Always looking on the bright side can have a dark side. Toxic positivity, relentless encouragements, and platitudes like time heals all wounds can do more harm than good, says therapist Whitney Goodman.
She is also known as the radically honest therapist on her popular Instagram account sit with whit.
Whitney says positive thinking has been packaged and sold as the cure to all our problems. She shares her antidote in her new book, Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy.
Photo: Whitney Goodman
Part of the book has been inspired by all the toxic positivity Goodman has seen on her social media feed, which she says invalidates and denies struggling people of their hardships and experiences.
"You can be optimistic and positive without engaging in toxic positivity.
"What toxic positivity really does is it dismisses, it minimises and denies someone's experience, you're effectively telling someone who is struggling, it's not that bad, that's not what you're feeling and if you just focus a little bit more on the positive, it can get better."
'Inspirational' or positive quotes shared on social media can miss the mark and make people feel worse, she says.
"We see a lot of perfection, positivity, all of that on social media and I think especially throughout the pandemic, people have become pretty tired of that and are wanting to see something a little more real and honest.
"Some of the ones that I find to be most harmful are 'time heals all wounds', 'everything happens for a reason' ... 'you can achieve anything you put your mind to', or 'you can never have a positive life if you have negative thoughts', those tend to be the most destructive for me.
"There are certain times where these platitudes might be helpful but there are a lot situations where they can be more hurtful."
For example, your grief-stricken or seriously unwell friend might feel like you are shutting them down or that you are suggesting they brought a bad incident upon themselves if you respond with an opposite frame of mind, Goodman says.
"People typically feel isolated, ashamed and like they can't go to you for support when this is what they're receiving after they share something difficult with you.
"I always like to validate that people typically are not ill-intentioned when they say these [positive] things so I suggest that people try to validate and seek understanding, just say 'this is hard, I'm here for you, I know that this must be so difficult for you', and try to meet the person where they're at."
Even in her practice, she's felt she has had to enforce this idea of being positive without exception.
"Especially when I was working with cancer patients, I really felt like positivity was mandatory and it was something I had to use as a therapist or I would be trying to make my clients more negative or not help them heal."
But research shows positive affirmations don't work for people with low-self esteem and can actually make them feel worse, she says.
"So we have to be very careful about telling people who do feel bad about themselves, 'just love yourself, just be positive and you'll love yourself', because we know that's actually just going to make them more depressed and make their self-esteem plummet even more."
While there is a big industry behind positive thinking, Goodman believes that's not because it's working, but quite the opposite.
"We keep selling people the same things over and over, and then blaming it on them when it doesn't work.
"Then the programme or the industry doesn't have to take any accountability for that."
In fact, having a little bit of negativity is not so bad, she says. It can help induce creativity, distinguish what's important to you, solve problems, and help you make decisions.
Goodman suggests a healthier way of looking at positivity by balancing reality and hope.
"I think that balance is of course different for everybody but it really just means attuning yourself to be able to look at 'this what I need to fix, this is what's not going right, this is what I need to accept' and also still having hope or an open mind that things could get better and we don't always know how things will turn out."
