Toxic Positivity in Healing
The thin line between Self-Care and Self-Torture
I attended a yoga class, intense and healing focused. The intention given for the class was to feel our bodies light up in ways we hadn’t felt before. My yoga practice had always been about finding the stuck places and then pushing through them—taking each pose to the furthest, deepest stretch I could reach. I had been told long ago that pain meant the work was working, so I pushed myself as far as I could hoping that it would heal some bad patterns and deeply held stress from trauma even more effectively.
I thought I should pursue release as aggressively as I could and that through enough hard work I could try to get back to who I used to be.
Never ceasing in self analysis, intense emotional releases, pushing myself to attain every sort of meditative state I could and always aggressively pursuing a different self. Unknowingly, echoing and copying the messages of shame from my childhood the whole time.
I was once the golden child of my family. My parents loved the ways I improved their reputation. But at some point that was all squandered and I was badly hurt. On top of being hurt I was, from then on, also shamed for even acting hurt.
Trauma led me to hide the light that used to draw people to my parents and it was replaced with anger, disdain, and sarcasm.
My parents were not happy with the changes.
My emotional, distant, and ungracious new personality became a focal point for my parents. As much as they could, they tried to fix me. They tried to compel me to fix myself via instilling beliefs and ideas into my pliable young mind. The conversion therapy went horribly, unimaginably off track and left me traumatized in ways that no one could’ve expected. Although it would later by grossly overshadowed; the unfortunately common pain of “conversion therapy” was still present. It originally started at home with my own parents as the facilitators. This was all layered on top of pain and social issues resulting from trauma, leading to no shortage of problems my parents thought I should fix.
Trauma’s resultant anti-social behavior—anger, numbness, dissociation, and generally being off-putting by being emotional—created a second space for the message that I “needed to change” to enter my life.
Public school.
My religious parents sent us to a small christian school, more like homeschool as the teachers were not certified and it closed when not enough people were attending. I started puberty, conversion therapy, 6th grade, and the trauma that would prompt my healing journey all within a matter of months. These repeated messages from my peers only confirmed what my parents had already laid down: that I had something very wrong with me and I needed to fix myself before I could be ok.
Returning to the yoga class that prompted me to write, to the instructor reminding the class, “Yoga is self-care, not self-torture.”
Self-Torture. The words struck me.
But it wasn’t until another writer compared their endless pursuit of therapeutic solutions to mental self-flagellation. That was when I saw it: thinking that by feeling and analyzing and crying and going through it all for the sake of healing; my mind went to middle school history and the Black Plague. One solution that people attempted was having groups of monks walking from town to town lashing themselves on the back with whips. They believed that the plague was God’s Punishment and that by punishing themselves they could mitigate some of the divine justice they believed themselves to be experiencing. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. Maybe the plague was divine justice, maybe it was a consequence of the pope declaring cats to be demonic, igniting a cat genocide that allowed rats to thrive… but I digress.
Years and years went by between these mirrors of pain and shame, beating myself up for being hurt. Adding judgment to suffering I started pushing myself as forcefully as I could into anything that helped even a little bit. Without any other explanation, or information, or agency I internalized the belief that being gay was the problem that needed fixing in order for my inner child to be loved and accepted by my parents and peers. That was the first thing that I was running away from.
I began shaping my life around how I could best repress and “fix” myself. I kept down this path, meeting with church leaders, tracking porn-usage, and treating my young self like an addict in recovery instead of a teenager in puberty. To this day my father will tell you that homosexuality is my burden to deal with like how another person might struggle with kleptomania or addiction.
The mindset was not entirely unhelpful, through those meditative sessions and letting the large emotions out as largely as it needed to eventually helped. At 19 I turned a corner, realizing that I was just damaging myself trying to fix something that was never broken to begin with. That opened the door for me to finally work on the real pain I was holding.
That wouldn't reveal itself until another 3 years later, but all the while, I still held so much shame. I was still running. I just didn’t know what exactly I was running from. The work paid off for me very recently. Opening up and speaking truth to my experience—starting with my earlier essay Christ-Like Suffering and extending to sharing with others in my life and in my family—set in motion a domino effect that improved every aspect of my life in a matter of days. From conversion therapy to working for a LGBT+ health clinic. From isolation to friends and community. From holding myself in—like a breath I don’t ever want to exhale—to living openly and allowing the fallout of my experience to actually fall out onto those responsible instead of continuing to blame myself.
I find myself in a new place then, where I cannot continue in the way I have been going.
By always going back to who I was at my worst and running from that person, I only strengthened the idea of that horrible version in my mind. As long as I was running from who I didn’t want to be, that person would always be chasing after me.
A new perspective is slowly percolating to the top of my mind. Before my 19 year old self reached the realization that being gay was nothing that needed to be fixed I had to go through a very painful process of killing the future version of myself that I thought I wanted.
Goodbye anti-gay Republican politician who resigns in disgrace after people find out he was having an affair with his young intern Brandon or Trevor, or something like that. I’m walking down a much better path.
However, without a future to look forward to, my temporal anchor in life was holding me in that painful past. Constantly revisiting the worst things in my mind, memory, and personality, to check if I am further away from them than last time seems like progress, but that constant revisiting also kept those horrible memories alive in me.
Sadly, we settle for what we are used to even when what we are used to is pain.
-R.H. Sin
Two conjoined epiphanies are arriving in my life simultaneously. The first is that, for so long, I have been pursuing this goal of healing to please others in my life. My inner child, the one afraid of being left alone and bullied for the rest of my life, had been steering the ship at break-neck speed and we were gonna crash if we didn’t change direction. The second is that, after getting rid of who I used to think I wanted to be, I need to create new goals. I need to place a new anchor for my life, one in the future that I can move towards. The kind of person I want to become.
Now to get to that I have to deal with the fear created from the first time. When I thought I knew what I wanted to be and had to about-face to save myself. Obviously I don’t want to go through that experience again and have had lots of internal resistance to any sort of goal setting, or planning. When asked “what do you want?” my inner child would start a whole tantrum. He would say, “I Don’t!” and drop into a sitting meditation that looks more like a belligerent toddler than a Taoist master who has truly attained a state of being desireless. My wants were never supposed to be a priority, only how I can help others.
Only how I can be used by others.
My inner self rejects the idea that I can actually live for myself, and my own goals, and so I have had to be creative and start where I can.
Fortunately and ironically, as the universe tends to work, I have someone in my life who has been fully steeped into personal development ideology. This person has even successfully dodged the cults of personality that fill the inspirational speaker environment. He has given me some great tools and although I frustrate him with my resistance, I am softly easing myself into it with just simple manifestations and affirmations. Writing down a few “I am” statements. Posting them where I can see then. Reciting them when I think to. Gradually, I’m working up to having a vision board and life plan and goals and all that stuff.
I was so against that world when I met him so at first there was nothing but contention for us there. Positive and uplifting self-development was antithetical to my childhood of shame-driven healing and growth. Self-determination went against all the programming I had received.
One chapter ends and another begins. Having reached this point so far in my healing journey I am repeatedly finding that each step upwards precedes another. Once you start this work of developing and evolving forward you can’t stop. You can’t turn around, you won't let yourself. Once you start removing the blinders you can’t then put them back on and pretend that things can go on as they used to.
So this time, gently, comfortably, and out of my own goodness to myself, I go on to the next mountain. I only wonder how the climbing will feel as I learn how to look forward to the peak instead of scrambling desperately away from the base.