The bad stuff is actually OK…

Image credit: Elise Gravel (http://elisegravel.com/en/)

I came across this image on-line the other day, and it speaks loudly to me as a former Christian Scientist. I think I’ve written on this subject deep in the early days of this blog, so this may be a bit of a re-visiting some ground I’ve covered, but now I want to do a bit of a deeper dive. This meme illustrates an issue that cuts deep for most of us former Christian Scientists, and it never really goes away. It is what I call the “bad” emotions and feelings.

Christian Science ingrains into its adherents what I have come to see as toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is, “…the act of avoiding, suppressing, or rejecting negative emotions or experiences.”_¹ If this doesn’t hit on the core of my upbringing and indoctrination in Christian Science, I don’t know what does!

Toxic positivity:

Until several years after I left Christian Science, I had never heard of the term toxic positivity. As an ex-Christian Scientist, I had always just thought of what people call toxic positivity as various versions of “deny bad stuff” or “always be happy”, which is what Christian Science theology ingrained in me. While I knew that the whole positive thinking movement was something well beyond Christian Science, and a sometimes unfortunate part of mainstream thought, I had never put an exact term to the toxic side of it. It is important to note that “toxic positivity” is not an official psychological term or diagnosis; rather, it describes a pattern of behaviour.² Like anything else in life, you need balance. Not all “positive thinking” is bad, and if you put too much of an emphasis or focus on the “bad” stuff, you can undercut needed emotional and mental health healing progress. But, the path to healing does sometimes lead through some dark corners, and you have to face them and walk through them if you want to heal. You cannot just simply deny them and move along.

Toxic positivity is the assumption that you should have a positive mindset and that everything is OK, when really, it isn’t.³

I found the above quote to be one of the best definitions of toxic positivity that I have found recently. It really nails it down to its essence, in my opinion. Toxic positivity is, to me, one of those terms that is easy to say, use, and apply, but do we really know what it means?

To illustrate what is meant by the term toxic positivity, here are some examples:⁴

• Statement: “I don’t know if I can have a relationship with my sister. She doesn’t treat me with decency and respect.” Response: “She’s family. You should love her no matter what.”
• Statement: “Work has been really stressful lately.” Response: “You’re lucky to even have a job.”
• Statement: “I’m having a hard day.” Response: “But you have so much to be grateful for.”

The Christian Science angle:

As a former Christian Scientist, the examples I just gave really hit home strongly, especially the first and third one. We were always told to see the “perfect image of God” in everyone, even in those who were clearly terrible people, like Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. For me, this set up one of so many contradictions I had to deal with. There were people you saw in the news, people from history, and people in your own life, that were straight-up shitty people with no redeeming qualities at all. Yet, Christian Science forced you to see good in them that was not necessarily there. Yes, my friends, this world is filled with purely evil people who have no positive or redeeming qualities at all. Not everyone is good, or even has a good side. Some people are just pure shit (like Nazis, for example). It is reality, and it is weirdly liberating for me to simply acknowledge that fact. This world is not an entirely good place. It never has been and never will be. That’s not pessimism, it’s realism.

For an example of how truly terrible this teaching of Christian Science can be in real life, I have heard many a story from Christian Science circles of women who were in severely abusive relationships being admonished to “see the good in their [abusive] partners…” yeah right, that beating you received is just an “illusion of mortal mind–that isn’t the real [insert name of abusive partner here]!” (“illusion of mortal mind” is one of the more common euphemisms found in Christian Science). That is just heaping more abuse on the abuse already suffered. Too many people, thanks to this teaching from Christian Science, have ended up locked into dangerous and abusive relationships because they felt that they just needed to see their shitty abusive partner as “God’s perfect child.”

We were also drilled ad nauseam to “always be grateful for what you have” to the point that many of us ex-Christian Scientists can’t even stand the word grateful. That’s all well and good, but it negates the real struggles people go through. Let me put this in a more stark way: if you had a friend who was diagnosed with a stage four cancer that was untreatable, would you tell them to be grateful for the good things they have/have had in their lives? I sure the hell hope you would not! Why then, would you do that to someone who is having a bad day, or who is going through a tough patch in their lives? I vividly remember, as a child in Sunday School, my classmate (and good friend) was paraplegic. Our teacher asked us, “If you could have anything you wanted, what would you want?” My classmate stated that he would like to be able to walk normally. That fucking asshole of a teacher ripped into my friend, angrily telling him he needed to be more grateful for the abilities he did have. Fuck, what an asshole! All the kid wanted was to be able to do what the rest of us took for granted. I will never forget this. That is an extreme example of the toxicity that can be found in Christian Science and positive thinking.

Some concluding thoughts (and a rant or two):

Positive thinking is not entirely bad, as long as real struggles and real emotions are not negated or suppressed. The struggle someone is going through needs to be acknowledged and validated, not negated, otherwise real healing cannot happen. Toxic positivity arises when negative emotions are rejected out of hand, or the positive thinking becomes a strategy to avoid things that are uncomfortable. In the end, it is all about balance. Walking through the dark places brings you to the light. Healthy positive reinforcement can provide encouragement when it is needed, and I think it is important not to wallow constantly and indefinitely in the negative.

Christian Science weaponizes positive thinking and gratitude in ways that are psychologically abusive. If you are not “grateful” enough for what you have, well fuck you, you ungrateful wretch! No more for you! If a partner or family member is abusive towards you, well you’re just not seeing the “real” and “perfect child of God” that that abusive person supposedly really is (by the way, they’re not, they are shit humans, plain and simple). Christian Science puts all of the blame and onus on the victim and little to nothing on the perpetrator–the perpetrator is “perfect”, you (the victim) must see them that way, and worse yet, support the perpetrator in their healing journey by seeing them as that “perfect reflection of God”. I kid you not, this is the reality in many peoples’ experiences. You, as the victim, are solely to blame for what happens to you. What a load of maliciously abusive crap! Even now, over a decade out from Christian Science, I am still unpacking the damage it has done to me psychologically. The way Christian Science teachings can gaslight victims and nurture abusers makes my anger burn hot.

Now, I await the inevitable defensive comments from the Christian Science/religion-apologist readers who will tell me to stop wallowing in it; or to stop rehashing it; to let go of my anger; or try to say, “that’s not really what Christian Science teaches/you just don’t ‘understand’ it well enough,” or whatever the excuse du jour it is. I’ll post your comments as long as they conform to my comments policy, but let me offer a heartfelt “fuck you” in advance. I am healing from this shitty fucking cult and what it’s done to me, and so are many others. I am doing just fine, because I am actually doing something about it (unlike in Christian Science where you just deny the shit), but like it or not, the healing process will be ongoing for the rest of my life. Counselling is an integral part of my healing. Writing here is part of my healing too. If you want to invalidate my experience, go ahead if that makes you feel better. I may respond, and if I do, I feel no need to be nice or polite, and neither does anybody else who may choose to respond–just as long as you are mindful of my comments policy.

____________________

Footnotes:

¹ “Toxic Positivity.” Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, LLC. n.d. Web. 22 July 2023.

² Ibid.

³ Scully, Simone M. “‘Toxic Positivity’ Is Real — and It’s a Big Problem During the Pandemic.” healthline. Healthline Media, LLC. 4 July 2023. Web. 22 July 2023.

⁴ Psychology Today, supra note 1.

⁵ Scully, supra note 3.

Related Links:

Elise Gravel: author and illustrator – this is the website that the meme that inspired this post came from. Gravel is an author and illustrator based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.