Written by Madison Lamb • Published April 20, 2026 @10:10 PM
When I was younger almost every time I expressed my feelings I was met with, “It’s not that bad. It could be worse.” Which kind of made me feel more alone because I wasn’t trying to discredit the good things in my life, I was just trying to sit with my pain and figure out how to regulate my emotions at an age where I didn’t even know how to adequately communicate that.
I was so so obsessed with:
“Telling someone they can’t be sad because others have it worse is like saying someone can’t be happy because others have it better”
Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows
I was literally gonna get that tattoo tattooed on my body. I couldn’t figure out the design, but the only thing holding me back was the price.
I was so adamant about repeating this mantra to the point of almost getting it permanently printed into my skin for myself and everybody else to read and never forget. This is because I wanted so badly to be heard in each invalidating environment, a deep desire that stuck around at just about every age of my life, including now.
The Rise of Toxic Positivity
Then toxic positivity became such a prominent trend it was brushed off as “good vibes only” or “don’t worry, be happy”, and although it is good to be grateful, there’s another more important step before this that toxic positivity prominently overlooks. The most important step is acknowledging the pain and sitting with it before you move on to the bright side. It’s not healthy to dismiss and avoid any feelings.
The trend gained traction in 2019 though the term originated in 2011 in a book called the queer art of failure written by J. Halberstam.
Additionally, in 2019, people online began doing a bunch of manifestations that were later perceived by the masses to be “toxic positivity”. The trend then grew popular again in 2020 during the pandemic.
Whitney Goodman’s book released in 2022 called Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real In a World Obsessed With Being Happy also addresses everything regarding the dangers of toxic positivity in public consciousness.
The Dangers of Toxic Positivity
There’s so much importance in sitting with your feelings, especially when they’re weighing down. Joy and happiness energetically lift you up but fear and sadness weigh you down.
Toxic positivity, attempts to force and strain you into a position you’re not ready for when you haven’t shed the weight through acceptance or even acknowledged that it’s there yet.
Rosie from Headspace Studios says it best: “You can’t fast forward to the Glow Up. The glow up comes from sitting in the mess and being real with what hurts.”
How to Quit Toxic Positivity
I’ll admit even I judge myself when I’m jotting things down in my journal. I’ll write down what I think I need instead of what I really need. I’ll write down the polished fragments of reality instead of the whole chaotic story. This is the conditioning of toxic positivity sneaking up even when I’m trying to care for myself in my most private moments.
Allow the sad, angry, fearful, and doubt to bubble to the surface just as they are without judging yourself. Don’t let toxic positivity veer you away from your true self, if you start discrediting your feelings in any way by telling yourself you shouldn’t be having these emotions or you should be happier instead then you’ve gone off track.
Just like toxic positivity tries to skip the step where we sit with the sadness, pain, and fear within us to instead focus on the bright side, the journey of self love often overlooks the first and most beneficial step.
The First Real Step in Finding Self Love
The first step can never be overlooked if you want your conscious being to anchor onto the new information you’re feeding it without automatically falling back into its old, toxic conditioning.
Keep in mind, this step won’t even have the opportunity to exist if you don’t first sit with the residual negative feelings first.
Unlearning everything ineffective that you have learned in the past to make room for the healthy new things is just like clearing out storage for new belongings.
The storage unit is your brain and the belongings is the knowledge gained through experience. Before now, you may have been conditioned to live in a way that isn’t healthy for you mental well-being. The only way to make room for the healthy knowledge is to identify the bad things you’ve learned along the way and recognize which areas they may have been impacting your life without you noticing it. Once you notice these subtleties you’ll have the power to get rid of this conditioning to make room for the new.
I have been able to do this by recognizing when I’m judging myself, especially during my private moments of journaling or meditation. I try to write and notice things exactly as they are and identify exactly what I need not what I want or I may think I need to fix this situation. This ensures I don’t make the situation worse moving forward and the act itself is the basis of a very important distress tolerance skill called radical acceptance.
What is Radical Acceptance?
Radical acceptance is the act of fully accepting reality as it is with your heart, mind, thoughts, soul, and actions.
This is different than regular acceptance which is the state of acknowledging the factual reality in which you may notice the inner resistance, that part of you that still doesn’t want it to be true. Radical acceptance is that final push through the resistance into acceptance of what is.
How to Use Radical Acceptance
The most important thing to understand is that radical acceptance does not mean approval. In other words, you can fully accept the fact that you experienced something life-altering without thinking it was approved. It just means stop fighting a reality that’s going to exist whether we continue fighting it and causing ourselves pain or not.
Instead of thinking:
“This is fine, I’m fine, I’m not hurt, I didn’t get hurt.” (When you’re not).
Radical acceptance allows you to say:
“Yes, I did experience that. I feel this way about it. This is what I need to do about it.”
It doesn’t erase the pain, but it stops you from adding more suffering on top of it and burying the joy of living deeper underneath.
We don’t deserve to suffer.
High Res Writing | where emotions are examined, not avoided.
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