Where Positive Psychology Goes Wrong

A Love Letter to Truth Over Perfection

Positive psychology and positive mindset culture have offered the world some real gifts: a renewed focus on gratitude, strengths, and the ability to reframe. But somewhere along the way, they started to miss the mark. Instead of fostering resilience, they’ve become shorthand for bypassing pain, rewarding performance, and pathologizing very normal human experiences.

This isn’t a takedown. It’s a reclamation.

Because sometimes the most psychologically sound thing you can do isn’t to "focus on the good" — it’s to sit with the truth of where you actually are.

1. It Pathologizes Normal Emotions

Positive psychology often treats sadness, anger, or grief as problems to fix. If you’re not happy, you must be broken. If you’re discouraged, you must be low-vibe. But discomfort is a normal, intelligent response to life. Growth, grief, and awakening often come through those feelings, not in spite of them.

2. It Promotes Emotional Bypass

In a rush to feel better, many are taught to jump to gratitude, affirmation, or reframing. But emotional bypassing delays real healing. It teaches us to skip the work of emotional digestion and go straight to the shiny outcome. Real transformation doesn’t happen that way. It happens in the hard conversations, the stillness, the tears.

3. It Rewards Performance Over Authenticity

In many leadership and entrepreneurial spaces, positivity becomes performance. We’re expected to look like we have it all together. Vulnerability is sometimes welcomed, but only when it’s neatly packaged with a takeaway. The truth is: some days we’re just human. And there’s nothing inspirational about denying that.

4. It Ignores Systems and Context

"Change your thoughts, change your life" can be empowering. But it becomes dangerous when used to ignore the real impact of trauma, racism, classism, chronic illness, and systemic inequality. Not everything can be mindset-ed away. And pretending it can just blames the individual for what the system creates.

5. It Creates Shame Around Struggle

When you’re surrounded by high-vibe culture, struggle starts to feel like failure. If you’re not feeling grateful, happy, or successful, you must be doing something wrong. But that just adds a second layer of suffering: shame for being human.

What We Actually Need

We need a psychological culture that can hold paradox. That doesn’t flinch in the face of grief. That can celebrate joy without erasing pain. That lets us say: “This is hard. And I’m still here.”

A positive mindset isn’t the goal. A truthful one is.

That’s where the good stuff lives. And it’s where we come home to ourselves.