Toxic Positivity
“If you are happy and you know it, clap your hands.” Sound familiar? Did you sing this as a child? I not only sang it when I was little but have also, I led other little ones in singing it though my years as a Sunday School and Bible School teacher over the 34 years my husband served as a minister in the six congregations that he pastored. It is a catchy little tune complete with hand motions that can make it hard not to smile and join in.
It is just one of the many messages we get that tell us to smile and “be happy.” I talked to someone recently that grew up as a PK (Pastor’s Kid). She was telling me how her father drilled into her and her siblings that their family was to be the example of how to live a God-filled life. And a big part of that was being happy. She told me how much she loves her father and knows it came from a good place but in her adulthood, she has become proficient in wearing what she refers to as “masks.” She went on to say that it has inhibited her from knowing what she is feeling. She has become so adept at “masking” her real feeling to appear happy and calm that now that she is learning to live “mask” free she is struggling to identify her emotions.
That got me to thinking. A few years I ran across a term that intrigued me, toxic positivity. The idea being that we can place so much emphasis on being happy, positive, that we are actually doing ourselves harm in the long run. Thus, the toxic part of this phrase. In counseling we say that “anything we resist, persists.” Meaning that we can ignore the pain, or the negative emotions but they get stored in our body and we will have to deal with them eventually. This is where the idea of “bottling up” our emotions come from. And because there is not an infinite amount of storage they will come out with a vengeance and usually not a good time.
Maybe instead of just teaching our children to be happy or pretend to be happy we could be teaching them how to feel all their emotions. How to make room for the negative emotions. How to sit with them, how to feel them. And how to trust that they will not last forever. That negative emotions just like positive ones will fade. I like to think of negative emotions like I would a 24 hour stomach virus. When you are throwing up and feeling so achy and awful it can feel like this is surely the end. But there is this little voice in your head that reminds you that by tomorrow you will be feeling better and that gets reinforced over and over as you live through these wintertime maladies again and again. The same can be true for negative emotions. They feel awful. None of us like feeling angry, disappointed, guilty, shameful, sad or any other negative emotion you can think of. It can feel like the end, that you will not survive it. But when we sit with those emotions, accept them, stop trying to change them or make them go away what we find is that over time they naturally dissipate. The intensity slowing fading.
Over time we can learn to validate these negative emotions. We get better and better at telling ourselves we have every right to feel sad or mad or embarrassed. And then we let it alone. We increase our tolerance for emotional discomfort just as when we start an exercise regimen we increase our tolerance for physical discomfort. The same principle is at work. If I spend a day bent over weeding my flower beds, the next day my legs will be sore, my back will ache, and I will be moving a little more slowly. I can validate that physical pain and say, “It makes sense my muscles are sore, I used muscles that are not used to this strain.” And I walk a little slower and when it hurts, I feel ok knowing the pain will be temporary.
When the negative emotions come, we can do the same thing. Validate, “It makes sense that I would be feeling angry, what happened was not fair.” And then maybe I move a little slowly, acknowledge the pain and know that the pain will be temporary.
Try it the next time you have a negative emotion you want to shove down because it is too painful to feel. Validate it, sit with it, and then allow it to rescind on its own.
And if you’re not happy and you do know it, you have my permission to sit this one out. You do not have to don a mask and sing.