A lot of people do not know how to experience joy without stopping themselves in their tracks.
In Sepedi, we have a saying, ‘Go thaba ka kudu go tlisha go lla’, which means ‘the one that is too happy is probably going to cry very soon’. This saying is so common that it is often yelled at children simply when they are being loud and happy. That’s how a lot of us are conditioned to shrink and have far less honest experiences with our emotions and lives. As a result, a lot of people curb just how much joy they are going to allow themselves to feel, and just how much peace they are going to allow themselves to feel, by creating the chaos that they are used to, or just sitting with sadder feelings rather than with their own joy.
This points to the scarcity that a mind brought up in survival mode tends to have. If you have been disappointed multiple times by your mother in childhood, you tend to believe that good things don’t last. If you are too happy, you will be disappointed. If you are too happy, you are going to cry, because your mother was always stealing your joy and raining on your parade. You have internalised the belief that it is not safe to feel joy, that it is not safe to feel a sense of peace, because it can be taken away at any time. This shows in the way that you interact with your feel-good emotions.
Few people know how to sit with their feel-good emotions, even those who seem to seek them out. They begin to create the chaos all over again. They self sabotage because their joy does not feel safe. The body is not used to it. The body cannot predict what is going to happen next. I remember watching a couples therapy video where the husband was complaining that his wife was a killjoy and he didn’t know how to please her. He recounted an interaction between the two of them where he was excited to spend time with her and said, ‘I want to take you to dinner tonight,’ to which she responded, ‘For what?’ When the therapist asked the wife why she said that instead of responding positively, she said, ‘I was actually excited but the words just came out that way – I don’t know why I said that.’ After trauma, being excited is a daunting experience, one that’s hard to sit with. This is probably why most people are only comfortable feeling good when they are under the influence of some kind of drug.
When you are raised in an abusive home, your brain learns to predict your parents’ behaviours and what will happen to you. You develop anxiety. You learn to read your parents’ moods. You learn to read how to protect yourself from them, and how to manage their emotions. So, in the absence of that, a lot of people’s bodies and nervous systems struggle to adjust to the new reality and settle into the new sense of safety. This means that the survivor needs to do the work of resetting the thermostat little by little, putting in the work, bringing in a little joy, sitting with that joy; a little bit of peace, sitting with that peace, until the body recognises this as the norm – as something that it can predict, something that’s safe. Safety in the belief that if we sit in peace, peace will continue. If we are sitting in joy, then that joy will continue until another emotion arises without us actively sabotaging our own happiness.
As a survivor, you need to remember that you are now in charge, particularly of who you let into your life, so that you can steer clear of people who steal your joy and peace, including your mother. You no longer have to forbid your own joy. You no longer have to shrink from it. You no longer have to anticipate the worst happening. What that requires is getting back into the body and teaching it that it is safe now to have(and feel) these good emotions. No one is going to take them away from you.
