Live with Dr.Charryse 🧠: The Cost Of Toxic Positivity

Hello loves, what is up? It is another Wednesday, another opportunity for us to join together professional of 2024. I think I've been in shock since the moment I found out about it. So if you follow me on other places and spaces, stay tuned for the link so that you can watch me while I have that few seconds of fame. But really, aside from that, it is a beautiful honor to know that somewhere across the world that people were able to see my heart and my passion and my vision for mental health. So I'm excited about that and you're my family, so I wanted to share.

Last thing I want you to do and then we're getting started is rate your week. We always rate your week from one to ten. One meaning it's been a rough week. You don't feel like you're showing up as well as you possibly could in your week. Ten meaning your week is the bomb off the charts. It's everything that you want. Let me lift this up just a little bit. 5. 5? Fighting for it. I'm going to work my way up as high as I can and that gives me a chance to also get a good idea of where you are and what you might be experiencing or feeling as you're coming into things.

Focus for today, I want to talk about the importance of validating your feelings and the challenges to toxic positivity. Emotions can be complicated, right? And depending upon what you've been taught, how you've grown up, the people that are around you, or your current environment, whether that's a physical environment, an emotional environment, a social environment, it can play into our ability to acknowledge this is how I feel about a situation. Many times we aren't open to all of the feelings that come up, especially the feelings that we don't like, the ones that make us feel uncomfortable, or the emotions that other people don't like and have a hard time with.

Let me say this off the bat, and I need to get back to my coffee. We're almost getting there. That time of season don't ever allow. I barely say that word, but I mean this. Don't ever allow someone else to tell you how to feel about a situation. It is important for you to reflect, to explore and to own. Here's what's happening for you around whatever is happening in your world. Here is why that is so important emotions are messengers. I probably say that at least once a week you will continue to help hear me say that multiple times.

Every emotion we have is a messenger that's giving us information. Whether that information is here's an area in our life that is unhealed, information about how we're feeling, about a situation, or information about here's how we need to move forward based on what's happening for us. So if you allow someone else to dictate or to tell you how you feel, you may miss some very important and significant messages that are needed for your own emotional health, your own mental health, and your own long term healing.

So we need to own what we feel. We need to honor what we feel in an appropriate way and then decide what do I need to do with everything that I'm feeling? And what do I see in myself, in how I'm responding to these emotions? No emotion is bad. We categorize them as good or bad depending upon our comfort level. But emotions in of themselves are not bad. It's really a matter of how am I responding to the emotions that I'm experiencing. I'm curious, how well do you do validating your emotions? Let me know.

I own my emotions. Well, I'm good with most emotions, except for I struggle to acknowledge when I feel x, y and zenith, for example, so many people struggle to be angry. If you've grown up in a situation where anger was taken way out of context, or anger makes you feel out of control, it's often an emotion that people don't do well with, maybe because they're afraid of themselves, maybe because they've been told it's not okay. But even anger is an important emotion because it motivates us to act.

Our only responsibility is to make sure that we're acting in a way that is helpful and not harmful. So something that I see fairly frequently from people is you have a strong emotion or there's a strong emotional situation you're trying to find the balance to. How do you work through this in a way that going to be helpful, but if you're not careful, you can lean too far into what we call toxic positivity. So what is toxic positivity? So this refers to. I wanted to give you a classic definition, not one that was just my own paraphrase.

So toxic positivity refers to the excessive and unrealistic incentive on maintaining a positive mindset. And so what happens is you work to be so positive that you do not acknowledge what doesn't feel well. So hear me when I say there's nothing wrong with considering yourself optimistic or being an individual who kind of says, I do a great job of seeing the best in most situations, wonderful. But if you are doing that to the point that you are overlooking how you really feel, how you need to feel, what continues to come up in your emotional life, then those two places are clashing.

Not wrong to be positive, but not helpful or healthy long term to be so toxically positive that you do not honor something's not right over here and my emotions are trying to tell me something. Here's what happens when you move too far into the land of toxic positivity. Of course, it's not an all exhaustive list. I'm going to give you a few things and then you add to the list. You can put it in a chat, add to your own personal list and go from there. Number one, it invalidates your emotions, or it can invalidate the emotions of someone else.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were trying to talk to somebody about how you felt about the situation and they went, oh, just don't worry about it. I'm sure that everything will work out great? That's not what you asked. You didn't need them to tell you that everything would work out great. You're not even really doubting that you just needed someone in the moment to sit with you or to listen and to honor the fact that you have a lot of emotions around the topic. So when we are quick to be toxic and positive, or we are surrounded by people who kind of live in that land, it can invalidate emotions that are very detrimental.

I've also seen this. I'm going to go there for a minute. Happen a lot when it comes to people that have been victims of sometimes domestic abuse, emotional abuse or sexual abuse, that when they've gone and they've tried to share with someone, I'm not okay, this is happening to me. Their emotions were overlooked. It's all right. They didn't really mean it. They just love you. They just care for you. So there can be some huge ramifications and a huge cost to talking to people that constantly invalidate our emotions.

Talking to people that won't sit with you in what you need to share or minimizing it ourselves because we're afraid, because we don't think that people will listen to us. We don't feel like people will believe us. Invalidating your emotions is harmful. Even though it's not comfortable, it is more ideal for you to own what you're really feeling and find ways to work through it than to minimize it and invalidate it. Number two challenges to toxic positivity is the suppression of feeling. So when constant positivity is encouraged, it can cause you to suppress emotions that other people might view as negative.

But again, all emotions are helpful and help move you forward and become a catalyst to what you need to do. If you suppress your emotions, and maybe you've done this before, I feel like we all have at some point that leads to increased stress, increased anxiety, and we also see in research that a lot of toxic positivity can lead to depression. You outwardly pretend everything is wonderful and great, and I'm fine and going through emotions and navigating everything, but deep down inside, you're stacking all of these painful moments that will depress your system and can keep you in a really low mood state.

And then you can become trapped. You become trapped by, this is what the world thinks of who I am, and I don't want to let people down, but, you know, inside, something completely different is gnawing at you. So the goal is to deal with what you feel in a healthy manner, not to suppress it. I'm probably going to make this a part two, and then next week talk about, well, how can you work on not suppressing emotions and not being toxic and positive to the point that it harms you? Number three, there's a lack of authenticity when we are not real about real situations.

Tell me if you've been there, right? You've been in a situation. You're like asking somebody, do you see what I see? Are you seeing what I see? Because I see what you see and you acting like you don't see it. And then people are coming off in a way where you just feel like, are we even in the same world? Are we looking at the same dynamic and situation? And that lack of authenticity erodes people's ability to trust us. So if you're trying to tell me something that's really difficult and painful, and I'm looking at you with a smile and going, oh, yeah, it happens all the time.

And then start talking about myself, we have a problem.