3 Common “Uplifting” Phrases That Are Subtly Toxic to Your Mental Health
Living in a culture in which awareness around mental health has become much more prominent, and in which phrases like “self-growth,” “self-care,” and “being trauma-informed” have become buzz words, it can be tempting to think that, as a whole, we’re growing in all the right ways.
But just as a tool as innocuous as gratitude can easily turn into toxic positivity, there are a few commonly repeated phrases that seem encouraging, uplifting, or validating on the surface, but in reality do more harm than good — and in far subtler ways than most of us realize.
So I’d like to call out the following phrases, and then offer three replacements we can use to bolster our self-confidence, self-compassion, and self-love in far more healing and lasting ways:
Phrase #1: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Actually, what doesn’t kill you often gives you trauma. For as many people who manage to get back up, learn, and recover from the traumatic event, there are just as many people who develop debilitating PTSD, negative coping mechanisms, and grow more jaded over time.
While I realize that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is, for the most part, to be taken metaphorically, the fact of the matter is that some things…
