You may have been hearing the term toxic positivity a lot lately. Over the last 4 years, life in human society has become a much more negative experience for people. In truth, for many people, life has become so emotionally hard to deal with, that they have turned to all kinds of coping mechanisms to deal with it. And one of these coping mechanisms is toxic positivity. It is absolutely rampant today. For this reason, let’s look at what toxic positivity is, why it is a problem and what to do about it.

A person who has a positive mental attitude focuses on the positives in any situation, expects good outcomes, even expects things to turn out for the best, re-frames negative things in a positive light, finds the silver lining, has an optimistic outlook on life and focuses on the desired outcome. It is easy to see how this could be a beneficial way to approach life. But what if I told you that there can be a really big dark side to positivity when it is used as a coping mechanism? To cope is to make a specific alteration mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage or adapt to something that is causing you stress. We usually adopt a coping mechanism when we believe that the situation that is causing us distress cannot be changed for the better or eradicated. Essentially, we believe that it is out of our control to eradicate the stressor. So, we are forced to manage with it, deal with it and adapt to it. This is especially true in childhood, when we do not call the shots about our own life. The people around us do. As people around the globe are feeling more and more powerless to the negative, unwanted stressors that currently exist in human society, they are turning more and more to coping mechanisms.

A person who uses positivity as a coping mechanism, uses positivity to deny, suppress, disown, reject and run away from anything they consider negative. It is an extreme form of avoidant resistance. This, is toxic positivity. When someone is engaged in toxic positivity, they are using positivity like a buoy that they are desperately clinging to, in order to keep them out of reality, because subconsciously they think that they cannot handle the negative aspects of reality. It is a form of willful denial. And in today’s world, it does not help that a few teachers and even more social media influencers are encouraging this. They are promising you that the way this universe works, is that if you focus entirely on the positive and put yourself in the place of already being where you want to be and already having what you want to have, that the reality you want will come to be. It is a real ‘fake it is how to make it’ mentality. Pretend to be confident and you will be confident. Think positively and only good things will happen to you. Imagine and act as if you have that boyfriend and he will appear in your life. There is even a “delulu” movement going on in the younger generations. Delulu being short for delusional. People are being told that the key to having the life they want is to “be delulu”. Be positively delusional, and what you want will become your reality. 

Because of all of this, we need to weed through the reasons why toxic positivity is a problem. 

1. It distorts universal truths. It is a reality that you live in a universe based on the law of mirroring (also called the law of attraction). What this means is, your external reality was designed to be a reflection of your personal vibration. But as per usual, the people who are promoting the idea of willful positive delusion, are drastically oversimplifying what makes up your personal vibration and therefore why and how something shows up in your external life. They are reducing your vibration solely to your mind and to what you are consciously focused upon. If I got into the full picture of what makes up your personal vibration, I would be writing a bible and you would be too overwhelmed to deal with it. But just to give you a taste of what I mean, take solely the genetics you opted into by coming into this life in the physical incarnation you opted into. Genetics are multi-dimensional, something science will one day find out. At one of these dimensions, they contain the memories of every ancestor who came before you on both sides of your family tree. This is one reason why ancestral traumas can be passed down, something scientists have already studied and proven to be true. A great many of these patterns are active when you come into this life, as you are meant to be the one to work with them for the sake of your own personal expansion as well as the expansion of the consciousness of your family line. So, let’s say that three generations ago, all of your family members were carted off to concentration camps and the people who lived and went on to have children, lost everyone they cared about, leading to hypochondria at the slightest of ailments. This pattern will be passed down. Simply focusing your conscious mind on being perfectly well and everyone around you being perfectly well, does not overcompensate for that imbedded experience. Especially when for most people, what we call the subconscious mind is SO much more powerful than the conscious mind. Nor is it looking directly at the trauma and creating real healing to that trauma. All this does, is give the person a mixed vibration. This ancestral pattern will still be reflecting in this person’s life as external experiences where they fear their own death and the loss of loved ones to death, no matter how much visualization they do and no matter how much they ‘act like’ everything is fine.
   Another tiny example is that by opting into certain decisions, you are automatically becoming a vibrational match to certain experiences. These include both pre-birth decisions, such as incarnating as a woman in the year 1705, as well as decisions you make along the way such as the decision to attend college. Positive focus does not suspend the law of cause and effect or the reality that this is a universal construct of contrast. There will be a set of positives and a set of negatives to any situation you chose into. For example, if you choose to become a professional surfer, no matter what, there will be a set of negatives that come with that. Things like risking drowning, injury, sharks, collisions, sunburn, surf rage, being cold and the extreme pressure of competition. You don’t tell someone who gets cold because of making the decision to surf in frigid waters… “Well, the whole reason you are cold and wet now is because you didn’t put yourself mentally in the place of being warm and dry, because if you had, you would be. You would have never experienced being wet and cold in the first place.
   Knowing these universal laws and using your conscious mind to manifest, which you can absolutely do, is but one part of the picture of mastering life on earth. It is not the whole shebang. And when it comes to altering your vibration to be more of a match to what you want, conscious positive manifestation pales in comparison to working with your subconscious; things like shadow work. On top of this, you have to be very honest about whether your goal is simply to feel good and create the life you want, or to become awakened. Because simply focusing on the positive and on the creation of what you want, is NOT the road to awareness and awakening. In fact, if it becomes your way of living life, rather than just a tool in your tool box for life, it can become an antagonistic force to awareness and awakening.

2. Toxic positivity is a resistance, dismissal, suppression and avoidance of negative thoughts, negative emotions, and negative realities. It is a pushing against what is unwanted. It is a refusal to accept something. It is a war with what is. This means, a great deal of energy is going into and towards the very thing that a person is trying to avoid. And this means, they will not only persist, but grow bigger until you cannot run from them anymore. Toxic positivity is not a coping mechanism that will work long term, and when it doesn’t, the negative reality you will be sitting in, will be far worse than it was to begin with and far worse that it would have been if you were to face the negative aspects of reality to begin with. 

3. Toxic positivity is a form of denial and as such, it will ruin your life. Denial is refusing to accept or admit to the truth of the reality of something unpleasant. It is a powerfully unconscious state of being because to slip into denial, a person has to either stop seeing, feeling and hearing any proof to contradict the positive. Or see the negative, but negate it, nullify it, deny or minimize the impact it has on their life, excuse it, forget it or rationalize it. Denial is a recipe for disaster. To understand why, imagine getting in an airplane and flying out across the ocean. Imagine that a low oil pressure warning light comes on in your cockpit. Now imagine that instead of actually addressing it, you take a piece of duct tape and put it over the light so you don’t see it anymore. Obviously, that is going to get you into a whole lot of trouble. Just like any coping mechanism, with toxic positivity, a person simply immediately indulges in the coping mechanism instead of actually making effective, positive changes to their life that accommodate for the negative realities that they are being presented with.   

4. Toxic positivity will destroy your relationships. Let’s imagine that you feel like you simply cannot deal with the pain you feel in response to someone else bringing up something negative or someone else’s negative emotions because it makes you think negative thoughts and feel negative emotions, something you feel you can’t deal with. Not being able to cope with that, let’s imagine that you will deny that person’s reality and refuse to accept it as true or valid. Instead, you minimize, invalidate and refuse to deeply acknowledge what they are presenting you with. The person is not able to be seen, heard, felt or understood by you. And you will not respond in a way that accommodates for their negative reality. As a result, you cannot act in their best interests. You will lose their trust. Just think of the previous analogy. If you get into an airplane and the pilot flies out across the ocean, sees a low oil pressure warning light come on in the cockpit and puts a piece of duct tape over the light so neither of you see it anymore, you immediately no longer trust the pilot. Trust is the holy grail of relationships. Toxic positivity in a relationship makes a relationship impossible. People may be in the same room physically, but they are in different realities completely and usually, the one who is not coping with toxic positivity is in torment because they are not just alone, they are alone in their pain. The single most painful thing a person can experience isn’t something painful… it is going through something painful, entirely on their own. To really help someone with their fear or pain, it has to be acknowledged, seen as valid and understood. Otherwise, all the “helpful actions” you take aren’t really helpful; they are simply attempts to trump the person’s painful reality with your reality. With toxic positivity, the mentality is “I don’t see you or feel you or hear you or understand you because it’s too painful to me to do those things.”  The underlying message is:  “I cannot accommodate your reality into my reality and feel good at the same time, so I’m going to choose to leave you alone in your pain and in your reality, so I can feel ok”. Toxic positivity is also one of the most damaging patterns that a parent can exhibit. If you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: When Positivity Becomes a Parenting Problem.   

5. Toxic positivity shuts down authentic discussion and communication. When someone is engaged in toxic positivity, anything that is not positive is countered, ignored and shut down. There is no space to come to the person who is engaged in toxic positivity with thoughts, insights, truths or emotions that they would deem as negative. They see it as wrong. And so, there is no psychological safety around honesty and expression around them. 

6. Toxic positivity induces guilt and shame for feeling bad and for having negative truths. Toxic positivity rejects all difficult thoughts, perceptions and emotions in favor of a cheerful, falsely positive façade. It is an intense and enduring pressure to feel good no matter what is happening. It carries with it the message that the thoughts and feelings that a person is thinking and feeling are unacceptable. It also carries with it the message that if you are not finding a way to think and feel positive, even in the face of serious tragedy or dire circumstances, you are doing something wrong. For this reason, it compounds a person’s pain. It makes someone’s pain worse as well as denies people the authentic support they need for what they are facing. And this is the message that a person who copes with toxic positivity is sending to themselves every day without even knowing it. 

7. Toxic positivity causes an escalation of negativity in others. When someone copes with toxic positivity, it causes pain to the other person, thus adding to the negativity of their life experience. Also, it is such an intense polarization that it tends to push people to the opposite polarity, which is negativity. On top of this, when someone suppresses the negative, it will come up through other people they have a connection to. On top of this, it is such a blatant refusal to acknowledge the negative and such a blatant opposition to pain that people find themselves having to escalate the negative and the pain in order for it to be acknowledged and in order to advocate for the parts of themselves that are in pain. Many people around someone who uses toxic positivity will begin to feel bad about themselves because of how truly pessimistic and negative they will start to become. At the same time someone who uses toxic positivity will be confused about why their positivity isn’t simply attracting positive people into their life. Why instead, they are increasingly surrounded by negative people and ever-increasing negativity. Most especially negative feedback.        

8. Toxic positivity prevents growth and personal expansion. It is in the acknowledging of the negatives, as well as the exploration of them, that we are able to gain the awareness and insights necessary to define what we want, change and to go in the right direction. To use toxic positivity is to deny yourself of self-awareness. It is to deprive yourself of external awareness as well. It is to break your own compass. Therefore, it is a guarantee that you will not develop as a person and you will not end up where you want to end up in life.  

9. Toxic positivity brings humanity further into the emotional dark age. It is critical that we come out of this emotional dark age. We have to learn what emotions are, what purpose they serve and how to respond to them. Toxic positivity makes an enemy of negative emotion. It is abusive to negative emotion or put another way, to the aspect of a person that feels negative emotion. And this guarantees that the negative emotion will not be responded to correctly. To learn more about this, you can watch my videos titled: The Emotional Wakeup Call and Stop Trying to Regulate Your Emotions.  

10. Toxic positivity is a form of gaslighting. When something negative is happening, it creates a false narrative of reality that causes people to doubt their own estimation of what is real. It makes people feel mentally ill when they are not. Reality contains both positives and negatives. To fixate only on the positives of a given reality, is to be out of reality. And a person who is facing something negative in reality, does not need the negative elements of reality to be denied, negated and nullified. 

Positivity can be a very helpful tool in the right context. Healthy positivity is rooted in reality. Toxic positivity is a fight against what is real. Healthy positivity is to acknowledge the bright side. Toxic positivity is to deny and suppress the dark side. Positivity works when a person is looking directly at and is taking in the full reality of any given situation, this includes what some people might label negative realities. But positivity must be authentic, not a cover that is dawned to hide or avoid anything negative. Using our original metaphor, the point of life is to master the art of swimming. Not to desperately cling to a buoy for dear life. If you use toxic positivity as your coping mechanism, the time has come to learn to feel your negative emotions and acknowledge your painful truths. You need to start to lean into discomfort and practice moving towards it instead of away from it. We engage in coping mechanisms to get out of pain. If you adopted the coping mechanism of toxic positivity, you felt you could not change or eradicate an actual situation that was causing you pain; so, you moved your sights to the unpleasant response to the threat… the pain itself.  You started to see pain in and of itself as the problem and therefore the threat to your life. In reality, pain was never a threat to you, quite the opposite. Pain is a feedback mechanism. It tells you information about your environment and yourself so that you can listen to that feedback and take appropriate action. 

So that you can understand better what I mean, I will paint you a picture. To see pain as the enemy and to engage in a coping mechanism to get away from it is akin to having your arm cut off and injecting yourself with morphine and convincing yourself that once the pain is gone the threat is gone and you’re all better.  When in fact the real threat is that you’re bleeding out and by not feeling the pain, you are certainly not all better. In fact, you will never take the necessary steps in reality to actually be better. Whenever you feel negative emotion, use the pain itself as a kind of mediation bell, awakening you to the opportunity to gain valuable feedback. It is trying to tell you something. If you engage in your coping mechanism to get away from it, you’ll never know what it’s trying to tell you and so you’ll never be able to take the right action for yourself or for the people around you.

The good vibes only mantra is a societal illness, one that we need to remedy, especially if we want to make any genuine positive change to this human society, which is currently causing us so much distress that we feel the need to use coping mechanisms to survive it.