The Paradox of Tolerance: Give Yourself Permission to Be Angry
So much for the tolerant Left, right?
When I was healing from my abusive relationship, I struggled for a long time with feeling responsible for everything bad that happened.
I thought if I had been stronger, if I hadn’t been autistic, if I had been better in every way — I wouldn’t have been treated like a problem to solve. Maybe I wouldn’t have been talked down to, berated, and blamed for everything that went wrong.
That self-blame doesn’t really go away, even though I logically know better now. I still occasionally struggle and feel useless and ‘less than.’ I think that’ll always be there.
But in the middle of all the pain and the sadness and the anxiety and the hurt, I found a way to break myself out of the spiral and shake it all off when I needed to. When it starts up, I know how to snap out of it and come back to myself.
When I finally left my abusive relationship, it was because somebody finally got it through my head that the problem wasn’t me.
I deserved better. I deserved to be treated better.
There was nothing wrong with me. He was the problem.
I learned how to stop blaming myself by turning it around. I learned to aim that blade where it should have gone in the first place, rather than carving myself up with painful barbs in the privacy of my own mind.
I gave myself permission to be angry.
I think a lot of people are conditioned to avoid anger. I don’t think most of us learn how to express it in a healthy way until adulthood, if ever.
We’re taught to focus on the positive, to ‘fake it ‘till you make it’ and just smile through the bad days. We’re taught that happiness is a choice. We’re taught that an attitude of gratitude is the best, most fruitful way to live.
Everything happens for a reason.
There’s a term for this kind of collective delusion in our society. It’s called Toxic Positivity.
The problem with this is that we have emotions for a reason. Expressing and processing emotions is healthy; denying them only makes them worse.
Suppressing negative emotions, or expecting others to do so, only increases the likelihood of feeling isolated and despairing. It allows trauma to dig a deeper pit and settle itself in for the long haul.
Unacknowledged pain can form a wound that doesn’t heal.
But we have a right to our emotions. We have a right to feel that sadness, that anger, that fear. It is normal, expected, and nothing to be ashamed of. The people who expect you to hide it and pretend everything is fine do not have your best interests at heart.
This is true on a personal level.
It’s also true when we’re talking about systemic injustices and discrimination.
In the past few years, we’ve seen a serious attack on human rights around the globe. I suspect part of it is driven by social media; false narratives and misinformation posts are not limited to the boundaries on a map anymore, and made-up statistics can influence people in the UK just as easily as in the U.S.
The global Overton Window is being pushed to the right. Yup, I said the magic words; go ahead and take a shot.
We’ve seen the loss of reproductive rights in the United States. We’ve seen anti-LGBTQ+ laws and political rhetoric crop up in the States, Canada, and the United Kingdom — especially ones targeting non-binary and transgender people.
The U.S. government doesn’t even acknowledge non-binary or trans identities anymore. Which is bullshit, to be clear — trans, non-binary, agender and genderfluid people are valid. Y’all are always welcome here.
Some people may look at these things and shrug. It doesn’t touch their lives, it’s happening somewhere else, or at least it isn’t happening to them.
They might say that it’s not so bad. And besides — the death penalty is awful, but if you don’t want to face it, don’t break the law. It sucks that being gay is illegal, but you can always ‘choose a different lifestyle’ or leave the country.
If you don’t like how things are run where you live, go somewhere else.
To the people who think that way, I have a statement of my own.
Respectfully, go jump in a lake. Screw that. We’re allowed to be angry. We have a right to be pissed off.
There’s this weird notion that people who care about human rights, the people on the ‘left,’ are supposed to just grin and bear it. That we’re supposed to be nice and friendly and accepting of other people’s views, even if those views are harmful to us.
There’s a term for that, too. It’s called the Paradox of Tolerance.
And by the way, the fact that caring about human rights is now explicitly considered a left-wing political position should tell you how utterly fucked up things are.
Once upon a time, that was considered to be a baseline neutral position. In my mind, it still is. The bar is buried under Hell’s basement, and some people still can’t clear it.
My abuse ended when I decided to make it stop. It ended when I decided to stop silently tolerating it and finally cut him out of my life.
As long as I just sat there and took it, it would never stop. As long as my abuser was allowed to hurt me without facing any consequences, there was no reason for him to change.
But to be honest, one of the things that hurt me the most was how my ‘friends’ at the time just let it happen.
I found out later that he’d been cruel to them, lying to them about me, for months. He tried to drive them away and leave me isolated from any support.
They all knew he was bad news, but they never said anything to me about what he was doing. They acted, to my face, like they didn’t know.
They saw me struggling, they chose to ignore it, and they saw nothing wrong with that. They decided that my pain was none of their business, so they chose to keep hanging out with me and act like everything was hunky-dory.
I don’t talk to those people anymore.
And if you expect suffering people to pretend everything is okay so that you don’t face any inconvenience, you’re doing the same thing as them.
People are being mistreated.
People are losing their rights — they’re losing the basic human right of feeling safe in their own homes. The basic right to express themselves, to make decisions about their own bodies and identities and personhood.
To heal from my abuse, I gave myself permission to be angry and demand better. Everyone looking down the barrel of oppression has the right to do the same.
Be angry, and act like you deserve better. Because you do.
Solidarity wins.
I like your term "toxic positivity". I think I'll find opportunities to use that