Toxic Positivity

As an oncologist, I get to face more death and dying than many other specialties. In the early years of my career, when I called the family of the patient who just passed away, I would quickly encourage them to think positive. Focus on the bright side that the patient was no longer suffering. Remember the happy times you were together. While it was meant to be good intentions, it also served as a way to tell the family members not to be sad or have any negative emotions.

Without realizing that I was promoting toxic positivity and believing that I was helping the families to cope better with their loss, I continued this practice for a while. As I thought that it was best to get out of the unpleasant or the sad mode, I did not want to acknowledge what they were really feeling.

Toxic positivity is the belief that you have to be positive all the time. It is the belief that feeling any negative emotion is wrong. The expectation to be positive applies to yourself and how you think others should be. The dismissal of negative emotions is good because they are not pleasant.

The suggestion of changing the view of your reality of negative emotions by someone else may make you doubt yourself. You start to hesitate to let your true emotions surface. You may gradually want to ignore the negative emotions. You may use this constant positivity as a means to cope, a means to face your situation – in an alternative view of reality that is not truly who you are. This will have a negative impact on your mental health. It causes stress within you, yet you are suppressing it. So the stress is building up even more.

To avoid toxic positivity, it is important to acknowledge that you are human. Human beings are meant to have all different kinds of emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant ones. You are not expected to spend 100% of the time experiencing only positive emotions.

Practice mindfulness. Notice how you are feeling and what you are thinking that is causing you to feel that way. Label that emotion. Experience it fully. What kind of sensation do you have physically? Where in your body do you feel it the most? Is this a pleasant or an unpleasant experience? Stay in the present. Take the time to let yourself go through it.

Feel your feelings. Any feelings. You get to choose not to be selective with only experiencing positive emotions and avoid facing the negative emotions. Having negative emotions is part of life. They also make you cherish the positive emotions more. Allow yourself to experience any emotion in a given moment. Then you get to decide what to do about it. Do you want to stay sad for a little longer so you have the time you need to process it? Or are you ready to move on to feel more neutral about your situation?

Back to the scenario of calling up a family member of a deceased patient. Nowadays, I usually allot adequate time to make the phone call, so I am calm and not rushed. I express my condolences and allow the time and space that person needs to express and to share. I listen. I let them know that they are being heard. I validate that it is normal to feel sad. I give them permission to feel it.

It is important to listen to other people’s feelings. Sometimes all they want is for someone to validate it and validate them as being human. It is alright to feel anything but positive for the time being. Nothing has gone wrong. You give others the space to experience their true feelings. You allow yourself to experience the whole spectrum of emotions. If you choose to spend more time in the pleasant emotions, that is alright, as long as you do not mask or avoid your unpleasant emotions.