Toxic Positivity: How You Can Sabotage Your Manifestation by Suppressing Emotions

Have you ever felt afraid to be upset and have forced yourself to quickly be positive again, because you might sabotage your manifestation? Or that you might “attract” something bad if you talk about your negative feelings? Or that everyone should pray harder/ be more spiritual to deal with life’s problems? Such ideas land us in a zone of toxic positivity. In other words, if we keep believing that we’re never meant to be sad or upset, we’re rejecting half of our human experience.

And in doing this, we lead ourselves into a trap of inauthenticity and more overwhelm! Of course, this is just our innocent attempt to create a happier life for ourselves. But it can actually, ironically mess up our manifestation because we’re not letting ourselves heal the fears that hold us back.

What do I mean by that all of that? Let’s unpack it here together.

The truth is, our feelings are an indicator, an inner compass of what’s going on. They are NOT bad – they’re actually what help you understand if something sat well with you or not.

If you were emotionless, nothing would trigger a response from you. Neither would wrong behaviour make you upset, nor would misfortune make you sad.

What’s wrong with that, you might wonder. I mean technically, the description above may sound like an enlightened person who is unshaken. True – but they are not unshaken because they neglect their emotions. Rather because they have full MASTERY over their emotions.

So they’re not indulging or avoiding their emotions – they are holding full awareness and using these emotions as the guide to their response to a situation.

Sounds more impressive and more human, right? Exactly.

Our spiritual journey is about embracing every single aspect of ourselves, including those parts that we may have never learned how to be with in the past.

Now comes the million-dollar question, how can you gain emotional mastery?

I have 3 tools for you to try out. I hope they help you become more aligned with whatever you’re manifesting for yourself, by stepping away from the toxic positivity and moving towards embracing your whole human experience.

#1 – Throw a 2-min pity party every day.

This is 120 seconds on the stopwatch where you give yourself CONSCIOUS permission to vent, rant, scream, cry, purge – whatever is your weapon of choice to release your emotions. Give voice to the very thoughts and feelings within you that are wanting to be heard.

The psychology of this tool? You are giving permission for energy to move through you. This is neither indulging endlessly in the mood nor running away from it. This is just enough time to let the emotion out, without spiralling down with it.

Sometimes, what all your conflicted parts inside need from you is for you to hear your own pain, to allow it to be here. And in doing that, you step into a deeper kind of inner alignment. One that is more integrated within oneself. From this place of integrity, you are now able to take more conscious actions towards your bigger visions.

When our group tried it a few months ago, everyone seemed to have a BLAST!

Set a timer on your stopwatch, let your emotions run their course for 2 minutes and see how this makes you feel.

#2 – Build emotional awareness.

The first stage of any change in life is having awareness. The ideas in this article might be new to you. But over time you’ll see that if you continue to think along these lines, ironically in being “more human” with your emotions, you’ll become more spiritual.

If this is new territory, start by learning to name your emotions. Several times a day, just check in with yourself and ask yourself how you’re feeling. You can even look in the mirror and ask yourself, looking into your own eyes.

Here are two tips to keep in mind:

• A feeling is something like sad, angry, happy, irritated, etc. Here’s a full wheel of emotions that you can refer to, to build your emotional vocabulary. Don’t resort to “I don’t know” – get curious about yourself and find out.

• A thought is something like “they shouldn’t have done that”. That’s not what we feel, that’s what we’re thinking. We often confuse what we’re thinking with what we’re feeling.

If you find yourself being able to spot the feeling underneath each thought, know that this self-reflection approach is working.

#3 – Build emotional intelligence.

Having built some levels of awareness, the next step is emotional intelligence, where you learn to work WITH your emotions.

The intention for emotional intelligence is to be able to find the deeper wisdom of even the most strange and unsettling emotions. As you begin to find value in your emotions, they become a catalyst in your spiritual development. And then you get to create that sacred space for others to be their “emotional selves” in front of you.

For example, your relationship with anger might be a bad thing. But what if anger wasn’t the problem, and your reaction that comes out of anger was? As you see this, you might start asking yourself what anger really wants for you, and figure out ways to work with that anger versus trying to suppress it.

By feeling emotions, you free them. See if you can feel all the feelings and ask them what they really want for you?

And if you’d like to explore emotional mastery with me, please know that there are in-depth tools and techniques that I’ve been trained in, in order to facilitate this depth of work for you.

Concluding Thoughts

That said, these are just some simple ways through which you can start becoming more YOU and creating a reality that is in alignment with you. Don’t let the toxic positivity mindset stray you away from the very manifestations you’re working so intentionally to create.

I’d love to know what other questions come to mind for you and to be able to help you answer them. Do let me know in the comments below!

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