We all have that friend of a friend who is always mega-smiley when you see them – and every time they are ‘amazing!’ and will share about their latest adventure, exciting party they were invited to or just how much they love the blooming of the flowers and the change of season. Being around them makes you feel tired and like you’re life is barely as tenth as exciting – otherwise you would be as excited, grateful and enchanted by life as this person, right?

 

Pay attention to how they make you feel.

 

Being around a person who is genuinely positive, ‘high vibration’ or expansive would feel energizing, not tiring. A person who is genuinely feeling good will not have an energy of trying to prove to the world how great their life is. The tiredness you feel around them is probably you energetically picking up on how hard they are working to project an image of positivity into the world.

 

A person who is genuinely ‘good’ will have no trouble attuning to the people around them – noticing where they’re energy’s at – and what is an appropriate way to channel their good vibes. Often it looks like curiosity about others, empathy, or sharing in a way that feels connecting.

 

If someone comes across as positive, ‘having it all together’ and so on – but the experience of being around them leaves you feeling disconnected and tired – then there is probably something going on beneath the surface.

 

Trust your sensitivity. Trust your inner knowing. They might not even know themselves yet, how hard they are working to keep up the appearances.

 

Refrain from giving much attention to the critical voices in the dark corners of your mind that might use this as fuel for thoughts like:

 

“there must be something wrong with me”

“everyone else has it all figured out”

“it’s my fault that I’m not living as awesome a life as them”

“I’m not positive / grateful / good enough of a person”

“if I was more like them, things in my life would work out”

etc…

 

Especially if you grew up in a hypercritical environment (i.e. a parent, teacher or other significant adult in your life having been often critical of you or how you did things) – you are likely to have a tendency to have a loud ‘inner critic’ that turns every external experience into a reason to berate yourself.

 

It’s a very clever thing – somebody pays you a compliment and it says something like “they’re only saying that to be nice”, it will quickly glance over everything you’ve achieved in the last year and focus on all the things that were on your list that you didn’t.

 

To go back to the original theme - what I have described above is sometimes called ‘Toxic Positivity’.

 

My understanding of Toxic Positivity is that it’s behaviour that is characterized by:

·      rejection and avoidance of ‘negative’ emotions – in oneself and others

·      superimposing positivity, gratitude, a ‘childlike wonder’ to every situation – to take on a persona where this is the ‘default setting’

·      when another person is sharing about a challenging experience and looking for space to be heard – ‘toxic positivity’ refuses to hear, and instead rushes to fix the situation by pointing out ‘there is still plenty to be grateful for’, for example

 

Toxic Positivity struggles to hold space for feelings like anger, disappointment, sadness or grief – because it doesn’t allow that for itself. ‘Positivity’ is a sort of crutch in order to avoid feeling a range of feelings that are part of the human experience.

 

The fear says something like:

 

“if I allow myself to feel these feelings – they will consume me, I will drown underneath them, I’ll never get out of that negative spiral…” – so it’s better to not open that Pandora’s Box in the first place.

 

It’s a sort of emotional immaturity – for anyone who has allowed themselves to feel these feelings, will know that emotions are like waves. They come, they are felt, processed and eventually they transmute into something else. At the initial stages of recovering from being emotionally cut-off – it’s true that actually feeling things can be quite stormy. However, this will become less intense over time, once all that has been bottled up has had time to process.

 

I can relate to this emotional immaturity – there was a time when I was terrified of my own feelings, when I was so cut off from them. I probably resorted to ‘toxic positivity’ myself too, and struggled with people expressing these ‘lower vibratory feelings’ as I then perceived them. It’s only in retrospect that I realise how emotionally immature I was myself at that time.

 

So – even though ‘Toxic Positivity’ is now something I don’t want in my energy field – I have compassion for it’s origins.

 

It makes sense to me that I was so emotionally immature. I believe that the majority of people still are. Emotional immaturity is endemic to many cultures with the history of discounting emotionality, feeling, sensitivity, all things associated with the ‘feminine’. Few of us learn how to navigate our different emotions – in many family systems we were punished for expressing anger, sadness, if we cried or threw a tantrum. Our parents were triggered by these strong expressions of particular emotions, since they didn’t know how to allow them for themselves, either.

 

In a culture where the subconscious messaging says

“You are worthy of love and connection when you are ‘nice to be around’, i.e. a smiling, good boy or girl “

+

“You are rejected when you express ‘negative’ emotions”

 

It is understandable that some unknowingly resort to toxic positivity as a coping mechanism.

 

But if that strategy doesn’t resonate with you because you are too aware of the parts of yourself that you are abandoning in that process – that’s something beautiful and worth honouring.

 

So perhaps another perspective for when you next come across a ‘toxic positive’ person is to remind yourself that:

 

1.     The tiredness you feel around them is probably the amount of energy they are expending on projecting this persona

2.     This is a coping mechanism to avoid feeling the full spectrum of their felt experience

3.     There is a wound underneath it all that is driving this person to use this coping mechanism

4.     YOU are absolutely entitled to hold boundaries with toxic positivity – YOU are allowed to walk away. Protect your energy and surround yourself with people who feel genuine and energizing!

photo: Aziz Acharki on Unsplash