In this op-ed, Krista Thomason, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, makes the case for emotional realism — the actual alternative to toxic positivity.
Social media’s “good vibes only” facade is crumbling. The hashtag for toxic positivity has over 79 million views on TikTok; climate change and a global pandemic have laid bare the emptiness of the Instagram health gurus who insist that all you need to do to change your life is change your attitude; and that shiny veneer that influencers were once known for is being replaced with tearful posts and more “behind the scenes” content. For a while now, people seem to be searching for an alternative to the relentless perfection we’re used to on social media — and many have praised the seemingly more honest posts, the emotional captions, and the look at less-than-perfect scenes. Gen Z has been praised for being more open about anxiety, depression, and mental health on social media — TikTok is sometimes described as a place of “emotional realism.”
But are we really being real about our feelings?
You might have seen a trend on TikTok known as the therapy dupe. Therapy dupes come in many forms: dyeing your hair, organizing your closet, buying new pens, and listening to music in your car are all examples. Feeling sad? The dopamine boost of ordering a new top online will surely fix it. Largely, therapy therapy dupes seem tongue-in-cheek. Most people understand that, while a Target trip might make you feel better in the short term, it doesn’t promote healing or reveal deeper truths about oneself. Still, whether it’s a joke or not, the idea of therapy dupes betrays an assumption about what therapy is supposed to do, namely make you feel better. Therapy dupes also reveal something about TikTok’s alleged emotional realism: The idea that negative emotions need to be managed, treated, or addressed somehow — just not always with actual therapy. Being more open and accepting about mental health doesn’t mean we’ve changed our assumptions about what mental health is. “It’s OK to not be OK” still assumes that having negative emotions is not being OK.
The advice you get about avoiding toxic positivity has the same problem. People will say things like, “denying your feelings just makes them worse.” But if there’s nothing wrong with negative emotions to start with, why are we worried about them “getting worse?” When we talk about accepting negative feelings, which ones are we talking about? One of the common responses to toxic positivity is that we can’t be happy all the time. Feelings of fear, anxiety, and sadness are both common and normal. This is true, but what about feelings like contempt, anger, and jealousy? If we are accepting our feelings fully, we can’t pick and choose which ones are socially acceptable. And, toxic positivity pushes a paradoxical idea that we should be relentlessly happy, making us feel bad for feeling bad — even though the idea seems to be that we shouldn’t feel bad about things.
These trends are all signs that we aren’t necessarily practicing the emotional realism that we think we are. The alternative to toxic positivity needs to be more than just “some bad feelings are fine sometimes.” Actual emotional realism means accepting that our feelings have a life of their own and that they don’t always fit into the neat categories we create for them. We also need to learn to listen to them rather than try to boss them around. Just because we feel something we think we shouldn’t feel doesn’t mean the feeling is wrong.
We have a long way to go before emotional realism becomes real. We can start moving in the right direction by realizing that we don’t need to use therapy-speak to talk about our negative emotions. They aren’t always symptoms of mental health struggles. We don’t always need to “process” them and they don’t necessarily stem from trauma. We don’t have to “practice self-care” when we feel them. Instead, let’s try treating negative emotions just like positive ones. After all, no one tells you that you need to “process” your joy.
Instead of thinking of bad feelings as something to manage, we see them for what they are: Part of a normal, full human life. Of course, many people need therapy and benefit from it — it can help us reframe our thinking in many helpful ways, deal with actual trauma, and manage many mental health conditions. But sometimes, feeling bad isn’t that deep. Our emotional lives are complicated because life is complicated. We don’t always need therapy or new pens to deal with it.
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