Is “Toxic Positivity” masking your true feelings? – Mary T. O’Sullivan

by Mary T. O’Sullivan, MSOL, business leadership writer

“The best way over, is through.” Robert Frost

There’s a new term floating around that caught my attention, “Toxic Positivity”. This phrase was new to me and exploring it became a revelation. This concept turns the current “gratitude” craze on its head. In a recent podcast, Dr. Brenee Brown interviewed an expert on the subject, Dr. Susan David. In the podcast, Dr. David explains her experience with “turning the frown upside down”.

As her father lay dying of cancer, she was readying herself for school. Her mother told her to go into his room and kiss him goodbye because today would be his last day. She went into the room, kissed him goodbye, threw on her backpack, and left. When she returned, her father was dead.  She didn’t stay with her father as he lay dying, because, as she says in her podcast, “my mother [was] trying to keep things as normal as she [could], and I [had] this really remarkable experience of going through the day and running from math to history, science to biology, and I know that my father’s going.” As she goes through the rest of the school year, she is complimented on how “strong” she is, and she keeps a smile on her face, all the while her heart is breaking and the world around her is crumbling without her father in it.

According to Psychology Today, “toxic positivity hinges on the failure to acknowledge or accept someone’s negative emotions.” It’s actually a form of gaslighting, telling people that their situation isn’t so dire, when only they, personally, experience the pain. In my previous career, it was a common retort to hear “you’re lucky to have a job”, when an injustice took place, in other words, “you have nothing to complain about”. Similar comments such as “you’re being negative” if you expressed dismay when in fact you’ve just watched a co-worked get laid off and escorted out of the building. Or when someone takes credit for your work, you might be told to “brush it off” or maybe some other glib remark like “there’s always somebody else who has it worse than you do”.

These phrases negate people’s true feelings and make them feel guilty for not only expressing them but having the feelings in the first place. Toxic positivity undermines the workplace’s psychological safety, making people fearful of expressing thought and ideas which may contribute to the betterment of the organization. Toxic positivity makes people feel invisible, unseen, not relevant, and invalidates normal human experience.

And then there’s toxic positivity people place upon themselves; that is the pressure of constantly feeling that they must be busy and productive, no matter what. Spreading themselves so thin that they force themselves to show up at work when sick, or as I witnessed in one case, the day after the funeral of a spouse. When asked why the person didn’t take more time off, much to my amazement, she responded that she had too much work to do and had to get back on the job as fast as possible. She must have forgotten one other common phrase heard around the office, “no one here is indispensable, you can easily be replaced”.

According to BetterUp, there are many forms of self-iNFLicted toxic positivity: guilt over not doing anything – indicating a lack of enjoyment of free time; ignoring Health and wellness – skipping doctor’s appointments, not sleeping enough; volunteering for too many projects – always being the eager beaver, willing to work late or on weekends to “get the job done”.

There’s no doubt that there are people in many circumstances that live on the dark side of emotions, but that doesn’t mean that others voicing feelings of sadness, frustration, anger, disappointment, embarrassment, or any other negative emotion are wrong. It means that they are showing the second side of themselves. Everyone has negative emotions. It’s time to stop masking them with trite phrases seen on Instagram, and Facebook, such as “name one thing that is making you happy right now”, “to have a good day is to keep your gratitude higher than your expectations”, try to be a rainbow to someone’s cloud”, “your smile can change the world, but don’t let the world change your smile.”

People are fragile, they feel deeply, that’s what makes us human. It’s time to allow ourselves and others to feel as humans do.

And so, we have this fragility that is interwoven in our lives, and yet the … narrative of, “Just be positive, just get on with it,” …  denies the systemic impact that not being seen has on people.  –  Susan David

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Mary T. O’Sullivan, Master of Science, Organizational Leadership, International Coaching Federation Professional Certified Coach, Society of Human Resource Management, “Senior Certified Professional. Graduate Certificate in Executive and Professional Career Coaching, University of Texas at Dallas. Member, Beta Gamma Sigma, the International Honor Society. Advanced Studies in Education from Montclair University, SUNY Oswego and Syracuse University. Mary is also a certified Six Sigma Specialist, Contract Specialist, IPT Leader and holds a Certificate in Essentials of Human Resource Management from SHRM.

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