I’ve spent a lot of time in the ‘healing’ world. You know the one—the endless loop of retreats, journals, and ‘breakthroughs’ that feel more like a checklist than actual peace.
I came across this piece and it felt like a call-out. It talks about how we often just rearrange our pain to make it look more ‘spiritual’ or acceptable to others, rather than actually dealing with it.
“What most people call healing is often just emotional rearrangement — shifting pain into more socially acceptable shapes. Productivity. Optimism. Spiritual bypassing.”
Healing Without Toxic Positivity
This hit me hard. I realized I wasn’t always healing; sometimes I was just decorating the wound so I could tell people I was ‘doing the work.’
Then there’s the whole ‘good vibes only’ thing. We’ve all been there, but when you’re actually in the dirt, that’s not help—it’s a gag order. It just suppresses the very things that need to be felt to actually move through them.
“Toxic positivity… turns [positivity] into a tool for avoiding, invalidating, or suppressing real emotions.”
Overcoming Toxic Positivity in Your Healing Journey
And if you keep the mask on long enough, the pressure just builds. I found this account of someone who realized that forcing the smile only made the eventual explosion way worse because they’d spent so much energy pretending the anger wasn’t there.
“Pushing those emotions down and forcing positivity only gave my angry/hateful outbursts more power because they built up to the point of explosion every couple of months.”
Toxic Positivity – My Self-healing Journey
The real shift happens when you stop trying to ‘solve’ your pain and just start living with it. It’s messy, it’s slow, and it doesn’t look like a brochure. If you’re tired of the performance, I’ve written more about the violence of ‘healing’.
Stop trying to optimize your pain. Just let it be. The exit is usually through the mess, not around it.