This may sound familiar to you: I was taught- in life, and in some spiritual communities- that I should be positive, and that by focusing on negative emotions, I’m cultivating and growing negativity. You may have heard the phrase ‘watering the weeds’ to describe what can happen if we focus too much on the negative. 

That's true, at least to some extent. If we walk around all the time saying negative things, that can actually create the reality that we don't want. But here’s what a lot of us aren’t taught: when it comes to human emotions, we are all capable of and actually should have a whole range of emotions, including anger, guilt, shame and sadness. If we pretend like we're not supposed to have them, or if we believe we're not supposed to have them, we hide them away, either consciously or subconsciously. 

Unfortunately, despite our best intentions, these negative emotions don't go away. They become our shadow- the parts of us that we don’t want to acknowledge- and they end up negatively impacting our health, our behavior, and our relationships. That's why it's called ‘toxic positivity’; if we're positive all the time, but don’t acknowledge our own lived experience and the lived experience of people around us, then we're bypassing reality and can harm ourselves and others. Bypassing it doesn't make it go away- I promise, I tried for a very long time!

One of the things I love about EFT/tapping is that we don’t bypass our negative emotions. When we tap, we're actually saying that negative emotion over and over again as we're tapping through the different tapping points. 

Because we leave space for ourselves to feel exactly what we’re feeling, we avoid the toxic positivity. 

The tapping technique allows us to process whatever we’re feeling, and then perhaps let it go or learn something from it.  When we don't process it, when we don't sit with it and deal with it, then our negative emotions can hang around all the time. That may lead to always feeling sad (or angry, or ashamed) and spending that emotional energy in ways that we could spend it otherwise (rest, connection, joy). 

In order to avoid toxic positivity, it’s essential that we acknowledge the emotion, sit with it, and allow it to be what it is. EFT/Tapping is a great way to honor and acknowledge that we're all human beings, and that honoring our whole range of emotions- both positive and negative- allows us to be our full selves. 

If you’d like to learn more about EFT/Tapping- for yourself, and how to teach it to others- please check out my upcoming EFT/Tapping training. Added bonus: if you register before the early bird deadline, you get a free 1:1 tapping session with me ($250 value)!