How toxic positivity zaps your potential

Staying positive is a good thing, right? If life hands you lemons, make lemonade!

What if I told you that expending effort to stay positive can actually hurt your ability to grow and make helpful changes? [**Note - if you prefer to watch or listen, jump down to the bottom of the page for a link to the video.]

We live in an era where positive thinking is frequently touted as the key to finding fulfillment and manifesting the life you desire. Obviously, I'm not going to say that a positive mindset is bad for you. What I am going to say is that a focus on remaining positive that doesn't allow room for your real human emotions to come through is not a good thing.

This hyperfocus on staying upbeat is commonly referred to as toxic positivity, which is defined as (positivepsychology.com):

maintaining that one should have a positive mindset and exude only positive emotions and thoughts at all times, particularly when things are difficult

You may be wondering, why is trying to maintain a positive mindset during difficult times a bad thing? For one, it stratifies our emotions and makes them binary. You end up categorizing feelings as “good” or “bad” when the reality is that feelings are feelings and they have value whether we are made uncomfortable by them or not. 

There’s the additional reality that as human beings, we grow the most when we aren’t comfortable. Think about it. When things are going your way, it’s easy. You’re just flowing and that’s awesome - we want to spend the majority of our time in that state of being.

HOWEVER, if you take an honest look at your life, you’ll see that it’s when you’ve been challenged that some of the most important realizations and changes in your life have taken place.

The reality is that all of our emotions, no matter how we perceive them, serve a purpose. I would argue that this is especially true of emotions we perceive as negative. 

Shadow work 

I'm an informal student of what's commonly referred to as shadow work. This concept of examining your “dark side” was brought into mainstream consciousness by psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the 1930s, even though its roots go back even further to ancient philosophy. The concept of the shadow is that we have ways of compartmentalizing the things that are true (or that we want to be true) about us. 

One compartment is for the things that we aren't proud of (the shadow) and the other compartment is for the things that we value about ourselves or for the traits that we want to display because we’ve been taught they matter. The shadow is the compartment that remains unseen and that we attempt to conceal, sometimes even from ourselves. When we perceive a personal trait as negative, we get uncomfortable and want to shift focus to what we feel comfortable presenting to the world around us. 

The problem with this approach is that what you attempt to conceal is a) not going to go away just because you don’t want to address it and b) is overlooked as a real source of power for allowing you to show up authentically. 

There is a reason the things in your shadow lurk in the background and pop up repeatedly over time. It’s to give you the opportunity to embrace that truth about yourself, and it will pop up as often as it needs to in order to get your attention. If you continue to avoid it, it will lurk and resurface over and over again until you address it.  

Let’s use an example to illustrate this point. I work with high-achieving, driven personality types who are on a mission when it comes to creating success. The challenge is that despite the creation of success, these folks don’t have a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction. 

Example

Here’s a common scenario. A client will come to me and say:

“I’ve been in my industry for x number of years, I’ve been recognized for my performance, I make really good money, but what I really want is to be promoted to VP. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to get there. Why? I’m starting to think something is wrong with me. Can you help me?”

This seems like a reasonable way to approach a roadblock. You try to diagnose why something is standing in your way and then remove that obstacle. But, this person doesn’t have the depth of clarity about what is creating this issue for them, so they see the symptom more clearly than the foundation of the problem itself.  

And guess where the problem itself lies? You guessed it - in their "shadow", the compartment where they conceal what can actually help them understand the core issue they face. 

My reply to the symptom presented is along the lines of “I’m going to help you understand why you feel you need this title/status and we’ll see if you still want it by the time we’ve done that.” 

You may be surprised to learn that 9 times out of 10, they don’t actually want the thing they’re chasing. They’re chasing it because at some point, they internalized the notion that they aren’t worthy until they prove it - this can be for any number of experiences or traumas that took place earlier in life - and the way they prove they are worthy is by striving for the recognition they believe demonstrates their value.  

This is just one example of the number of ways that your shadow side contains powerful epiphanies for your growth and potential. What you may currently view as your "dark side" is also a part of you. None of us is all light or all dark. Everything is a balance. And to be honest, in my opinion, the dark parts of you, your shadow aspects, are what make you interesting. It's a part of you that, if acknowledged and worked through, only serves to strengthen your relationship to yourself and will give you the confidence to show up authentically and unapologetically, which can be very freeing and create a sense of lightness and a burden lifted from your shoulders.