Toxic positivity is the "only good thoughts" mentality, and I think self-hypnosis sometimes gets lumped in with toxic positivity pretty often. Toxic positivity is different from optimism in that optimism still makes space for hard feelings, and toxic positivity stifles "undesired" emotions. If there isn't space for real life to happen and for your real life feelings to bubble up, those will feelings will still be there even if you choose to attempt to push those feelings away. The good vibes only manifesting mindset is actually unhelpful, because you can't process your feelings and any blocks you might have unless you move through them. Toxic positivity is a block or a wall that we put up around ourselves or put around other people.
Toxic positivity minimizes and invalidates feelings and struggles you experience, and is quite frankly, unhealthy. Within the core of toxic positivity is shaming, silencing, and over-simplifies complex issues.
Hypnofertility and Hypnobirthing encourage feeling your emotions so you can process them. Sometimes it's fully processing a smaller block you have, and sometimes overcoming a block means coming to a different place in how we see or understand it. When people suppress their emotions, they still end up being there and can come up in other ways (I'm looking at you irritability and anger!)
In many guided meditations with the goal of self-hypnosis will often suggest to set any thoughts, worries, or stressors aside for a moment -- temporarily! But the goal isn't for you to put it away long-term in an attempt to make believe they don't exist.
So what do we focus on instead of toxic positivity in Hypnobirthing and Hypnofertility?
acknowledgment
validation
compassion
connection
openness
Rational Thought Process (an exercise to help guide processing and finding helpful affirmations.)
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