The Harm of Toxic Positivity and Spiritual Bypassing: A Call for Authenticity and Personal Responsibility

In recent years there’s been growing awareness of the terms toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing, yet the deeper implications often remain diluted or misunderstood. Both concepts tend to stem from a well-intentioned desire to cope with pain or make sense of suffering but they can easily cause harm when they’re used to deny emotional truth or avoid personal accountability. Increasingly too the words authenticity and personal responsibility are being co-opted by spiritual communities, not as tools for growth but as ways to subtly shame others or elevate oneself, used to silence rather than support, bypass rather than feel.

Toxic Positivity, When Positivity Becomes Harmful

Positivity is often praised as a virtue, a way to stay resilient and hopeful, but sometimes we use positivity as a mask, a defence, a strategy to avoid facing the messier parts of our inner world, often this avoidance isn’t conscious or cruel, it comes from years of not feeling safe, from not being shown how to hold discomfort, from lacking nervous system regulation or emotional support, in those conditions positivity can feel like the only lifeline

The problem arises when this internal coping habit is projected outward and imposed onto others, when someone shares pain and instead of being met with compassion they’re told “don’t feel that way”, “stay positive”, “you’re creating bad energy” "stop playing the victim", this response dismisses their truth, it frames pain as failure and treats normal emotional responses as spiritual weakness

This is where positivity becomes toxic, it’s no longer about hope, it becomes a tool of avoidance, a weapon of shame, an emotional shutdown disguised as spiritual wisdom, people don’t always need advice, they often just need to be witnessed, they need space for their grief, anger, fear, confusion, not a shortcut to false light.

Real positivity holds space for reality, it doesn’t gloss over the hard stuff or pretend it doesn’t hurt, it allows the full spectrum of emotion to move, it values honesty and depth over appearances and perfection, it supports growth through presence not pressure.

Spiritual Bypassing, Avoidance Disguised as Enlightenment

Spiritual bypassing often overlaps with toxic positivity, it uses spiritual concepts to avoid emotional discomfort, instead of sitting with the truth of what’s arising we’re told “it’s part of the divine plan”, “your vibration created this”, “it’s just the moon”, these statements can offer comfort when used with nuance but more often they become a way to sidestep the work, to avoid accountability, to turn complex emotional experiences into a metaphysical blame game.

It gets more harmful when this language is used as hierarchy, when someone positions themselves as more enlightened, more aligned, more healed, and then uses that position to shame others for struggling, suddenly spiritual maturity is defined by how well you suppress your pain, how quickly you “rise above it”, how little you inconvenience others with your emotions.

At its most damaging, spiritual bypassing distorts concepts like personal responsibility, turning them into tools of blame rather than empowerment, if you’re grieving it’s because your vibration is low, if you’re anxious it’s because your thoughts are misaligned, if you’re angry you’re spiritually undeveloped, this is not personal responsibility, this is spiritual gaslighting

The same goes for authenticity, within these spaces authenticity is often twisted to mean “I speak my truth no matter how it lands”, “I do what I want because it’s my soul path”, but true authenticity isn’t performance or rebellion, it’s deep rooted self-honesty, it includes accountability, humility, care for impact, it’s not about bypassing boundaries or emotional awareness under the guise of being “real”.

What I Mean When I Say Authenticity and Personal Responsibility

When I speak about authenticity and personal responsibility I’m not pointing to forced positivity or to blaming the stars for our struggles, I’m not talking about toxic independence or denying support, I’m talking about choosing to meet our emotional landscape with honesty, I’m talking about feeling our grief fully, about owning our triggers instead of projecting them, about recognising when we’re acting from fear or pain and choosing to stay present anyway, if it feels safe to.

It’s not about blaming ourselves for what we feel or what’s happened to us, it’s about acknowledging the parts of us that need tending, listening, integrating, it’s about being curious instead of reactive, it’s saying this pain is real and I’m willing to understand it, not bury it under “love and light”, not hand it off to Mercury retrograde, not spiritualise it out of existence.

This kind of responsibility is rooted in compassion, it’s not about shame, it’s not about fixing yourself, it’s about taking ownership of how you respond, how you relate, how you move forward, even when things feel messy, unclear or hard.

Creating Spaces for Real Connection

If we want to create a culture of true healing we need to stop bypassing and start feeling from a resourced nervous sytem that has the capacity to feel, and sometimes not all at once but in a titrated way. We need to stop hiding behind mantras and start holding space for each other’s mess, true growth requires honesty not perfection, humility not performance.

Supporting others means listening not correcting, validating not minimizing, allowing space for their truth without turning it into a lesson or a lecture, the real spiritual path isn’t always neat or graceful, it’s raw, awkward, beautiful and fucking messy!

By moving beyond toxic positivity and spiritual bypassing we make space for wholeness, for the full messy spectrum of human experience, we stop fearing darkness and start integrating it, we let joy and pain sit at the same table, we begin to trust our own inner knowing instead of outsourcing it to gurus, cosmic weather or trend spirituality.

Authenticity and personal responsibility aren’t checklists or hashtags, they’re practices of coming home to ourselves, they’re what happens when we choose truth over performance, connection over control, and feeling over fleeing, only from that place can we truly support one another, and ourselves, on the path to healing and wholeness.