Toxic Positivity 🙄
☠️Toxic positivity in the birth world☠️
Pretty common🙄.
If you have ever felt like your difficult feelings got dismissed or you weren’t heard, it’s likely you encountered some toxic positivity.
What is it 🧐?
Well, toxic positivity is a sort of overgeneralisation of a happy and positive state of mind (‘positive vibes only’) that inherently comes with a denying or at least minimising of more complex and difficult, as well as negative emotional experiences we have as humans.
But why is positivity bad 🤔?
Ya know, positive mindset = positive life?
Hasn’t positive thinking proven to be a good thing?
Sure, IF THE POSITIVITY IS ON OUR TERMS AND COMES FROM OURSELVES, and we find it helpful.
It is not so helpful when it stops us expressing our real emotions or comes from other people and does the following:
🚩 it makes us hide how we REALLY feel
🚩 our real emotions get dismissed
🚩 it makes us feel guilty for having difficult feelings
🚩 others try to make us use a different, more positive perspective all the time
🚩 others make us feel like our negative emotions are our fault and if we just tried hard enough they’d disappear
So what might this look like in practice?
Maybe like this:
🥴 ‘Don’t be scared, birth is AMAZING!! You just have to think positively!
🥴 With such a negative/worried mindset, birth is going to be so much harder. Chill out!
🥴 Oh, don’t dwell on your past birth experience, this time will be so much better.
🥴 It could be so much worse! You have a healthy baby!! Everything happens for a reason.
🥴 ‘She believed she could, so she did!’ affirmations.
Boils my piss.
This toxic positivity usually comes from a space of wanting to help, without knowing how to. It doesn’t usually come from inherently bad intention.
But intention is less important than effect!
How can toxic positivity be avoided and how can we lean into the more complex nature of human feelings?
☺️ It’s ok to be scared. Do you want to talk about anything specific address your fears?
☺️ How can I support you to calm your mind?
☺️ I know going into another birth after a traumatic birth is HARD, for lots of different reasons. Let’s make a plan to optimise your chance of a better experience.
🥴 Sometimes life/birth just isn’t fair. I’m so sorry that you had this experience. I’m here if you need to talk.
Etc etc.
If you feel like you are getting bombarded with toxic narratives during or after pregnancy, seek out people who don’t minimise your feelings.
There are plenty of us who are really aware and try to keep away from that kind of toxicity, by presenting a more nuanced way to address the complex emotions that come with pregnancy, birth and new parenthood ♥️
www.debsneigerindependentmidwife.co.uk