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

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

...