I Can't Keep Calm and Carry On - Understanding Toxic Positivity and How to Cope

As a hypnotherapist and consciousness coach, I've dedicated my life to helping individuals gain a more expansive life perspective, let go of negative behavior patterns, heal from trauma, and broaden their self awareness. One of the pervasive issues I've observed, which often stifles authentic personal growth and self-improvement, is the phenomenon known as 'toxic positivity'. And I'm intimately familiar with it, as I've struggled with this beast for most of my adult life.

Toxic positivity is the excessive and ineffective overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state across all situations. It's the insistence on maintaining a cheerful outlook, even when faced with serious life struggles or mental health challenges. While positivity and optimism are valuable traits, they can become toxic when they invalidate genuine human emotion and experience.

Keep Calm and Carry On, but to what extent?

Our society is increasingly obsessed with the idea of constant positivity. You'll see it plastered on social media, within self-help books, and even in daily conversations. We're told to "look on the bright side", "be grateful", and "stay positive", even when we're navigating through life's toughest storms. While these mantras are well-intentioned, they can often lead to the dismissal of genuine feelings of pain, sadness, or difficulty.

The danger of toxic positivity lies in its negation of reality. It creates an unrealistic expectation that we should always be happy, that every situation has a silver lining, and that negativity has no place in our lives. This mindset can inadvertently lead to feelings of shame and inadequacy when we inevitably experience negative emotions. It can also lead to deep disassociation with various different layers of existence - for example in my case, I had a profound disassociation with my physical body, with deep emotions in general, and with understanding the consequences of my actions.

Personal growth and self-improvement are processes that involve a broad spectrum of human emotions. They require us to face our fears, confront our pain, and work through our struggles. By simply 'staying positive' and ignoring these emotions, we deny ourselves the opportunity to truly grow. Or put more bluntly, we do not grow. We stagnate in a confusing shame-spiral that time and time again leads us back to self-loathing, asking ourselves 'why do I feel so bad when I'm trying so hard to be happy?'

Moreover, toxic positivity can hinder the healing process after trauma, and more so after significant trauma by a loved one. By encouraging individuals to 'move on' and 'stay optimistic', we're essentially invalidating their distress and minimizing their experiences. This can delay recovery and even compound the trauma, leading to more severe mental health issues down the line.

So how can we approach positivity in a healthier way? The answer lies in emotional agility – the ability to navigate and use our emotions to serve our best interests. Instead of suppressing negative emotions, we should acknowledge them, understand their source, and use them as tools for personal growth.

For instance, if you're feeling sad after a significant loss, allow yourself to feel that sadness. It's a natural response to loss. Instead of suppressing it with positivity, explore it. What can it teach you about yourself, about the value of what you've lost, or about how you handle change? By exploring and understanding our emotions, we allow ourselves to learn, grow, and ultimately, heal.

One of the most helpful practices for feeling negative emotions can be the art of "holding space". This is a practice where you simply allow the emotion to exist without definition, opinion, judgement, or even much thought at all. Holding space requires you to simply observe the emotion, and to observe your mind's attempt to fall back into traditional programming, such as "this is terrible", "this always happens to me", or "this will undermine my plans", etc. The truth is, we simply do not know what meaning any circumstance may have in our lives, and oftentimes the meaning can be multi-layered and entangled into various other aspects of our lives that may not become apparent for months or even years down the road. By giving yourself the simple goal of holding space, you can relieve your mind from the duty of fixing and figuring out, and instead allow yourself permission to feel what you feel.

This practice also facilitates the ability to embody emotional agility - recognizing that all emotions, both positive and negative, are transient. They come and go, and none of them define us. By accepting this transient nature of emotions, we can prevent ourselves from becoming overly attached to any particular emotional state, be it positive or negative.

In conclusion, while positivity is a valuable trait, it's essential to strike a balance. We must allow ourselves to experience and express a range of emotions authentically. This balanced approach allows us to truly embrace personal growth and self-improvement, moving away from the dangers of toxic positivity. Remember, it's okay not to be okay sometimes. It's okay to feel your feelings, to understand them, and use them as stepping stones on your path to growth and self-improvement.