Not only did our childhoods leave us with shame, anxiety, and trust issues, they also managed to make the good stuff feel unsafe too.

Because it wasn't just the painful emotions that got distorted growing up, a lot of us learned

that feeling good was its own kind of danger. Here are three reasons why this happened.

Number one, good things didn't last. We got our hopes up and we got let down. Holidays got ruined,

birthdays got ruined, mom never stayed sober, our parents always started fighting again.

Over and over we learned that good things were temporary and that the higher we let ourselves

feel, the harder the fall. Bernay Brown calls this foreboding joy, that deep instinctive sense that when

something good is happening, it's about to be taken away. This is why when your life is going well,

you have that nagging feeling that everything is about to go to shit. This is why three good

days in a row doesn't feel like progress, it feels like you're overdue for something

bad. And sometimes we don't even wait for it. We sabotage the good thing ourselves just to get the

drop over with because at least then we're the ones in control of it. Number two, certain emotions

weren't allowed. Some of us were directly punished for feeling them. Others

got the message indirectly through a look, a shift in the room, a parent who couldn't tolerate

your happiness when they were miserable, that feeling happy when the people around us were

suffering felt like betrayal, so we learned to dim ourselves to match the emotional temperature of the room.

Either way, we learned that certain emotions were off the table completely, or that feeling them

put us at risk. Number three, good emotions and survival mode can't coexist. A lot of good feelings

require us to be in a regulated, grounded state, But during our childhoods, we were rarely there.

We were either activated, hypervigilance, scanning, bracing, or we were shut down, checked out, numb.

Because it was too painful to stay present in our own bodies.

There wasn't room for joy or excitement or peace. There wasn't room for joy or excitement or peace. There wasn't room for joy or excitement

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