|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
I’ve written about positivity a lot. Possibly too much. And I’ve always meant it. I genuinely am, by temperament and by effort, a positive person.
But I watched a short video in the early hours this morning, when I do most of my thinking, and it made me stop and ask myself an uncomfortable question.
Am I sometimes too positive?
Not just optimistic in outlook, but, and this was the phrase that landed, toxically positive?
Before I go any further, the video is worth watching. It’s short, clear, and it made me think.
What is toxic positivity, and why does it matter?
The video puts it simply. Toxic positivity is what happens when a positive statement is used to dismiss or eliminate someone’s negative feelings, rather than acknowledge them.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
“At least you have your health.”
“Stay strong.”
“Others have it worse.”
I have said all of those things. I have had all of them said to me.
The problem, and the research is clear on this, is that none of them actually help. When someone is in genuine pain, fear, or grief, and the response is to reach immediately for a silver lining, what that person often hears instead is that their feelings are inconvenient.
The emotion doesn’t disappear. It just gets pushed underground, where it tends to grow.
Toxic positivity is not the same thing as being positive. That distinction is the one that stayed with me. Genuine positivity makes room for the hard stuff. It doesn’t pretend it isn’t there. Toxic positivity papers over it, often with the best intentions in the world.
The honest question I had to ask myself
Here it is, plainly. Have I, at times, given the impression on this blog that I am coping better than I actually am?
The honest answer is sometimes, yes.
I’ve written before that what you usually read here is my thinking one or two steps refined, after I’ve had time to process, compose, and find a frame I can live with. That isn’t dishonest. It’s how I survive, and how I write. It’s my therapy.
A large part of that process is deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable self‑work. Therapy, honest self‑help, and sitting with things long enough to understand them rather than escape them. What ends up here is usually the version I’ve worked through, not the version I started with. That inevitably makes me sound more composed, and sometimes more upbeat, than I actually am in the moment.
This isn’t about deception. It’s about filtering. But the cumulative effect of that filter matters. When something sounds more resolved than it really was, it can unintentionally set a standard that others measure themselves against, and feel they’re failing to meet.
That is the last thing I want.
What toxic positivity feels like from the receiving end
Living with PSP, I receive quite a lot of it. None of it is unkind. Almost all of it is meant well. But I recognise it now.
When someone tells me how brave I am, or how well I’m handling things, I understand the intention, and sometimes what I want to say back is this. I’m also exhausted, frightened, and last night was terrible.
When I’m told I’m “so strong,” I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t always want to live up to the word. When someone tells me to “stay positive,” I know they’re trying to help, and yet on some days positivity is the very thing I don’t have the energy to perform.
The intention behind toxic positivity is almost always good. The impact is often the opposite of what was intended.
I also recognise the denial of the dark days, the silence when things look bleak, in much the same way.
It isn’t just the patient
This doesn’t only land on the person who is ill.
Caregivers, partners, children, and close family members are often on the receiving end of toxic positivity too, sometimes even more so. They’re told how amazing they’re being, how strong they are, how they must keep going. And while those words are meant as encouragement, they can quietly remove permission to be scared, resentful, exhausted, or angry.
For caregivers especially, there is often very little space to admit this is hard, or I don’t know how long I can do this, without feeling like they are failing some unspoken moral test. Positivity becomes another obligation, another thing to perform, layered on top of an already heavy load.
Toxic positivity doesn’t just silence suffering. It distributes it unevenly, pushing it into private spaces where people feel they have no right to complain.
There is another dimension, and it matters for PSP
There’s another reason these expectations are so heavy, and it has nothing to do with mindset.
Most discussions of toxic positivity focus on psychological pressure. But for people living with a neurological disease like PSP, there is another layer that rarely gets talked about. Biology itself works against you.
PSP doesn’t just affect movement and balance. It directly damages brain circuits involved in mood, motivation, and emotional regulation. Depression and apathy in PSP are not merely understandable reactions to a brutal diagnosis, though they are that too. They are also, in part, neurological symptoms of the disease.
Across multiple studies of PSP patients:
55 to 58 percent experience depression of some severity
62 percent experience apathy, partly neurological, not purely psychological
37 percent have probable anxiety
Around 44 percent maintain adaptive coping without a clinical mood disorder
(Schrag et al. 2010; Higginson et al.; Santamaría‑García et al. 2022)
What this means in practice is that telling a PSP patient to “stay positive” isn’t just emotionally unhelpful. It’s neurologically uninformed. The struggle isn’t a failure of attitude. It is, at least in part, a feature of what the disease is doing to the brain.
This isn’t an excuse, and it isn’t a reason to stop trying. I haven’t and I won’t. But understanding it changes how those comments land. When someone asks me to cheer up or look on the bright side, they are often asking something my own brain is actively working against.
That isn’t self‑pity. It’s simply the reality of this disease.
What to say instead
If “stay positive” isn’t helpful, the obvious question is what is?
There’s no perfect script. But there is a principle, and it’s simpler than most people think. Make space rather than close it down. Don’t rush to fix the feeling. Don’t leap to the outcome. Just stay in the room with it for a moment.
The most useful thing anyone has said to me during a genuinely hard stretch wasn’t wise or carefully composed. It was something like, “That sounds really difficult. I’m here.”
That’s it. No silver lining. No reframe. Just acknowledgement that what I was in the middle of was real, and that the person saying it wasn’t going anywhere.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer is a question rather than a statement. “Do you want to talk about it, or would you rather be distracted?” hands control back to the person who’s struggling. It removes the pressure to perform gratitude for comfort they didn’t ask for.
And perhaps the most underrated sentence in any of these situations is this. You don’t have to be okay with me.
None of this denies hope. None of it is pessimistic. It just refuses to rush past pain in order to get to the hopeful part. In my experience, that refusal to rush is what makes the hopeful part, when it comes, mean something.
Viktor Frankl and a better alternative
Viktor Frankl’s idea of tragic optimism, the belief that meaning can be found even in unavoidable suffering, is often cited as the genuine antidote to toxic positivity.
Frankl did not survive Auschwitz by focusing on the good, or by suppressing the reality of what surrounded him. He survived by searching for meaning within it,
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
I find that far more honest, and far more useful, than “stay positive.” It doesn’t ask me to pretend the PSP isn’t happening. It asks me what I am going to do with the fact that it is.
That is a question I can actually work with. It is also, I think, the question behind every post I write that is any good.
Where I am landing
I’m not going to stop being positive. It’s who I am, and built positivity, grounded in faith, practice, and accumulated experience rather than performed for an audience, genuinely helps. I believe this, and the research backs it up.
But I am going to be more alert to when my positivity tips into the other kind. The kind that papers over something real. The kind that might, without meaning to, make someone else feel that their own difficulty is something to be ashamed of. And the kind that asks something of a person, patient or caregiver, that their own biology or exhaustion is actively working against.
Positivity is not a one‑trick pony. Neither am I. And I think this blog is at its best when it reflects both of those things honestly.
