Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black. If you've ever felt bad when someone's told you to just be happy, then this episode is for you because we're going to explore the limits of positive

thinking with our guest, psychotherapist Whitney Goodman. Whitney is the author of a new book

called Toxic Positivity, keeping it real in a world obsessed with being happy. And the book

is described as a powerful guide to owning our emotions, especially the difficult ones.

Whitney, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Tell us more about what you mean by toxic positivity.

Toxic positivity is the unrelenting pressure to be happy all the time or to be seeking

out positivity and happiness no matter what the circumstances.

And you say that it's that positivity in and of itself isn't toxic, but it can become,

become toxic. So at what point does that happen? Yeah, absolutely. So positivity is not toxic.

It becomes toxic when we use it to dismiss people to tell them that what they're feeling isn't true or is wrong to deny our reality or someone else is, or just to shame people into feeling like they're not doing enough or that their difficult emotions are invalid. And a lot of that

depends on, you know, what is the topic we're talking about? Who is our audience? Who's receiving

this? And also what is the timing of that delivery? What brought you to the point of saying,

hey, I need to write a book about this. This is, this is something we need to be

looking at in society. So I got on Instagram as a therapist just to promote my practice like four

years ago. And what I noticed was there was all these posts floating around that were making

me feel really terrible. And I think I hadn't interacted with them because they just weren't showing up in my space

until I got on there with my professional account.

And I was thinking, gosh, my clients must feel so terrible when they see this stuff.

And I started just saving it, kind of cataloging it, and noticing when it would come up in

conversations with my own clients, my family, friends. And after a while, it's just like, wow,

this is everywhere. And everyone seems to be so bothered by it, but we're not doing anything about it.

...