Why we are so afraid to feel ‘Joy’…

“Find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

What is Joy?

A 92-year-old man, short, very well-presented, who took great care of his appearance, was moving into an old people’s home one day. His wife of 70 years had recently died, and he was obliged to leave his home. After waiting several hours in the retirement home lobby, he gently smiled as Leah, a nurse, told him his room was ready.

As he slowly walked to the elevator, using his cane, Leah described his small room to him, including the sheet hung at the window, which served as a curtain.

“I like it very much”, he said, with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old boy who had just been given a new puppy.

“Sir, you haven’t even seen the room yet. Hang on a moment, we are almost there,” Leah said.

“That has nothing to do with it,” he replied. “Happiness is something I choose in advance. Whether or not I like the room does not depend on the furniture, or the decor – rather it depends on how I decide to see it. It is already decided in my mind that I like my room. It is a decision I make every morning when I wake up.

“I can choose. I can spend my day in bed enumerating all the difficulties that I have with the parts of my body that no longer work very well or I can get up and give thanks to heaven for those parts that are still in working order. Every day is a gift, and as long as I can open my eyes, I will focus on the new day, and all the happy memories that I have made during my life. Old age is like a bank account. You withdraw in later life what you have deposited along the way. “

Joy means something different to each of us. We can choose joy. Except, how easy can that choice be if we are already afraid of joy?

Afraid to feel joy?

“If you ask me what’s the most terrifying, difficult emotion we feel as humans …I would say joy.”_Brene Brown

And it is. It is terrifying sometimes to feel allow yourself to feel joy.

I’ve talked about fear before, and how I used to be so afraid, all the time. But as I sat down to write this, I was thinking back on all my most fearful moments, and I realised something; I was most afraid when something good happened.

Whenever I got a piece of good news, whenever I accomplished one thing or succeeded at the other, whenever my birthday was coming up, or whenever life wasn’t throwing any stones at me; then the fear crept in, real, bone crushing, stomach clenching-fear.

I would be so afraid, of what I thought was coming, and that made me even more afraid to sit and feel that sense of happiness and peace that comes with great news.
I was terrified of allowing myself to feel joy.

Because I thought, “this must be a fluke. Anytime now, something really bad, some terrible news is coming. So let me brace myself for that.”

And that’s how I lived, for such a long time.
I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Brené Brown calls our discomfort with joy “foreboding joy.” In her book Daring Greatly, she writes:

“…I’d argue that joy is probably the most difficult emotion to really feel…In a culture of deep scarcity—of never feeling safe, certain, and sure enough—joy can feel like a setup…We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

It took me a lot of time, a lot of prayer, a lot of learning and unlearning, to not have to live with so much fear all the time. But last year, when I was reading Daring Greatly, and I read the above passage, it finally made sense. I had a moment of pure recognition.

I realised how often I hadn’t allowed myself to fully experience moments of pure bliss and joy because I was so scared of losing those moments.
I was always thinking that, “…if I allow myself to enjoy this, to feel this, aren’t I doing a disservice to myself? Since this moment is fleeting? And the longer, more permanent feeling of doom and bad news is just around the corner? ”

I realised how often I didn’t allow myself to experience a moment fully because I was scared of losing it. It finally hit me how often I’d played small to protect what I already had, to not mess up the flow, as if by daring to go out and experience more and be bigger, I would be creating some sort of imbalance and putting the life I had at risk.

I know I’m not alone. I know that out there, you reading this post right now may just be like me. I know that sometimes, feeling joy also brings up feelings of scarcity for many of us.

But…I also know of people who will allow themselves to feel joy and then try to numb the sadness. Brene Brown reminds us, “There’s no such thing as selective emotional numbing. There is a full spectrum of human emotions and when we numb the dark, we numb the light.”
If you want to feel the joy, you must allow yourself to feel the sadness.

It’s Our Anniversary!!!!!
Joy has an intimate relationship with vulnerability.
“Our actual experiences of joy—those intense feelings of deep spiritual connection and pleasure—seize us in a very vulnerable way,” Brown writes. “When something good happens, our immediate thought is that we’d better not let ourselves truly feel it, because if we really love something we could lose it. So we shut down our ability to completely enjoy so that we can also shut down our capacity for feeling loss.”

With time, I learned that I don’t need to push joy away in order to protect myself from how painful loss can be. I learned that when I love something, I should love it hard, because it will change. So, you don’t need to keep pushing joy away. You can learn how to retrain your mind; so that instead of feeling afraid every time something good happens, you can allow yourself to fully experience it.
You can allow yourself to stay with the joy—to name it appropriately, to detail it, to allow it space among all the other emotions without needing it to take the back seat.

You can start with your language.

I’ve read about ancient cultures where parents named their child “ugly one” to distract the gods. The logic was that if they didn’t brag about their beautiful, beloved child, the gods wouldn’t notice and be tempted to take the child away for themselves.

Luckily, we don’t live in a world of greedy, trickster gods. Appreciating our child and naming her beauty will not put her in danger.

In the same way, embracing joy and naming it for what it is doesn’t not endanger you. Accurately naming your joys as joys and your fears as fears will help you not to be as confused about the two as I once was.

The 19th century English poet William Wordsworth has a beautiful sonnet that begins, “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind.”

It’s a beautiful line that reminds us how unexpected joy can be—how wild and unruly. And how impatient we often are, to get rid of it rather than experience it.
Because we have firsthand knowledge of what the flip side of joy looks like-sorrow, misery, despair. And that is what makes so many of us afraid to feel joy; knowing that when the joy fades away, there is emptiness waiting for us on the other side.

“But what if we allow ourselves, even with our sorrows and losses, to experience and stay with joy? What if we chose to develop our inner joy muscle; not to forget the dark, not to forget the losses, not to forget sorrow but so that when joy does appear, we are not as afraid? What if we chose to seat with joy a little longer? So that instead of being afraid of the lack it reminds us of, we can instead embrace the presence, the moments it grants us.”