Does “joy” feel like a distant memory or an intangible experience for you?

Are you on the journey of seeking more joy in your life?

Maybe you’ve found this blog, as in your healing journey, “more joy” is the beacon that gets you through the tough times, and you are fearlessly on the quest to learn more about trauma, anxiety and depression and how to support a more joyous life.

If that sounds like you, then welcome, this post is for you, and if that doesn’t feel like you that’s okay too, I invite you to stay for a story.

Let me tell you a story about a woman named Ellie who came to therapy with the goal of “wanting to feel more joy + lightness in her life”.

She sat on the couch across from me…she was so eternally wise, and self-aware. She had worked so hard to get to this place of understanding herself, but she still felt stuck and nowhere closer to her joyful, fulfilled life.

She came back session after session, explaining her struggles and breaking down the gritty details of who she was, until one day I said,

“Hey Ellie, is it okay if I slow you down and ask what you are feeling right now?”
Ellie responded with haste, “well I’m feeling sad because of…” and trailed off into her explanation.

I paused her again in attempts to help her connect more with her emotional experience,

“Ellie, are you sad right now? Where is the sadness, is it with you, are you feeling it?”
Ellie responded “well yeah I’m sad”, she paused, beginning to choke up not knowing what to say.
I chimed in with gentle support and a question that seemed to have changed everything for her.

“Ellie, I hear you are sad and I can understand how hard it is to feel stuck in that sadness. I’m curious how your body is holding onto that sadness, and perhaps if there is room for you to feel it? Can you just for a moment stay with that sadness?”

For the first time in her therapy experience, Ellie was still, she took a moment to check inside and find her sadness…she was really being with her emotional experience.

Sometimes as humans we can be aware of feelings, but struggle to FEEL the feelings, tuning in to our emotions and letting them take up space.

All of a sudden she felt her throat getting tighter, her heart sinking, and tears welling up in her eyes. She said, as she began to cry,

“ yeah I feel so sad because…”

I so ever gently interrupted her again “hey Ellie it’s okay, can we just let the sadness be there, it's SO important why, and also its SO important to just feel, so just feel sad my dear”.

Ellie, hearing this, felt her shoulders drop and soften in surrender, and spent the next minute or so letting her tears flow, crying, and being guided by me, to find support in her own breath and the pillows and blankets on the couch. This somatic release, was exactly what she needed.

She cried, while I held space, providing compassionate support and company, until Ellie felt a huge sense of relief wash over her body and exclaimed “woah that felt so cathartic, I feel lighter”.

I cracked a very stereotypical nerdy therapist joke and Ellie let out a HUGE chuckle, beginning to laugh deep into her belly, and that feeling of lightness transformed into a moment of JOY! Could it be?

Ellie settled into a feeling of calm after her chuckle with me and asked, “What just happened? For a moment there I felt so light and wow, I really laughed. Is that joy? How is that possible?”

I then began to share a bit of on emotions…."Let me explain the connection between our pain and joy. They might be more connected than you think!”

Emotions are an integral part of the human experience. They provide us with valuable information about ourselves and our environment, and they can motivate us to take action or change our behavior.

However, it is common for people to try to avoid or suppress emotions such as sadness, anger, and fear. They may try to explain it away, finding logical and “cognitive” ways to cope with the pain….

While this may seem like a reasonable strategy to avoid discomfort, it can actually have negative consequences, including a reduced ability to feel positive emotions.

Our emotions are interconnected and interdependent, they are all processed in the same areas of the brain. The neural pathways that process pain are called the nociceptive pathways. The nociceptive pathways send signals to the brain's pain center, the somatosensory cortex, which processes the sensory information and generates the experience of pain.

However, the same neural pathways that process pain can also process pleasure and joy.

This is because the somatosensory cortex does not just process sensory information related to pain; it also processes sensory information related to other physical sensations, such as touch, temperature, and pressure. When we experience pleasure and joy, these sensory signals are processed in the same way as pain signals. However, instead of activating the pain center, they activate the brain's pleasure center.

This means that the same sensory channels in the brain can be activated by both pain and pleasure, but the experience we have depends on which part of the brain is activated. When the pain center is activated, we experience pain, and when the pleasure center is activated, we experience pleasure and joy. Pain and joy are actually closely related to each other, cousins if you will! In other words, our emotional experiences are not isolated events, but rather a complex and dynamic system of interrelated experiences.

When we try to avoid or suppress our perceived negative emotions, we are essentially shutting down a part of our emotional experience. This can create a "numbing" effect, where we feel less overall emotion, both positive and negative.

This is because the brain processes emotions as a whole, so if we try to suppress painful or uncomfortable emotions, it can also reduce the intensity and richness of positive emotions.

Research has shown that people who struggle to identify or express their emotions, particularly painful ones, often experience lower levels of overall emotional experience, including positive emotions. This is because our ability to experience positive emotions is dependent on our ability to process and regulate negative emotions. By suppressing negative emotions, we may be hindering our ability to fully experience positive emotions.

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So, to wrap up this short story with a nice bow…

Ellie was able to FEEL into her sadness, thus allowing her to FEEL into the depths of her own experience of joy. She was activating “stuck” pain and moving through the experience, using those key areas of the brain, so her JOY was fully expressed as well.

This is why….I extend an invitation for you to FEEL it all my dear, the heavy and awful, the light, and all the emotions in between. These different parts of us, make up who we are.

If it feels too scary at first that's okay, maybe find a trusted friend or a therapist that can help support you in feeling safe to express your emotions slowly, bit by bit, over time.

And If you are ready to lean into those heavier feelings, let them out, because the pain that you may be avoiding feeling, just might be the very thing you need to feel, to then welcome and unlock the feeling of JOY.

At Integrative Psychotherapy we help clients engage in therapy so they can feel more comfortable in their skin and befriend alllll their emotions.

We offer talk therapies, narrative therapies, Somatic therapies and other scientific based methods such as EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Internal Family Systems/ Parts work, and Expressive Arts.

Reach out today for your free 15 minute consultation to see how we can help you feel better and experience a more fulfilling life.

Until next time,

The Power of Feeling our Feelings: a story of joy and pain