living your best life
EVERYTHING IS AWESOME by Desiree Stewart
Have you ever run into a friend and when they asked, “How are you doing?” and you answered, “I’m doing great!” despite your heart feeling like it is being squeezed by an outside entity? Now, I am not advising that you tell every Tom, Dick, and Harry how you are feeling. Vulnerability is not meant for every person that crosses your path. What I am asking, though, is if you feel you are stuck in this world of false positivity. False positivity, otherwise known as toxic positivity, according to The Psychology Group, is defined to be “the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. The process of toxic positivity results in the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience.” We seem to have entered a period in time where it is believed that we must always be positive in order to be deemed healthy. That somehow, if we continually choose to be positive, the negative will just go away. But, in actuality, this is not true and can be extremely damaging in the long run.
Rigid Positivity “We are caught up in a rigid culture that values relentless positivity over emotional agility, true resilience, and thriving,” says Susan David, Ph.D., a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and author of the book Emotional Agility. “And when we push aside difficult emotions in order to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop deep skills to help us deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.”
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The truth is, our emotions are neither positive or negative, rather, how we use or present those emotions are when they become a problem. If our anger causes us to yell at a loved one or throw items and destroy property, we are using those emotions in a negative manner. But having anger is not a bad emotion nor does it make you a bad person. Susan David, Ph.D. goes on to say “The conventional view of emotions as good or bad, positive or negative, is rigid. And rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic. We need greater levels of emotional agility for true resilience and thriving.” We have entered a
A Hard Year
period where it is believed that somehow, if we continually choose to be positive, the negative will just go away
Let’s be honest, the last year has been emotionally taxing on almost everyone. The constant level of change, stress, unknown, has put almost everyone on edge. To say that we have all been positive and everything is grand would be a boldfaced lie for most people. Having hope for the future is different than feeling positive in the moment. So how do we ensure we are feeling our emotions and being resilient as we travel through the difficulties? Perhaps sharing a bit about me would be helpful. I am a full-range-of-emotion person. I’ve tried to not be. I’ve been told many times I’m too emotional, too sensitive. Over time I have tried to hold back my emotions definitely not to show them and on occasion not to feel them. I can speak for myself and say that has
