Why silver linings aren't always what's needed
Updated: Sep 3
If you've spent any time on social media, you'll probably have noticed how often difficult experiences come with a positive message attached. A breakup becomes an opportunity for growth, a setback becomes a lesson and a difficult period becomes a chance to become a stronger version of yourself.
Sometimes those things are true. Finding meaning in difficult experiences can be helpful and there can be something valuable in recognising what we have learned or how we have changed. But there can also be a pressure to look for the positive before we've had a chance to acknowledge how something actually feels.
This is sometimes described as toxic positivity.
Photo of cloud by Dadee Aissa on Unsplash
What is toxic positivity?
Toxic positivity isn't simply being optimistic or trying to find hope in a difficult situation. It's more about the pressure to maintain a positive outlook regardless of what is happening, or responding to difficult emotions in ways that leave little room for the difficulty itself.
It might sound like “Everything happens for a reason,” “Look on the bright side,” or “You just need to stay positive.”
These responses are often well-intentioned. Most of us don't particularly enjoy seeing someone we care about in pain and when we don't know what to say, reassurance can feel like the kindest response. Sometimes, however, what a person needs isn't to be made to feel better. They need their experience to be heard and recognised.
Why do we reach for positivity?
Difficult emotions can be uncomfortable, both for the person experiencing them and for the people around them. Sadness, anger, fear, grief, shame and disappointment aren't always easy to sit with.
When we see someone struggling, there can be an understandable urge to make the feeling go away. We might reassure them, offer advice, point out the positives or encourage them to look towards the future.
We can do the same thing to ourselves. Instead of allowing ourselves to acknowledge that we're struggling, we might quickly move towards “I'll be fine” or “It could be worse.” Sometimes this can give us enough distance to keep going, particularly when a situation feels overwhelming.
The difficulty is that tricky emotions don't necessarily disappear because we've found a more positive way of describing them. Sometimes they need to be acknowledged before we can really understand what they are telling us.
You don't have to turn pain into progress
There is a particular kind of message that appears frequently online: difficult experiences are valuable because they make us stronger. Sometimes they do. But not everything that happens to us needs to become a lesson.
A relationship can end and simply hurt. We can miss out on something we wanted and feel disappointed. Someone can let us down and leave us angry.
That doesn't mean these experiences can never lead to growth or change. With time, we may find meaning in them, learn something about ourselves or discover that our lives take a direction we couldn't have anticipated. But we don't necessarily need to find that meaning immediately.
Sometimes something is simply painful.
What about social media?
This is something I've been thinking about in relation to this page too.
A counselling page is inevitably a curated space. I choose the images, the words and the ideas I share, and I try to make the content thoughtful, useful and welcoming. But in doing so, I can also contribute to a particular picture of what emotional life looks like.
Social media tends to show us the parts of life that are easiest to present. Even a counselling account can begin to look like a place where wellbeing means being calm, self-aware, reflective and ready to grow.
Real life is rarely quite so tidy.
And I think there is value in being conscious of that, particularly when we're using social media to talk about emotional wellbeing. The intention of this page is to share information, introduce some ideas about how we understand ourselves and give you a sense of who I am and how I work. It isn't intended to suggest that there is a particular way you should feel.
What does this mean in therapy?
Counselling isn't about making you feel positive, and it isn't about finding a silver lining in everything that happens. Nor is it about convincing you that everything will be okay when neither of us can know that.
Sometimes the most useful thing may be having somewhere you can say that something is difficult without immediately having to make it sound better. You don't have to arrive with a lesson, or turn your experience into a story of growth. You can be angry, frightened, sad, confused, disappointed or unsure and those feelings can have a place in the room.
For me, counselling is partly about developing the space to notice what is actually happening for you, with curiosity rather than judgement. Sometimes that may lead towards change; sometimes it may involve accepting something that cannot be changed. And sometimes it may mean recognising and grieving something we have spent a long time hoping could be different.
That last part is important. Hope isn't always helpful. Sometimes holding on to the possibility that something will change can protect us from having to face a painful reality. Martha Stark describes this as relentless hope — a defence against the pain of disappointment and grief.
This doesn't mean that hope is inherently problematic, or that we should give up on the possibility of things being different. It means being curious about what our hope is doing for us. Is it helping us move towards something that is genuinely possible, or is it keeping us tied to something we are finding difficult to accept?
Perhaps the alternative to toxic positivity isn't negativity. It's being able to be honest about where we are, without immediately needing to know where we are going.
Not everything needs a silver lining. Sometimes we just need the space to acknowledge what is there.
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