Toxic Positivity and the Law of Attraction

There’s nothing worse when you’re going through a hard time than that person who tells you to just ‘think positive’. It’s invalidating, shaming, and aimed to make you feel like you are somehow failing as a person for having emotions. 

Toxic positivity has become rampant, especially amongst the ‘wellness’ crowd where a misunderstanding of the Law of Attraction has basically scared people into thinking that you are only allowed to feel happy only ever. If you don’t, you’re doing life wrong. 

I’m not sure where the confusion all started, but it has become like an addiction for a lot of people. And it has led to a lot more emotional collapses than it has genuine help. 

So, let’s start with an explanation of the Law of Attraction, and why having Emotions like a real human doesn’t invalidate it. 

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, the Law of Attraction came into popularity from the bestselling book ‘The Secret’. It originated from Abraham, an entity that Esther Hicks channels. It’s got some decent ideas, but keep in mind the source of the information – an off-planet entity speaking through a human is telling you how you should live your life. Sure, maybe this entity has some decent understandings, but that doesn’t make it Divine Universal Truth. You’re getting one dude’s opinion. And you have no way to fact check this guy’s resume. He could be the equivalent of the 40 year old creeper who lives in his mom’s basement trolling people online. You don’t know. So take the information with a grain of salt and decide whether or not it’s something you want to base your belief systems on, is all I’m saying. What does he know of earth? Has he ever lived here? Can you trust the source of this information? 

Now, this sounds like I’m Abraham bashing, but I’m not. I love Esther Hicks and Abraham seems like a cool dude. But any being that shames a human for the complex array of very beautiful emotional experiences that are fundamental to our species is not coming from a place of Divine Truth. That dude is an incarnated being with his own opinions about life on a planet he may or may not ever have even been to. So just… consider the context before you base your life on his opinions about how you should be living your life. All I’m sayin’… (And for the record, yes, Abraham is a collective consciousness, but that doesn’t mean that that collective consciousness isn’t incarnated. People make this mistake often too – there are incarnated collective consciousnesses, which are really just the equivalent of incarnated people who share one consciousness, like a hive mind network (like the werewolves in Twilight… yes, I used a Twilight reference… I went there.) and there are collective consciousnesses that are made up of souls or divine beings. Incarnated beings are programed with all of the beliefs and opinions necessary for that particular lifetime. It’s not the same as Divine Truth that souls have. Just food for thought the next time you’re chatting with beings from Andromeda or Pleidia and taking what they say as Divine Truth for a human life on earth. You’re getting their perspective on what they think a life on earth should be like. That does not mean they looked at your soul plan for what you wanted your life to be like. That’s like your judgey aunt coming to visit who has an opinion on you wanting to be an accountant and she’s trying to force you to travel and be an artist. Just cause they’re off world does not mean they get an opinion on how you live your life. Keep that in mind before you take their advice.)

So, what is the Law of Attraction? It’s the concept that we are in constant communication with the world around us. We co-create our realities. And what we think and believe and feel creates a vibration that resonates with the world around us to bring us (or ‘attract’) those things to us that match our vibration. So if you’re happy, you’ll bring the situations and people to you that are happy. If you’re sad or frustrated, you’ll bring the situations or people to you that are sad. This accidentally sets up a fear-based ‘so only think happy thoughts always’, which is the heart of Toxic Positivity. 

The thing is, those events and people and situations are really just neutral things. Your experience of them is what you can control – whether or not you decide to be happy or sad or angry about them. This is the difference between a positive mindset versus Toxic Positivity. That traffic jam you’re stuck in? From the Toxic Positivity crowd – you created it because you woke up grumpy, are worried about being late for your meeting, and now here you are. You failed at being unrealistically happy and now here is your punishment. A positive mindset, for contrast, says that it is perfectly normal for you to be feeling nervous about the presentation you have to give at your meeting so you are going to love and accept that feeling and allow yourself that beautiful human experience and luckily here’s a wonderfully valid reason for being a little late so you get some extra practice time in. Thanks for always having my back, Universe! 

People who use positivity as a deflection mechanism for not dealing with human emotions generally have some deep feelings within themselves around what human emotions are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But human emotional experiences are like a colour wheel. Saying that only some of those colours are ‘good’ colours just limits your ability to create art. Why is yellow good but magenta is bad? Personal preference, sure, you can like the experience of one more than the other, but it doesn’t make you a bad person to like magenta. And that’s what the Toxic Positivity people would have you believe. That if you have chronic depression or anxiety, that you are a bad person. That’s like telling someone with diabetes that they are bad people. It’s just garbage. That’s not Divine Love. That’s ego based, Toxic Positivity from someone who has a serious lack of self love and self acceptance and a lot to learn as a soul. So love them for their lack of understanding, but maybe spend more time with people who aren’t quite so judgey. 

Loving yourself while you’re sad or angry or any of those emotions turns that vibration to one of love and self-acceptance. That’s where people get the Law of Attraction wrong. It’s not about not feeling those emotions – we’re human, we’re going to – it’s about loving the f’ing bloody crap out of yourself, knowing you are a beautiful person and enjoying the experience of anger, or sadness, or whathaveyou. Being afraid of feeling a particular feeling pretty much just guarantees you’re going to feel it a whole lot more. But when you get to paint with all of the colours of the rainbow and thoroughly love and enjoy the experience of all of them – life gets a lot more enjoyable. 

Thanks for reading! Till next time, Folks!

Do Stars Have Consciousness?

I am a giant lover of all things woo woo. Law of Attraction, E-Squared, Many Lives Many Masters, Extra-terrestrial communications, etc etc. Love it. My physics teacher in high school was hardcore into X-Files and as a class, we watched it religiously. He would challenge us to question everything and keep an open mind. My high school biology teacher taught me that the best thing about biology is that there is always an exception to the rule and life will always find a way to survive anywhere. What’s that you say? Life can’t exist at temperatures above 100 degrees Celsius? Oh, wait - thermophiles. Okay, life can’t exist is extremely acidic environments - acidophiles can! Hmm, legendary giant squids? Yup - they exist too. 

As scientists, our job isn’t just to explore the known but to explore the unknown. That’s the whole point of discovery: not to assume something doesn’t exist, but to wonder if it does. This article on the theory of a conscious universe, for example, is such a great example of why I fell in love with science in the first place. It’s open to the possibilities. We don’t actually know the answers yet, but we’re willing to design some experiments to try to figure them out, fully knowing that we may never really have the full picture. And that’s okay. Because I kind of like living in a world where not everything has been discovered yet, where there is still some mystery left to the workings of the Universe. Because otherwise, we’re just validating other people’s research instead of coming up with our own unique ideas. And personally, I’m way more interested in figuring out why something went wrong than just seeing it go right, yet again… sigh… Give me a good outlier to investigate any day, because it’s from those outliers where so many great discoveries have originated.

Overcoming Overactive Empathy

So, you got yourself all open to the Universe and now you can’t shut it out, huh? Don’t worry. I can help. 

Overactive empathy is a new kind of buzzword for the energy crowd. It’s one of my favourite new things because it helps to highlight why I teach stuff the way I do. 

First rule of energy management - take care of yourself first. You are responsible for you. That means that you are responsible for only you, not anyone else. How someone else feels is not your problem. Your job isn’t to have to mitigate anyone else’s emotional reactions. Your job is to mitigate yours. 

Overactive empathy happens when we forget rule # 1 - take care of yourself first. 

Second rule of energy management - you cannot solve an energy problem with energy stuff. I know, sucks right? You went looking for a solution to all of your problems in the woo and found that it just amplified your problems instead of fixed them? That’s because that’s what it does. Hence rule the first. 

You need a good, solid, physical, real world foundation before you start reaching for higher level stuff. Because Law of Attraction - whatever you’re vibrating at resonates with the world around you to bring you more of what you already are. So if you’re reaching for energy stuff because you’re lonely and looking for connection, guess what? The energy world is just going to bring you more experiences that make you feel lonely and looking for connection. 

You have to solve you first before you start sending any vibrations out into the world. 

The way to look at it is that the Universe is trying to help you learn you. So it will helpfully bring you everything you need to understand your own blocks. That means playing them out over and over until you see the pattern. 

In non-energy speak, this is called behavioural conditioning and why cognitive behavioural therapy has become such an important tool to understand your behavioural loops and change them. So, to solve an energy problem, we can find the solutions in the non-energy world, and them apply them to the energy world. 

Sometimes, this can be difficult to do. So, another way we can do this is to utilize the energy world to help us train and practice something in a non-confrontational, risk free way, and then apply that to our real lives. This is the basis for a lot of spiritual therapy or energy management practices. It’s basically just neuro-rehabilitation exercises but dressed up in fun and fancy woo speak. 

A great example I use is Angel Therapy. Angel Therapy was designed as a treatment program for, basically, mom guilt. Mom guilt stems from the feeling that you’re not being ‘mom enough’ if you’re not putting everyone else first. That leads to burnout and overwhelm. As a treatment program, you’re taught the names of the angels, their colours, what they do, and then you practice asking your angels for help with stuff. It’s a neuro-rehabilitation program. You get to practice asking for the things you need from the appropriate people to ask it from in a risk free, non-confrontational way. And then, once you’ve mastered that, you begin to apply it to your real life - asking your husband to do the dishes, asking the kids to pick up their toys, etc. Suddenly you feel better, have more energy, good-bye mom guilt, and life seems so much rosier. 

That’s what I mean by you have to solve an energy problem in the real world. Without fixing the underlying reasons for your burnout and overwhelm - not having learned the skills to ask the right people for what you need in a way that gets those needs met - you’ll just continue feeling crappy and searching the woo world for solutions that don’t help, compounding the problem.

Remember that saying, ‘happiness is an inside job’? It’s true. You have to get yourself to a good place first, then go exploring the woo. Don’t look to the woo to fix you. It’ll just amplify what you’ve already got.  

So, what is overactive empathy in real world speak - boundary issues. It means that you struggle with feeling confident in asserting your boundaries and having them respected somewhere in your life. You feel like you are responsible for someone else’s emotional responses, so you take over the job of ‘feeling’ it for them so that you can mitigate their reactions. 

So, how do you fix it? There are two ways - address it by practicing boundary setting in real life. Or, if that’s too hard at first, strengthening the areas of your brain responsible for boundary setting with ‘energy exercises’ until you feel more confident and then practicing setting boundaries in real life. 

See how both solutions end up with you doing it in real life? It’s honestly the only way to fix an energy problem. 

So, what are some good energy exercises for boundary setting? Shielding exercises are a great one - that’s visualizing light bubbles around you and others that keep your emotions and energy yours and their emotions and energy theirs. You strengthen that part of the brain that recognizes ‘my responsibility’ versus ‘their responsibility’. 

Once you feel confident with that, move on to practicing it in real life. When someone is upset, try not to rush in and fix it. Practice surrounding them and you with the light bubbles and saying in your head ‘your feelings and energy are your responsibility, not mine. My responsibility is to my energy and emotions.’ And then do something to get your mind off of it instead of ruminating on everything that you should have done to fix it for them. 

Luckily, the Universe will provide you with all kinds of opportunities to practice good boundaries until you no longer need the practice. That’s when you know you’ve ‘levelled up’, so to speak. You will no longer be vibrating at ‘I have boundary issues’ so you won’t be bringing stuff that keeps you having boundary issues to you. See how that works? 

If it’s all clear as mud, feel free to reach out and we can chat about your specific situation and come up with more tailored exercises more specific to you. We’re in this together. Don’t feel like you’ve got to figure it all out on your own. I’m here to help!

Til next time, folks!