What Is Toxic Positivity?

Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health explores Anxiety, Depression, ADHD, and Meditation with 150+ video chapters in a Final Fantasy-inspired skilltree.

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[lastplusfirst]

Forcing negative experience into positive lessons: ❌

Acknowledging the good while accepting the bad: ✅

[BubbaYak]

It's also important that it comes from the person experiencing it. It is really unhelpful to tell someone who is upset about something that they're feeling things wrong and it is in fact a good experience. It makes them feel bad about the thing they're going through as well as feeling bad that theyre feeling bad.

[JenOween]

My oldest broke his arm at school early on in elementary school. The TA who stayed with him and just held my boy in his lap, told me that my son said to him "I know the ambulance is coming. I know I'm going to the hospital and they'll fix it. But right now, this sucks."

He's a smart little stinker.

[ianabrahams]

When things just suck we are learning to deal with the suck.

[TakeMeAWeigh]

I suspected this was a thing but I didn't know it had a term. I just knew someone that made me feel bad if I complained about anything. They felt the need to turn every negative thing into a positive. I felt like they were just being totally unrealistic and it really started messing with my head. It's not good to be overly positive or negative. Like all things, moderation is needed.

[incubated]

I just had the most frustrating day, full of disappointment and triggers. I consider myself a total optimist, but I just kept feeling like i lied to myself whenever i forced myself to see the growth or silver lining today. This video couldn't have come at a more perfect time. Thank you for your wisdom. Sometimes things just suck, and acknowledging that can sometimes make all the difference.

[DinoTechSR]

I get how some people go through that. My brother does this and I wish I had it cause I have the exact opposite. I turn every positive experience into a negative one, because I did something small wrong. How I would kill to have more positivity that I didn’t have to force upon myself

[NutellaCrepe]

It gets bad when people use toxic positivity as an excuse to not improve themselves. It’s avoidance. You see it in gaming when people force themselves to say they’re just here to “have fun” when they’re on a double digit L streak and clearly frustrated at the game. They then take the same approach when they come back and make no effort to improving their performance. This type of behavior manifests IRL and they end up being trapped in bad situations but never using negativity as a motivation to change.

[jessicagilmore]

You have helped me more than the hundreds of therapists I have seen over the years

[babybirdhome]

Technically everything *_IS_* a learning experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to avail yourself of that opportunity every single time. In fact the reality is, you won’t be able to - if you had that kind of capacity, you wouldn’t be worrying about negative things in the first place.

[donnelly]

It’s a positive day when getting more wisdom from Dr. K.😊

[nezukoshiki]

I have been doing this about learning and seeing more positive and looking for the depression bias, all of the good things get erased but now i know, so when i start erasing the positive, i stop and think, wait, its not all bad. I did so much man. Keep up the good work and learn from the failures. ❤

[jiahuizhou]

If people force themselves not to be negative and view their frustrations as something to be suppressed and transformed, they're being inauthentic and avoiding processing those emotions. Yes, you do need to do something about whatever issues you have, but the negative emotions are meant to be acknowledged without judgement, otherwise you bottle them up and you explode one day, despite your best efforts to keep it positive.

[janeyrevanescence]

My mom was a Pollyanna and she inadvertently made me feel worse and even resentful because I was suffering from intense mental illness.

Well, she went through a period where her Pollyannaisms couldn’t even break through and she realized “Oh crap, now I understand what my daughter was going through.”

Now we’re both realists. I see the positives a lot more while she sees the negatives.

[wickie]

I think the goal is discernment between understanding when you're being biased vs balanced. For example: I've been going through a mental health crisis myself. One of the many aspects of it is my fear that my stability will cease to exist before I have the chance to replace it with my own stability. (I'm unemployed and live at home with my mom and have never had a job, and my mom is getting old and so am I) But one thing that I was completely ignoring is the fact that I even have the stability to begin with, and as scary as it is that it could be ripped away at any moment, that fear is what paralyzed me more than it actually happening. I could have spent that time being grateful and using the gratefulness to motivate me instead of the fear.

[Omkar]

I personally think that it is justified sometimes to rely on positivity a little too much, when you feel like you don't have any other options. It's not an ideal situation where you can express whatever negative emotion you want, but sometimes life is just like that.

[danteshollowedgrounds]

I get it honestly sometimes, with others I just wish it wasn't so forced like everything is okay when sometimes everything is not okay.

[nikitakipriyanov]

You have to let yourself a time to be sad or upset. It's normal to have a grief over something somtimes. It's even normal to be angry, it's releasing anger to other people is what's wrong, but by itself it's a valid emotion which will be always present in a mentally healthy person. It's impossible to be constantly happy about everything or regardless something, it's *not healthy*.

And, you can't just say to someone who just experienced some "life sucks" moment things like "don't worry, be happy". They have to live through it, not to suppress the emotion and pretend that nothing happened. That would be exactly that, *pretending to be someone else*, and that's really bad. And the person who would say "don't worry, be happy" *is toxic* by just not acknowledging the feelings.

I've encountered people (rarely, though) who seemed to be "always positive" and had a reputation of everyone's friend and "the soul of the company" and so on. While everything around then went good, that's no problem. When something bad happens, however, no matter what, *they* appear to be a cancer on the society, they are never able to handle it properly, only making things worse. Over time, I've learned to recognize them early and avoid, but still, so many people around are ready to forget the harm that person made to them, just to be around that "happy star". Disgusting.

[TheCaptainCrack]

Its like he is describing the newsletter from my companys intranet..
EVERYTHING is always awesome

[eebbaa]

the point about finding small wins is probably important, but far easier said than done. even if i do something good, or even in absolutely useless victories (like winning in a video game), it’s just not enough to make me feel anything that will tip the scales towards the positive, or bring me up to even the point of ‘zero.’

if i win in a video game, i tell myself “i still suck at this game, and i should have studied instead.” if i do the dishes, it’s “wow that took forever because i didn’t do them until now, ” or “i still haven’t folded my laundry though.” and this is just for the small stuff; obviously, i have massive, unsolvable problems with myself and my life on a fundamental level that i have to keep in consideration, too.

i’ve poisoned the well of my emotions to the point where any time something does bubble up, it’s bad. little victories feel pointless in the face of overwhelming losses. logically, i know that i should try to harness some kind of momentum with “small wins, ” but i simply cannot find it within myself to acknowledge anything besides my abject failures, because those are my reality; those are the shackles that i wake up in the morning with, and the shackles that i go to sleep with at night.