Learning how to complain effectively is a great life skill because it's not something that's going anywhere.

So I encourage people to first really identify what is the problem? What am I complaining about?

And then from there figure out what do I want to change here? What do I want to happen?

And who can help me get to that end goal? And that might mean just I want to vent and I want to be listened to and I want to feel heard.

So I'm going to call my mom. It might mean I'm complaining about you know the temperature of my food at the restaurant.

So if I just complain about that to my friend, nothing's really going to happen. I need to tell the waiter so I can get that problem fixed.

Right. And instead of trying to necessarily stop complaining or complaining less, I think effective complaining is much more useful.

You're listening to She with Jordan Lee Dooley, a personal development podcast for the everyday woman.

Come invited, leave ignited. Here's your host, Jordan Lee Dooley.

Hey Whitney, welcome to Sheep. I thank you for having me. Yes. So happy to have you here. I am really looking forward to this conversation for many reasons.

I think this is a topic that has been thrown around on the internet a lot, but I don't think we have a very good understanding of it.

But before we dig into all the questions I have regarding toxic positivity and this phrase that I think we hear a lot, but don't really fully understand.

I would love if you can tell us about the work that you do and why you wrote a book on this topic. Sure. So I am a licensed marriage and family therapist.

I work with adults primarily that are struggling with their family relationship or with the relationship with themselves.

And I wrote a book about toxic positivity because it was a phenomenon that I saw impacting my clients and the people around me in such a way that I felt like we needed to open up the conversation and talk about it.

Also social media in a much more in depth way. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's really important because it is a phrase. I don't know if the phrase is the right word, a term. Maybe it's the better way to say it.

That we hear, I think on social media a lot, it's kind of this thing that we're somewhat familiar with, but I don't even know if we fully know how to recognize it or you know, it's just kind of like I think become a trendy word without us really knowing what it is.

So I love if we can dig into this topic a little bit from your perspective and from what you teach what is toxic positivity and what is it not.

Toxic positivity is really the unrelenting pressure to be happy or put a positive spin on anything no matter what the circumstances.

I like to clarify that we can be optimistic without engaging in toxic positivity. We can be hopeful without using toxic positivity.

It's more of a pressure or something that we're forcing on people when they're not in a place to feel that or when it's not optimal to do that.

Yeah, I think that's a really important differentiation because I think when we hear this idea of toxic positivity, it can make us like we don't want to be toxically positive, right?

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