The other day I was driving down a Michigan highway listening to Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast featuring Dr. Susan David originally aired in March. They were speaking about the unintended cruelty of toxic positivity. I felt totally called out, sometimes I do this toxic positivity thing. Brene and Susan described it as overriding people’s authentic feelings because we find them intolerable.
Listening closely, I learned toxic positivity was demanding resilience from others in our time, not theirs, and we do this because it is so hard to see people in pain. Me, the trained grief worker, a person who measures her words, says the wrong things sometimes. We all do, it’s part of the human condition. We are good and kind, thinking we should really be sweet and spiritual cheerleaders. It’s hard to sit in sadness with someone who is in deep despair. We fall short and offer pitiful and benevolent statements veiled in empathy to push people along, especially loved ones, to where we’d prefer they be. We want them safe and comfortable. We say things like,
“It could be so much worse, at least…”
“Think of all the good things you have going for you.”
“Positivity attracts positivity.” (Ugh, I could just throw up. I think I said this to one of my kids last month.) And don’t forget the all-time, guilt-loaded, soul-crushing,
“God wouldn’t give you more than you can handle.” By the very grace of God, I stopped saying this a long, long time ago. This, all of this, have the unintended consequences of shutting people down and that is not at all what we want to do.
The morning after my mother died a group of children from the neighborhood stood on the other side of the wooden screen door in our kitchen holding a homemade card made of 12 x 18-inch construction paper stapled at the top. Written on the cover in cursive with black crayon were the words, “Our Deepest Sympathy’, the tail of the letter ‘y’ was scrolled decoratively up to the right with great intentionality and care. I loved that about it. I’ve held on to this card and I look at it now and again when I find it tucked way back in my guest room closet while I’m searching for something else. Inside held signatures of adults and children from the neighborhood scrawled in pen, pencil, and crayon, some had bubbled their letters. A few children drew flowers with tears falling from their centers. The sad and nervous little group handed their expression of condolence to my younger sister and me, then continued on to school, we stayed behind for a day or so. That was what they were told to do and that is what they did.
It was a sincere effort, they showed up and acknowledged our loss. After the card had been delivered life was expected to resume as before, especially once my mother’s funeral was over. That was how childhood grief was done in the 1970s. “At least we still had our father. And if we were positive good things would find us. Surely God wouldn’t give us anything we couldn’t handle.” Unable to talk about death with anyone, grief became the driver of my life.
I take comfort in knowing experience has taught me to mostly have a compassionate response to someone else's pain, words grounded in openness and generosity,
“I see you. I hear you. I can handle all your feelings.”
“I’m curious about how it feels to be you right now.”
“I notice you are quiet/tired/weary… can you tell me about it?”
I’m not critiquing the kind of support people need who are doing things like enduring a hard and unfulfilling job or adjusting to the homesickness of a college dorm room. Those situations call for encouragement, although compassionate curiosity and wondering how they feel is important. No, this is about thoughtful communication when interacting with people who are mourning a death or the loss of a job, health, or marriage. We can never know how another person feels and to assume we do is a mistake. Our experiences do not mirror their experiences. It is not for us to decide when resilience will take hold. Toxic positivity pushes people to move along a forced timeline. As though a demand, toxic positivity shouts,
“I’m willing to lay more grief and loneliness in your lap with my impatience because it is hard for me to see you unhappy.”
I’m just not willing to say that anymore. Toxic positivity, I have named you and I’m just not doing you anymore.
Copyright (2021) Suzanne Bayer. All Rights Reserved