The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: Trauma survivors are often highly practiced at tolerating discomfort, pain, disappointment, and instability. Healing may involve building capacity for the feel-good things, including security, ease, joy, love, pleasure, and the relationships that allow those experiences to become more available.

Many trauma survivors reach adulthood having practiced endurance far more than experiencing ease. They have learned how to keep going through disappointment, instability, relational uncertainty, and emotional bracing because life required that level of adaptation. This can create a confusing experience later on, where pain feels familiar enough to navigate while joy, security, love, and pleasure feel harder to receive. The body may have an incredibly high tolerance for what hurts, while still needing time, support, and gentleness to build capacity for what feels good.

Some people assume trauma survivors need to learn how to tolerate unpleasant feelings, and of course there are times when building capacity for distress is helpful. For many survivors, though, the capacity to endure discomfort is already incredibly developed. They know how to make it through pain. They know how to function while activated. They know how to keep going when they feel unsettled, lonely, afraid, disappointed, or unseen. What may feel much more unfamiliar is allowing themselves to experience something good without immediately preparing for its loss.

When happiness was fleeting or complicated in childhood, we may learn to live without expecting much joy. If our earliest relationships were unsafe, inconsistent, or unfulfilling, we may become accustomed to accepting whatever connection we can get. We may believe that wanting more will make the disappointment sharper. We may stop asking for something different because pain has become the thing we know how to survive. We may long for happiness while having very little practice letting it take up space in our bodies.

Sometimes we become accustomed to never feeling settled.

This can create a painful pattern in adulthood. We may continue doing what we have always done, even when we know what we have always done has not worked for us. We may stay close to the discomfort we understand because something new feels more destabilizing than the pain we already know how to manage. We may long for security and still feel suspicious when it begins to arrive. We may desire joy and still brace against it. We may want love and still feel upended by the vulnerability of being loved consistently.

And y’all, this can be especially confusing when joy arrives in relationship.

Someone may meet us with tenderness, and our bodies may respond with fear. A relationship may feel consistent, and we may begin searching for what is wrong. Someone may offer care, and instead of receiving it, we may feel the impulse to question it, minimize it, test it, or move away from it. Sometimes the goodness itself is activating because our bodies have so little practice trusting an experience that does not require us to brace, chase, shrink, earn, or prepare for disappointment.

When discomfort has been the closest thing to home we have ever known, safety and stability can feel foreign. Joy can leave us feeling exposed. Ease can make us feel suspicious. Pleasure can feel undeserved. Love can feel like something we are waiting to lose. The nervous system may interpret these feel-good experiences as risky because allowing them in creates the possibility of ache if they change, end, or fail to last in the way we hoped.

The belief may sound something like, if I stay with discomfort, at least I know what to expect. If I allow myself to feel good, I might be disappointed. If I let myself hope, I might hurt more later. If I soften into this experience, I might lose the part of me that knows how to stay prepared. These beliefs make sense when the body has learned to associate openness with danger, and they can also keep us from receiving the very experiences we have been longing for.

Healing requires us to build capacity, and increase our desire to feel something different.

This may begin with small moments of ease, pleasure, security, or joy. A meal that tastes good. A song that softens something in the body. A relationship that feels calm enough to stay present in for one more moment. A day that is not extraordinary, but also not terrible. A moment of laughter that feels connecting. A slow morning where the body feels slightly less braced than usual. These moments may seem ordinary, but for a nervous system accustomed to discomfort, they can become important experiences of something new.

Sometimes the greatest joys come from what is already within our grasp- they may not arrive as huge, life-altering moments. They may not feel like elation, excitement, or the best day we have ever had. They may be subtle or just good-enough. Part of building capacity for joy is learning to let those moments exist. As we are able, we can begin to notice what feels slightly north of neutral. We can begin allowing a small amount of good to register in our bodies. We can begin making room for enjoyment without it needing to feel huge, exciting, or life-changing in order to count.

Please know, increasing our tolerance for joy does not require pretending pain is gone. Joy and grief can exist in the same day. Ease and uncertainty can exist in the same relationship. Pleasure and tenderness can exist in a body that is still learning how to trust itself. Healing invites the nervous system to develop enough space for multiple truths to exist at once.

This is where gentleness becomes important. We cannot shame ourselves into receiving joy. We cannot force the body to trust ease simply because our mind believes it should. We can, however, practice noticing when something feels good and staying with it for a few seconds longer. We can notice the urge to dismiss it, question it, or prepare for its loss. We can place a hand on our chest and remind ourselves that our body is encountering something unfamiliar. We can let the unfamiliar become a little more recognizable through repetition, support, and time.

As healing unfolds, we may begin to realize that our tolerance for pain is already high enough. Many of us have practiced enduring, managing, surviving, and making do for far too long. What we may need now is practice with happiness. Practice with love. Practice with stability. Practice with receiving care. Practice with allowing good-enough moments to matter, even when they feel small.

Dear one, if joy feels hard to let in, there is nothing wrong with you. Your body may be learning how to receive what it did not get to experience consistently before. You are allowed to start small. You are allowed to notice one glimmer, one steady relationship, one ordinary pleasure, one moment of ease. You are allowed to build capacity for the feel-good stuff slowly, with patience, with support, and with the gentleness your younger self always deserved.

Thank you for letting me see you,