EVERYTHING IS AWESOME: Toxic Positivity

Positive Psychology…seriously, you?

I just finished my training program and certification exams as a Positive Psychology Coach. Folks that know me may find it ironic that I pursued training in positive pscyhology. I’m generally regarded as the cynic or curmudgeon in most of my professional and social groups.

In my mind it makes sense for 2 reasons.

First: Positive psychology is the study of human flourishing. One of my biggest pet peeves (and much of the source of my curmudgeonliness) is wasted potential. Unrealized potential is literally the opposite of flourishing. So why wouldn’t I study a discipline devoted to helping humans optimize their lives and fulfill their full potential?

Second: The best way to address struggles/challenges I identify with in the personal and professional realm was to train in both executive coaching, and positive psychology coaching. In this way, I would be forewarned and forearmed to aid professionals with issues in their personal life, professional life or both.

Most of my personal/career challenges have come in the form of “false compartmentalization”. I, like many others, maintained a separation between the personal and professional. The bit that I was missing in this was that the personal and professional had a common factor: me. Once the realization hit me I was able to see that many parts of both aspects of my life weren’t optimal. One of the reasons I hadn’t seen it before is that I would often be good at something in my personal life, but not in my professional life, or vice versa. I would take notice of the success in one domain, and be blind to the struggle in the other. The awareness that I was frankly deluding myself with the artificial separation of personal and professional led me to talk with colleagues about their struggles and challenges. Turns out this artificial separation, and subsequent blindness to areas of struggle is not a unique “me problem”.

Everything is Awesome

-Emmet, The Lego Movie

There will be a great many blog posts on positive psychology topics as this blog evolves. Today I want to address one of the biggest misconceptions about positive psychology: There is no benefit to negative emotions. All negative events must be reframed as gifts, otherwise you will drown in the negativity. We must be happy all the time. in other words: EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!

There are a variety of ways this is born out. In a future installment of this blog, I’ll discuss a rather trying period of my professional life when I was fired. Spoiler alert, despite making the best of this episode, I won’t be thanking those that executed my firing as having given me a gift. But, that’s a story for later. In recognition of my positive psychology program, I’m going to use a more personal topic. It’s also timely and relevant to a fundraiser my wife and I put on every year for the past decade.

Not a Negative, but a gift.

To begin, here’s my premise. Negative emotions are vital and useful to the human experience. Negative emotions come from the accurate assessment of negative events as such. The avoidance of any and all negative emotions as bad/harmful/unnecessary is what I will term “toxic positivity”. Much of the mechanism to avoid negative emotions is reframing negative events as necessarily positive.

The usual verbiage used here is “That’s not a negative, it’s a gift”.

There’s an understandable reason why there are some who promote toxic positivity and think they are helping. There is a negativity bias inherent in human psychology, which probably served an evolutionary purpose. Thousands of years ago, things that were negative didn’t just make you feel bad, they killed you. The world is a much safer place now that we aren’t running from saber tooth tigers regularly, but our wiring/biology isn’t appreciably different. We still respond to threats, negative occurrences, and failures with negative emotions.

Negative emotions should surely be managed. Letting negativity run rampant by not being aware of our bias, and amplifying our negative emotions through storytelling that magnifies them is counterproductive. Additionally unchecked negativity may frankly have negative health consequences. I am not, in any way suggesting that intentional wallowing is a good plan.

I understand what these positive guru types are after. They are inspired by stories like “The parable of the Chinese Farmer”. Google it, and go have a quick read if you are unfamiliar with it. The moral is supposed to be about withholding judgement, being flexible in your interpretation of life events, and being open to the positive that can come from any event. However, it is usually overinterpreted in leadership seminars as “you can’t judge things” or “there is no such thing as a negative event”.

Bollocks.

There is also a tendency to misinterpret Stoic philosophy in dealing with adverse events. To be sure, the stoics would say that the events that happen are out of your control, and it is your responsibility to manage the only things in your control: your attitude and your actions in response to life events. Seems like an obvious leap to “there is no negative”. However, the stoics also felt that there was a right way to live, and that to live in concert with fate and nature and do the right thing was virtuous. It is literally impossible to hold yourself to a standard of doing the right thing if there is “no good or bad”. To be sure, Stoics would not promote wallowing. Quite the opposite. Stoicism asks you to embrace your fate and the events that happen to you. However, this is as an admonition to live in response to and in concert with reality. It is not an admonition to equate good and evil as the same.

This to be sure is a nuanced approach. I actually agree with the Stoics and with a reasonable interpretation of the Chinese farmer parable. Assess events for what they are, and not the catastrophe you worry they are. Don’t negate the positive that may be present in an ambiguous event. And no matter the nature of the event, it is solely your responsibility to respond your best to it and move forward to make the most of your life. My contention is that none of this requires you to suspend your moral judgement that there is an objective reality, and that there is a standard of good/evil in that reality.

Feeling the negative emotions that come from an event like cancer, a death in the family, or a natural disaster is a vital impetus to human growth and flourishing. But the fact that humans can flourish following a horrific event, despite them (correctly) feeling negative emotions about it does not change the nature of the event, or mean that we should simply “skip to the good parts” and not feel the feelings that come from negative events.

Perhaps an example.

Cancer Sucks

My wife and I are in the midst of our annual fundraiser. We run a 2 course race challenge every November at Walt Disney World, and raise money for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The first time we did this the race was sold out, and we pledged to fundraise in exchange for race entry. Ever since, every race we have run has been a fundraiser. It’s been an honor every year to lead and inspire our donors to support the amazing work at St Jude. The stories of the amazing patients at St Jude show courage, fortitude and resilience in the face of cancer during childhood.

At no point would anyone sane or moral suggest that these patient’s cancer is a good thing. The response to the cancer is positive. It’s amazing. The kids, their parents, doctors, nurses, clinical staff, and researchers are incredible in the example they set in the face of adversity. Their choices in the face of something objectively negative and horrible are incredible and positive. That positivity doesn’t make the occurrence of pediatric cancer a net positive.

It’s cancer occurring in children. Children who didn’t make choices to place themselves at risk for cancer. It just happened, despite that it is absolutely not their fault.

Our fundraiser became a bit more personal; My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer this year. Training for our run has had to happen alongside scans, biopsies, surgery, radiation, hormone therapy, telling the kids, managing careers and maintaining our marriage.

Cancer can go fuck itself with a cactus.

Thanks JD Robb! My wife read me a quote from your most recent book, and it perfectly encapsulated what we felt about cancer.

So…how best to reframe the diagnosis of cancer? Is it a positive? Is it a gift?

Don’t get me wrong. My wife and I have had a great many positives happen in the wake of her diagnosis. Our perspective and priorities have become clearer and easier to put into action. Our relationship is stronger and so is our family. All of these good responses to a lousy awful thing like cancer is a testament to my wife’s character strengths, resilience and fortitude. None of these positive responses in any way changes the nature of cancer as something terrible.

A quick game to illustrate: would you wish cancer on your spouse or child?

Thanks for playing.

Nobody sane or moral would wish cancer on anyone. My grandmother had an Italian colloquialism that roughly translates to “I wouldn’t wish it on a dog”.

We actually both feel it is our duty as moral humans to 1) judge events as good or bad when able 2) respond as your best to either type of event. We also feel it is a moral perversion to take the perilous step beyond that duty. Reframing your response by seeing an aspect of opportunity in any negative occurrence is an excellent approach. We reject the notion that by responding with positive change/positive attitude/personal growth that the event itself then becomes good.

If that were the case, ie. if cancer happening to kids is a good thing (or an unjudgeable thing)- why are so many working so hard to cure it? This is usually my response to another example of this misguided reframing of bad things as good things. If a bad thing were a good thing, why would we work so hard to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else? If it’s a gift, we should want to distribute it widely. Not convinced? How bout another example?

Superman

Christopher Reeve suffered a horrible accident when he was thrown from a horse and sustained a devastating spinal injury. He made an unbelievable choice following this to live his life to the fullest and do everything he could to raise awareness of spinal injury, promote treatments, and fund research into the reversal of spinal injury. To be sure there are advances in since and technology that happened as a result of his advocacy. He is quoted as saying during his appearance at the academy awards after his injury “I wouldn’t have missed this welcome for the world”. Some interpret this quote as him saying he wouldn’t have changed anything about his injury, and that he saw the injury as a gift. Christopher Reeve was an exceptional person, and demonstrated a strength of character and resilience that most of the rest of humanity can only aspire to. But he didn’t think his spinal injury was a good thing, or a gift. He dedicated his life to finding a cure, and improving the lives of people suffering from similar injuries…because he knew inherently and by his experience that it is awful to have a complete cervical spinal injury. What he meant is that he wouldn’t give up his life and miss the opportunity to speak at the academy awards because he had a spinal injury. Choosing to live on in the face of a devastating injury and disability like Reeve did is amazing, exceptional, and the most positive heroic thing he could have chosen to do. But he had no allusions that the positive choices he made, or the advances in research and treatment that will come from his advocacy makes his injury a good thing or a gift.

Man’s Search for Meaning

Shall I go on?

The number of examples like this are endless. Have you read “Man’s Search of Meaning” by Victor Frankl? Brilliant book about the ability of a human to cope with literally inhumane conditions and levels of suffering. That book is an amazing gift to humanity from Frankl, and has almost certainly guided many to make positive choices following horrendous circumstances. Would any sane human reframe the holocaust as a gift because Frankl’s book was written as a response to this unimaginable evil? Frankl certainly didn’t. He was able to separate the evil of indecent humans, and the horror of evil and suffering from his responsibility to his own life. He made a distinction between the suffering/evil and facing suffering with dignity.

I laud Frankl and Reeve for their amazing courage and dignity in the face of their experiences. Their ability to flourish despite negative events is the essence of positive psychology. My wife is a badass as well, although she and I are under no illusions that early stage breast cancer is the same magnitude of struggle. However, I still wouldn’t wish any of these things on a dog.

It is frankly a disservice to their humanity to interpret their experience through some kind of post modern lens which negates objective reality and turns morality into pure relativism. Sorry, not sorry. Reality exists, and some of it is downright shitty. Our ability to judge bad/evil from good/moral and make the best of our potential in the face of either is the essence of our humanity. That is flourishing in the truest sense, and it doesn’t come from delusions about bad things being gifts. It comes from calling it like it is, and moving forward regardless.

Takeaways

1. There is an objective reality, and some of it is evil and awful.
2. It is not only ok to feel rotten in the face of something evil and awful, its normal and human to do so.
3. Wanting to feel pleasurable all the time is generally at odds with both objective reality and your humanity
4. You can choose how you respond to awful things. Choosing to learn, grow and progress following them is an excellent way to manage the awful things in reality, and move to human flourishing.

I would love to hear your thoughts. What awful circumstances in your life did you follow by choosing to flourish? Who do you hold as a mentor/role model who have inspired you with their response to adversity?