Toxic Positivity Culture | 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't "Just Think Positive"
Hi Muses! I'm trying something a little different this week because I'm feeling salty. (And I'm told I'm funny when I'm salty, so...)
I'm basically gonna rant about the classic piece of advice to "just think positive," because really that advice makes me mad. Because not only can it be entirely unhelpful, but it can be downright harmful as well.
Click below to watch the video, or read on for the full transcript.
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As I've talked about before a little bit on my channel, I have a long history of chronic illness, mental illness, trauma, and severe depression. And often when I was growing up, instead of receiving direct help for my often overwhelmingly negative experiences (be it physical pain or mental health problems), instead of getting direct help for those things I was often told to "just think positive." And I'm not saying I was completely at the mercy of this piece of advice, I did have doctors that were trying to help (yada yada yada), but when it came down to me being by myself, a kid, and feeling like absolute crap mentally and physically, lots of people just told me to "think positive" and um... NO! Awful. [BLEH] Suffice it to say the entire concept gets me really salty. Which is why I'm here talking to you about it today.
Quick disclaimer though. I mean the whole "thinking positive" thing can be a helpful tool for some people in some circumstances. I'm just here pointing out all of the other people and the other circumstances where it can be very unhelpful, if not entirely harmful.
So why is the advice "just think positive" harmful? Let me count the ways. (And I understand this is not an exhaustive list. These are just the top five things that are front of mind for me right now.)
Let's start with the perspective of the person giving the advice to "just think positive." When you tell someone to "just think positive," you're doing a couple of main things. The first of which being that you are devaluing their actual felt experience in the moment. You are setting it aside and telling them to "just think positive." And there are two sides to that coin, and you might be doing that because you genuinely think that advice will help them, or you could be doing that because if they were to think positive it would make you feel better, which... Not great. But the other thing that you're doing when you tell someone to "just think positive" is you're telling them they cannot trust you with everything that they are and everything that they feel and experience.
To have deep and meaningful relationships with people, we need to be able to trust that it is safe to show up as we are in the moment without any sort of exceptions. And having that safety to feel like shit, and to be going through tough times, and to have those experiences and feelings with another person who isn't devaluing your experience or asking you to "just think positive," that can be transformative. That kind of support is life-changing and I just want to point out how important that is.
So if you are someone who is telling someone to "just think positive," you need to really think about what that is communicating to the person. Are you communicating to them that they shouldn't trust you? That their pain doesn't mean anything to you? Because if you don't want to be communicating that, maybe don't tell them to "just think positive."
Another reason why the advice to "just think positive" can be really harmful is because it can often be a form of gaslighting. And gaslighting is where you are telling someone that the way they have experienced their feelings or their circumstances is incorrect. It's like... This might seem really simple but for example, if someone were to grow up thinking the sky is blue (because it is) but their entire life everyone in the world reinforced the idea to them that the sky is actually green, to the extent that that person then truly believes that the sky is green (even though they look up and they SEE BLUE), that's gaslighting. And gaslighting is a really traumatic form of - I don't know - brainwashing. There's no better way to put it. Because if you are someone who has experienced extensive gaslighting, you learn to not trust your own direct felt experience, and you learn to mistrust yourself, and that is a really awful place to be.
As someone who experienced a lot of gaslighting growing up, I can tell you it's not good.
Coming back to a place where I can start actually believing in and trusting in my direct felt experience is huge. It's a lot of work, but it is so worth it. And when you tell someone to "just think positive," you are in a way wiping away that person's own felt experience and trying to override it with your own, of "positive thinking." And the person starts to believe, "Oh. I shouldn't be feeling these negative things. I shouldn't be experiencing these negative things. I need to think and feel positive instead." And it's a form of gaslighting that overwrites their actual experience and makes it very hard for them to feel what they're actually feeling, to experience what they're actually experiencing, and that can be really damaging.
Comment below and say if you have ever experienced gaslighting. There's no need to go into any sort of storytelling. I don't want anyone to rip their heart open. I just want everyone who watches this video to leave a really short comment saying whether or not you've experienced gaslighting, so that when people go and look in the comments they can see how common it is.
Now let's talk about the advice of "just think positive" but from the perspective of the person who is receiving that advice.
If you're the kind of person who wants to do better and be better, if you hear the advice to "just think positive" you try to do it. You try to make it happen. You try to "just think positive." And as a result of that you end up dissociating from your actual felt experience and you either numb out from it, or you just sweep it under the rug. Either way it's gonna come back to bite you later. Because a feeling or experience cannot be processed, cannot be healed from, cannot be moved on from, without fully experiencing it and integrating it into your life. You can't just ignore stuff.
Furthermore, if you continue this pattern of "just thinking positive" perpetually, you sweep so much stuff under the rug, you dissociate from so many things, that you eventually gaslight yourself. You lose the ability to actually feel and sense what you're feeling, what you're experiencing, because you no longer trust your direct felt experience. And there becomes this chasm between you and what you're feeling, and you're unable to bridge that gap. And the longer you have that gap in your life, the harder it is to heal from it.
It is possible to heal from it. I can attest to that (something I'm working on right now).
But you need to be able to feel what you're feeling and for that to be okay. It's beyond important. You can't process a feeling you don't allow yourself to fully experience, and you can't solve problems that you don't allow yourself to fully see and comprehend.
Ultimately "just thinking positive" (especially if you do it over and over and over again), it has this compounding effect where all of your problems, all of your negative feelings and experience just build up in this dark corner of your mind and they never get processed. But they're still there! And they're still causing problems in your life. And until you open the door and look at what you got, you can't actually heal, grow, solve problems, and move forward.
Is there a place for dissociating? Numbing out? For other forms of coping strategies? Of course there are. Some feelings and experiences are so overwhelmingly negative that it is not safe for you to try to process them on your own. It can be helpful to be conscious of it when you're purposefully coping with a stressful situation by dissociating from it. Having that knowledge will allow you to (when it is safe and/or when you do have the support) to go back and to work through it and to process it.
So there you have it, the things that make me really salty about the advice to "just think positive." It can be such a harmful piece of advice. And as a recovering "just think positive-er," I can really attest to that.
If you're looking at me like, "Uh Cassie, this is all great, but then um... How do I actually process my emotions?!" I recommend checking out this video on what I call Anytime Pages. It's a great targeted journaling exercise to help you process things. (And there are lots of ways to process things. This is just one of them.) So check it out if you're interested.
And also, if you're curious about hearing more of my personal experience with depression, you can check out this video.
And if you're curious about what the heck it is that I do as a coach. (Yes. I'm a coach.) I recommend checking out my free Masterclass on overcoming procrastination and resistance. You can sign up for free at this link. All you have to do is sign up with your name and email address.
If you liked this video, please hit that like button, subscribe, and share it with at least one other person.
I'll be back with another video next Tuesday. I'll see you then. Bye.
OUTTAKES: And I'm told I'm pretty funny when I... [BLEH] What is it? [AH][GROAN] Wow I can't speak fast enough. [HMMM] Another way... Oh, I'm going to start this whole section over again [HIGH SQUEAKY VOICE] because it was a bad explanation! That can be shorter. [HMMM] I [BLAHLALA, PHLEM, COUGH] That was terrible.