When does joy-bonding become toxic positivity?

Love and light.

Everything happens for a reason.

Good vibes only.

Choose joy.

Protect your peace.

If you know me, you know that I am quick to trust, easy to burst into laughter, and find joy in many things. I may have come close to owning a throw pillow with "Live, Laugh, Love" printed on it. Judge if you must but I'm a sucker for a good alliteration.

While seemingly harmless and even wise to take heed to each of those socially rewarded shorthands, selective emotional acceptance is not advisable; there is a real danger to connections built on partial truths. 

The act of joy isn't only an individual choice to embody an emotion, but it is relational. It is also cultural and systemic in nature. If you think I'm exaggerating to make a point or politicizing unnecessarily, take a big step back to get the happiness industry into your view. It. Is. Alarming. You might see the packaging of ancient spiritual traditions into McMindfulness, or sacred individualism written into the fabric of the American empire by the graduates of the CIA-funded Iowa Writer's Workshop. Glimpses of corporate resilience messaging while people are laid off in droves, with Black women in disproportionate numbers, might pop up. 

You might also notice that the business of self-help is estimated to be 40-50 billion US dollars globally. That's $40,000,000,000, ten zeros. That estimate doesn't include all the derivative products like throw pillows, mugs, wearables, etc. etc. etc.

"Imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect," said Salman Rushdie. Not claiming "negative" energy sets up an imaginative world where humans thrive by claiming only the joyful truths of existence. It's sus. 

I am hearing the binary critique of energy entanglement choking the life out of empaths. If you hear it, too, I invite you to pause and relax, listen to the warning, but don't rush to action just yet. Affective empathy, vicarious trauma, and compassion fatigue are phenomena to pay attention to. I am not advocating the release of discernment to let it all in. I am suggesting that over-indexing toward any petal on the bloom of human emotional experiences shortchanges possibilities for healing at individual and collective levels. 

Let's rewind to set up the table upon which our cups of tea may be refilled while we continue. Please indulge me and let me get nerdy about this for just a few paragraphs. 

Definitions:

A Trauma Orientation is an unfortunately common side effect of modernity, where identity and relationships are organized around pain, where hyper-vigilance and survival-based relating can promote codependent relationships, or attachments formed through precarious cycles of harm and reward. Connecting only on the axes of pain and survival can lead to Trauma Bonding. It's a useful coping mechanism, one I am no stranger to, but it's also limiting and can present many side effects. 

For example, one party in the trauma bond moving towards healing and joy can lead to the other party feeling judged, rejected, and abandoned. The Trauma Trigger that gets pulled from such inner states can lead to self-sabotage, emotional off-loading, trauma-spreading, and other habits that stop us from being shiny.

There is also Trauma Porn, which sometimes happens in workplace or nonprofit storytelling spaces about lived experience and identity, where consumption and performance of suffering are expected and rewarded. Connection technologies like social media play a major role in promoting oversharing without integration, counterfeit connections, and distress entertainment. 

Toxic positivity is the overgeneralization of a happy, optimistic state that results in the denial, minimization, or invalidation of certain authentic human emotional experiences. (Check out Sara Ahmed's thoughts on the unrelenting social pressure to be happy, if you want to nerd out even more.)

Joybonding is the formation of social connections through shared expressions of positivity, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging pain, complexity, or harm. (Cordelia Gaffer is moving with this specific concept in corporate spaces, as an example of many solutions to trauma bonding.)

Toxic positivity is an understandable, even respectable, protective response to trauma and vicarious trauma overwhelm. Joy-bonding, if not careful, can become the inverse shadow of trauma bonding. Instead of bonding through shared pain, volatility, and chaos, overcorrection leads to bonding through enforced positivity, emotional flattening, and artificial harmony. It might be evidenced in wellness influencer culture where “morning routine” and “raise your vibration” videos mask burnout and encourage spiritual bypassing.

In frameworks that prioritize ‘elevated’ conversation and discourage engagement with negativity, emotional expression becomes curated rather than authentic. Guidance such as redirecting difficult conversations, briefly acknowledging grief before returning to gratitude, or refusing to ‘agree’ with negative realities may cultivate a certain atmosphere—but it can also suppress the relational processes necessary for healing. When joy becomes the primary or only acceptable mode of connection, individuals may begin to self-censor pain, grief, or critique to maintain belonging. The trouble is, rejecting the pained parts of ourselves to avoid additional pain from social isolation isn't belonging; it's hustling to fit in.

When joy is maintained by avoiding or redirecting pain, it is no longer a practice of expansion—it becomes a practice of exclusion. 

Genuine, Generative, Justice-lovin' Joy-bonding

I did warn you. I have a weakness for alliteration. Also, puns, but that's a story for another time.

Psychologist Kamilah Majied frames joy not as a passive emotion, but as a cultivated practice of resilience—one that allows individuals and communities to resist the physiological and psychological impacts of chronic stress and oppression. bell hooks weaves joy, love, and accountability. Audre Lorde positions joy and the erotic as sources of power, not denial. Bayo Akomolafe sees joy as refusing urgency, a force that interrupts oppressive forces. Thich Nhat Han encourages pausing to see the wonder of this moment and being joyfully together with relational repair practices like Beginning Anew. 

In these lineages, joy is not the denial of suffering or avoiding accountability—it is the capacity to remain alive, connected, and truthful within it. But when joy becomes a requirement rather than a resource, it shifts from resistance to regulation. 

What if joy is not the absence of pain, but the capacity to remain in relationship with life because our miraculous bodies can metabolize pain if we only got out of our overthinking habits? What if joy-bonding wasn't an individual chase for an emotional experience but an authentic expression of a life with meaning inside of community? What if joy-bonding was purposefully done, not to increase productivity and grow the wellness industry's earnings, but to generate critical connections (Boggs)? What if our possés across time and space, including our ancestors, are in it to win it with us, and want to witness our shared joy as medicine for injustice?

There's no recipe to generous and jolly joy-bonding, but here are a few ways to start.

Mindsets

• Joy + grief coexist

• Joy is relational and cultural, not just individual

• Joy is resistance (especially in marginalized communities)

• Joy that expands capacity, not avoids reality

Practices:

• “Both/And” emotional language → “I feel grateful and overwhelmed”

• Community agreements: No forced positivity. No trauma performance for belonging. Space for silence and ambiguity

• Reflective prompts: Where am I using joy to connect? Where am I using joy to avoid?

• Ask yourself: What emotions are allowed in this framework?

• In group settings, discuss stealth messages about happiness, joy, and trauma. (ie: What are the movies in our heads about people who are happy, joyful, light, and easy to get along with? How do we respond when trauma surfaces in our workplace?) 

Joy can become regulatory when it defines belonging. It can accelerate justice and healing when it imprints to critical connections. How does your design for spaces of belonging consider the whole range of human experience, flaws and all?