Toxic Positivity vs. Real Resilience: Why Hope Without Action Is a Trap

Hi, welcome to the Original Self Podcast. I'm Evet DeCota, owner of DeCota Life Coaching, and I am a psychology-informed life coach who explores resilience, mindset, and the courage to become your authentic self. This is a space for honest conversations about growth or identity, relationships, and all the messy moments in between that shape who we become.

Between the salon chair and coaching sessions, I've learned a lot about the phrases we reach for when someone else's pain makes us uncomfortable. I have also, for the record, said most of these phrases myself. In this episode, we're going to talk about why they hurt more than they help.

So let's discuss toxic positivity versus real resilience and why hope without action is a trap. I'm going to say a few phrases that I want you to listen to and also pay attention to how your body feels when you hear these phrases. These are phrases that people say to you like when you're expressing difficult

emotions or you're telling a story of something crazy that happened to you. And I will give you a warning. Some of them might make your eye twitch, which I feel is the right response. So, okay, here they are. Here's the first one. That can't be true. Or you're too sensitive. It's never happened to me.

You shouldn't think like that. Side note, who loves a shouldn't? Raise your hand. Look on the bright side. Just be positive. At least you have fill in the blank that invalidates your feelings the most. Or, ha, you think that's bad? My experience was way worse. Or everything happens for a reason. The last one, you're fine.

If you just felt your jaw clench, congratulations, you're totally human. You've heard these. You've probably said them. I know I have. And I think no one's getting out of this episode clean. Today, I'd like to sit with what those phrases actually do to us. Because on the surface, I think they sound kind. They sound like encouragement.

Or they sound like someone's trying to help or support you. But underneath it, I think there's a very clear, specific message. That message is, your feelings are making me feel uncomfortable, and I'd like you to stop having them. At the core of that is what it's called toxic positivity.

What we'll look at today is the difference between the toxic positivity and real resilience. We'll also look at why hope without action becomes one of the most seductive traps we fall into. I'd like to share how I learned the difference the hard way and it involved the people I love the most. This one gets personal.

It needs to be. I don't think you can understand toxic positivity from just a definition. I think you understand it from the moments that cost you and I something. So I'm going to start with defining what toxic positivity is because I think the

word toxic gets thrown around a lot and it can feel like we're labeling every kind word as some kind of emotional assault. But that's not what I'm talking about. Positivity that is toxic is the belief that no matter how difficult or painful a situation is, people should maintain a positive mindset.

It's the reflex to skip over real emotions and jump straight to the feeling of fine. You see it everywhere on the coffee mug that claims good vibes only. Which, by the way, I think is a very bold claim for a coffee mug to make at 7 o'clock in the morning. Just saying.

Or it's the self-help phrases that tell you to choose joy. As if joy is on a menu and you've just been very indecisive. Maybe it's the well-meaning friend who, when you tell her something is breaking your heart, says to you, at least you have your health. You smile and nod because what else are you supposed to do?

But I think something closes down inside of you a little bit. There's a psychologist named Susan David. She's a teacher at Harvard Medical School, and she wrote emotional agility or what she calls the tyranny of positivity. She said that at its core, toxic positivity is an avoidant coping strategy.

She says telling someone to be positive invalidates their experience and suppresses their emotions that they need to feel. So it doesn't make the anger or sadness or grief go away. It actually enhances them and then layers shame on top of it. It's another way of conveying that my comfort is more important than your reality.

Sit with that for a second. My comfort is more important than your reality. What's actually happening in those moments? It's not always with cruelty or on purpose, but I think it can have the same effect. She also gave a TED talk. It was called The Gift and Power of Emotional Change. David shared research.

from a survey that she did with over 70,000 people in it. She states that a third of them reported harshly judging themselves for having bad emotions or they actively tried to banish those emotions because they did not feel that they were socially acceptable. There's also a therapist named Whitney Goodman who wrote the book Toxic Positivity

keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy. Goodman says that the pressure to stay upbeat, no matter how dire the situations are, she points out that that forced optimism actively harms healing by not allowing the individual to move through the difficult emotions because they aren't allowed to feel them in the first place.

Toxic positivity skips that step entirely. It rushes past the grief and straight into the lesson. It jumps past the anger and straight into gratitude. Or it rushes past the fear and straight into the reassurance that everything is going to work out. The worst part is that the person that feels this and receives it

they are deemed a problem. Their reality is inconvenient. Or if they can't smile through it, then they're doing something wrong. Before we go any further, I would love for you to pause and think about this. When was the last time someone dismissed a real feeling you had with a phrase that sounded kind?

What did you actually feel in that moment? Not what you were supposed to feel or what you pretended to feel, but what actually landed inside of you when they said that phrase or words. The part about the toxicity that nobody names out loud is that it creates shame. Brene Brown, my favorite scientist,

has dedicated her career to studying shame's cause and effect. She defines it as the intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging. The installation of shame in people comes from the people whom we trust telling us that our feelings are wrong, that we're too sensitive or too much. We're not accurate or it's not warranted.

I don't think we arrive at shame all at once or in one conversation. I think it's a thousand small moments where we bring something to someone that's very real to us and they hand us back a phrase instead of their presence. Each of those moments teaches us that my feelings are a problem.

I should hide them and not share them. I should figure out how to stop having them. the tyranny of the shits done messing us up. But the wild thing is the person handing you the phrase seldom means to hurt you. I've said that many times. I mean, we all know that one person who truly does intend harm,

but hopefully once we figure that out, we stop hanging out with them. But the ones that have no intention to hurt you are reaching for a sentence that makes the moment easier Not for you, but for them. I think it's important to point out that something that took me a long time to see clearly.

Toxic positivity often comes from people who are themselves drowning. It's not only a personality flaw, but it's a survival reflex. For maybe when we don't have the emotional capacity to sit with someone else's pain, because our pain is already at the brim or past the brim. That reframe matters because if we only understood toxic positivity as something

others did to us, we will never catch ourselves doing it to the people we care about. Here's something to think about. Who in your life taught you over time that your feelings were a problem? The harder question, who have you taught the same thing to without meaning it?

I have been on both sides of the coin in my life many times. I've been told that my feelings were too much, but I have in moments told others that the same thing, that their feelings are too much. This example that I'm going to tell you about

taught me more about toxic positivity than any book or class I've ever taken. So for many years, my mom was the receptionist at my salon. And for over three years at the end, she was on dialysis. She was the person that made everyone feel welcome. But most importantly, she was my person. She was my best friend.

As she became sicker, she came in less and eventually could not come in at all. And suddenly I was running every part of the salon, doing her job and mine alike, and coming home at night and taking care of her. There was a specific evening that I am not proud of,

but it defines how toxic positivity can also come from a place of love and fear. It wasn't from a stranger or some bumper sticker mindset, but from a daughter who was doing everything she could and still reaching for a sentence she wished she could take back.

I had worked a very long day with no breaks and my knees and hips were really hurting me to the point of where I could barely walk. I hadn't eaten and when I came home, my mom told me that she wanted to go to the store.

I didn't want to say no to her because she had been stuck at home all day long. So I got her wheelchair and I helped her into the car and I lifted the heavy wheelchair into the back of the car, drove to the store,

walked around to find what she had wanted and did the reverse when I arrived home. This is all to say that I was even more tired and in pain by doing all of this. I still needed to get her something to eat, help her get into her nightclothes,

and clean up her apartment because I was so terrified of bacteria getting into the open wounds in her legs caused from edema that the dialysis didn't remove that she could get sepsis and... That would be the end. The point of telling you all of this is that while I was wheeling her to the elevator,

she told me she was angry. She said that she couldn't believe that her kidneys didn't work and how unfair it was. She told me she didn't understand why she had to suffer. I didn't have the patience to just listen I firmly said to her that many people suffer but don't have loved ones around to help them.

I told her that many suffering people do not experience living their full lives. The minute I pushed the down button on the elevator, I regretted saying it. My mind was saying, why is she not allowed to vent? Why couldn't I let her feel sorry for herself? Why didn't I show her compassion?

ask her more questions so that she could process what she was feeling. Why did I blurt out that bullshit and shut her down? The truth of my why was that I was too tired and too scared. If I let her be furious, I had to be furious. If I let her be heartbroken that her body was failing,

I had to sit with the fact that I was losing her. I didn't have the room for that on top of the wheelchair, the wounds, the work day, and my own body breaking down trying to carry hers. So I reached for a sentence that made her feeling smaller because making her

feeling smaller was the only way I could keep moving. That's toxic positivity. delivered not with intention and cruelty or intentional cruelty, but delivered with exhaustion, delivered with love even, but still delivered. And then it landed on me as shame. The part that broke me later when I was,

was when I learned my mother confided her feelings to my really good friend. She would often visit my mom when I was working, and my mom was able to express her fear, exhaustion, and grief over her own body to her. She could tell my friend the truth because she wasn't me.

My friend wasn't scared to death of losing her and was able to receive my mom's emotions. My mom protected me from her feelings because she loved me. But if you've ever watched someone you love hold their pain from you to keep you comfortable, you know what that costs. They are sparing you,

but it's your loss of the sacred and honest confessions that they would have shared with you if you only were able to open the door and invite their emotions in. The thing is, is I knew what that felt like. And I turned around and did it to someone who was not only my hero,

but also at a very low point in her life. I learned quickly that she couldn't tell me how she truly felt. Fortunately, I never did it again. I never dismissed her. Not that I got everything right, but I never reached for an easy phrase again. And then one day, closer to the end of her life,

she knew she had to go back to the hospital and she started crying. My mom was not an easy crier. It was a very rare emotion for her. And she didn't have any power at this time. But this time I didn't panic at her emotion. Instead of reaching for a phrase or a sentence,

I just sat on the arm of the chair that she was sitting in and held her as we both cried together. That's the moment I choose to remember, not because it redeems me from my behavior at the elevator or whatever. It's because it's genuine resilience. Not the bounce back version, the Instagram version. It's the real one.

It's letting yourself feel scared enough to cry with the person who's dying. Instead of trying to fix it, fix their fear with a sentence, It's letting the moment be as big as it is while holding space for both of you inside of it. Listener, is there someone in your life right now whose feelings you have been managing

because their reality is too hard for you? What do you think it would look like to stop managing and just be present for them? I was thinking about how my actions turned toxic positivity into real resilience, which made me think how the word resilience has been hijacked. Like the way the world speaks about it,

it sounds like it must have to have a silver lining attached to it, or it's bouncing back, it's turning lemons into lemonade. Or maybe it's a slogan on a pillow that you'd find at that store, HomeGoods. You know that store? It's like a hoarder's dream store filled with unorganized items steeped in chaos.

That's how I feel about that store. It makes me panic. Anyway, that isn't resilience. Resilience to me is acknowledging that things may be bad, really bad, and knowing that I'll get through them. Not because the bad part is not real, but because I'm real. My capacity is real. And my history of getting through things is real.

My resilience came from my life, not a book. When I was a kid, I broke a lot of bones, leading to many timeouts from my daily life. Hospital stays. A cast on some limb. stretches where I couldn't walk, couldn't play, nor could I hang out with my friends at school.

I would watch the other kids learn how to cruise down the street on their bikes and skateboards. But what I learned is how it felt for my body to continually take me out of my own life without warning. But slowly, I also learned that I was still me on the other side of it. The body would heal.

The world would be waiting. And I wasn't the only breakable thing. And I wasn't broken in a way that lasted. I was also a kid who became heavier than other kids my age. At that time in history, kids noticed the weight gain and never hesitated to comment on any difference between me and them.

I spent years being pointed at for looking different. But what I did with that teasing and harassment is what built my resilience. I don't think I could have survived it if I let all the criticism in at one time. So I let in what I could handle in small pieces.

And in between, I reminded myself of what was true about me. I was smart, I was funny, I was a really good friend. But what I didn't realize is that I was actually pattern rewiring at the age of 10. Somehow I was able to take the hurt in in small doses that didn't drown me.

But in between those confidence chipping insults, I was building a version of myself That was big enough to handle it. That's resilience. Not pretending the pointing didn't happen. Not telling yourself the mean kids were just telling the truth, which is what they said to my face a few times. Or not always looking on the bright side.

There's nothing wrong with that. But in order for me to build up my resilience, I had to let the hurt be real. while also letting in what was true and real about me. This pattern has carried me through my whole life. I had a doctor once tell me that my knee hurt because I was obese. Now look,

I know that the more weight someone carries, the more pressure you have on your joints. That's not news to me. But this doctor was very gung-ho about it being my fault and very sure that the fix was going to come from me walking more and watching what I ate.

It's all very good advice, yet I still demanded an MRI. I stayed in his office until he agreed to order one. What were the results, you ask? The results were a bone-on-bone knee joint. no traceable meniscus, no ACL, no MCL, many cysts and bone spurs. He never apologized, said he was wrong.

He never said anything remotely human about how he acted in that appointment. And he didn't have to. By then I had already learned the most important lesson in my adult life. I have to believe myself. when the room won't. Another reason or experience for building my resilience is I have been a woman in a

male-dominated industry my entire career. Yeah, even the beauty industry, the decisions at the top, the distributors, the brands, the business side has been predominantly owned by men for decades. In my career and in my life, I've been told that my experience wasn't real.

I've been told that a man who acted unkindly to me must have been having a bad day because he's always nice to the person saying it. I've heard a thousand versions of the phrase, well, I've never had experience with him. Each of those phrases has asked me to erase myself a little.

And I have chosen over and over not to do that. So when I say that genuine resilience is knowing you will get through, even when it's bad, I mean it. This is the thing that I've been building since I was a kid in a hospital bed.

The reason toxic positivity lands so hard on me is that the exact wound I have spent my whole life healing Every time someone tells me to look on the bright side, they're doing a smaller version of what the school kids did, what the doctor did, what the friends said.

They are telling me that my reality is not real. I don't buy it. I think what saved me every single time was that somewhere deep inside, deep down inside, I kept believing myself anyway. And that's what I want for you. So I ask you, where was your resilience forged? Not the slogan version, the real one.

What did you live through that taught you that you could live through anything? And are you giving yourself enough credit for it? Or are you still explaining it away? So far, we've talked about toxic positivity as something that happens between people. One person says a phrase and the other person receives it as shame, right?

But there's another version that occurs inside of us and it may be more damaging to our well-being. It's when we use hope on ourselves to avoid reality. There are three examples I want to share of Hope's role in avoiding reality. One of them is mine.

I have lost 40 pounds, give or take, more than once in my life. That's not a small thing to say out loud, but it's true. Every single time I have done it, there has been a moment when the old eating habits slowly creep back in. The thing is,

I'm conscious of it, but in order to avoid it, I won't step on the scale. Because the scale would tell me the truth, right? I will negotiate with myself. If I gained, it's probably only one or two pounds. And I can easily lose that. But mostly I hope that I haven't gained any of it back.

I hope I got away with it. I will go for months hoping. not stepping on that scale. And every single time when I finally face it, the weight is back plus more. That is not hope. It's avoidance dressed up very nicely. The second example is we all know someone who always says everything will work out.

They say it over and over. But Self-indulgence, struggling to pay bills, and then panicking about money while never changing your mindset or the circumstances that are actually in your control don't create different results. It's a pattern exhibited by many, and a version of it is in all of us.

It's when we get into a bind, we say the universe will provide. Or we just go back to doing the thing that created the bind in the first place. There's nothing wrong with hope if there's action behind it. Some people call it faith mixed in with gratitude and a positive mindset.

I'm all for that as long as we change the negative behavior. I have seen with my own eyes that when hope becomes the permission slip to not change, It's not hope at all. It's just a cage with a pretty little name on it. My last example is the truth, but it's more dramatic.

I had a friend who avoided opening his bills for months. He avoided paying his taxes for many years. And the weight of all that avoidance built up such stress in his body that it started to take over his vagus nerve. Once that vagus nerve was activated, he would just pass out randomly, hit his head,

like it was very horrible. It seemed that his body was doing the work of what his mind refused to do. The envelope stayed closed, but his nervous system was paying the bills instead. The body always knows what the mind is avoiding. You can keep the envelopes closed. You can skip the scale. You can continue destructive behavior.

But your body keeps a record. And eventually, I guess the record comes due. As I said at the start of this episode, hope without action is a trap. Hope is supposed to be the fuel and the thing that keeps you walking when the path is long or winding or actually unclear.

But I think when you use hope to not walk at all, it stops being hope and starts being like a wall that keeps you stuck. Nelson Mandela, he spent 27 years in prison. 27 years of reality that he couldn't pretend was anything other than what it was. But somehow, He emerged without bitterness, without despair,

and without denial about what had happened to him. Now, obviously, I don't know him, but what I've read of him, about him, that is what everything says. No bitterness, no despair, and didn't deny what had actually happened to him. In his autobiography, he wrote about his own optimism. He said,

part of being optimistic is keeping one's head pointed towards the sun and one's feet moving forward. That's not one thing, it's two. Your head is pointed toward the sun. Let's call that hope. And your feet are moving forward. Let's call that action. hope and action together in the same sentence, in the same practice.

The Nelson Mandela foundation says it even more plainly. They say his hope was not passive optimism, but it was disciplined and active and strategic. That's the kind of hope that produces resilience, hope that looks at the scale, and still believes you can change your relationship with food.

It's hope that opens the envelope and deals with whatever is inside of it. And it's also hope that acknowledges your mother is dying and still sits on the arm of the chair with her. The other kind, the kind of hope that keeps your feet still, No matter how pretty your view of the sun is, it's not hope.

It's paralysis. Let me give you something to think about. What's the envelope you're not opening? Or what's the scale you're not stepping on? What's the phone call you're not returning? And what's the version of hope you've been using to justify not doing it?

I want to make sure that anyone listening to this doesn't think I'm the evolved one in this conversation and other people are the ones who need to work on themselves. So here's my own piece. Throughout my life and especially my childhood, I heard the phrases that you're fine, you're okay, you're all right. And to be fair,

I was sometimes. Sometimes I was fine. Sometimes I was also bleeding and broken. The Venn diagram definitely has some overlap there. And then, of course, because we become our own influencers, I have caught myself using the same phrases on people I work with.

When a hair color has gone wrong in the salon, a stylist may start to panic. And I have been known to look them dead in the eye and say, you're fine. I use it as a reset, a little electric jolt to their nervous system.

It gets the panicker, not a word, back online so we can solve the problem in front of us. It's not the worst tool, but it's also not the best one. Honestly, a quick you're fine in the middle of a high pressure salon moment is not the same as telling your grieving mother to be grateful she's alive.

There is a difference and the difference matters. But the phrase is still a phrase. It's still doing the thing that phrases do. Telling the person in front of you that their distress is unwarranted. When what I actually mean is we can fix this. Those are two different messages. The first one shrinks the person.

The second one expands the walls in the room, allowing breath. I'm still learning to reach for that second one. I think the work of noticing what we reach for is not pass or fail. But it's not about becoming the perfect person who never says the wrong thing. It's about catching yourself. Each time you catch yourself,

you earn a little bit of space between the reflex and the response. Allowance for the ability to choose something different. That's what I'm trying to practice. So think about what is your go-to phrases or phrase? What's the one that you reach for when someone else's feelings are making you feel uncomfortable? Name it, just name it.

You cannot change what you have not seen. Okay, now let's turn this into something that we can actually use. The following are a few things that you can try this week, just a handful of practices. The first one is to notice the phrases. Notice the ones other people reach for when you bring them something real.

Notice the ones you reach for when someone brings you something real. You don't have to fix them yet, but you just have to see them. Awareness is the open door. The second one, when someone you love brings you something hard, Try saying nothing at all at first.

That sounds really hard, but try something like, I'm so sorry, tell me more. Or try, what do you need right now? Ask a question instead of offering a phrase. A phrase can create shame. A question can create presence. The third one is stress. to let people be furious or heartbroken. Let them be scared.

You don't have to fix them. You don't even have to match their mood. You don't have to talk them out of it, which is something I do very often. You just have to stay because that's the whole gift. Not many know how to stay. The fourth one is to let yourself be furious too.

You're allowed to be angry about the unfair thing. You're allowed to be scared about a hard thing. You're allowed to not be grateful in the moment where gratitude has not earned itself yet. If I had a dime for every time somebody said to me, you have to be grateful, but I couldn't feel it, it annoyed me.

It made me feel less than. If someone tries to talk you out of your own feelings with a bumper sticker phrase, you're allowed to notice that. You don't have to say anything. You just have to recognize it for what it is. The fifth one's the hardest. I will tell you, open the envelope. Step on the scale.

Return the call. Make the appointment. Whatever it is that that hope has been letting you not do, do the smallest version of it this week. Not the whole thing, just the first step. Because that first step is the whole thing. The first step is how you know that hope is real. So here's where this lands.

If you recognized yourself anywhere, in what we talked about today, on either side of it, like the one who has been shut down or the one who does the shutting down, just hear this. Noticing is not the same as being stuck. Noticing is actually the movement. Noticing is the first thing resilience actually asks of you.

Toxic positivity tells you that your reality is a problem to manage. Genuine resilience tells you that your reality is the only honest place to begin. Hope, the real kind, is not something you hold instead of reality. It's something you hold while you're looking right at it. My mom died.

I never got to undo what I said at that elevator. But I did learn what she was trying to teach me. Even when she was angry, Even when she was scared, she was trying to teach me that love is not the same as comfort. That being present for someone is not the same as trying to fix them.

That sitting on the arm of the chair is sometimes the most resilient thing a person can do. I carry her with me in this work. I carry every version of myself who had to learn to believe her own story when the room would not. So here's your final reflection question.

It's just one, and I would love it if you could just sit with it. Where in your life have you been reaching for a phrase when what the moment is actually asking you for is to be present with someone else, with yourself? Name one place, just one. And then this week, try staying instead.

If you'd like to explore what is quietly holding you back or what patterns have been doing their work in silence, or actually what might be waiting on the other side of them, I would love to talk to you. You can find me at decotalifecoaching.com. I offer individual coaching and I truly love this work.

Thank you so much for being here with me today. This episode was not an easy one to put together and I do not take it lightly that you spent this time with me. I hope something we talked about today stays with you.

I hope it helps you be a little gentler with yourself and a little more honest with the people you love. I'll see you next time.