Author: Steve Hickman
“It’s OK. It’s all good.”
How many times have you heard that phrase uttered after some sort of upsetting, stressful, or unexpectedly painful experience? Especially in the United States, people routinely say this in an effort to demonstrate some feigned expression of equanimity, often after someone else apologizes for saying or doing something upsetting. People say things like this (or “I’m fine,” or “No problem”) to appear to remain above the fray or to avoid “getting into it,” as if it is possible to be untouched by messy human emotions.
Is it really “all good” when your rights have been violated, or you have been harmed by word or deed, or tragedy has touched someone you know and love?
It’s really not “all good” that these things happen, and to deny the pain, suffering, and outrage that arise in countless situations is to try and repress or deny our (admittedly sometimes flawed) human experiences of occasional terror, resentment, jealousy, and greed (to name a few). At times, life simply sucks, it hurts, and it’s not good, no matter how you look at it or try to frame it.
What Is Toxic Positivity?
When we say “it’s all good,” we are engaging in what has come to be called “Toxic Positivity”: an excessive and reflexive over-generalization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. Toxic positivity tends to encourage the denial, minimization, and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience. In other contexts, this could be called emotional bypassing. By appearing unfazed by difficult situations in life, one creates a facade of immunity that is unrealistic, and sometimes outright harmful, in the implicit message it sends.
The dangers of Toxic Positivity
On the surface, keeping up the facade of positivity seems pretty harmless, but when you scratch that surface you begin to see the corrosive effects of pretending that everything is just peachy all the time. Take social media for example – it can often turn into a “highlight reel” of our lives, where we create the illusion that all our time is spent eating fancy meals, taking cool trips, and having fun gatherings with people we love. There’s nothing wrong with sharing the highlights of our lives, but it creates the illusion that we don’t have to clean the litter box, suffer through illness, navigate arguments with our partner, or borrow money to get through a rough patch.
The US Surgeon General has recently raised the alarm about “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” and one of the key factors is how each of us looks at the apparent lives of others (often glimpsed through the lens of social media) and compares those “highlights” with the reality of our actual lives. We can’t help but come up short in such unrealistic comparisons, leaving us feeling shameful, flawed, uniquely unfortunate and generally as if we don’t measure up to society’s expectations of us. These are dangerous feelings that can lead to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other mental and physical health challenges.
What is the alternative to Toxic Positivity?
The meditation teacher and author Bodhipaksa wrote, “Mindfully accepting our painful feelings is an essential prerequisite to supporting ourselves with kindness and compassion. Accepting our pain means being willing to be present with it, not pushing it away or reacting to it.”
Nobody wants to dwell on pain or difficulty, but denying that life includes these challenges is equally harmful for us. Meeting and acknowledging the presence of suffering (in addition to joy, success, delight and all the aspects of life), so that we can tend to our wellbeing is really the key to navigating the sometimes treacherous and sometimes pleasurable waters of our lives.
The really powerful opportunity here is to practice full and complete awareness of our moment to moment experience, whether it is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. As much as we want to have all pleasant experiences, we know that life doesn’t work like that. There are potholes and speed bumps on the road of life, and accommodating the full spectrum of human experience is the equivalent of putting good shock absorbers on our car. Shock absorbers don’t make the road any smoother; instead, they make the ride smoother. This way, when we encounter the rough patches in our lives, we are prepared to navigate them with minimum disruption and stay on course.
Toxic Positivity sends a false message that the road is always smooth and we will never get lost on our life journey. Intellectually, we know how wrong that message is, but we so easily fall into assuming that it should be true, and then beat ourselves up when our journey doesn’t go the way we believed it would. Keeping our eyes wide open to the fullness of life, as an antidote to toxic positivity, tells us that the road of life is not entirely predictable and sometimes gets a little rough, but that we have what it takes to make that journey as pleasant and productive as possible. You never know what you might discover if you just look around and appreciate the fullness of each step of the trip!
Finding resilience in acceptance
You don’t have to necessarily like or embrace the struggles, stresses and disappointments that life hands you. If you can at least allow or accept that life invariably consists of difficult situations (along with all the positive experiences), then you can bring all your resources to bear. You can approach each situation with a growth mindset, where you stay true to your core values and learn from setbacks and challenges, and carry the lessons into the future.
And most importantly when things go wrong (as they do in life), you avoid feeling isolated or separate from others, because you courageously acknowledge that everybody struggles, fails and falls short sometimes – it’s actually a fundamental part of being human. When we recognize our common humanity, then we become more resilient in the face of challenges because we realize that everyone has these experiences and we are connected to others in our own human imperfection!
If we all practice some of the courage and willingness to gently but firmly encounter and connect directly and unflinchingly with ourselves and others who are experiencing painful emotions (regardless of the source), then we will truly be doing good work in the world. Brené Brown wrote, “My mom taught us never to look away from people’s pain. The lesson was simple: Don’t look away. Don’t look down. Don’t pretend not to see hurt. Look people in the eye. Even when their pain is overwhelming. And when you are in pain, find the people who can look you in the eye. We need to know that we are not alone, especially when we are hurting. This lesson is one of the greatest gifts of my life.”
May we truly find a way to look each other in the eye when we are hurting.