When positivity turns toxic.
‘Fake it till you make it’ could simply be the most dangerous advice the self-development community has peddled for years, and it does nothing but isolate you when you’re at your lowest.
Anxiety and depression are thieves of joy. It’s the complete inability to see any light at the end of the tunnel. The weight of the world is crushing and the fear of the unknown is paralyzing. As someone who has struggled with anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember, something about being told to fake it till I make it, or to just “think positive” when it feels like the world is caving in on you, has never felt encouraging to me and it’s never worked.
When I first got into self-development, I (like many) bought into the idea that happiness is a choice, and for some reason that I hadn’t yet discovered, I was choosing to be depressed? When I would have negative thoughts, and there were A LOT of them, I waged an internal war on my own emotions that was never won.
Positive thinking was another measuring stick to pit myself against. Why wasn’t I able to flip that positivity switch and make things happen, and others seem to find it so easy?
I was so glad when I saw the term ‘toxic positivity’ floating around online. I felt like an acknowledgment of a feeling I hadn’t been able to articulate. Think Positive advice is an oversimplification of something that is not simple. It diminishes our emotions to positive and negative and leaves no room for the hundreds of emotions in-between.
If you’ve experienced anxiety and or depression, you will know that no matter how positive you’ve tried to think, your brain will have a rebuttal for any positive thought. It is an actual chemical imbalance! so “just think positive” won’t cut it.
You don’t have to suffer from anxiety and depression to feel like being told to think positively is dismissive. Because a lot of the time it is.
Positivity turns toxic when you start to deny your own feelings, or you believe the universe will somehow punish you for feeling negative. If your vibration is low you won’t attract what you want. “It must not be happening because you don’t have the right mindset!”, but what happens when you can’t get into that mindset? When you’ve experienced a crushing blow, when your worst fears have been confirmed, when you’re in a state of loss and grief, the toxic positivity game will tell you that it’s somehow your fault that those fears manifested in the first place.
The reality is most of us are dealing with unrealized trauma and we are living in a world that is chaotic and uncertain, how can we be blamed for being sad, anxious, depressed, and just plain old fucking petrified? How can we be blamed for doing exactly what we are wired to do, survive!
What you don’t feel you cant heal. The darkest moments in my life have been the most transformative, but that didn’t come from denying how I felt in order to appear that I have it all together.
You don’t have to be fully healed to get what you want. Putting a positive spin on everything can only put you in a place of denial and it’s a guarantee of repeating old patterns. Emotions are complex, if it was that easy to think positive or “up your vibration”, it would be.
Instead of adding pressure on yourself to think positive, think acceptance.
Accept how you feel in every moment, you don’t have to rationalize or justify it. The minute you accept how you feel and allow yourself time is positive and is the greatest act of self-love.
The universe doesn’t punish you for having emotion, take as much time as you need to feel sad, furious, confused, scared, and everything in between. You still deserve to have everything you want even when you feel like shit.
Written by Tara-Emily