July 18th, 2024
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
Our culture has a propensity to put a medical label on many aspects of human behaviour that previous generations would have considered to be in the range of normal. I came across one a few nights ago on a Radio 4 discussion programme that I hadn’t encountered before. Apparently, there is a thing called toxic positivity.
The conversation cited social media exchanges during COVID as an example of the genre. People would share on their profile that they had gone down with it and were bombarded with a series of positive messages. “You’ll be fine, you’re doing brilliantly, it’s not that bad”. Sadly, for many people it really was that bad. Not only did they not survive the infection but many still struggle with its long- term effects. Undoubtedly, many people today feel a pressure to feel positive, and display that positivity in their interactions with others. For some this leads to feelings of guilt when you really aren’t doing OK at all. Many people who use social media feel this pressure to make their lives in cyberspace seem as good as everyone else’s. This leads to the double whammy of comparison and one’s own inner incoherence. Everyone seems to be having a much better time than I am – at least that’s what Facebook says. Not only that, but if I know the image I am projecting is at odds with how I really feel, the incoherence has a detrimental effect on mental health. There have always been elements of this in human interaction, but somehow social media seems to make it much worse.
Grieving people have told me how hard it is when friends see them coming and take a wide berth. Its reported that the grief from about six months after a major loss can be made much worse by the pressure to internalise it for fear of dragging friends down. Friends of course will report how incredibly well and positively the person is doing. Toxic positivity enforces a silence that means true feelings have to be internalised for fear of upsetting others. This effectively trivialises those feelings. But if we create spaces where its not OK to talk about these inner things, the issues won’t go away, it’s just we’ll feel better and our friends will continue to suffer in silence.
They will be battling the internal ‘I should be’ narrative of. I should be — able to go back to work, I should be able cope with this, I should not feel like this, etc. insert your own should here.
Its no wonder that loneliness is so bad for people, reducing life span and leading to other physical symptoms. The church, if its working properly, should be a space where vulnerability and authenticity are welcomed. The antidote to toxic positivity is the Christian virtue of hope. When Paul wrote to the Roman Church he sought to encourage them in the face of savage persecution. Sadly, some of his exhortations have been reduced to trite phrases lifted out of context on posters with soft-focus mountains and waterfalls. When he said in Romans 8: 37 that, “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us”, the ‘things’ mentioned were famine, isolation, martyrdom and public humiliation. There is no hint that things will be all right in the end, nor a lack of realism about the gravity of their sufferings and the pain they were going through. The hope offered was that all of this found meaning in the providential love of God. Their ultimate security and well-being weren’t dependent on their circumstances changing, but on their eternal, unshakable relationship with God through Christ. As he said to the Corinthians, reflecting on his own sufferings, “our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all”.
Raymond Williams said that, “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing”. This is the radicalism of Christian faith. It is not the denial of stoicism or the dismissals of toxic positivity. It is the walking alongside those in pain, allowing the articulation of inner feelings in their own way in their own time. It is to live with the messiness of the world because we know the next one is intersecting it and the kingdom is coming, slowly and imperceptibly, but it is coming. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
+Richard