Toxic Positivity invalidates someone’s emotions and minimises their distress. The person may therefore feel misunderstood, alone, like a burden or ashamed.
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Toxic Positivity invalidates someone’s emotions and minimises their distress. The person may therefore feel misunderstood, alone, like a burden or ashamed.
When a person talks about what they are feeling, their main goal is usually to validate their emotions, to understand and accept the emotional experience. In contrast, emotional invalidation involves ignoring, denying, criticizing or rejecting another person’s feelings. Toxic positive can be very harmful to mental health. People who experience emotional invalidation are more likely to have depressive symptoms.
Allow yourself to feel multiple emotions, and never bottle up your feelings. There’s nothing worse than feeling bad about feeling bad. As someone who judges myself for not feeling happy all the time, it’s important for me to remember that my emotions don’t have to make sense, that I’m allowed to feel happy and sad at once. These two emotions are not mutually exclusive. Most emotions are multi-layered, we can feel grief, sadness, and relief at the same time. The pandemic didn’t make it easier too, there was a mad increase in social media usage, thus, making it even harder than ever to stay centered and not get sucked into the false idea that everyone else’s life is perfect and you are the only one suffering.