The following podcast is a deer media production.

Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Lisa Pressman and today we're talking about

toxic positivity and the antidote to toxic positivity with radically honest psychotherapist

Whitney Goodman. She has a really cool Instagram account sit with WIT and she wrote a book

called toxic positivity keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy and we're talking

about how to integrate being supportive, having hope and gratitude and a sense of possibility

without diminishing the experience of your child or other people in your life by inadvertently

using quote unquote toxic positivity. So we're talking about this with regard to

young children all the way through adolescence and our experience even with our partners,

other parents and our parents. If you enjoy this episode, please don't hesitate to subscribe,

rate and write a little review with maybe a nugget that you've got that you thought might

inspire others to listen to the podcast. It's so helpful for me. And of course you can subscribe

to my bulletin. Dr. Lisa dot bulletin.com and DM me on Instagram for listener Q and A at Raising Good

Humans podcast. So I want to start off by just defining and distinguishing between toxic positivity

and optimism, which are totally different things but seem to be getting conflated.

Yeah. So toxic positivity is really like this unrelenting pressure to be happy and positive no matter

what the situation. And I like to think of it as we're offering someone a really simple solution

for a complicated problem that we know nothing about. Optimism on the other hand is really just

having like an outlook towards life that things can change and get better and improve. And I think

when we look at the opposite of toxic positivity, we're really talking about how can we acknowledge

reality and what's actually happening and hold space for that hope and optimism at the same time.

So what are some examples of things that parents and we don't only have to talk about parents,

...