Melissa Dlugolecki argues that toxic positivity is avoidance, not strength. When you suppress uncomfortable feelings like whack-a-mole, they resurface later as delayed breakdowns or rage. Real healing means sitting with the discomfort instead of muscling through it.
Understanding that toxic positivity and this muscling through is actually not a growth mindset. It's bypassing, it's avoidance. We can't grow in anything if we just stuff it down. There is a chapter in my book, again, Scar Tissue, called Whack-a-Mole, where it's this idea where we take something that we don't necessarily like the way it's working, or it's not feeling good, and we just whack it down. But if we don't take care of it, it's gonna come right back up. This is why you see people have breakdowns years after a loss or complete rage years after not maybe managing things in a childhood trauma. And so we gotta talk about it. We get to do the work, we get to be in the barn.
