The Toxic Positivity of "Good Vibes Only"
Everyone dealt with the threat of COVID-19 and the impact of lockdown in their own way. For many people, trying to stay positive was a healthy coping mechanism, but that doesn’t mean fear and anxiety and expressing negative emotions should be dismissed or denied.
Toxic positivity is not letting yourself feel any emotion besides happiness or gratitude. It is not acknowledging or recognizing that multiple complex emotions can exist in you all at once, and you can be both grateful to have a roof over your head and hate the job that’s continuing to pay you in order to afford that roof. You could be devastated at the loss of life from Covid-19 and enjoy the hygge of quarantine. There were so many social media posts about being super productive and using quarantine wisely in order to learn a new language, get fit, finally write that novel, or lean into virtual dating, and for anyone who wasn’t feeling excited about those prospects or who was just trying to get through the day while keeping any depression or despondent feelings at bay, that felt like one more thing they couldn’t manage. When we shut down any negative emotion, we don’t actually make it go away. We close the metaphorical closet door on it but the specter of it looms behind the door, growing scarier and stronger in our minds precisely because we aren’t addressing it.
There’s an expression “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and it means that when we bring the scary things into the light, whether they are memories, emotions, or fears about the future, we can really examine them and take away some of their power to infect us. One excellent strategy for accepting and balancing the seemingly conflicting emotions we feel at any given time is the old improv standby of “yes, and.” For example, “I am so tired of being stuck inside with my family and I am grateful that I enjoy my family’s company enough to be stuck inside with them.” or “I am afraid of what the future holds and I feel some excitement at the hope some things may change for the better.” When we give ourselves permission to hold multiple seemingly conflicting truths in our minds at the same time, we can eliminate the tension between them and give room to all of our positive and negative emotions.
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