Terrible, Thanks for Asking. That's the name of a podcast I stumbled across today and I'm terribly grateful. It's bold. It's raw and it challenges the status quo that we're all "just fine".
What's negative about positivity?, the episode I listened, made me 1) feel more at peace with my so often so deep emotions 2) write this blog post as I feel like this podcast is really worth sharing as it brings up topic we don't usually talk about.
So here's a bunch of thoughts that were said and resonated with me deeply enough to note them down. But honestly, just dedicate an hour of your time to listening to it. Susan David made way too many good points to note all of them. :)
But really, if we think about toxic positivity in its most salient form, what is it? It's an avoidant coping strategy. It's avoidance. When you are telling other people just to be positive, you are basically saying to them, “My comfort is more important than your reality.” And we are also saying to them, “There is no space for your humanness here.”
Now, when you take this to its extreme, in a more individual level, you find — and I've seen this time and time again in my work — someone who says something like, “I'm bored in my job, but at least I've got a job.” And they talk themselves out of it. Five years later, they're still bored in their job. But now they've lost five years. And it’s not that they would just throw in the towel then and there. But if you showed up to that difficult emotion, you might start thinking about, “How do I tweak my current circumstance? What are some skills that I want to be growing? What interactions could I be having with people that would enable me to feel less bored?”
So when we show up to our difficult emotions, and when we try to recognize the value that's being signposted by them, this is what helps us to be adaptive human beings. And this is one of the reasons that Charles Darwin described emotions as being functional, that every single one of our emotions has a function.
And so, you know, I've often in my work had people saying things to me like, “I don't want to be stressed. I don't want to experience grief. You know, I don't want to be disappointed. Yes. You know, I want to start that new career, that new job. But I don't want to be disappointed.” But if we think about it, these are actually “dead people goals” in a way. You know, dead people never experience stress. Dead people never experience discomfort. if you want to have a life and love and raise a family and leave the world a better place and move into situations of intimacy, with that comes vulnerability and potential loss. And so discomfort is actually the price of admission to a meaningful life. Being able to hold both the, you know, so-called positive emotions and the difficult emotions side by side are what actually create far greater levels of meaning in our life.