Podcast Transcript | Ep. 23
Toxic Positivity | Ep. 23
[00:00:00]
[00:00:45] Hello, and welcome to another episode of order within I'm your host Brandon Ward. Today, we're talking about. Toxic positivity. Episode number 23. This is an intriguing topic. Well, I probably say that for all topics that I discussed on the show, otherwise I probably wouldn't be discussing them. But.
[00:01:09] A topic of interest. I think very relevant in our society that we live today. And want to talk about how this impacts us. So if you things. What is toxic positivity. How pervasive it is in our culture. The dangers of toxic positivity. The perception over reality concept.
[00:01:32] And then finally, really being authentic as a counter to. Fake. Toxic positivity. All right, so let's go and dig in here. Looking at. What toxic positivity is. And I think it's something, this is a new concept. My wife actually introduced me recently. Now it's not new in the sense of people have been doing this for a very long time being positively fake.
[00:02:00] But identifying it and understanding what it is and how it reflects in our society is something that's new for me. And so I wanted to share some of these things and. See if we can't learn and grow a little bit here on how to counter this. And how to navigate.
[00:02:15] Toxic positivity and what it means to us and how we can handle that. All right.
[00:02:20] Some components of toxic positivity. The biggest thing is going to be. The fake positive aspect, like you're only expressing positivity negativity. Darkness bad things. Are something that. People who apply this in their lives, do Address, they don't acknowledge. They push it out. They stuff it down.
[00:02:45] Whatever you want to call it. They're denying the negativity and they are positioning a very.
[00:02:51] Unnatural positive perspective, only identifying the positive things. Only calling out good potential outcomes. Only focusing on positive qualities. Quote unquote. It could be happiness, joy.
[00:03:07] Honesty, whatever it is like maybe honesty is not a good one, but it's only coming at things with a positive perspective, even when things may be negative or dire or bad.
[00:03:20] What this will do and what it tends to do. Is. Blinds us to reality. We're ultimately blinding ourselves to reality. Negativity. Is a part of reality. And so when we are experiencing toxic positivity, either in our own lives or someone who is ascribing to this perspective, We can find ourselves in a situation to where we are being pummeled with the positivity to.
[00:03:50] Deny. Reality in many ways to ignore reality, to overcome what reality actually is.
[00:03:58] That's a dangerous position to be in being blind to reality, being blind to negativity, to darkness, to danger in society and in our lives. Is a dangerous position to be if we're denying that, it's actually a good thing to recognize pitfalls, dangers, darkness, toxic behaviors. Negativity bad things.
[00:04:20] Things that can potentially harm us. These are good things. And nature all throughout is made up. Of both negative and positive elements. Good and bad things that we judge as good and bad.
[00:04:35] Humanity has a skill, a talent and ability to judge perceive. Observe. This allows us to apply judgements, perspectives, to what we're seeing in reality. And that can be great and bad because. If we're skewing deeply away from what is we're putting ourselves in situations. That will only end up harming us and others because we're building.
[00:05:04] Glass houses. Or houses of cards, these types of things. A lot of that happens when we're dealing with toxic positivity. And so in order to overcome negative aspects, people will sometimes overwhelm us. It's been known as like love bombing or positive bombing where you're ultimately just.
[00:05:23] As a way to overcome any negative traits or qualities you plow through with positivity, you ignore all the negativity. And you just hammer home all the positive stuff. And it is an example. You have a terrible financial situation and you're deeply in debt. You lost your job. You have no income.
[00:05:42] And instead of acknowledging that reality and recognizing like, Hey, look, I need to do something to help to address some of this. Maybe. Get some income coming in, whatever that may be. We deny that reality. We tell ourselves, ah, everything will be okay. Everything will be okay. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. And we keep in this loop.
[00:06:01] Thinking that things will be okay. We will figure it out and that will overcome it. But the reality is if we don't recognize the seriousness of the situation and say, look, this is potentially dangerous. I need to be honest with myself about where I am. And be realistic about the financial scenario that I find myself in and look at possible avenues to potentially alleviate some of that. Even if that means taking a lower quality job or something like that, lower paying job to have some income. Now, this might be a bad example, but.
[00:06:33] When we deny that reality, we don't allow ourselves a chance to overcome and adjust what we're experiencing. It actually keeps us locked into this pattern of thinking that everything will be okay without taking positive action now. I'm a faith-driven But faith is only good when we couple that with action, we have to couple our action with our faith, with our optimism, with our hopeful perspective, if we only keep a hopeful perspective, but do nothing.
[00:07:00] In response, this is where negative loops can happen. We can get ourselves into destructive cycles. So when you're looking at toxic positivity, it's often driven by this heavy, positive front. There's a complete denial of negativity or bad scenarios. There's a blindness to reality because it's only the positive that we're willing to see. And then there's an overwhelming push to see the world the way that person may be pushing or perceiving. So there's all this force being generated behind it so that you also see the reality that we're seeing.
[00:07:34] So it's almost like come to me and join in my reality so that we can both be together and our blinders on what we're seeing. It's a way to amplify. Our ability to deny reality.
[00:07:46] This is very pervasive in our culture. And it starts in a lot of ways with celebrities, politicians. Political figures, social media influencers, all of these people that have social perspectives that have social presences, I should say, not perspectives, but a presence. A. Persona. And. Many people will use that position of power and authority to lead people into certain outcomes. So they will skew what they're telling you to get something from you. This is the danger of this is that.
[00:08:28] Celebrity culture, social media influencers, all of this is very prevalent in our society, but those individuals are only showing us such small windows into their lives. And. Celebrities as an example, literally pretend for a living. So that does not mean that they're good people just because we love the way they act or the art that they create, or we love the roles that they play. It does not mean.
[00:08:53] That they are. Figures or role models that we should look up to necessarily because we're only seeing small portions of their lives. And just because someone is talented at creating or doing something as an artist does not necessarily mean that they are high quality. Moral person. So our culture focuses heavily on this social influencer ability, the ability to influence masses.
[00:09:19] But that does not mean that is true. Real or good. And so understanding the influence of culture, of celebrity, of social media influence and the deception that often comes with that and realizing that we're seeing only the very tip of the iceberg. The majority of the people are underneath the surface there. The massive underneath hidden element of that.
[00:09:42] Iceberg is what most of us carry around. That's where we have all of our truth, our good our bad our ugly. All those things. And so when we only look at the top part, that's being presented to the world and we assume that's reality. We deceive ourselves and we deceive others because we're setting up unrealistic expectations on how reality operates, which creates misery.
[00:10:06] This is how we create psychological pain in ourselves is the alignment of our reality to the expectations that we have, the bigger that gap, the more psychological pain that we often experience. So if there are people, celebrities, leaders, Influencers telling us that this is what reality is, but in reality, it's completely different than that.
[00:10:25] We go about operating out of that expectation. It does not matter if that's reality or not, the way we're interacting with that reality is what's influencing our experience. So our perspective is crucial here. This is also very true. In a lot of the new age movement. There is a heavy focus on positive thinking, positive emotions, feeling good. Envision your future. Feel good about it. Believe that it's real. And then that's it. That's all you need to do, but that's patently false. That is a great.
[00:10:59] Part of the process and envisioning success, the future that you want, the life that you want to live is a fantastic practice to do, but it's just part of it. We have to take action. We have to take risks. We have to move. And so unless we couple that envisioning with action, we only create more of this fake, toxic positivity.
[00:11:24] And again, as I was mentioning earlier, The denial of reality in our culture is in our society is so prevalent as well. We skew things based on what we want to believe in the beliefs we have. In order to present reality in a way that is suitable to us, not in the way that it actually is. And this type of.
[00:11:48] Influence happens all throughout our culture with business with government. With the environment. Finances, all of these things, there's so much happening. That's just being presented as something. But the reality is being hidden from us behind the scenes, right? An example is. Corporate cultures and practices. Nike or under armor, or some of these large companies that produce lots of clothes and materials goods, but they're using a lot of times slave labor in very horrible circumstances to leverage, to provide that output. Now.
[00:12:28] I'm not saying that I am by any means perfect to this. I try my best to Intentional about where I purchase things from. So I can support businesses that are aligned with the way I want to live my life. That's very difficult to do though. Sometimes for these very reasons, because we're often deceived about what the realities are.
[00:12:45] Behind businesses or governments or some of these movements. So it's our job to lean into that, to understand that everyone presenting Has an agenda and that it's our duty to dig into that and understand what that may be. All of us have something to gain. And we're looking to gain in our presentation. That's true for everyone, including myself. Like I absolutely want to build an audience.
[00:13:13] And people that love my content and gain from it. I absolutely do. I want to make money as a writer and a content creator. I'm not trying to act like I don't, but being clear about that, being transparent about that, those things are not wrong inherently in themselves. It's the way we present them.
[00:13:31] And our honesty about it that will determine how good or honest that presentation is.
[00:13:38] So the cultural aspect of this living. A false reality, looking at denying reality, a lot of this is driven by control the desire to control, to receive what we want to achieve, what we want to take, what we want from the world. So we have to present ourselves. Or our businesses or whatever, it may be in a certain way.
[00:14:01] Marketing and sales. This is the whole game of that positioning and sharing information about what things do or can provide value for as a part of the game. That's a part of how you communicate value in our market, but. When it's driven by deception and lies is where we get trouble. And social media has made this extremely easy to do now. The whole influencer culture, you can literally go and take fake photos of riding on a flying on private jets to make it appear like you're more successful than you are. There are apps that literally can change the way you look.
[00:14:38] Without doing anything to your actual appearance, you can perceive, you can like if you look at that documentary on Netflix, The fire documentary, that fire event, that's a prime example. They went about getting all these social media influencers, the most popular, sexy models you can possibly imagine to promote this event.
[00:14:59] But the event itself was garbage. The underlying architecture of that event was junk, but people bought the vision. That didn't buy the underlying. Infrastructure, because it was misled. We, they were deceived about that. That's the danger of this there's things like that happening. At all levels in our society right now. So our ability to engage with reality, lean into truth, regardless of how challenging or complicated or murky or negative it may be.
[00:15:31] Enables us to overcome this toxic positivity, this fake reality. That we are engaging with. And social media is a big part of that. Being mindful of those things. I'm thankful that we're learning more about this because it influences us as And we have to be thoughtful about that. We have to understand that there are agendas at play here and how they influence us matters. So being mindful of those influences allows us to free ourselves from the impact.
[00:16:01] Of this deception, at least at some levels, we always have to be on the lookout for when this is happening.
[00:16:09] The dangers of toxic positivity. Now we've talked about some of these things, obviously at a societal level and the dangers that it can create. You can get yourselves into mercury situations. I know I certainly have by buying into the hype, by buying into the most positive outcomes and ignoring many red flags, that can be true in relationships.
[00:16:27] That can be true in work. That can be true in spirituality. That can be true in all areas of our lives. So understanding. What to look for and knowing that negativity, darkness. Mishaps mistakes are all part of life. They're all part of growing and it's a true reflection of how reality operates.
[00:16:48] But when we don't.
[00:16:49] When we adopt these behaviors and or others are adopting these behaviors. There's the potential. It starts with the denial of our needs because when we're faking positivity, when we're presenting an image or an idea to the world, what we're saying is that the perception of others matters more than my own needs. So we're presenting an image to the world.
[00:17:11] That we think and feel is the best way to show ourselves so that people will think highly of us and give us what we need. But what we're doing internally potentially is denying what we actually need inside of us. There will be negative feeling, sadness, darkness, anger, hurt, pain. All of these things are a part of the human experience.
[00:17:35] So our denial of those realities deny our needs because in those stories, in. In those feelings are learnings for us that we seek that we need to dig into and understand so that we can grow and become more wholesome. Reality is made up of negative and positivity. Of those components. So by denying negativity, we're denying a whole component of reality. That is a dangerous place to be.
[00:18:02] It denies us of the needs that we have at psychological and spiritual levels. And that forces us to continue to stuff things down and what we're stuffing down. Is ourself our true needs, our true expression by doing that, we are just shoving down our authenticity, deeper and deeper into the subconscious of our being.
[00:18:23] This can create outcomes where if we do that for a long time, things will eventually bubble up and we will explode. And my wife is into true crime. And I've seen some of these experiences. I've seen some of these stories unfold. Where. In particular men, and this is women sometimes too, but can deny their true feelings, deny what they truly desire. They're lying to everyone around them. And then one day they snap and destroy their whole family. They annihilate their whole family.
[00:18:57] Or they deceive like, as an example,
[00:19:01] Sorry for the. The background noise here at my neighbors. His car is loud, but.
[00:19:07] When we. Like financial crimes are another great example. All of these families, right? Bernie Madoff who deceived so many people and was lying in misleading about the financial viability of a company that he was building in reality, he was just stealing from everyone. He was lying to his family. He was lying to his investors.
[00:19:27] He was misleading everyone to keep up the image of what is. And so when we're, when we are. Living in that way, we're denying our ability to grow and progress and to assimilate the balance of negative and positive energies to grow and learn and live more authentic lives. It's incredible. What happens?
[00:19:50] The more we deny reality and. Some examples. And I'm going to talk about this in the next section here, but. It's the key thing here with a lot of these toxic positivity components, is they're learned and rooted in our childhood, these are often behaviors that we learn. We learn to suppress our negativity.
[00:20:08] To manage and ensure that the people around us feel a certain way. We learn that certain emotions and responses are not acceptable to have the support and nurturing that we need from our family, our friends. So we deny these things. So these behaviors become learned over time and we learn to suppress our true feelings based on our need to survive.
[00:20:29] That's a part of this process is understanding that we learn these things very early on. And so if you grew up in a household like this with a parent who is toxically positive, Then these are things that you're going to have to uncover in your own behavior. It's something that we all have to go through because we learn these behaviors from the environment that we're raised in. So identifying it in ourselves, identifying it in others allows us to learn about these behaviors and eventually find what our true needs are and express them and not be ashamed of those things because.
[00:21:04] Negativity, these darker feelings and energies and thoughts. Have place and purpose in the world. So we can learn from them and use them to be better versions. Be the fullest versions of ourselves.
[00:21:18] So getting into perception over reality. It's truly about caring more, what others think than what others actually know about who we are. So it's about the. Image of what we are and who we are that matters more than reality. This is the danger of this. And this is where in these situations, particularly in these massive financial crimes.
[00:21:44] These massive, just brutality driven crimes. And you see it in shows and things as well. Ashley and I have been watching Fargo's fantastic show by the way. It's based on real events. The nonfiction is often way crazier than fiction. And so the whole we're in season three right now, but the first two seasons.
[00:22:03] The whole premise is built around the denial of reality and. Caring more for appearances, as opposed to what reality is. Honey that show on Hulu with Jessica Biel playing again yet. Another example of a real character is another example of the denial of reality. The fake positivity. Where you're caring more about appearances and what other people think then you are actually about the needs of yourself or the needs of others.
[00:22:32] That is the danger when you're, when you are. Promoting the social perspective over your own internal self. That's the danger that creates these horrific situations. And it happens a lot because our place in society. When we don't feel an internal place in the universe becomes our prime mover. Because without something beyond this world, without something beyond earthly life to have meaning from the only thing we have to derive our meaning from is our place on earth. Therefore, we prioritize that place on earth, above all else, which means most likely you're going to lie and deceive, to keep that position.
[00:23:17] In a good standing place. So if you're doing deceptive things, if you've broken the law, if you've committed crimes, if you stolen money, if you've murdered individuals, you go about denying that fact to keep your position. That's the idea of. Perception being the priority over reality.
[00:23:39] You're living for the opinions of others.
[00:23:42] And I'm telling you, if you want to get a crash course in this Fargo is fantastic on this because in those multiple seasons, you see how people lie to see cheat mislead. Only to keep the perception of themselves as good caring people alive. It's insane. The measures that people will go. And in that season, in that show, things got exponentially worse. So much more suffering and death was created simply because a few individuals.
[00:24:13] Chose to deny reality and keep the perception as their priority, as opposed to being honest and truthful about what has happened.
[00:24:22] Crime mob's intervention overlapping, all these incredible things happened simply because two individuals were unwilling to share in reality and be truthful about what had happened.
[00:24:35] If you haven't watched Fargo, I suggest check it out if you have some time, because it's a great show, but. These things are happening. A lot. They happen throughout our entertainment. I know that. I have mentioned Harry Potter on the show. And I've mentioned it many times. The lady, I cannot think of her name now. I believe it's in movie four or five.
[00:25:04] Where she comes in from the ministry of wizards on now. I know I'm probably going to agitate some of the Harry Potter fans out there. I've seen them a few times. I'm a big fan, but I can't reiterate them specifically. I should have researched this before the show here, but the
[00:25:20] She has all the cats in her office. She's wearing pink a lot. She has a very high pitch, positive voice, and talks about positive things all the time, but she's brutal.
[00:25:30] Some of the most brutal dictators and people throughout time have spun through positivity. Through good things being deceived as the meat, like as the way to go about doing this. That character, the lady in that movie, I can't think of her name right now and it's going to drive me nuts. I'm not even going to look it up though, but if you know the movie, you know who I'm talking about,
[00:25:52] She's an prime example of toxic positivity. She created so much pain and suffering in those students in that space. Only to keep up this false image of perfection of no mistakes. Remember how they had all the rules on the wall too. And it kept getting bigger and bigger. All she was doing is sucking the joy out of life by trying to keep up this false image of perfection and no problems and control. It's all driven by the idea that we have this insane control.
[00:26:25] Over our lives and over other people. And what that ends up doing is it creates neuroticism. That lady was neurotic with her behavior, her desire to control everything and everyone around her to keep her reality as true and real. And I will do this and she had that crazy.
[00:26:45] It's like a pencil or whatever it was the feather that you would write. And as you wrote it out at RIT, it went on your hand. That's cruel. That is cruel all in the name
[00:26:55] There's so much bad done in the world with good intentions and then the name of helping. So being mindful of these things helps us to uncover that and recognize it when we see it and move forward from it.
[00:27:09] All right. So the last bit here. Is going to discuss the counter to all of this.
[00:27:14] It's the. The authenticity that allows us to counter this toxic positivity being authentic. Now I've talked about this quite a bit on my show. I've had, it's a thread that runs true through all the work that I do. But being authentic and being truthful is critical
[00:27:30] It's how we create balance in our lives. It's how we engage with reality. It's how we. Actually get positive results and outcomes from negative experiences, feelings, thoughts, and things of that nature. It's not the denial of the negativity. It's the leaning into it. It's hitting things head on. It's hitting the hard components of life.
[00:27:52] Right in the mouth, all that negativity, all that darkness. We overcome it by addressing it by. Leaning into it. Not denying Shadows grow as we deny what we deny will grow in scope and eventually blot out all of our life and often comes down, crashing. Into our lives along with many others. When we deny that reality.
[00:28:20] So authenticity allows us to lean into truth, to lean into our feelings, to be honest about who we are and where we are, and to be real about circumstances, to be real about our feelings so that we can be genuine so that we can improve upon and build from these things. All of us have. Negativity, darkness warts, all of those things, right?
[00:28:44] If you've ever lifted a rock up, like on the top side, you see this beautiful, colorful rock that's been cleaned by the rain and sitting in a beautiful nature environment. There. You pick that rock up and you flip it over. It's going to be gross, wet, moist there's bugs, crawling out everywhere. That's reality. It's both the front and the underbelly. We have all the positive light shining.
[00:29:09] Elements to us. And we have all the muck in the mire and the bugs and the grossness inside of us. These are it's the balance of life. That's what keeps life in balance. So when we deny either one of those pieces, we find ourselves out of balance. Now I'm going to do an episode on nihilism and the focus on materialism as well, because it's just as dangerous, but in a different direction.
[00:29:33] I almost think though for me, toxic positivity is more dangerous though, because it's deceptive. Nihilism is at least. Honest and upfront like, you know what it is, but unless it's being hidden, which that's, the irony is a lot of this toxic positivity is a front for deep inherent nihilism, but that's a topic for another episode. So leaning into our authenticity.
[00:30:02] I'm being truthful about where we are being truthful about our feelings.
[00:30:05] Embracing the negativity, the darkness learning from those things being real. Being honest about the fact that we don't know everything, that we make mistakes that we're not perfect. That's completely acceptable. None of us are perfect. None of us have it all figured out. We're all learning. All of us are learning.
[00:30:21] So knowing that.
[00:30:23] Allows us to find balance in our lives allows us to lean into things that we may be afraid of to find those feelings that can help us. Understanding that in that negativity is potentially the unlocking potential, potentially the unlocking potential. Geez. It's our untapped potential waiting inside there.
[00:30:45] When we lean into the negativity and the positive, when we balance those realities and we embrace what is instead of presenting a false perception, perspective, and image to the world, that's a very dangerous place to be. All right. Y'all. That's all I got for this episode. So I think next episode now that I kind of laid into it, I think we're going to do a nihilism.
[00:31:11] And materialism episode next, I've got quite a few other things that I'm really excited to share with y'all and working on. So working on a WordPress site too, to get all this stuff set up. But. I hope you're enjoying the show. I do hope you're enjoying the content. Please feel free to connect with me on Twitter at Brandon Lee ward, you can join my sub stack. If you want to get episodes and content delivered direct to your inbox, that's a way to ensure that you never miss out what I'm doing.
[00:31:38] And also feel free to just comment or leave me notes or thoughts, questions anywhere throughout that Twitter sub stack would be the best way to do it. Eventually I'll get my WordPress site up, Hope you're having a great week so far i do appreciate you tuning in and until next time y'all.
[00:31:53]