But/and, I also and specifically want to talk about how hard it can feel for those who come from relational trauma backgrounds to even remotely know what brings them joy if they didn’t experience joy in their childhood and/or if they have a hard time connecting to their bodies.
If this is you – if the idea of what brings you joy mystifies you and you have no clue what this might mean or how to bring more of it into your life but you’re curious and eager to do so – please keep reading.
What is joy?
Joy. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But what actually is joy?
Merriam-Webster defines joy as a noun as:
- A : the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires : DELIGHT
B : the expression or exhibition of such emotion : GAIETY
- a state of happiness or felicity: BLISS
- a source or cause of delight
And the definition of joy as a verb is:
- : to experience great pleasure or delight: REJOICE
From any angle, from whatever definition you choose, joy, quite frankly, feels GOOD.
Why is joy important?
Why is joy so important?
Aside from the fact that it feels good (see the above definitions), joy is one of the keys on the emotional keyboard of life we can and should be able to access in order to proverbially play the richest and most enlivened emotional music possible.
What do I mean by this?
If you imagine a piano keyboard and all its attendant, beautiful black and ivory keys, you can imagine that each key represents an emotion that we experience in our human lives: sadness, lust, grief, horror, anger, peace, contentment, pride, impatience, love, devotion, and so forth.
With the emotional keyboard of life, the goal is not to learn and be able to play only a few keys.
The goal is, instead, to learn how to play the richest piece of music possible by developing your capacity to feel and appropriately express each of the proverbial keys on this keyboard.
And joy is one of these keys.
And it is, quite frankly, a really delightful and delicious one to feel!
I would also argue that, for those who come from relational trauma backgrounds, it becomes even more important for you to learn how to “play this key” so to speak.
How do I know what brings me joy?
But how do you know what brings you joy if you had a childhood deprived of joy?
