Negative Emotions: A Case Against Toxic Positivity

We hear it and see it every day. A loved one tells us to maintain a better attitude—suck it up, get over it, you're being a baby, stop whining, and it's high time to move on. Less judgmental people may dismiss our emotions—it could be worse, everything happens for a reason, or look on the bright side.

The memes tell us we need to think positively all the time, and allowing so-called negative thoughts to occupy our minds is to invite negative experiences into our lives. They define our emotions as negative or positive, and we should always choose positive emotions—though they rarely show us how to do this.

Depression and anxiety can fill us with difficult and hard-to-overcome thoughts and feelings, but toxic positivity can be real. (Difficult emotions, not negative emotions.)

Toxic positivity can reduce valid and important emotions to the polarity between negative and positive. Emotions are given such labels. And we are often encouraged to get over terrible negative emotions and hurry up and think and then feel positive. Friends and family are often involved in dismissing our emotions.

Traversing the Inner Terrain

Source: Andrea Mathews

Difficult emotions can help us get in touch with our internal guidance system. The difficult emotion of anger, for example, can facilitate awareness—you need to leave this toxic relationship. Anger can tell us that we need better boundaries, or it can tell us that we need to talk with someone who consistently offends us.

Anger can be misused. Instead of talking with a person who is offending us, for example, we decide to accuse and abuse them. We need to learn how to use our difficult emotions. Rather than calling them negative and judging ourselves for having them, we can empathize with our feelings. Our emotions can give us messages about us. They tell us that we need to take care of ourselves and may even show us how.

Labeling an emotion negatively may lead us to dismiss and repress them, but they are likely to surface later in some way that is not pretty.

Toxic positivity has no room for difficult emotions; it labels difficult as negative. All of our emotions are important and they need our attention and validation. We need to sit with them and glean their message.

Grief is a good example, we need to sit with grief and allow its expression. However, grief is sometimes considered to be a negative emotion that needs quick resolution. Toxic positivity does not allow time for grief, we need to hurry up and reach closure.

Some emotions are easier to handle, while others are more difficult. Joy is a valid emotion that is expressed as a pathway to more authenticity in our lives. But calling that emotion positive and calling other more difficult emotions negative, only causes us to invalidate our inner world.