22/07/2019
From the wonderful Josh Connolly.
All feelings welcome at Some Space. It's through acknowledging things as they are that we can work towards making changes.
I speak a lot about the dangers of hitting people with positivity without any validation because I think it’s something we should all become more mindful of.
I’m not a huge fan of the term ‘toxic positivity’ because I think it becomes too binary. Similar to what happened with the term ‘toxic masculinity’.
However, I do think this picture does well to highlight an issue with some of the terminology we see.
As we all begin to explore what ‘mental health’ means to us, I think it’s really important to consider that ‘good mental health’ isn’t necessarily just feeling good.
I always like to come from the angle of the listener in terms of communication & as listeners, a stream of positive solutions is often driven by our need to fix.
I believe it takes courage and strength to be able to acknowledge, accept and/or communicate our struggles and when this courage is just met with what we should do to change, or just simply positivity, it can completely devalue our experience & push us further into a shame state.
Positivity is important, it’s needed and creating a positive outlook can be huge for growing as an individual but when it comes at the expense of validation, I believe it becomes detrimental. 🙌🏼
