Are you delightful during all hours of every day? Just a stream of kindness, love, compassion, and cheerfulness? Do you have seven gratitude journals next to your bed? Are you compulsively helpful to everyone? Is happiness your default emotion?
Ok, Adam, you just described Mary Poppins. What’s the problem here?
Well, first of all, she’s not real. Secondly, not experiencing a full range of emotions and being “great” all the time is some delusional, dissociated, self-abandonment type stuff (i.e. a trauma response).
Were feelings not allowed in your childhood home? Maybe you were rewarded for being happy all the time? Were you punished for having feelings or expressing them?
Don’t feel that way. Stop crying. You don’t really mean that.
Were you gaslit, invalidated, and denied your reality?
In childhood trauma, of which there are innumerable forms, “We learn to fear our feelings instead of feel our feelings because to feel them would be far more dangerous,” as Dr. Gabor Maté put it.
Feelings are the body’s biofeedback system that tells us about the quality of our self-care and any unmet needs we may have. It’s our check-engine light.
When we’re disconnected from our feelings, we can’t accurately discern what our needs are or get those needs satisfied in healthy ways.
However, needs must be satisfied (that’s why they’re called needs).
And in the absence of our awareness, we’ll grab whatever maladaptive coping strategy we can get our hands on in an attempt to meet our needs. Addiction, codependency, perfectionism, busyness, control, promiscuity, variously self-destructive behaviors, and yes — compulsive pleasantness.
The biggest problem with being a flowery, jubilant beam of fucking sunshine all the time is that you can easily convince yourself that you’re amazing and build up a sense of pride around your charmingly splendid trauma response.
It can work itself deeply into your identity (as trauma tends to do) and become astonishingly difficult to resolve.
The second biggest problem is that repressing negative emotions over time leads to actual medical diagnoses — cancer, ALS, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, various autoimmune diseases, etc. See Dr. Maté’s book When The Body Says No for facts and figures.
There is nothing wrong with being joyful, obviously.
But rejecting your other feelings could literally be killing you.
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