negative truths. It carries with it the message that if you are not finding a way to think and feel positive, even in the face of serious tragedy or dire circumstances, you are doing something wrong. For this reason, it compounds a person’s pain. It makes someone’s pain worse, as well as denies people the authentic support they need for what they are facing. And this is the very message that a person who copes with toxic positivity is sending to themselves every day, not just other people, without even knowing it.

How can you recognize toxic positivity in yourself or others?

Signs of toxic positivity include dismissing negative emotions with phrases like “just think positive,” avoiding discussions about challenges, maintaining a falsely cheerful facade despite distress, invalidating others’ struggles with optimistic platitudes, or feeling guilt for experiencing negative emotions. It’s a refusal to acknowledge negative realities, often accompanied by a “good vibes only” mentality.

What can you do to address toxic positivity?

If you use toxic positivity as your coping mechanism, the time has come to learn to feel your negative emotions and acknowledge your painful truths. You need to start to lean into discomfort and practice moving towards it instead of away from it. Whenever you feel negative emotion, use the pain itself as a kind of meditation bell that is awakening you to the opportunity to gain valuable feedback. It is trying to tell you something. The question is, what? Try to understand what it is trying to tell you, and because of this, you’re going to be able to take the right action for yourself or for the people in your life. The “good vibes only” mantra is a societal illness. It is one that we need to remedy, especially if we want to make any genuine positive change to this human society, which is currently causing us so much distress that we feel the need to use coping mechanisms to survive it.

Why is addressing toxic positivity important for society?

Toxic positivity brings humanity ever so further into the emotional Dark Age. It is critical that we come out of this emotional Dark Age. We have to learn what emotions are, what purpose they serve, and how to respond to them. By addressing toxic positivity, we can foster emotional intelligence, authentic communication, and genuine positive change to this human society, which is currently causing us so much distress that we feel the need to use coping mechanisms to survive it.