drerinwatsonThe most difficult feeling in your life won’t be the pain that comes from deep loss. It won’t be the grief, anxiety and depression that follow trauma. And it won’t be the complete numbness that protected you as you tried to emotionally survive all the hurt, but that still haunts you years later as you try to rebuild.
The most difficult feeling in your life will be when joy tries to sneak back in. When pleasure starts knocking, beckoning you to come and play.
You will think, “How can I play in the face of such terrible pain?”, “How can I allow joy in if awful things have happened and may happen again?”, “How can I allow myself recovery and healing if holding on to pain is the only way I validate that what happened was real?”, “How can I let go of anger if it feels like letting them win?”, “How can I find peace if they just get away with it?”
It takes courage to face the dark tunnels of despair. It takes even more courage to walk through the tunnel into the light and allow yourself to keep moving forward. It takes immense strength to welcome happiness back into your life.
Can You Have It All?
A client once gave me a piece of artwork she had created that had a quote that read: “There is no life so shattered that it cannot be repaired”.
She shared with me, “At times I have felt my life was trying to challenge that statement. As if saying, ‘Wanna bet? Try me!’ But when I look at my children, I realize that there is no pain in the face of their existence. Being with them allows me to expand myself to receive pure joy and an abundance of happiness. But it confuses me. How could things be so good, and so bad?”
When I work with clients, we explore the duality of emotions; The idea that one can have deep wounds that deserve mourning, and hold space for ecstasy. That light and dark can co-exist and that we don’t have to deny one to experience the other.
Recovery starts to emerge when we can find one area of life where we allow for joy to come in— even amidst a magnitude of pain. And then, just maybe, we can learn to expand the areas of our lives where joy is also ready to take root.
Why Pleasure Gets Shut Down
For survivors of attachment trauma, especially those caused by narcissistic and scapegoating abuse, pleasure is the experience that gets shut down the most. It is the most threatening for a few reasons:
For one, you know genuine pain, terror, devastation, loneliness, isolation, grief, sadness, rage, hopelessness, betrayal, injustice, and loss. When you have come face to face with the rawness of these emotions, it is really hard to go back to an emotional experience that seems “oblivious” to the fact that these emotions lurk around the corner. You need to remain on guard. You cannot be blindsided by another emotional “attack”. And it is an attack because it completely destroys your nervous system’s regular operations and causes you to enter into the survival states of fight, flight, or freeze. And when those get overloaded, you go numb.
Secondly, it’s hard to transition moods. Even if you want to, your neural pathways have been in “vigilance” mode for so long that you’re asking your brain to literally reroute messages. And that takes energy and conscious effort. And you may be already too burned out by the distinct lack of support that is a tell-tale feature of those who have narcissistic parents.
It’s also hard to transition moods because, for survivors of narcissistic and scapegoating abuse, one of the core components of this trauma is that many people don’t believe you. So you hold on to your pain because you need someone to acknowledge that it happened. And sometimes the only person willing to acknowledge what happened is your own self. Letting go of the anger and grief, feels like giving in. Like letting them win or get away with it.
Finally, survivors of attachment trauma have been taught that they are not deserving of joy or pleasure. Those who grew up with an abusive narcissist for a parent learned very early on that they should never outshine their parent. They learned if they are happy and gleeful, that it could threaten their parent (because it triggers that parents’ deep sense of their own worthlessness and despair), which could result in the parent lashing out or stonewalling their child. Children of abusive narcissists need to maintain a relationship with their parent out of survival, so they learn to shut joy down as a compromise. Indeed, so much of their life experience was of natural joy being intervened upon. Pleasure being denied them. Glee being silenced, squashed, and chastised. Sadness becomes a more familiar companion, and even as adults, it’s hard to “abandon” that companion and step into something new.
How Joy Can Heal, Even If It Feels Uncomfortable At First
We know that when pleasure is experienced without judgment or censure a strange thing happens: It grows.
And when we allow difficult emotions to exist without judgment or censure, they dissipate.
And yet, we cling to our pain — not feeling it in a way that would allow it to resolve and recover — but just holding it so close because it’s the one certainty we have had in our life. The familiarity of it feels like home. But holding on- without fully feeling-means we become trapped in our dark tunnels. We are unable to explore the depths of the cave because the pain is too much, but we can’t move forward for fear of the light either. We become frozen in our lives.
Having an abusive narcissist as a parent teaches you to judge your own pleasure as sinful, and to see suffering as a virtue. And society mirrors this sentiment. You are taught to be ashamed of your pleasure because how dare you attend to what feels good for you when you ought to be attending to other people’s needs? How dare you explore your own wants, desires, passions and fulfillment if it takes away from serving your parent’s (unachievable and insatiable) pleasure and fulfillment? Narcissistic parents condition you to believe that living your own life and experiencing joy in that life (outside of them) is selfish.
But pleasure is the gateway to your true, embodied, and aligned self. It was your parent’s impossible needs, expectations and standards that took you away from who you are and what you have the capacity to be. They kept you small to serve their purposes, not because you inherently lacked the capacity for a beautiful life. Not because there was something wrong with you that meant you didn’t deserve joy or happiness.
You Can Have It All
I want you to come away from this article knowing that you can have both: You can have joy and pleasure, without abandoning the importance of your pain and sadness. You can move forward through the tunnel, into a life of genuine fulfillment and wholeness, without letting go of your truth. The losses you experienced are real and they deserve accountability. However, putting your life on hold, or denying yourself pleasure, while you wait for someone to take responsibility is simply making a home for yourself in hell. It is like being a starving captive who finally breaks free and discovers a table piled high with food, but then chooses not to eat until their captors say they are allowed to. There is no recovery without emotional nutrients. Joy provides those nutrients, and you need to eat them up in order to live.
You do not have to be at the mercy of someone else’s decision about what your life gets to be like and what happiness you deserve. Because they will never choose your happiness. Your greatest act of defiance is choosing your own happiness anyway. You win — not them — when you create your own abundant life.
