Toxic Positivity and Accepting Your Emotions

I will never be the kind of person preaching toxic positivity. Someone who tells you that if you do a certain amount of healing, or reach a certain pinnacle in your life, that all other emotions will fall away. Who makes you believe that there is an end goal you can reach of not feeling anger or sadness or pain

Anyone who tells you this, in my humble opinion, is full of shit.

Suffering is the one thing that makes us all human, and connects us to each other. We will never reach a point where we never experience suffering again. Buddha said it first: “All life is suffering.”

If you’re telling yourself a story that you’re ‘cured’ and thus will never feel hurt or pain again, you’re susceptible to falling into the same pattern of suppressing your emotions when suffering comes knocking. You’ll feel shame each time you feel sad, or you have a moment in anger. Your moments of joy and happiness will be colored by the emotions you refuse to look at. 

The goal of healing is not to remove certain emotions, but to change the way you deal with those emotions. And the first step in dealing with your emotions is letting them in. Accepting that you have them.

It’s okay to be angry

It’s okay to be sad

It’s okay to be disappointed

It’s okay to be scared

What matters is if you’re being honest with yourself about what you’re feeling, and dealing with it in a healthy way or pushing it away.

I wrote this reflection after meditation this morning. I realized that I get very anxious when I unintentionally make the people around me upset, either by expressing an opinion or by taking an action for myself that does not fulfill their expectations. Examples: Cancelling an appointment last minute, sharing a political opinion someone doesn’t agree with, not replying to someone’s message promptly, etc. 

I had a parent who made me 1000% responsible for every feeling and reaction I triggered in her. I internalized a story that it was not okay to be angry or upset, that I had to be hyper-vigilant to what triggered mom, and it certainly wasn’t okay if mom was angry or upset. Now I am repeating the patterns in my adult life from my childhood, as so many of us do. But am I really doing the people around me a service by viewing their emotions and mine in that way? If I’m avoiding making someone angry, aren’t I just suppressing their truth and my own? Helping them avoid confronting their own anger, their own discomfort?

It all starts with you. And when you accept for yourself that all of your emotions are okay and allowed, it will change the way you deal with those emotions when they come up, and it will change the way you deal with your loved ones when they experience those emotions. If you learn to give yourself grace when you feel anger, it will be easier to offer others grace when they feel anger, instead of trying to avoid making them feel the emotion in the first place. 

So by all means, scream into your pillow if you need to. Tell your partner through clenched teeth that you need a minute. Go sneak in the bathroom and have a cry before going back to your job that’s stressing you out. Know that it is all OK. Allow it, let your emotions be. And over time, that process will feel less and less reactive. 

Pretty soon, you’ll be triggered by road rage, and you’ll want to throw your hand up and flip the guy off, but instead you’ll chuckle and laugh it off. And other days you do still flip the guy off, but the chuckle and the laugh still comes afterwards, because you’re allowing. You’re accepting. You’re embracing. The shame is gone. And maybe, when you get flipped off on the road, you’ll give them a chuckle too. 

A beautiful photo of an Arizona sunset from the other night,
reminding me that without the rain and without the clouds,
we wouldn't experience beautiful colors like this