![]() ![]() She's 27 and lives in Sydney, and about a year ago she moved in with this yogi friend of hers.Īnna: I was really excited about it, I was really excited about living with someone who valued mental health and was trying to improve themselves. Sana Qadar: This is someone we're calling Anna. Today, toxic positivity, why we engage in it, why it's so damaging when we do, and whether something called tragic optimism can be the antidote we need.Īnna: So I met my now ex-housemate a couple of years ago and she is a yoga teacher and so that was how we first started our friendship, was her teaching me yoga. Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar. And really in some ways it's not so much about that desire to be happy or even for other people to want us to be happy, that's actually quite a good thing, it's when it becomes at that level where failing to achieve that at some point (and inevitably we all do) feels like we are failing to achieve some sort of important social standard. Sana Qadar: There's a term for these kinds of comments and the attitude they push, it's 'toxic positivity'.īrock Bastian: You know, it's about the idea to be positive all time, to maintain positive thoughts, a certain level of positive emotionality. Really? You know, it's absolutely pathetic. Jaime: So many people are reflecting back to you these kinds of statements, you just learn it's not safe to express those feelings, it's not okay to talk about how you are feeling sad.Ĭeara Rickard: And they are telling me that if I'm just positive enough, that cancer won't kill me. But these statements aren't just irritating, they can really chip away at our sense of what is an acceptable way to feel. Sana Qadar: That last one, if you've had an illness or cared for someone who has, you know that sentiment can be especially awful. Sana Qadar: A helpful refrain later down the track but not as a first response.Ĭeara Rickard: Oh, it's all in your attitude, you have to have hope, you have to be a fighter. Sana Qadar: That one is a personal pet peeve.Īnna: Okay, but what can we be learning from this? Jessica Mead: You always have those people who say it could always be worse.Ĭeara Rickard: You know, everything happens for a reason… Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 646843.Sana Qadar: When things are going wrong in our lives, there are certain platitudes that people tend to say which are perhaps meant to be helpful but often aren't. Tragic optimism as a buffer against COVID-19 suffering and the psychometric properties of a brief version of the Life Attitudes Scale. ![]() Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 9(1), 23-31. Development of the Vicarious Resilience Scale (VRS): A measure of positive effects of working with trauma survivors. Killian, K.D., Hernandez, P., Engstrom, D., & Gangsei, D. Olatunji (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of anxiety and related disorders (pp. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(5). Form tribulations to appreciation: experiencing adversity in the past predicts greater savoring in the present. In fact, if one learns to flex one’s gratitude muscles, experiencing adversity can enhance appreciation for life’s simple pleasures (Croft, Dunn, & Quoidbach, 2014).Ĭroft, A., Dunn, E.W., & Quoidbach, J. That comes from processing traumatic events by wrestling with them and actively searching for meaning from what we've been confronted with. But simply surviving a trauma doesn’t guarantee growth. Studies of post-traumatic growth (PTG), and vicarious resilience (Killian et al., 2017) have found that we can grow through primary and secondary traumatic events, leading to increased appreciation of one’s life and increased compassion, purpose, and altruism. It may also cause one to miss out on an opportunity for growth (Kaufman, 2021). In my professional and clinical roles, I don’t tell clients, supervisees, or friends to simply “stay positive” because it rings hollow during a global crisis and sounds like a ducking of reality. Psychological researchers refer to such a stance as toxic optimism, and it’s just not very helpful. A Pollyanna-ish stance of “everything’s coming up roses” and rushing to all places normal-when 1 in 500 Americans have died of COVID-is tone deaf and, frankly, out of touch. As Buddhists remind us, being human means experiencing discomfort, disappointment, and pain human existence involves suffering.
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