Toxic Positivity: Gaslighting or Not?
Last week, I chose the Homecoming-podcast: ep. 68 to accompany me on my daily walk. I heard a new term and decided to do some research on it: toxic positivity. I found a handful of stories on Medium on the topic, like “When Does Positivity Become Toxic?” by Brooklyn Reece. With a better understanding of this phrase, I started thinking about work. The workplace is an environment people are encouraged and feel pressure to seem positive, even in the midst of tremendous difficulties. Depending on the field you work in, employees in some working environments identify with this false positive atmosphere on a regular basis. I believe teachers have faced toxic positivity as a reality on many school days, long before the March 2020 stay-at-home orders required virtual learning.
There is an instructor who says “just keep smiling” at least once a week to colleagues and students. She has been repeating this for years. A fellow faculty member rolls her eyes in response to this phrase every time she says it. (I know this because we use the gallery Zoom or Teams features daily as we teach and support other teachers’ classes, following the remote learning schedule.) The first I heard her say this was in the teachers’ lounge amongst 3 other instructors, while one was complaining about their shitty day. At that time, I thought the comment was encouraging and beckoned all of us to look at what was going well at work, even in our personal lives in that moment.
Nearly 9 months into the pandemic, our students have remained under the stay-at-home order, except for two days they each came to school for math and reading diagnostic testing in September. Let me tell you, they are TIRED of this phrase! I see it on some of their worried, bored and oblivious faces. The world as they knew it vanished with the quickness.
In the beginning, (across the 5 grade levels that I taught) the majority of them when asked would excitedly express how much they loved homeschooling. They loved sleeping in longer, because they no longer had to wake up earlier than the sun to get ready to catch school and publication transportation buses. They liked the virtual schedule, because of the shorter classes as well as the increased brain and visual/screen breaks. They liked wearing their pajamas to school and were content not turning on their cameras at all. But now, there smiles have faded. Weekly I hear a student question, “When are we coming back to school?” They miss their classmates, teachers, in-person classes, and extracurricular activities. Some of them want to socialize as they did before the health crisis. At times I wonder how many of them attend remote school just to make the hours pass quicker.
At this point, telling the students to just keep smiling seems irresponsible for a number of reasons. One, it doesn’t allow the students to talk about their concerns and hear from others that have similar thoughts. It is of great important to ask the students how they really feel and what they really think about how things have drastically changed for all of them and their families this year. Two, this phrase encourages discounting one’s feelings and sticking with a fake reality. If we don’t create safe spaces for children to express their emotions we are modeling that it is okay to fast forward past a core emotion to a surfaced one. This seems like a recipe for developing mental health issues. Three, the overused saying silences the students. If they cannot see the positive in that moment and they are being told to smile through the anxiety, stress, and fear it’s as good as telling them to “shut up and smile”. Is this the example we want to teach students? How do we want young people to handle future crises in their lives? With a smile? That’s scary advice, because you know who smiles through it all…the Joker!
:/
Mood: I’m Upset — Drake
Are you guilty of toxic positivity? Do you allow yourself and others to feel your feelings? Comment below.
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