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| Poisoned Shuriken by Alex Manning. |
Toxic positivity is positivity that denies truth. It minimizes and dismisses negative emotions regardless of circumstances. It pushes away nuance and reality to focus solely on a narrative of fake joy. Acting positive can be a coping mechanism, but when you do not allow yourself or others to feel and process the emotions they feel it becomes a cage. That makes it as useless as constant negativity. Toxic positivity is stoicism with sparkle emojis attached to it.
We can help people and ourselves better by being constructive with our encouragement. ''Failure is a part of growth and success'' instead of ''Failure is never an option!!''. One tells a person that one failure is not the end of the road because there are more chances to rise, the other is a distressing falsehood. Only one is helpful. Choose to be helpful to your friends, family and self today.
Positive Psychology is hardly a new thing, but some of you like me will only have heard of it recently,or right now. It's a field in Psychology that has promised us better results for easing the burden that life puts on our mental health and It is absolutely worth a listen.
What made Positive Psychology so special they felt it deserved it's own name? In summary, Martin Seligman got fed up with Psychology's excessive focus on trauma, suffering and pain while little attention was given to the processes of making people happy. That is how Positive Psychology was born with Seligman as the founder. Positive Psychology is purely focus on the present. It's focus on the positive and the real life application of it. It's focus on your strenghts and how to boost them. It is the science of optimism.
It is an actual science, It's postulations and theories are based on evaluation made in the light of evidence. Some of the goals of Positive Psycholgy are to enhance the positive experiences of people and to improve their goal getting drives. I'd like to be happier and achieve my goals so I'm paying attention.
It's not a magic wand as there of course is valid criticism of the field. It'll would be easy enough to veer into Toxic Positivity and Victim-blaming if one is reckless. I also believe that integration of traditional method is important for balance. I might write a whole post about this after I'm done with my Positive Psychology learning period. There is criticism of every field however and there should be, nothing is perfect. It's a good way to adress non-pathological unhappiness and malcontent and I believe it should be taken seriously.
If you'd like to delve into the topic you could check these out;
- Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being - and how to Achieve Them (a fantastic overview of positive psychology from the father of this discipline)
- Ed Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (a nice introduction to the science of well-being from one of its pioneers)
- Coursera The Science of Well Being by Yale University(My personal favourite!)