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The term toxic positivity has gained popularity in recent years, referring to moments when people responded to others’ struggles with surface-deep assurances and clichéd phrases such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” or, “Have you tried yoga?”
But there is a similar, if lesser-known, concept that is more inner-directed: emotional perfectionism.
While we usually think of a perfectionist as someone who holds themselves to a high standard for how they look, behave, or work, emotional perfectionists hold themselves to a similar standard regarding how they feel. Rather than encouraging others to look on the bright side (toxic positivity), they expect themselves to be unfailingly upbeat.
“It’s really when you have an emotion about emotion, and you’re suppressing what you have labeled the bad emotion,” said Annie Hickox, a psychologist who also holds a Ph.D. in clinical neuroscience. “Emotional perfectionism often follows a script of: ‘We shouldn’t do this,’ ‘I shouldn’t be mad about that,’ ‘I shouldn’t be angry,’ ” added Hickox, who coined the term in 2016.
Hickox believes emotional perfectionism could be an unrecognized source of anxiety, based on experience with her patients. “They’ll say, ‘Oh no, I’m not a perfectionist.’ But you can find thoughts where they’re holding themselves up to a very high standard,” she said.
Toxic positivity and emotional perfectionism have the same underlying root cause: a discomfort with other people’s negative emotions. Vrinda Kalia, a psychology professor at Miami University who studies perfectionism and emotional expression, said that expecting life — yours or others’ — to be “awesome all the time” is extremely debilitating because it ignores reality. “This is not what life is like.”
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People who experience emotional perfectionism are reluctant to admit to negative emotions. (iStock)
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