Countering Toxic Positivity with Lamentation

Toxic positivity is the belief that no matter how dire or difficult a situation is, people should maintain a positive mindset. It's a "good vibes only" approach to life. And while there are benefits to being an optimist and engaging in positive thinking, toxic positivity instead rejects difficult emotions in favor of a cheerful, often falsely positive, facade.
We all know that having a positive outlook on life is good for your mental well-being. The problem is that life isn't always positive. We all deal with painful emotions and experiences. Those emotions, while often unpleasant, are important and need to be felt and dealt with openly and honestly.
Toxic positivity takes positive thinking to an overgeneralized extreme. This attitude doesn't just stress the importance of optimism, it minimizes and denies any trace of human emotions that aren't strictly happy or positive.
Forms of Toxic Positivity
Toxic positivity can take a wide variety of forms. Some examples you may have encountered in your own life:

• When something bad happens, such as losing your job, people tell you to “just stay positive” or “look on the bright side.” While such comments are often meant to be sympathetic, they can also be a way of shutting down anything you might want to say about what you are experiencing.
• After experiencing some type of loss, people tell you that “everything happens for a reason.” While people often make such statements because they believe they are comforting, it is also a way of avoiding someone else’s pain.
• When you express disappointment or sadness, someone tells you that “happiness is a choice.” This suggests that if you are feeling negative emotions, then it’s your own fault for not “choosing” to be happy.

Such statements are often well-intentioned—people just don't know what else to say and don't know how to be empathetic. Still, it is important to recognize that these responses can be harmful.
At their best, such statements come off as trite platitudes that let you off the hook so you don’t have to deal with other people’s feelings. At their worst, these comments end up shaming and blaming people who are often dealing with incredibly difficult situations.
Toxic positivity denies people the authentic support that they need to cope with what they are facing.
Why It’s Harmful
Toxic positivity can actually harm people who are going through difficult times. Rather than being able to share genuine human emotions and gain unconditional support, people find their feelings dismissed, ignored, or outright invalidated.

• It's shaming: When someone is suffering, they need to know that their emotions are valid, but that they can find relief and love in their friends and family. Toxic positivity tells people that the emotions they are feeling are unacceptable.
• It causes guilt: It sends a message that if you aren't finding a way to feel positive, even in the face of tragedy, that you are doing something wrong.
• It avoids authentic human emotion: Toxic positivity functions as an avoidance mechanism. When other people engage in this type of behavior, it allows them to sidestep emotional situations that might make them feel uncomfortable. But sometimes we turn these same ideas on ourselves, internalizing these toxic ideas. When we feel difficult emotions, we then discount, dismiss, and deny them.
• It prevents growth: It allows us to avoid feeling things that might be painful, but it also denies us the ability to face challenging feelings that can ultimately lead to growth and deeper insight.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-positivity-5093958

The burden of Lamentations is not to question why this happened, but to give expression to the fact that it did. At certain moments the book seems to look beyond the destruction, to hold out hope for the future, but in the end despair overcomes hope. Past and future have little place in the book. It centers on the ‘present’ – the moment of trauma, the interminable suffering. The book is not an explanation of suffering but a re-creation of it and a commemoration of it.
Adele Berlin, Lamentations, 18

"Lament is a repository for "sheer happenings." It curbs narrative's tendency to assign causes and meanings, to use storytelling to mennd the unmendable. Lament's capacity to represent non-narratives allows it to preserve what is irreducible and inexplicable about evil... We can bring to God not only our best behaved happy selves but also selves seized by despair, brokenness, a thirst for revenge, and other so-called unacceptable feelings. This is lament, the first step in reconstituting the broken world"
Dr. Rachel Adler, For These I Weep

The function of such lament speech is to create a situation that did not exist before the speech, to create an external event the matches the internal sensitivities. It is the work of such speech to give shape, power, visibility, authenticity to the experience. The speaker now says, “It is really like that. That is my situation.” The listener knows, “Now I understand your actual situation in which you are at work dying to the old equilibrium that is slipping from you.” (Brueggemann, 1982, p. 30)

A lament is a passionate expression of distress. To lament is to wail and to complain and to “sing the blues” – of loneliness, hopelessness, helplessness, grief, exhaustion and absence of meaning. It is the voice and the record of a person in turmoil. Finding this voice for ourselves and learning a vocabulary with which we can honestly engage our clients and patients in a way that does not deny or dishonour their very real anguish, is vital to a ministry of balanced spiritual care. We are called to weep with those who weep, uncomfortable as that might be. Availing ourselves of the language of lament is the alternative to disengagement. Without a vocabulary of pain, there is no vehicle for connecting with God or with others from within our world of suffering. “The prayer of lament is the language of the painful incongruity between lived experience and the promises of God. Without it we would be left speechless and hopeless in the midst of affliction” (Billman & Migliore p. 107). New meanings are waiting to be made in the place of suffering. It is important to recognize that lament is very different from the encouragement of an attitude of self-pity or the inducement of gratuitous anger. Lament is the cry of a painwracked soul that has no other honest words to speak. It is an anguished prayer from a place of crisis and the voicing of thoughts and emotions that cannot be otherwise. The only alternative is muteness and repression. Through lament we hold onto faith that God is mysteriously in the mix of our disequilibrium, whether experienced as present or absent.
https://spiritualcare.ca/flow/uploads/pdfs/LAMENTATION.pdf

Questions for discussion:
1. How can we make space for lament in group and one-on-one settings ?
2. Do you connect with lamentations from this psychological lens? Why or why not?
3. Do you have a relationship with lament? When has it served you? Has it ever gotten in the way?

4. What do you see as the bridge between lament and healing? what is the next step after lament, and how can we integrate that in a treatment setting?
5. Lament offers one model for helping individuals process victimization in a healthy way. Are there other tools you can think of that tend to this vulnerable state without prescribing a 'victim identity' onto the lamenter?