Are You Guilty of Toxic Positivity? [Spoiler alert] more than likely...
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s handy to look on the bright side of life, right? Who doesn’t love an optimist? But, what if by always looking for a fix or the silver lining, you’re actually invalidating perfectly reasonable and logical emotions.
More than that, what if being positive is actually making you toxic?
In this conversation with Whitney Goodman, the radically honest psychologist, we explore how always being hopeful or trying to be helpful can actually be confusing and dissatisfying.
It’s something we’ve seen creep into our vocabulary more and more with things like manifesting, but actually all this ‘looking on the bright side’ can make you vulnerable to failures and make you wonder what you’re doing wrong.
Fear not though, in this conversation, we explore some valuable tools to help you eradicate toxic positivity, the ways in which you can be helpful and constructive and why a little negativity isn’t actually a bad thing…
This conversation with originally published in 2022.
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Transcript
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