A Journey to Discover Toxic Positivity
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life — Dr. Susan David
Up to the point where I started my journey of self-discovery, I knew not toxic positivity by its name, I knew it as a means to keep my life glued together. For me, as someone who did his utmost to avoid confrontation being able to paint the most flattering picture to soothe and comfort people around me would prevent them from abandoning me. If they got upset or sad, I had to get them out of it; I thought it was simply something you do when you are a good person.
Of course, these means of appeasement meant that I had to lie and manipulate. The lying and manipulating were done to get people to avoid feeling pain and thus allow me to release this sense of guilt and responsibility for how they experience life.
Eventually, lives built on lies and manipulation come crashing down. I felt like a victim because I had not done this to enrich myself. I had done it because I was the rock, the good guy.
As with any rock bottom situation I had two choices, fall deeper by staying the course that I had set out on, or shift my mindset about life. I chose the latter.
Most of us are conditioned to, “suck it up”, “keep your chin up”, “this too shall pass”, etc. External conditioning from childhood discouraged me from experiencing the challenges in life and the emotions that come with them.
Like so many others, I didn’t have the safe space to express myself healthily. Since we learn this from our earliest ages, we then bring that to our own children, and thus, we perpetuate this forced false positivity. This is unless we break the cycle and start the inner work to find the path to our individual version of the “optimized self”.
Toxic positivity is essentially where we pretend everything is ok, when, in fact, it isn’t. It is the need we feel to turn on the light in a room where someone is sitting in the dark when that person simply needs us to sit in the dark with them.
For anyone on a spiritual path, it can be a form of spiritual bypass, but it is not an obvious distinction. On the face of it would call into question affirmations, positive visualizations, gratitude practices, etc., as being toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing.
Gratitude practices where we find gifts in every situation would on the surface of it be categorized the same way. Thankfully, these practices are not practices in toxic positivity. The key difference is what we do with those emotions when they come up to be noticed and acknowledged.
I spent my life up until my mid-40s pushing pain down to avoid conflict and to relieve others of discomfort. I would engage in a masking practice whenever I would have uncomfortable emotions come up, to avoid experiencing the emotion.
The mindful approach separates the thought from the emotion. We allow ourselves to experience the emotion, but make sure not to attach to it, nor judge ourselves for having the emotion. We give it our full attention but from an observer’s point of view. While observing the emotion we engage in a neutral and inquisitive thought process, that gradually moves over to thoughts that we chose and want to have. In this process, we then give the “emotion” free reins to reveal itself and to move through us before dissipating. Concurrently our thoughts, as we shift them over to thoughts that serve us, start to generate feelings and emotions that are of higher vibration.
Toxic positivity, at its source, has less to do with me not wanting to experience the discomfort of emotions, than people around you being uncomfortable with you experiencing it, and that is where we condition our learning to avoid experiencing our emotions. We force our positivity on others when we are uncomfortable with their pain or perhaps think we have no time to sit with them to give them our support with our presence. Part of that problem is that we don’t recognise the fact that we can feel their emotions as our own and if we have the self-awareness to differentiate between our own emotions and feelings and those of others, we can easily remove what doesn’t belong to us and fully and unconditionally hold space in peace with the person who is suffering. As an intuitive empath, I suffered greatly from this until I learned to manage the energies within my energetic body, and as a coach, I work with these energies to be fully present and supportive of my clients. We can all learn it, but because it is not considered hard science, most ignore it and perpetuate toxic positivity in their own lives.
I have through my practices gained several benefits:
- I have released pent-up emotions.
- I have healed childhood traumas and other aspects of myself that have weighed me down in lower energy frequencies.
- I have increased my emotional intelligence (EQ) by experiencing the emotions on their way to being released.
- My EQ has opened my ability to feel empathy. I can now comfortably recognise the emotions within someone else without freaking out.
If you want to try for yourself, start, in meditation, by learning to observe your own experiences from the perspective of your awareness. Notice emotions, feelings, and sensations. Observe them without attaching to them, and allow them to reveal themselves to you. They will communicate with you their shape, colour, name, density, texture, etc. They are there as a means for your body to communicate with you as the consciousness that something is going on that needs your attention. When you become more adept at this practice you can ask the emotion, feeling or sensation, “Do you belong to me?”, if it doesn’t, you can gently ask that it leaves. However, if it does belong to you, you follow the practice above. Imagine if we all develop these skills and allow our near and dear to evolve their emotional intelligence, not to mention our own, where would be as a species? How would it be if we trusted our compass as opposed to the map?
The journey of being human is to experience oneself. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional and the suffering is in how we perceive our experiences. When we avoid experiencing life with masking and coping mechanisms through, for example, spiritual practices, we are exercising spiritual bypass. It has been a valuable lesson for me to have gone through periods where I’ve fully exercised spiritual bypassing and projected toxic positivity. It is because I have experienced these that I can recognise them and hopefully catch myself should I find myself there again. The challenge is that we are poorly resourced to deal with our own ‘stuff’, so how can we be expected to hold space for others when they are going through their own? This is where I find it critical on my journey to finding my optimal self to go through the experiences and accept them for whatever they are and whatever they bring me. The result is always growth and learning, and I don’t have to judge that good or bad, it just is.
