Craig is someone who has really turned his life around.
In his early twenties, he suffered terribly from depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
But that was before he joined a community yoga class and felt so much better that very
same day.
Within a few years, he was reading countless fascinating New Age self-help books, taking
classes on the law of attraction manifestation, and had become a vegetarian.
He grasped what he felt was an unavoidable truth: As you think, so shall you become.
To Craig, the universe was pure consciousness and love—if you could match that frequency
of trusting and generative positivity, then you would always align with the good that
was flowing all around you at all times.
If you’re negative, though, the universe will mirror that negativity straight back
at you.
In time, Craig starts to understand all the adversity that he’d experienced as a manifestation
of his own lack of self-love and his own doubt in universal abundance.
And thinking this way worked for him.
Until it didn’t.
When his sister died, Craig was completely bowled over by an unmanageable mass of negative
feelings that caught him off guard.
He told himself that there are no mistakes in life, that she was somewhere better, that
it was all okay, and that there was no need to mourn since energy never disappears—it
only changes form ... And yet, he still felt devastated.
He hid these feelings of devastation, even from himself.
He couldn’t admit that part of his new conversion to the light meant obsessively guarding against
any experience of the dark.
He put on a brave face, and when people asked how he was doing, he responded with speeches
about the transcendental nature of mortality and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and how he
was ecstatic to receive this lesson in non-attachment.
In response to the mourning of his other family members, he remained aloof and occasionally
sent them “inspiring” quotes that actually upset them.
One day, he makes his mother cry when he not-so-subtly suggests that her continued upset is evidence
of her poor spiritual development, and that she should meditate more instead of moping
around.
It sounds cruel, but it’s only a natural conclusion of the very same philosophy that
had helped Craig up till that point.
Craig’s only crime was that he sincerely wanted to be good.
Only good.
He saw himself as strong and wise and happy.
Who wouldn’t want the same?
And when he instead felt weak and foolish and desperately sad, he didn’t know what
to do with those feelings.
When he spoke to his fellow New Age friends, and even when he consulted a local counselor,
they only gave him pithy Zen koans or said, “Everything happens for a reason,” or,
“Try to remember the good times,” unconsciously affirming this fear that negativity was unacceptable,
and to indulge it to any degree meant that you were a bad person.
For Craig, “bad” meant unenlightened, unevolved, and unintelligent.
Things he really didn’t want to be.
One day, a few months after the death of his sister, Craig is at rock bottom again.
How did this happen?
What about all that positive personal growth and development?
What about all that positivity and enthusiasm—where did it go?
He goes online to all the social media accounts that once gave him so much motivation and
inspiration (did you know that Instagram has over fourteen million posts with the hashtag
goodvibesonly?), and he only feels worse.
He again falls into a depression, not because he is mourning his sister’s death, but because
he sees his own mourning as something to be ashamed of.
Everything feels worthless, imperfect, wretched.
Craig looks at himself with hatred and thinks that he would be able to pull himself out
of this misery if only he were more enlightened, more aware, more spiritually wise.
But the truth is, Craig is in this mess because he sought out all these things in the first
place—at the expense of acknowledging his authentic experience.
The Positive IS Powerful, But ...
Toxic positivity is an overgeneralization of a positive and optimistic attitude.
In a way, it’s a cognitive bias because it refuses to acknowledge states of mind,
events, thoughts, or feelings that are deemed “negative."
Positivity is a wonderful thing.
This book would not exist unless there was some belief in positivity’s power.
Some would say that the most successful among us are not the pessimists or the realists,
but those who encounter life with a slight glass-half-full approach.
However, if you’ve encountered the “positive vibes only” brand of positivity in the self-help
world, you’ve probably wondered whether this overly rosy view of the world is really
the best approach to take.
Toxic positivity is actually pretty negative if you peek under the hood—it’s about
denial, minimization, and invalidation ... of your own experience.
So, it’s not positivity itself that is toxic, but our insisting that our genuine and real
experience be something else.
Toxic positivity has us wearing masks, silencing our real feelings, and extending this invalidating
attitude to others, too.
As we see in Craig’s case, the results are often the exact opposite of what we want.
The truth is, human beings are complex wholes.
They contain both good and bad.
Carl Jung once said, “I’d rather be whole than good."
As the originator of the idea of the human shadow, Jung was fascinated by the psychic
material we ignored, repressed, and disowned—where did it go?
In Carl’s case, the disidentified emotions just went underground until all that depression
burst out and caused him to fall into a deep sadness.
•There are lots of reasons we deny the “negative” parts of ourselves:
•We don’t want others to think we’re boring or unpleasant downers
•We don’t want to cause others pain
•We don’t want to admit that we are confused, mistaken, or flawed—i.e., our egos!
•We don’t want to admit that we are frightened, weak, or vulnerable in any way
•We are worried that once we acknowledge negativity, it will flood us and we’ll lose
control
According to renowned shame author Brene Brown, these negative feelings are cultivated in
silence, secrecy, and judgment.
In Craig’s case, his “positive thinking” came with a set of unspoken rules:
Silence: Don’t admit that you are feeling distraught, even to yourself, and don’t
talk about it.
Secrecy: Hide the facts of this experience from everyone so it becomes your private torment
Judgment: Criticize yourself harshly for feeling this way
Craig cultivated a particular image of himself that he takes pride in.
But secretly, he tells himself, “If they only knew what a total toxic and negative
mess I really am, and if they really knew what a phony fake I am, they’d reject me
for sure."
Have you told yourself something similar?
That you couldn’t ever really reveal your true feelings to others for fear of the repercussions?
Understand that this is a judgment you have already made of yourself.
The costs of denying our full experience (both positive and negative) are high.
We live inauthentically and lose touch with what we really want, think, and feel—i.e.,
with who we really are!
We feel isolated from others.
Because we cannot open up in genuine vulnerability and truth with them, we never really connect,
and so we feel even more alone in our shame.
What’s more, we carry that attitude to others.
We tell others to, “Think happy thoughts!”
and what they actually hear is, “You can only be around me if you are also pretending
to be this fake, eternally happy person."
After all, if you can’t bear your own negative feelings, how could anyone trust you to handle
theirs with any care and tact?
We end up attracting more inauthenticity.
Our world gets increasingly more curated and controlled and looks happy, but feels emptier
and emptier.
In the preceding chapters, we’ve worked hard to identify and root out distorted, unhealthy,
and self-defeating thoughts and beliefs.
But that doesn’t mean you should replace all these with their polar opposites, glibly
believing instead that everything is awesome, you can do absolutely anything you put your
mind to, and that a fully actualized person is just brimming with joy and enthusiasm twenty-four-seven.
Let’s not allow the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction!
Good Versus Whole
Make your goal to be a person who accepts their complete, full selves, both dark and
light.
It takes maturity to embrace what is, even though that may be imperfect, flawed, uncomfortable,
or confusing.
No human being is one hundred percent invulnerable.
“Negativity” is built into the fabric of life itself—without it, we would never
understand gratitude, we would never learn what we valued, we would never be challenged
to improve, and we would never face the natural consequences of our behavior and the fact
that not all choices are good for us.
We are mortal.
We can be hurt, we can make mistakes, and we can even be the “bad guys” sometimes.
To acknowledge all this is NOT to be negative any more than to deny it means we are positive.
The following sentiments are common whenever toxic positivity is in full swing.
Notice if you use these phrases on yourself or with others, and gently challenge yourself
to find room in there for your real, full experience instead:
“Stay positive!”—“How are you feeling, exactly?
What is your experience like right now?
I’m listening without judgment.”
“Failure is not an option.”—“Failure is learning.
It’s a part of life.”
“It’ll all be okay.”—“What is happening for you right now?”
“Every cloud has a silver lining/Everything happens for a reason.”—“Sometimes, bad
things happen.
What do you need to feel supported?”
“You got this!”—“I’m here for you no matter what.
You deserve kindness and support even if you’re having difficulty.”
“Good vibes only.”—“Ancient Roman Playwright Terence puts it best: ‘Homo sum,
humani nihil a me alienum put,’ which means: ‘I am human, and I think nothing human is
alien to me.’
In other words, all vibes are allowed because they are part of the rich, three-dimensional
fabric of human experience."
Keep reminding yourself that toxic positivity does not have any benefits.
It does not make life easier to bear, it does not guarantee more favorable outcomes, and
it does not give you a kind of cheat code that allows you to bypass all the messy and
uncomfortable parts of life.
In fact, if anything, it makes the hard parts of life more difficult to bear.
What we shove out of conscious awareness doesn’t disappear.
It only festers somewhere else, where it doesn’t get the benefit of our compassionate awareness
to help process it.
Thus, the negativity that we don’t acknowledge never has the chance to teach us or enrich
our lives in any way—what is “positive” about that?
Letting Go of Toxic Positivity
Step 1: Make friends with discomfort
Toxic positivity is, at least at first, the easy way out.
Facing your discomfort head on takes courage and honesty.
If you notice yourself leaping in to reassure, dismiss, invalidate, or soothe a negative
feeling, stop and notice what you’re doing.
Try to instead “sit with” your unpleasant emotion.
Don’t try to destroy, fix, dissolve, or triumph over it ... but don’t succumb to
it, either.
Just sit alongside it.
Put a name to your feeling and leave it at that.
Watch your mind try to run around everywhere to escape it, and bring it back to the present
and to the truth of reality.
“I’m sad.
I feel a deep, deep sadness about my sister passing away.
I’m so confused and hurt."
Then don’t judge, interpret, or rush to fix what comes up.
Just let that emotion be what it is.
Step 2: Be patient
Toxic positivity can feel like a quick fix and an instant relief.
But working through your emotions takes time.
Don’t rush and be overly keen for a happy resolution, or barge ahead wanting to skip
over the difficult bits so you can get to the happy ending where you’ve learned your
lesson and can move on.
Seeds sprout when they’re ready, wounds heal as best as they can, and emotions come
and go, but on their own schedule.
Take it as your duty to give them comfortable passage—don’t hold on to them but don’t
be too eager to rush them on, either.
“I’m sad right now.
I don’t know how I’ll feel tomorrow.
I know this won’t last forever, but I’m willing to let it last as long as it needs
to.”
Step 3: Distinguish between productive and unproductive negativity
Finding a balance between positive and negative is not complicated.
If there is a negative side to positivity, then there is a positive side to negativity.
You can navigate your way through them both by framing it all in terms of productivity
or usefulness:
Productive negativity – pure, authentic emotion that does not contain judgment, shame,
or resistance to that emotion.
Negativity that promotes insight, learning, resilience, or inspired action.
Unproductive negativity – the secondary negativity that emerges around an authentic
emotion and serves to prolong and exacerbate it without any benefit.
Negativity that limits options, inhibits action, and leads to passivity, despair, and loss
of agency.
Let’s go back to Craig and his example.
When he looks at his second big bout of “depression,” he can ask whether it’s unproductive or
productive.
He may see that there are actually two emotions—one is sadness, and the other is a mix of shame,
anger, and irritation about that sadness.
The secondary emotions don’t seem to go anywhere—in fact, they only seem to make
him feel worse.
But he also notices that when he focuses on the primary emotion—the initial sadness—it
hurts, but if he doesn’t heap judgment and shame onto it, it doesn’t feel as bad as
he thought it would.
In fact, once he fully acknowledges how he actually feels, he notices with surprise that
he doesn’t feel that way for long.
His sadness, once acknowledged, actually spurs him on to feel new, different things.
After a few weeks of “sitting with” how he genuinely feels, something else stirs in
him: He wants to act.
He feels compelled to do something meaningful in his sister’s memory—something he wouldn’t
have dreamed of if he was still pretending that everything was okay!
Like so many people who learn to let go of toxic positivity, Craig understands that the
remedy for depression is not happiness, but authentic sadness.
Toxic positivity doesn’t help, but neither does stagnant depression and despair.
Instead, Craig finds a way out through the middle: by accepting what is so that it can
be processed and released.
Step 4: Reconnect to your values and shift to problem-solving
Emotions exist for our benefit.
They are there for a reason and have evolved to keep us safe, help us to connect, and allow
us to live a life of meaning.
Emotions—all emotions, even the awful, inconvenient, or embarrassing ones—can teach us something
if we are willing to listen.
It is not necessary in life to suffer needlessly just for the sake of it.
Rather, you are a human being who is tasked with finding meaning and purpose in your experiences.
If you can invoke your values and principles, you can imbue your suffering with meaning—and
transform it into something beautiful.
As you accept and sit with uncomfortable emotions, try to look for the hidden blessing.
Not in a “everything happens for a reason!”
way, but in a way where you graciously make the best of everything that comes your way.
Compare experiences against your values.
For example, if you value independence and autonomy, allow a frightening cancer scare
to teach you the value of interdependence and the power of asking for help.
On the other hand, you might find that negative experiences with someone who keeps violating
your boundaries confirm for you values that you never knew you had before—the principles
of dignity and self-worth.
The trick is that you cannot be inspired and taught by negative emotions until you feel
them fully.
You cannot skip over the painful part and rush to the blessing in disguise part—the
blessing is only revealed by enduring the negative emotion in the first place.
Craig, for example, values intellectual mastery, truth, and spiritual development.
But if he acknowledges his real emotions, they may teach him that, ironically, the best
way to move forward sometimes is to go backward, and the best way to grow is to be willing
to let go of your ego’s idea of what life should be like.
Identify your personal values and the principles you hold most dear.
And then let them inspire you to take action and solve problems.
If you are going through a difficult time, remind yourself of what makes life meaningful
for you.
Then take action that incorporates the way you feel but brings you closer to what matters.
For example, you may face the fact of deep regrets you have about your past.
But you remind yourself that you value who you are today—and that person is who they
are because of those past experiences.
You take action and forgive yourself, vowing also not to act today in ways that you might
regret tomorrow.
Think of negative emotions as a pathway into more deeply understanding your values—and
bringing them to life in action.
Ask yourself, “How does a person who values what I value behave when they experience
what I’m experiencing?"