For a while now, my husband and I have been facing a series of personal crises that have left us only half-jokingly pondering whether the Biblical Book of Job was written especially for us. A cancer diagnosis. A heart attack. The deaths of multiple loved ones over a very short period of time. In the middle of all this, a pandemic with restrictions that felt like a prison sentence in solitary confinement. And we’ve been asking ourselves, “How do we get through this ‘midnight of the soul’ with our lives, our relationships, and our faith intact?”

When we sought professional counseling to help us process all this – a wise decision, I now believe – I sent a warning shot across the bow to Robin, our therapist: No toxic positivity, please. I wanted at least one place where I didn’t have to say “fine” when asked how I was doing. After all, anyone who attends 12-Step meetings knows what “fine” really means, right? (Clean version: A Frazzled, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional mess.) What I needed, I told Robin, was a place where I could say, “I’m scared. I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted.” And not be judged.

Far from being a sign of “adjustment disorder” – or any other pathologizing label insurance companies want mental health professionals to paste on people as a condition for covering the cost of therapy sessions – my attitude going into counseling may be entirely healthy, according to both secular and spiritual experts.

What is toxic positivity?

Toxic positivity is the demand that we project a relentlessly upbeat attitude regardless of our actual feelings and circumstances, says Miami-based psychotherapist Whitney Goodman. “Every day we’re bombarded with pressure to be positive,” she explains in her book Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy. “Even faced with illness, loss, breakups, and other challenges, there’s little space for talking about our real feelings – and processing them so that we can feel better and move forward.”

Before I go further, let me emphasize that I’m not suggesting all positivity is wrong. I certainly am grateful for the get-well wishes and prayers, the delicious meals people have sent to our house when we didn’t feel like cooking, the many offers to assist with transportation and other needs, the cat photos and baby goat videos and bad puns posted to our Facebook pages, and the many other things our wonderful family members and friends have done to help us feel supported as we’ve moved through our recent crises. However, it is quite possible to experience “positive” emotions such as gratitude and “negative” emotions such as grief simultaneously. For example, when I’ve lost loved ones, I’ve felt both gratitude for their lives and grief over their loss. At the same time.

According to Goodman, positivity becomes toxic when someone seeks support, validation or compassion during trying times and is met instead with a platitude or a lecture, or is shamed for not being happy or positive enough.

Toxic positivity may be well-intentioned but often ends up feeling dismissive, she says. We may think we’re being supportive by offering platitudes such as “this too shall pass” when a friend is going through a difficult time. But in reality, we may be invalidating their experience by subtly suggesting that their feelings are somehow wrong. At worst, our good-vibes-only culture encourages emotional suppression and shames us for being too negative: You’re not the only one who has problems. Focus on the good things in your life and be grateful. It could be worse. Suck it up, buttercup. Spare us the pity party. Get over it already.

Toxic positivity too often has the effect of gaslighting people who have legitimate feelings or concerns, and may seem to imply that everything bad in their lives is their own fault, Goodman adds. Whether our goal is to help people feel better or to shame them, we tend to use platitudes and lectures as a conversation stopper. Always appearing positive and carefree allows us to deny our reality or the other person’s, rationalize unacceptable situations, or avoid taking responsibility, and can instantly shut down uncomfortable dialogue.

I suspect toxic positivity may be one of the drivers behind the nastiness of our current culture wars. In our day-to-day conversations, how long can we discuss news stories about tragedies such as floods or earthquakes, let alone “political” issues such as racism or gun violence, before someone subtly or not-so-subtly encourages us to change the subject? And while our society allows us few acceptable outlets for the legitimate expression of suffering and anguish, there is one negative emotion that is not only accepted but celebrated: Self-righteous outrage. We are allowed to call people names, hurl insults and assassinate each other’s character, but heaven forbid we break down and cry when we are grieving.

Putting on our ‘church face’

Unfortunately, even our churches – at least in the U.S. – often don’t do much better with strong “negative” emotions, according to Methodist pastor Abby Norman. “In church,” she says in the book Yes You Can Talk to God Like That, “we slap a smile on and wear the mask I have heard called ‘church face.’ As in, ‘I was crying in the parking lot, but I put my church face on and walked into the foyer and told everyone I was fine.’ Somehow, we’ve decided that church is where everyone is supposed to be OK, fine, great! We are afraid our church family can’t handle our sorrows.”

Church people can be nearly as uncomfortable with suffering and anguish as secular folks are, so we may also discourage overt expressions of strong emotions. The result? At church, we often get to hear still more dreadful lectures and platitudes: God is good, all the time! Everything happens for a reason. You mustn’t question God’s will. God won’t give you more than you can handle. If we fail to keep our “church face” properly pasted on at all times, it may be implied that we lack enough faith to trust God appropriately.

Some folks suggest that even our private prayers should reflect a good-vibes-only attitude. Prayers of praise and thanksgiving only, we may be told. If we ask for anything, we must only ask for knowledge of God’s will for us. Heaven forbid that we ask for something selfish, or admit to God that we’re afraid or angry. “Perhaps we’re afraid even God can’t handle the hardest stuff in our lives,” Norman laments.

This, she believes, is pretty unhealthy. “Imagine going to see your doctor, but instead of explaining what is wrong with you, you immediately tell the doctor you are fine or that it isn’t that bad,” she explains. “Why even bother going? Coming to God and to the greater body of Christ as though everything is fine when it is not fine is exactly what we do at church. Then we wonder why church doesn’t feel good or why we can’t heal.”

An antidote from the Bible

Fortunately, the Bible offers a healthy antidote to toxic positivity: Lament.

According to Norman, lament takes up a surprising amount of space in Scripture. “People giving God the what-for, while not taught in Sunday School, is actually almost a third of the Bible,” she points out. “When categorizing the Psalms, experts say that 40 percent of them are psalms of lament.”

Indeed, the Book of Psalms brims with prayers about pain, anguish, fear and grief. Take passages like Psalm 6:6:

I am weary with my moaning;
    every night I flood my bed with tears;
    I drench my couch with my weeping.

David certainly spews out some honest feelings in Psalm 22:14-15:

I am poured out like water,
    and all my bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax;
    it has melted within me.
My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
    and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
    you lay me in the dust of death.

In fact, Psalm 22 continues in this vein for 21 verses before turning to expressions of faith that God will deliver him from harm.

Additional examples of Biblical lament abound:

• The Bible offers us the entire Book of Lamentations, which is chock full of passages like 3:17-18: “My soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is; … my endurance has perished; so has my hope from the LORD.” (Maybe it should come as no surprise in our good-vibes-only circles that Lamentations seems to be one of the most neglected books of the Bible.)

• The Hebrew custom of wailing and rending one’s garments to express deep anguish upon the death of a loved one or a great calamity appears several times in the Bible. Reuben rent his clothes when he found that Joseph had been taken from the pit (Genesis 37:29).  David rent his garments when he heard that Absalom had slain his brothers (2 Samuel 13:31).  

• When Job fell on excruciatingly hard times, he didn’t lose his faith, but he did confront God, demanding to know why these things were happening to him. He even wanted to put God on trial. Meanwhile, his friends responded the way too many of us do. At first, they were empathetic, but then began offering useless advice and even asking what Job had done to deserve his misfortune.

• Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes reminds us that for everything, there is a season. A time to weep and a time to mourn are sanctified, right along with a time to laugh and a time to dance.

• Jesus wept. More than once. As he faced crucifixion, he pleaded with God, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” And while he hung on the cross, he asked, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

In other words, Job and David and even Jesus were willing to talk to God in ways many of us can’t quite manage, and none of them were struck by lightning as a result.

Lament can be healthy

“Lament allows us to fully face and name our pain,” says longtime Bible Project Blog contributor Whitney Woollard. “It creates space for future resolution and hope without glossing over our trauma.”

In a post titled “Lamentations: The Volatile Voice of Grief” (link HERE), Woollard explains that lament “gives us permission to protest life’s difficulties, to scream, cry, vent, plead, and complain in the presence of God and others. It lets us ask the hard questions without condemnation: Why did this have to happen? How could you allow it? Where are you in the midst of it? It allows weeping without explanation. It might be messy and uncomfortable.”

By the way, God is quite capable of handling our negative feelings, including our anger, according to Jesuit priest Jim McDermott. “Most of us were taught being angry at God was taboo, at least a sin and at worst ‘duck your head because the lightning is coming’ dangerous,” he says in a recent blog post (link HERE). “But we have known hard times, some of us very hard times, or we have witnessed people we love ravaged by disease or addiction in ways that just seem cruel or malicious. It’s only natural in those moments to turn to God, who we hear over and over at church is here for us, loves us, walks with us, and ask, ‘Well? How about it? Where are you now that we actually need you?’”

Woollard believes we could benefit from including elements of lament in both our individual and congregational lives.

“Incorporating prayers of lament into a Christian worship service or small gathering is a way to give voice to hurting believers,” says Woollard. “It says, ‘We see you and we grieve alongside you.’ In a global village where disasters, wars, shootings, and famines are brought before our eyes daily, it’s natural that we should weep with one another by sharing in the God-given language of lament and crying out ‘How? Why?’ alongside them. Lament then, is a powerful practice that gives voice to our grief and initiates the healing process.”

On an individual level, “if you feel alone, forsaken, or abandoned by God, give honest expression to those feelings,” Woollard suggests. “If you’re exhausted by life’s blows, having lost all endurance or the will to go on, tell it to God. Really. The Bible wants you to do this.”

If we can trust God to handle our anger and our sadness, we can avoid using these emotions to damage other people or ourselves by bringing them into our prayers, says Kaya Oakes, a contributing writer for America magazine (link HERE). “Yes, you’re angry,” she points out. “Yes, you’re sad. God is present to us in those states of emotional turmoil, too. But God isn’t asking us to move on or let go; like a trusted friend or a good therapist, God simply receives our sorrow and desolation, and gives it a place to go.”

We need not edit our prayers

In other words, we need not edit ourselves when praying, but can be as brutally honest as we need to be when life gets painful. “As in any meaningful relationship, sometimes taking the risk of saying what you actually think and feel is itself the path out of the desert,” says McDermott. “What is shared is no longer carried alone; in fact, it’s often released.”

Woollard concurs. “If you’re not used to this kind of raw honesty in God’s presence, it might seem scary at first. That’s okay. Just know that lament isn’t irreverent; it’s biblical. Going to God in your grief is an act of faith all on its own.”

This all sounds very reassuring to me because I must confess that, during a crisis, most of my prayers tend to be of the foxhole variety:

Dear God, please get us out of this jam. Help!

One time, while I drove to the emergency room in the wee hours of the morning – for the fourth time in two weeks – I just plain screamed:

DEAR GOD, MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!!

My prayers have also sounded a lot like lament on numerous occasions:

Dear God, I’m tired of cancer. I’m tired of heart problems. I’m tired of arthritis pain everywhere that’s so bad I can’t sleep. I’m tired of test results with nasty surprises. I’m tired of fighting with insurance companies every single time a doctor changes one of our medications. I’m tired of doctors who don’t want to communicate and collaborate because of turf issues. I’m tired. I’m tired. I’m tired.

So, here’s another heartfelt prayer.

Dear God: To be perfectly honest, I’m scared. I’m overwhelmed. I’m exhausted. Thank-you for listening. Amen.