Is "Toxic Positivity" Affecting Your Marriage?

In this episode, we take a look into the often-misunderstood world of 'Toxic Positivity' and its impact on marital relationships. Join us as we unravel the complex dynamics between maintaining a positive outlook and the potential harm it can cause in a marriage, especially when it leads to the suppression of genuine emotions and concerns. We also take a look at the harming effects of labeling.

➤ The Article Referenced In Today's Episode: bit.ly/3Ojaauz

➤ Key Highlights:

- What is Toxic Positivity? We define this buzzword and explore how damaging labeling your spouse can be.

- The Psychology Behind Suppressed Emotions: Our expert analysis breaks down how hiding true feelings can lead to significant problems in a marriage.

- Real-Life Scenarios: We discuss practical examples and signs of "toxic positivity" in everyday marital interactions.

- Expert Opinions: Gain insights from experts on the balance between positivity and emotional honesty.

- Navigating Emotional Validation: Learn strategies for recognizing and validating both positive and negative emotions in your spouse.

➤ Why Listen to This Episode?
If you're struggling to understand why constant positivity might be harming your relationship or are seeking ways to encourage honest emotional expression between you and your spouse, this episode is a must-listen. It's particularly beneficial for couples who have been married for over a decade, addressing common challenges faced in long-term relationships.

➤ Additional Resources:
For those looking for more in-depth support, visit our website at MarriageHelper.com for resources, workshops, and personalized assistance to help you navigate through your marriage crisis.

➤ Subscribe and Stay Connected:
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more insightful content on marriage, relationships, and overcoming crises. Your journey to a healthier, more fulfilling marriage starts here!

➤ Book A Call:
If you'd like to book a call with an intake specialist, visit https://marriagehelper.com/booknow

Relationship Radio is hosted by CEO of Marriage Helper, Kimberly Beam Holmes, and founder of Marriage Helper, Dr. Joe Beam.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Joe, there's a new term out here that we're going to discuss today called toxic positivity, and you and I have been around well, you longer than me, but we've both been around in the psychology space long enough to kind of see words like this and think what have they decided to?

Speaker 2: 0:45

Yeah, what? What new thing is an old thing that they've given a new name to.

Speaker 1: 0:50

That's pretty much it, so our team actually pointed this article out to me today. It's this article titled Seven Ways Toxic Positivity Can Destroy.

Speaker 2: 0:59

We can destroy a relationship. Oh, this should be great.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Basically, what it says is that toxic positivity is the belief that, no matter how dire or difficult a situation that someone must maintain a blindly positive mindset that keeps them from truly seeing things the way that they are. And then it goes on to talk about the symptoms of toxic positivity, that you hide your true feelings out of fear of what other people may think. You ignore emotions that feel overwhelming to get on with life. You minimize any discomfort in order or with good feel or feel good sayings and buzzwords, and validate your own and others' emotions with reminders that things could be worse. Feel ashamed about your negative feelings so you try and just push them down and keep a smile on your face or shaming other people when they are expressing negative emotions. This is the definition of this toxic positivity. You're just hearing this for the first time.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Yeah, but the last one is the only one that I would absolutely agree with about shaming other people, because there are times when you really should be pushing down your negative emotions because something needs to be done, and if you let the negativity take over, you won't do anything at all. Since you were little, just a child In my mind, you will always be my little child, but as you were little, you remember I would teach you that if you're in a situation where something has to be done, you don't have time to be sad or scared.

Speaker 1: 2:26

Get mad and do something about it.

Speaker 2: 2:29

Then later you can get sad or scared, but if you're to begin with, then things are going to get out of hand. So what I hear them saying is okay, well, what if people just never do face the reality of it? Of course I would agree with that. We tell people all the time if you're not going to face reality, you're going to live in denial, you're going to wind up in a mess, because denying reality doesn't change reality. So some of those things I would say no, sometimes you do need to hold that down for a while. But, yes, should you have the ability to express what you feel, should you be able to engage what you feel. But you and I both know sometimes people don't even know how to touch in their own selves what they feel.

Speaker 1: 3:13

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:13

Because if you ask them what are you feeling, what do they say?

Speaker 1: 3:17

I don't know.

Speaker 2: 3:18

Well, do they? Are they just pushing it down, or do they really not know?

Speaker 1: 3:25

Well, I think many times when people say they don't know, they don't allow themselves to feel it, whether they've pushed it down, whether they're intentionally keeping it separate. You know, I think it kind of comes to semantics. But here's what I thought of when I heard and read this article, which was about 30 minutes ago. It sounds like a defense mechanism, right?

Speaker 2: 3:48

In the sense of.

Speaker 1: 3:50

In the sense of if I feel like I can't deal with my emotions right now because they're too much, they would be too overwhelming, then my defense mechanism is going to be pushed them down. I think about when we first brought our daughter home from India and she would fall and hurt herself and was clearly hurting like she was clearly in pain, but there was a fear of crying. There was this fear of I can't show you my real emotions because I don't know if I'm going to be accepted if I do so, so I'm just going to smile. So she would just smile, try and like, laugh her way through it. And it was this it was a way for her to try and deal with the environment she was in and the best way that she knew how, with the tools she had at the time.

Speaker 2: 4:34

With what she thought could be the potential reaction from you.

Speaker 1: 4:36

With what she caught? Yeah, sure, and so we don't know. You know how she was treated at the orphanage or anything like that. But I have a issue with the term toxic positivity. It's a negative Because this seems like it is labeling the other person in a very negative way, Like they have a negative intention with what they're trying to do their best with in the moment.

Speaker 2: 5:00

And again, before we totally leave it, sometimes people are being positive because they don't know exactly what it is they're feeling, and so, if I don't know how to represent to you what's going on inside of me, I've got a couple of choices. One is to be totally neutral, or the other is to be totally negative, or the other totally positive. And I wouldn't think. In most situations, if you're not sure what you're feeling, positivity probably comes out better than negativity, wouldn't you think?

Speaker 1: 5:28

Yeah, I mean I'm quickly trying to go through anything I can think of. Most of the time, a positive response is going to work more in your favor than a negative one.

Speaker 2: 5:37

Right. But I like Eliana when she was first here from India, like if I cry, maybe they won't like me. If I cry, maybe they don't want to keep me. If I cry, maybe they want to send me back and that kind of fear. We both know that we encourage everybody.

Speaker 2: 5:55

As best you can examine what's inside of you, you have to have a safe place to let it out. But even then it has to be a safe place, because if I'm having negative feelings, fear for example, and I tell it to the wrong person, it actually can be used against me, and so maybe on those occasions neutrality sounds better, or even not a false positive way of doing it, but at least not indicating the fear, because the fear will be used against me or the anxiety will be used against me, because there are people in the world, if they can see those negative emotions, will take advantage of it and they will use you or hurt you more. You know the old thing we used to kid around when a man's down and kick him so he can learn to rise above it. That's not my philosophy, by the way. That's an old saying that was supposed to be funny, but it wasn't funny because of the fact that I'm just going to make it worse. And yet there are people in the world who will do that. I have witnessed, let's say it's a husband who finally opens up and shows his emotion, and maybe his emotion is sadness or maybe his emotion is fear. And I have actually witnessed wives, when they see that, not knowing quite how to react to that because they hadn't seen that before in them and they didn't know how to handle that because it was a new experience attack.

Speaker 2: 7:20

I thought you were a man. Why are you crying? I thought you were the person I was going to depend on. You're the strong person. Why are you? And so I would always say if you're going to express what you really feel, you might want to check the environment. You're in, the people you're around. I think there's a proverb in the Old Testament actually I can't quote it exactly, but the paraphrase is even a fool speaks his whole heart. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1: 7:52

That we can teach people to be toxically positive, If we want to use that word and for people listening on the podcast, I'm using parentheses around those words just like we can teach people to lie, just like we can teach people in our reaction to them. If they begin to realize this isn't a safe place, then they're not going to deal with the real issues, they're not going to bring up their fears or worries. They are likely to put on this face or put up a defense mechanism just to get through. And so it's not always the other person's fault, it's always a bad thing either.

Speaker 2: 8:30

Sometimes it's what you need to do right now to get through, to get past, and it doesn't mean that you're lying. It just means you're not making yourself more vulnerable at the moment. I wouldn't call that toxic. I'm assuming they're talking about somebody who never, ever, accesses their own emotions and pretends about everything. Yeah, I don't sit on and think I'd call it toxic.

Speaker 1: 8:50

And they may be, but here's the thing how many people is that actually describing that actually go through life never looking at the negative, always being positive, putting on a smile, never, you know, just sweeping everything under the rug and not dealing with reality. How many people are we actually talking about to do that? What do you think?

Speaker 2: 9:11

Of course, I don't know of any research on it. No, I don't either, so therefore I have no.

Speaker 1: 9:15

And that's saying this is not a research, this is not a psychological term that we're researching, this isn't opinion.

Speaker 2: 9:21

This isn't opinion for sure, and it sounds to me like it's written by somebody who finds themselves more in a negative territory and therefore get offended when other people are in a positive territory and therefore start making judgments about that positivity. That's not what you really feel. You're pretending, you're acting, you feel shame, whatever else it might be. Do you think there's possibility that that might be where this label would come from?

Speaker 1: 9:47

Perhaps, but my concern is so you're taking something that actually the majority of people to this level are probably not actually dealing with, but many people are dealing with it as a way to cope, a way to handle, a way to XYZ, but now you're putting a negative label on it. And here's what we do know from the psychology when I begin to see you as sick or you, you, joe, you're just talk, you're toxic in your positivity, then everything I see is gonna go through that filter and I'm gonna begin to further the blame, and then you're the problem. You're the problem when, in reality, I could be changing the things I'm doing to help facilitate a safer place for you to be vulnerable. But that's not what this is about.

Speaker 2: 10:35

And so the terms you and I are more familiar with that have been in psychology and sociology for many, many years, not just some new fancy way to say something old. We know about negative effect and positive affect. Not affect, but affect, affect. Help me pronounce that affect AFFECD.

Speaker 2: 10:53

It's cold outside, my tongue quit working. So positive affect and negative affect. Negative affect basically says that because I view you negatively, I view everything about you negatively. If you say good morning, I wonder what your ulterior motive is. Positive affect is I tend to see everything about you positively. So even if you do something stupid, I tend to excuse it because I feel good about you. And so what you were just saying is if I have a negative affect toward the other person, then I'm really prone to grab labels and put them on there because that justifies the negative emotions I have about you anyway. So if I can call you a narcissist or toxic positivity or whatever else, it justifies my thinking negatively about you in my mind. But what we're saying is it doesn't do it in reality, or at least it shouldn't do it in reality.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Right, because that's not what's gonna heal the situation or make anything better. Continuing to blame someone is gonna continue this cycle of pushing them away and not having a healthy relationship.

Speaker 2: 12:02

Yeah, the week in, before we actually filmed this, I was doing another workshop with quite a few couples in there, a three day intensive workshop for couples in crisis. And again, like I do in every single workshop that I lead, and I'm sure the other leaders here as well somebody is usually a wife, but it could be the husband. But somebody will say well, my counselor said that my husband is a narcissist, or it could be. My counselor said my wife is a narcissist. I heard it again this weekend, like I heard every single time, and I always ask how many visits did your counselor have with your spouse before making that label? Well, my spouse has not been met by my therapist. So even when I sing that person just going on, whatever you said, they have made a diagnosis of narcissism, to which I always say the same single word response run, find somebody who is professional, find somebody who's ethical, because it's the same thing, right? So, ultimately, what should we be saying about labeling that we really want people to hear?

Speaker 1: 13:02

Don't do it. Ever, Unless you know that it's truly what it is. I mean, think about how many tests that a good doctor is gonna run on someone before they give a diagnosis. They wanna make sure they're right before they begin treatment. And then labeling is great, because you have certainty of what you're dealing with and then you can make a proper plan to move forward with it. So in that kind of situation yes, this is a little bit different- A whole lot different, I think.

Speaker 1: 13:34

It's a little bit harder to get 100% right on what just one of the problems is, because in the line of work we do, we know that there's typically several things that are happening as symptoms, but there's typically only a few, maybe even one at some times core issues. So labeling that was your question. Should you label If the labeling of something is helpful in actually getting you to move toward fixing it?

Speaker 2: 14:00

sure and try to make the labels not quote toxic end, quote Right, something that's going to make the other.

Speaker 1: 14:07

I mean, that was even a big thing when I was going through my Masters in Family Therapy. Training was even how we talk to a client who is experiencing depression. You do not call them depressed. Because, Because then you are labeling them and that is how they are going to see themselves, and it will perpetuate the issue.

Speaker 2: 14:27

So if a wife were to say my husband is forgetful, that's kind of a mild thing. It's the kind of thing you actually could do something about. Well, because on the way is forgetful, let's hang the keys right next to the door so that we can always find them. But saying your positivity is toxic. Maybe we can summarize it this way Sometimes it's okay not to show the other person what you're exactly feeling. Sometimes it's because you yourself don't know exactly what you're feeling.

Speaker 2: 14:57

We think that most of the time, if you're in a relationship that really matters to you, you should be able to express your emotions and to be accepted by the other person, even if they don't like the fact that you're feeling that emotion. And so it's okay to say I'm afraid, it's okay to say I'm worried, but only if the other person is willing to hear that and not attack you for it or condemn you for it, but you're down for it, and so sometimes you just need to check who am I with? What might happen here? I want to be open and transparent, but we have to have the right environment to do that, and let's talk about that just for a second, not long. I want the right environment to do that and if the environment's not there?

Speaker 2: 15:36

I think sometimes it makes sense not to reveal what you really feel Now, if you don't know what you really feel, if you have the right person with you, somebody who genuinely cares and loves you and is open sometimes you can discover what you feel just by talking it out. But that it won't happen if the person is judgmental or condemning. It will only happen with somebody who's actually paying attention to you. Would you agree with that?

Speaker 1: 16:00

I would agree.

Speaker 2: 16:02

And what was the thing I said? We'll come back to and talk about the environment.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Make sure the environment that you're in is conducive to doing so.

Speaker 2: 16:08

Means.

Speaker 1: 16:11

Well, I'm not quite sure what you were thinking when you were saying that. Not just where you are, which I'm sure is important. If you're out in public, then that's maybe not the best time to dive deeper into these things. But even then, the environment of if you're at home and how has the day been, all of these factors are put in there. But then there's finally the environment of what you were just saying. Is the spouse able to hear and be a safe place, even if it's something that they don't want to hear or wished were different?

Speaker 2: 16:43

So my last comment about that and Kimberley can say what she wishes here is this If you feel like your spouse is not being open and transparent about what they feel and therefore you might want to accuse them of toxic positivity, you're just pretending, you're not being real, not being honest. If you say it that way, they're going to continue to guard their emotions, they're going to continue not to tell you what they feel because they feel unsafe with you. And so if you think your spouse is doing that, then the better way would be to say I can see that what you're saying doesn't seem to fit. What's going on with your face and the things you've been doing, even the way you've been eating or sleeping. Would you be willing to tell me what's really going on in there? And if they say, I don't know, I'm willing to listen and whatever you say I will hear. I'm still on your side. I still love you. So, rather than attacking what you might see as toxic positivity, instead change the environment where the person can tell you what they really feel.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Yeah, and how many times have we heard people, clients, when they come to our workshops, when they do our 90-day programs, they come to us and they say I was putting all the blame on my spouse. But I realize now there was actually more in my control that I could change.

Speaker 2: 18:03

Nearly every couple, every workshop.

Speaker 1: 18:08

Absolutely, absolutely. We love seeing those changes in people, and so we have a way that our listeners, that our audience, can book a call with our intake specialist to learn more about how we can help you. Whether it's you yourself right now, if you don't have a spouse who's engaged and wanting to work on the marriage guess what we have a path for you. Or if you and your spouse are willing to work together, we have a path for you too a very effective 90-day programs that can help to begin to turn around your marriage. And you can book that free call with our intake specialists by going to marriagehelpercom. That's B-O-O-K-N-O-W. You can also click the link in the show notes, whether you're listening on the podcasts or whether you're watching on YouTube, and you can book that free call with one of our amazing intake specialists. Until next time, remember, there is always hope.