[Topics: Toxic positivity and Lessons Learned in 2021]
I will be re-posting my former blogs, possibly 2 at a time, over the next days. Under coercive control and due to marital duress and financial abuse, I thought perhaps if I deleted all of my blog postings a couple of years ago, things would improve. They didn't - they got worse. And the purpose of my blogs is to help fellow victims. So, here goes, from more recent posts and then going further back...
Blog originally posted January 1, 2022:
Wishing you a new year of authenticity, affirmation, and acceptance - void of toxic positivity
Today is my birthday and the beginning of a new calendar year. For both annual occasions, the well-wishes tend to be for the day, for the year, for me, and for others to be "happy." And how wonderful happy people and happy moments and happy years are... and there are sure to be many.
But I may also be experiencing a very sorrowful birthday. I am grieving, with my children, the fourth birthday, the fourth bringing in of the new year, without my husband. The fourth new year of a dismantled nuclear family. It is painful beyond words.
And this whole year is likely to have its share of deep pain, grief, and suffering, along with joy and peace and serenity.
While we truly want those we love to be happy, the fact is that each of us need, more than happiness, the permission to truly feel our authentic emotions, for those feelings to be accepted by others in our lives. Suppressing true emotions prohibits wholeness, health, and the nurturing of genuine relationships with one another. Accepting ALL of our emotions, personally and with one another, being real about how we are feeling, we permit our happiness to also be more real.
Emotions are full of information vital to our well-being. They are not facts in themselves, but they are data, and ignoring emotions can be extremely harmful, to both individuals personally as well as to relationships and society in a broader sense.
Undealt with feelings do not disappear; difficult emotions generally intensify with suppression. McKenna Princing, in UW Medicine's Right As Rain article, "What You Need to Know About Toxic Positivity" (September 8, 2021) says, that "if you keep ghosting your own emotions, they’ll keep coming back to haunt you until you finally deal with them."
Positivity includes two factors: what we ourselves feel, and what we project to others. We may want to fiercely guard how we ourselves feel, and we may want someone else to feel better, but requiring pretensive positivity is not the way. We cannot have genuine bonding if we are unable to accept another person's grief, anger, sadness, or other generally unpleasant emotions.
Toxic positivity communicates that someone not feeling positive enough is not good enough. It fosters individualism - people care for their own sense of happiness rather than being willing to empathize with another person's suffering. Toxic positivity also demands that people suffering difficult emotions do one or more of the following:
mask their emotions
isolate from others who may seem like "positivity police"
bury their feelings - which can lead to addiction, anxiety, depression, self-hatred, and other illnesses
feel that they are unworthy or incapable of relating to others if they are not happy (but to become truly happy, we need genuine connection/relationships in our times of suffering)
People who participate in toxic positivity may be (unintentionally) abusive. They may gaslight someone suffering, belittling that person's pain or problem(s), invalidating their feelings, blaming them for being "dramatic" or "negative", and shaming a person already hurting. This is emotional abuse and can severely impact mental health.
Toxic positivity can prevent optimal growth. As we learn to recognize, understand, label accurately, express, and regulate our emotions, we grow. As we help others to do the same, we grow in relationship to one another, and as a society. Emotions, including unpleasant emotions, help us to face reality, and they teach us about ourselves, others, life, and experiences.
A personal tie-in:
In my marriage (and in the problematic involvement/intrusion of my in-laws and some church members/leaders in my marriage/nuclear family life), a main destructive factor was that painful emotions were not accepted; they were not permitted to be expressed (by me… negative emotions by those with more “power” were cause to distance me further… as if I was the cause for their unpleasant feelings). I was admonished by in-laws not to bring up things that "hurt" my husband, although I desperately needed to resolve major issues in our marriage that were hurting me... deeply and unsustainably. I needed to address deep feelings of grief about clear intrusion on our marriage, for instance, based on plenty of factual evidence. For bringing up such matters of concern, I was told I had to leave, that I could no longer live in my home; I was prohibited from returning to my home, I was no longer "allowed" to live with my husband, etc.
Communicating one's feelings, even if not always "perfectly" should not be punished. (I raised my voice at my mother-in-law in a conversation in which I stated that I was not angry - that I was hurting... and was blamed and punished repeatedly for that, suffering the loss of my marriage, home.... because I hurt my mother-in-law, and thereby hurt my husband -- they seem to have permission to hurt and to express their pain... permission that I don't have.) Punishing each other for communicating our emotions and expressing pain is cruel and abusive. And the damaging effects on our children, other family members and our larger social circle have also been extensive.
I was also punished for not being “happy enough” many times. I’ll briefly describe one such “date”. Around 10 PM one evening, my husband texted me, asking if I wanted to meet at a Winchell’s at 10:15, for about 15 minutes, knowing I was back in L.A., but not knowing where I was staying, only that I was forbidden by him to come home. I accepted the invitation to the donut shop, quickly freshened up, and scurried to my little compact rental car parked in my friend’s garage. As I pulled up to the Winchell‘s, and saw his/our Tesla Model X, and him sitting there in Winchell’s, wearing my dad‘s jacket that my dad gave me shortly before he died, I felt sad, and truthfully, rather bitter. I tried to have a positive attitude and date, while being told that my husband would leave our house long enough to allow me a window of time to go in and get what I needed in order to prepare our taxes. I guess I didn’t act happy enough. He told me, via text after that “date”, that because I didn’t seem happy to see him, he didn’t want to see me again while I was in LA for that trip.
When my daughter has stayed or lived with in-laws, one of the most painful aspects of her experience has been the fact that everyone acts like everything is OK, when it’s not. The toxic positivity prevents her from opening her pain in a real way. When she was hospitalized, she told the therapist that this was one of the hardest things she experiences, when people -especially family members - act like everything is OK when it’s not… when things are insanely wrong. She felt the need to talk about things honestly, but that opportunity was generally not available, as everyone around her just seemed to have to stay positive in their emotional state. At one point, with some relatives on my husband’s side, with whom Christy lived for about a year, I visited, and let them know, bawling my eyes out, that Christy and I were at level 10 emotional pain. I believe that may have helped Christy be a bit more real with them, and perhaps they were more genuine with her. But Christy was hospitalized months later, while living with them, and having been unable to open honestly with them about difficult emotions. And those relatives- very dear and I thought close to me - did not reach out to me even one time in the nine months that I lived in their area, after I had so vulnerably opened up about the pain of our nuclear family experience.
So, as this new year begins, Nathan and Christy and I have much complexity of emotions: a lot of pain, grief, concerns, sorrow, emotional exhaustion, regrets, fears.... along with joy, happiness, gratefulness, optimism, and even peace. And to be in healthy relationships, which are vital to our healing and well-being, the whole range of feelings needs to be accepted - by ourselves and by those with whom we can share genuine, healthy, relational bonds.
I highly recommend the book Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, which has been a tremendously helpful resource to me. (I referred to this book in a previous blog...)
I also highly recommend Susan David's book Emotional Agility, as well as her TED Talk "The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage": https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_david_the_gift_and_power_of_emotional_courage
Some of the content of this article is from the following links; please refer to these articles for more information:
Blog originally posted December 31, 2021
Lessons Learned in 2021
As I reflect on my first 51 years of life (I turn 51 tomorrow), as well as on this past year, I feel to end 2021 with a list of lessons learned, primarily, this past year:
If I can't watch Scientology and the Aftermath without tearfully relating to some of the abhorrent treatment experienced by those who did not agree with leadership, currently experiencing some of the same cult-like treatment from my spouse and his family, along with some church members/leaders, something is wrong.
Sleeping, speaking out, and connecting with other survivors are three important practices that promote healing from abusive and/or cult-like experiences.
Amidst the pain, life has beautiful gifts to offer. This year:
I had so many precious times with incredibly dear friends and family members, some new and some old... in my time this past year in Texas and California and Colorado and Tennessee and Washington;
I was hugged by Sir Winston, a sloth at an exotic ranch, where I also fed lemurs and kangaroos and a giraffe, a deer, a Mediterranean donkey - so humble and small - one like Jesus rode into Jerusalem before being crucified... and spent priceless time with a precious family from Oklahoma who met me there;
I had weekly visits to Ranch Hands Rescue for several months in Texas, where I interacted with an amazing therapist and awesome, therapeutic animals who are themselves trauma survivors;
I worked at two ranches and a farm and two wonderful schools (one in Dallas and one in the Seattle area);
I weathered a couple of ice/snow storms;
my daughter broke free of a toxic relationship;
my daughter is overcoming toxic treatment by church leaders in the locality to which we tried to "escape"- and she, her brother, and myself are somehow healing from the loss of that once precious church community that was once a safe haven to us, we thought, that meets where my parents lived for about 10 years... a place we stayed so many times during my children's childhood;
my son is healing from a psychological break induced by ongoing, deep, painful, complex trauma he has endured for several years now, particularly due to the demolition of his parents' marriage and his being rejected and shunned now by his father and his paternal relatives;
I can look out of my living room window and see Mt. Rainier on clear days....
Love doesn't stonewall, neglect, shun, and lie about its object(s). If there is a breach in connection/communication, love seeks repair of that relationship in a timely way. Love rejoices with the truth... and the truth isn't something love is ashamed of. Love doesn't punish a person for reaching out for help.
Narcissists stonewall, neglect, shun, and lie about people when such behavior serves their self-interest. If there is a breach in connection/communication, narcissists do not seek to repair that relationship unless not doing so might make them look bad, and if doing so does not compromise their self pride and sense of entitlement to treat others however they want to treat others, regardless of the damage incurred on that person or others. Narcissists try to keep hidden any truth that exposes them for what they are: narcissists. Narcissists believe and/or act in a way that the "truth" should be understood/perceived as whatever narrative they can monopolize for their self-interest. Narcissists punish anyone who reaches out for help, if that person, in doing so, may "make" them look bad.
God is so, so, so, so good. God loves the "unlovable" - those whom religious people tend to shun and cast away. Church leaders spoke of asking my daughter not to meet with the "church", after lies were circulated that they refused to allow her to clear up. God loves my daughter and welcomes her to HIS society. God loves my son, brokenhearted and tattooed and vulnerable and lonely. God loves me, a wife who was rejected by my husband whenever his family became involved in our lives, until it was no longer "our lives", but rather simply HIS life - in which his family has full freedom, as long as I am utterly excluded. But I am loved by God, and for this, I am so blessed and enraptured with gratefulness.
Thank you to my subscribers and anyone who reads this blog. If my experiences resonate with you, my heart goes out to you. If you are one of the people who has narcissistic and cult-like behaviors, my heart goes out to you because you are living in a lie and perpetuating lies, and you may not even know it.
Here's to a beautiful new beginning. Happy 2022!

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