Friday Feature: Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Positivity?

 We've all been there. 

You work up the courage to share your honest feelings about something only to have the person you tell brush it off, leaving you feeling worse than you did to begin with. Maybe you're hurt, maybe you're angry, and maybe you'll even swear off sharing anything real with that person again. 

Most of the time, the other person doesn't mean to be hurtful (or at least that's my optimistic spin on things). We're not mind-readers, after all, and so we come up with the best response we can. Sometimes, that response is colored by distraction, our own feelings, or time constraints that leave us unwilling to begin a discussion we don't have time to finish. But, either way, the response ends up being a poor fit for a declaration of feelings that likely left the confessor feeling more vulnerable than the responder realized. 

These seemingly flippant or off-key responses have recently acquired a label: toxic positivity.

As someone who teaches positive psychology and who believes in the value of an optimistic outlook, I always cringe when I hear that descriptor, but this article in The Cut (via New York Magazine) does a great job of exploring this topic. Though its title ("Get Your Toxic Positivity Out of My Face") is a tad aggressive, it's actually a pretty apt descriptor for the feelings involved.

The article made me think of another common exchange, one in which the speaker wants to vent and the listener jumps in with a solution. Here again, the intention is good, but the response ends up leaving both people feeling dissatisfied with the conversation, and perhaps even undervalued or unappreciated. 

In a world where we so often communicate electronically instead of face-to-face, it can be hard to know what to say, whether we're sharing our own feelings or responding to someone else's. But the beauty of spoken language is that it comes with other hints -- a facial expressions, a tone of voice, perhaps even a whispered delivery -- that can help us decode what it is the speaker needs, if we only take a moment to do so. That doesn't mean we'll always say the right thing -- especially when sometimes, there really is no right thing to say -- but it might mean we come off as less tone-deaf in our replies. 

When it comes to positivity, can we really be toxic? Is it a matter of intention? If we worry too much about this, we might never speak again but, given its potential impact on those we care about, perhaps it's worth considering.