How we hurt our friends when we’re trying to help. Is our positivity toxic?
Dr Hannah Ryan, Clinical Psychologist, Two Leaves Therapy
Picture this…
You are drinking coffee around the dinner table when one of your friends wells up and shares an intimate disclosure with the group. Murmurings of support go around, but they mainly come out as encouragement to not "let it get you down", "stay positive", and "focus on your big holiday- it's only around the corner!". A couple encourage her to see how it could be worse, saying “at least” one thing and “at least” another. You see your friend's face crumple slightly and you sense that she may have needed, for just a moment, to not feel utterly alone with the very real "negatives" and difficult feelings that seemed so uncomfortable for others. Perhaps not coincidentally, she begins to backtrack, force a brave face, wipe her tears and minimise the reality that society would have her brush away for fear it might contaminate us all. "It's fine," she smiles unconvincingly, "I'm so lucky, really, and I have so much to be grateful for; it could be so much worse. Should we get the bill?"
This is toxic positivity. Whilst validation encourages us to open up as it leaves us with a sense that others can tolerate our emotions and gives us a feeling of being heard, soothed, understood and connected, toxic positivity- "the unrelenting pressure to be happy or be pursuing happiness, no matter the circumstances" (Goodman, 2022)- achieves the opposite. To Goodman's definition, I would add that TP involves the sociocultural pressure to remain unangered in the face of angering actions, unfearful when facing frightening or uncertain events, unhurt after hurtful experiences, empty of grief after loss and resolutely hopeful in the face of tragedy.
The impulse, we are told, often comes from a well-intentioned place. People mean well. This is, after all, how we are conditioned to 'do emotional support' en masse; we feel we are helping by fixing, cheering, reassuring, and saying, "But look, it’s not all bad!” in the manner in which we would distract a wounded toddler with a singing teddy, and we often lack the emotional vocabulary to offer a substantially meaningful alternative. What a shame; if we did, perhaps fewer of us would need to outsource our emotional needs to professionals. As someone who has grown up in Ireland and called London my home for the past decade, I have had the opportunity to observe the subtly different iterations of this phenomenon on either side of the Irish Sea. Both involve copious amounts of tea, but the Irish version involves many more expletives, which, ironically, can be profoundly validating in the right context ("Ah, you poor bastard, what a load of shite.").
But toxic positivity is undoubtedly a global phenomenon. Moreover, its prevalence seems to be growing with the rise of Instagram spiritualism and social media gurus who promise we can manifest our deepest desires with mindset and willpower alone; if our thoughts create our reality, shouldn't we shut down the negative ones tout suite? TP's close relative is toxic gratitude, which is not genuine gratitude at all but comparative suffering, a sinister twin masquerading as benign, which causes us to minimise our struggles because someone else always has it worse. If I have broken my toe, someone else has broken a leg. If I have lost a parent, someone else has lost them younger or lost two. If I have discovered I cannot have any more children, some people have none at all. So the cycle of self-invalidation perpetuates itself, blocking each of us from ever grieving our feelings, and creating grave consequences for our emotional health.
The ubiquity of toxic positivity and its various iterations has led me to gravitate towards friends who are more comfortable dwelling in darkness and difficulty when I am going through something personal. As I have aged, I hoped I would become more tolerant, but instead I have found myself feeling increasingly itchy in the presence of this particular brand of emotional support. As with most things in life, it can easily wash over me when I am feeling more resilient, but if I am pricklier, it leaves me feeling invalidated and regretful of having shared. In contrast, my precious validators can stay emotionally present. Crucially, they know they will not send me into a puddle of sadness from whence I will never be rescued by simply saying, "I'm so sorry; that sounds incredibly hard".
The fact that my validators are few and far between and are often trained professionals has led me to ask whether our impulse is always purely well-meaning, or whether something else might be going on. Sure, on one level, I am willing to admit that we are earnestly trying to cheer up our friends and help with whatever tools we’ve got. But are we not also trying to protect ourselves from confronting a reality in others that might stir feelings we have never been taught to tolerate in ourselves? If there is a truth to this, perhaps it is not to be judged, then, but perhaps it may also be more driven by self-protective instinct than conventional wisdom would have us believe.
If you are reading this and squirming as you think, "Oh no, am I a bit like that?" the answer might be 'yes', and I might be a bit too. In the same way that we can all be "a little bit sexist", we may all be prone to "a little bit of toxic positivity”, especially when we feel stuck, helpless and at a loss for words. But by being generous enough to stay present for twenty minutes of our emotional pain, the most validating among us understand something that many don't: that they will paradoxically lessen our sadness rather than prolonging it and that they will actually survive the temporary discomfort, too. In fact, it may bring us closer together and could even feel fulfilling when they emerge on the other side.
Who does it harm?
Toxic positivity can potentially hurt anyone, but it disproportionately hurts the vulnerable, the suffering and the marginalised. What if you opened up about racism at work and were told, "But look, you have a promotion coming up. Just hold your head up, don't make a fuss and don't let them see that they've gotten to you?" What if you told your friend about your father's terminal cancer and were reassured that "it's great that you still have a few good months left"? What if you told someone you had suffered a miscarriage and were told, "At least you know you can get pregnant; you can always try again next time"? What if you told someone about a vicious homophobic attack you experienced with your partner that left you with nightmares and panic attacks and were told, "That's just ignorance; don't let it get to you. Put it behind you now. Have you got any holidays booked?" Would any of these responses make you feel better? Would any of them 'help you forget your feelings'? I didn't think so.
What is wrong with positivity?
Sarah Korba writes that the main difference between toxic positivity and optimism is that, unlike TP, "sincere optimism is rooted in reality" and allows us to acknowledge a full range of emotions without censorship. There is nothing wrong with genuine positivity when it is congruous with the situation. Renouncing toxic positivity is not about being miserable all the time. By all means, dance with wild abandon at your friend’s birthday party. Show up with non-alcoholic champagne when she finally gets pregnant after infertility. Throw a slumber party for two with giggling joy when your mate buys a house by themselves. Mirror your friend’s genuine relief and optimism after he has finally escaped an oppressive work environment.
Whitney Goodman, family therapist and author of the book Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy, puts it, "Positivity lingo lacks nuance, compassion and curiosity. It comes in the form of blanket statements that tell someone how to feel and that [imply] that the feeling they're currently having is wrong". P. 304. To put it this way, we all enjoy cake at a birthday, restaurant or special occasion, and when the event calls for positivity, we can appreciate that, too.
There is something that attachment researchers call “matching the affect”, which is about parents mirroring the facial expressions and tone of voice of babies in parent-infant dyads. They hypothesise that this can leave babies feeling emotionally regulated and connected as it helps them feel understood and cared for (e.g. Hughes & Baylin, 2012). The same could be said for adult pairs. If you have previously felt ecstatic with joy and pride for yourself and your friend has been bursting with genuine happiness for you, you will remember how good this can feel. On the other hand, if you were feeling despairing and your friend’s face was the human manifestation of the yellow smiling emoji, you may have been left feeling misunderstood, disconnected and as though something about your experience was fundamentally wrong.
What does the research say?
You'll be hard-pressed to find a qualified psychologist saying, "Just put it out of your mind", "try not to think about it", "don't worry", or anything beginning with "at least". That’s because psychological theory and research have strongly proposed that invalidation is harmful to our mental health. In fact, one of the pre-eminent theories of why some develop traits known controversially and somewhat stigmatisingly as "Borderline Personality Disorder", characterised by prolonged distress and emotional dysregulation, is that these difficulties can emerge in adulthood when children with 'sensitive temperaments' grow up in consistently invalidating environments (Linehan, 1993). According to Linehan, “invalidating environments” are characterised by caregivers who:
"delegitimise a child's valid emotional experience or expression…[additionally, the invalidating caregiver] may directly contradict the child's experience ("you aren't sad, you are fine") and…they may misattribute the emotional expressions of the vulnerable child to socially unacceptable characteristics or personality traits". (Musser et al., 2018, p. 10)
These children may have been made to feel like their feelings were "too much", "too wrong", "too sensitive", "too exaggerated", or "too big" for their caregivers to handle. They may have been left alone with difficult emotions they could not regulate, feeling ashamed and blamed for having them, which magnifies emotions rather than simmering them down. As a result, they may struggle to soothe and validate themselves in adulthood, the fundamental building blocks of emotion regulation, because they did not receive this vital support from their caregivers, who likely did not receive it from theirs.
Validation and therapy
Validation was discovered to be a powerful therapeutic tool by something of an accident, according to one of my favourite research legends. In a Randomised Controlled Trial, Professor Marsha Linehan, founder of Dialectical Behavioural Therapy (DBT), decided to use "validation therapy" as a control condition, hypothesising that her active condition involving a sophisticated programme of mindfulness, skills training and group work would be superior (Linehan et al., 2002). To her surprise, when control therapists practised nothing more sophisticated than radical validation ("Of course you would feel that way, it makes complete sense given the trauma you endured"), it was highly effective, and there were statistically no differences between the "validation therapy" and the more comprehensive DBT programme. Moreover, the population in question were not suffering from mild difficulties; these were people on the more severe end of the "mental ill health" spectrum who were struggling with dependence on opiates. It was clear that they had sadly been chronically deprived of relational validation, and since their capacity for stability and sobriety significantly improved, a correlation between emotion regulation and consistent, compassionate validation with a safe other was convincingly demonstrated.
Suppressing emotions, expressing emotions and long-term health outcomes
The research on emotion suppression and mental and physical health is equally pertinent and fascinating. Myriad studies now suggest that when we suppress and avoid emotion- shoving it away, pushing it down, scribbling over it with forced gratitude as a culture of TP would encourage us to do- it is not only bad for our mental health, but it can actually cause such elevated levels of stress and inflammation in our bodies that it can compromise our cardiovascular and immune function (e.g. Chapman et al., 2013, Merz; Fox, & Malcarne, 2014; Tyra, Fergus & Ginty, 2023).
In the short term, studies have found that “thought suppression”, the act of attempting to shove thoughts out of your mind, by saying things like “don’t think about it”, “I’m going to try not to think about it”, “I’ll just distract myself so that I won’t think about this anymore” or attempting to push thoughts away actually increases the frequency of such thoughts, as well as their subjective severity in distress; and this is true for mildly distressing thoughts as well as serious intrusive images. In fact, so robust is this finding that it has been replicated enough times to stand up to systematic reviews and meta-analyses (e.g. Abramowitz & Tolin, 2001)- where multiple studies are statistically aggregated to make sure that this was not a mistake. And yet, this contravenes conventional wisdom. Raise your hand if someone in your life has advised you to “try not to think about” something difficult…
Psychologists often explain this with the “don’t think of a pink elephant” thought experiment. If I tell you to try really hard not to think of a pink elephant, what are you going to think of? Next comes the beach ball metaphor of emotional suppression, used by Acceptance and Commitment Therapists. Imagine you are swimming and a beach ball is clinging to you. Very annoying. Now imagine that you expend all your energy getting into a battle with the ball in an effort to shove it under the water. What will likely happen is that the beach ball will shoot back up with increasing force. However, if you allow the beach ball (unwanted emotion) to simply cling to you, it won’t feel pleasant initially, but after a while, it might drift away by itself (Stoddard & Affari, 2014).
In the long term, one study found some astonishing results about the effects of emotional suppression on health: 12 years after participants agreed with phrases such as "I try not to worry anyone else", the emotional suppressors were discovered to have been significantly more likely to have died from any cause, including from serious illnesses such as cardiac arrest (Chapman et al., 2013). Toxic positivity may not be about what some people might consider the snowflake generation's "fluffy feelings", then, but may also have something to do with our vulnerability to disease and death itself.
Conversely, studies in which people were encouraged to write freely about all their emotions after a traumatic event without censoring themselves for four days in a row in writing experiments, this relieved them so much that it had a positive impact on not only their mental health but also their immune system up to six months later; the emotional expressers even had fewer visits to their GP than those who kept it bottled up (Pennebaker & Susman, 1998, Frattaroli, 2006, Merz, Fox, & Malcarne, 2014).
We often believe in our societies that "complaining is bad for you" and "people who focus on the negatives are annoying". Perhaps these people complain so much because they are not receiving the compassionate validation they need? What if our cultures were more open to sitting patiently with people through their phases of despair as well as their phases of hopefulness?
Supporting yourself if someone has shut you down with toxic positivity.
If someone has recently shut your distress down with inappropriate or insensitive positivity, I am sorry. It may reflect their capacity to validate rather than the validity of your pain, but that does not detract from how hurtful it can feel.
Allow yourself to feel angry, hurt, disappointed, let down or anything else. These are normal human emotions. They are not bad or wrong. You are not being "too sensitive", and you may need to move through them.
Try to stop scrolling, moving and doing – and take a moment to acknowledge these emotions. It sounds simple, but it's hard to do (especially consistently). Put your phone down. Close your eyes. Place your hand on your chest and slow your breath. Tell yourself, "I can feel these feelings, and they will pass in their own time; I do not need to rush them away, even if they are uncomfortable".
Try to intentionally offer yourself a gesture of care, rather than mindlessly scrolling or getting pulled into work or a mindset of, "I have to do this or that". It's more about how you care for yourself than what you do. This will signal to your mind and body that you are looking after yourself.
If you have a trusted validator in your life, consider sharing your experience and seeking emotional support. This would be a resilient and vulnerable act, given you have just had your pain minimised, and it might give you a different experience of being emotionally cared for. If you don't have a trusted other right now, you could try one of Pennebaker's evidence-based expressive writing exercises. Here is a short podcast explaining how.
Consider replacing positive affirmations with gentle, validating mantras. Some studies suggest that positive affirmations such as “I am strong, powerful, smart and amazing” have a mild and temporary mood-boosting effect for the minority of us who have high self-esteem and solid core beliefs but have a negative effect on the majority of us with wobbly self-esteem and trickier core beliefs (such as “I’m bad”, “I’m unlikeable”, “I’m undesirable” or “I’m stupid”) (e.g. Wood, Perunovic & Lee, 2009). If you find mantras helpful, you can try using realistic validating mantras instead, such as: “these feelings are difficult because I am human”, “this emotion will come and go in its own time, like a wave or a cloud”, or “I am having a hard time right now, and that’s okay. I give myself permission to feel my feelings”.
Final Thoughts
Toxic positivity may not be going anywhere fast. Still, we can start a validation revolution one person at a time, and we can start with ourselves. You can begin by weaning off the phrases: "I know I shouldn't feel like this…", "I just need to focus on the positives", and "I know others have it so much worse" and replace them with phrases such as, “It makes sense that I feel this way”, and, "I just need to give myself some time to feel my feelings". Whatever Instagram, your old school friend or your Great Aunt says can be taken with a pinch of salt because the evidence is clear: shaming ourselves and others for having the "wrong" emotions and attempting to manoeuvre ourselves into a perpetual state of hopefulness, joy, and gratitude is like trying to engineer the weather into a perpetual sunny day (Harris, 2016): it's ineffective, harmful and, well, just a bit toxic.
Thoughts for Reflection
How comfortable are you when sitting with uncomfortable emotions in yourself and others? Do you often feel like you have "the wrong" feelings if you feel anger, bitterness, jealousy, hurt or hopelessness?
When you think about the three directions in which toxic positivity can flow: outwards towards others, from others towards you and from yourself towards yourself, which resonated with you the most throughout this?
Did you read this and worry about whether you have previously shut down others with positivity? How can you understand this in context? Can you be compassionate and forgiving towards yourself?
Do you still wonder if there is a difference between expressing difficult emotions freely and "wallowing"? What is the difference for you?
How does the word "toxic" sit with you? Does this feel too strong, too judgmental and too condemnatory, or does this feel just right?
What are the attitudes towards emotions in your family, community and the society in which you grew up?
How has the historical context of your ancestral lineage affected your family’s and culture’s attitude towards emotions?
In what ways do you identify with and in what ways do you resist the attitudes your parents’ generation hold about emotional suppression, emotional expression and what it means to be emotionally tough or weak?
Do you have anyone in your life who is a "trusted validator"? How do they make you feel your experience is valid and accepted? What impact does this have on your emotional state?
References and Sources
Abramowitz, J. S., Tolin, D. F., & Street, G. P. (2001). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression: A meta-analysis of controlled studies. Clinical psychology review, 21(5), 683-703.
Brown, B. Empathy versus Sympathy. Animated short uploaded by Diana Simon Psychotherapy on Youtube. Video: (4) Brené Brown on Empathy vs Sympathy - YouTube
Chapman, B. P., Fiscella, K., Kawachi, I., Duberstein, P., & Muennig, P. (2013). Emotion suppression and mortality risk over a 12-year follow-up. Journal of psychosomatic research, 75(4), 381-385.
Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: a meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 132(6), 823.
Goodman, (2033). Ten of the Most Unhelpful Things You Can Say When Someone Is In Pain. Website: 10 Of The Most Unhelpful Things You Can Say When Someone Is In Pain - sitwithwhit.com
Goodman, W. (2022). Toxic Positivity: keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy. Penguin.
Harris, R. (2016). The 3 Happiness Myths (Youtube Video). The 3 Happiness Myths - YouTube
Hughes, D. A., & Baylin, J. (2012). Brain-based parenting: The neuroscience of caregiving for healthy attachment. WW Norton & Company.
Korba, S. (2022). Toxic Positivity vs Genuine Optimism. Website: Toxic Positivity vs. Genuine Optimism - Kyan Health
Linehan, M. M. (1993). Dialectical behavior therapy for treatment of borderline personality disorder: implications for the treatment of substance abuse. NIDA research monograph, 137, 201-201.
Mosely, M. (2022). Write it out: the Healing Power of the Pen. Michael Moseley's Just One Thing BBC Podcast. Link: BBC Radio 4 - Just One Thing - with Michael Mosley, Write It Out
Merz, E. L., Fox, R. S., & Malcarne, V. L. (2014). Expressive writing interventions in cancer patients: a systematic review. Health psychology review, 8(3), 339-361.
Musser, N., Zalewski, M., Stepp, S., & Lewis, J. (2018). A systematic review of negative parenting practices predicting borderline personality disorder: Are we measuring biosocial theory's 'invalidating environment'?. Clinical Psychology Review, 65, 1-16.
Pennebaker, J. W., & Susman, J. R. (1988). Disclosure of traumas and psychosomatic processes. Social science & medicine, 26(3), 327-332.
Stoddard, J. A., & Afari, N. (2014). The Big Book of ACT Metaphors: a practitioner's guide to experiential exercises and metaphors in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. new harbinger publications.
Tsai, W., & Lu, Q. (2018). Culture, emotion suppression and disclosure, and health. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(3), e12373.
Wood, J. V., Elaine Perunovic, W. Q., & Lee, J. W. (2009). Positive self-statements: Power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science, 20(7), 860-866.
