Positive psychology

Feelings VIII: The Sense of Joy

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, Positive psychology

Feelings VIII: The Sense of Joy

A couple of blogs past we offered Feelings VI: It’s All About Hurt, and then paradoxically offered Feelings VII: It’s Not All About Hurt in which we suggested that the feeling of joy is just as important as the feeling of sadness, which is the heart of “hurt.” Today we would like to unpack this business of joy and try to be practical about how we can experience and express more joy in our lives. Keep in mind that the emotion of sadness and the emotion of joy are on a continuum of love. In other words, we feel joy and sadness singularly because we love something: joy when we have it, sadness when we lose it. We have written extensively in several venues (blogs, papers, and our book, The Power of Positive Sadness) about the importance of sadness, which we yet think is the heart of most difficulties people have in life, like relationship problems, anxiety, depression, and anger. But today we would like to look at the other side of the “love continuum,” namely the side that is about having something that we love, which brings some kind of joy to us.

Joy is most easily recognized through one or more of our five senses, but also comes through intuition, cognition and fantasy, which we are daring to call our “sixth sense”. We will start this discussion by examining the ways joy enters our system through our five physical senses and then proceed into the murky waters of intuition. As we examine the various ways that we experience joy, consider your own experiences with joy, whether recent or long past.

Joy coming through the sense of smell (olfactory)

This might seem an odd way to begin our discussion of the experience of joy in the five senses. When we think of smell, we generally think of bad smell, rank, rancid, or disgusting. So, while smell might not seem the most obvious way to start a discussion of joy as experienced in the five senses, it is actually the most important place to start because the sense of smell is our most basic sense. Consider the animal kingdom, whether it is a bear sniffing the air for the scent of pray or your dog sniffing telephone poles and certain portions of other animals’ anatomy, and you will see this most central sense operating in nonhuman animals. Smell might well have been the first sense developed, at least by mammals. Furthermore, there is an interesting thing about smell that most people don’t know but that contributes to many addictions. With all the other four senses (sight, touch, hearing, and taste) information that comes into the sense organs goes through a transfer point in the brain before we actually have cognition of it. But smell goes through no transfer point, and instead goes directly into the cerebral cortex, which then creates some kind of thought or action. It seems that this most primitive sense remains primary, at least if we see how smells are processed in the brain. Interested readers might rea about pheromones, which are chemicals that trigger a social response in the animal kingdom including humans. It is the smell of something that immediately enters our brain, much more quickly than the other four senses. Consider the aromas that entice you, like flowers, new mown hay, meat cooking on the grill, the stew simmering on the stove or the smell of fresh air in the autumn.

Joy in hearing (auditory)

Something heard might be offensive, but actually most of what is heard is on the pleasant side of the spectrum of like/dislike. There are many kinds of sounds that reach our brains through our ears. Music is one of the predominate vehicles for experiencing joy through the sense of hearing.  Music is universal from tribal drums to Gregorian chants. Music is described often as “moving” “Being moved” is a way of describing this indescribable experience we call feeling that connects us to either a memory or evokes a sense of ease and peace internally. What pleases you when it comes to music: Christmas cantatas, a bit of sax jazz or maybe the Spanish guitar?  The choices are as varied as there are people in the world. The feeling that one has with music is what we want to discuss in our continuing attempt to get at what “feeling” is all about.

What does it mean to be “moved” by music? This “being moved” is a “feeling,” including emotion but it is more than emotion. One person can have a profoundly positive experience and another a significantly negative one, all to the same music. Once at a men’s workshop, I played Pacobel’s Cannon, to which Deb and I were married, and which I find to be quite “moving” in a positive way. I enjoy hearing the Canon. However, when I played the Canon, one of the men in the group said, “I hate this piece of music.” Both his feeling and mine were genuine, both were valid, and both needed to be expressed but not to incite an argument. Bob and I took turns talking about our feelings about the Canon and in so doing, learned about each other.

While the most dramatic, music is not the only auditory experience that can bring positive feelings. Pleasant auditory feelings can be nature-created: wind through pines, the cardinal’s song, water lapping and rain on the roof. Human made sounds can be just as wonderful: Distant train horns, office laughter, the giggling of young children, engines operating at peak performance, or even the ticking of a clock.

Note the sounds in your life that bring you a sense of pleasure, which is that “feeling” coming to you when you hear something wonderous or satisfying. How often do you comment on these favorable sounds compared to the honking cars, barking dogs, or screaming children that you find offensive?

Joy in touch (kinesthetic)

As music is first to come to mind when we think of pleasurable sounds, sex usually comes to mind when we think of pleasurable experiences of touch. Certainly, sexual contact in its many forms is nearly universally a good feeling. There are, of course, many people, for whom this is not the case, not the least of which are those who have been molested early in life. For the larger majority of people, sexual touch is gratifying and brings this good feeling, “good feeling” being a term we have used for the many experiences in life.  One of the components of sexual or intimate touching is that it is generally reciprocal. It is the exchange of touch the give and take that adds so much to sexual or intimate pleasure.

“Just touching”, that is the simple act of tactile engagement brings a multiplicity of pleasure. The first jump of summer into a cool lake, brushing your hand along ancient monuments,  stroking your pet or ruffling the hair of a child, grasping your favorite fountain pen or the warmth of your morning coffee mug.  For some, like artisans, the touch of their tool can actually ignite their inspiration. A carpenter can pick up a block of wood and sense what to do with it. I know an artist who describes the picking up of her brushes as a “holy sensation”. We all know the wonderfulness of touching our pet or feeling them brush up near us, to hug a friend at the airport when they arrive, a good strong and secure handshake at the end of a successful business meeting and of course, the pleasure of when your grand-daughter slips her little hand into yours is that “good feeling” that is only experiences through touch.

Touching and being touched can reach deep inside of us and may even reach our core self. If I am touched by a person familiar to me, that touching can be quite spontaneous as well as particularly pleasant, partly because the touch was unexpected. At that moment, you can feel something special, something of a connection, something safe even though the touch was simple and short. This simple and short positive experience can also occur when you touch something, whether living or nonliving. What happens in moments like this is that this person or thing has had an enhancing effect on you. You feel yourself, and also you feel better in some way. Do you acknowledge the pleasure, contentment, connection, or safety that comes with certain kinds of touch?

Joy in taste (gustatory)

Similar to the olfactory senses, the sense of taste provides the greatest variety of good and bad feelings. “Good” and “bad” may be due largely to acquired taste. Who immediately liked coffee when you first tasted it as a child? Who didn’t like ice cream as a child? It appears that the sense of taste, more than any of the other five senses, appears to develop over time largely with familial and cultural influences. I am impressed with Mexican and East Indian folks who can pop hot peppers into their mouths and enjoy the flavor when some people might become seriously ill with such ingestion. Consider the taste of sugar, meat, fruits, vegetables, alcoholic drinks, and a glass of water with a fresh slice of lemon or lime. Which are to your liking. Which feel right? My wife loves to prepare green bean in drizzle of olive oil, a well sliced onion and a good splash of white wine and wonders how anyone else wouldn’t like her prep.  Our grandson doesn’t like green beans at all, and probably wouldn’t even if grandmother coated them in sugar. Taste is about as individual as there are people on the planet.

Joy in sight (visual)

A picture is worth a thousand words, right? I continue to find that true even as my preferred mode of communication is with spoken or written words. Sight is perhaps my weakest sense, at least somewhat due to the fact that I am color blind. When Deb points out the roses on a wild rose bush we pass on the road, or the tomatoes on the vine as we are walking from the office to the house, I am always at a loss to see such things. As we speak we are in the last of summer where everything is lush and green, perhaps my least favorite color because I often cannot distinguish green from red, brown, or gray. Where Deb uses terms like Kelly green or chartreuse, or when I read something like “very verde,” I am bemused because all these colors are simply green. Driving home from our cabin up north last week the forests were alive with color and shape for Deb, the shades very distinct. I can appreciate a sunset and the like, and I even commented to Deb on how we might have a full moon next week, but I am not moved by things visual the way so many people are.

People who are more gifted in matters visual are a gift to the world. Such people are those who create visual things and those who appreciate them. Clearly, artists of all visual forms are those who use their talents to enhance the visual beauty of the world. There is something special in the artist who often feels compelled to create visual art. Michelangelo reportedly “saw” David before he carved him and only needed to chip away the marble from what he “saw.” Artists certainly have an appreciation for art in its many forms, perhaps especially in their chosen modality, but appreciation of art is something that many people have. Things that are seen include the created art of painting, natural art of the Colorado Mountains or Niagara Falls, or the simple beauty of two young girls dressed up for a dance recital. In everything seen, there is potential for joy or for disgust. Consider how many times you have spoken of what you have seen noting the frequency of your comments about what is beautiful.

There are many more things seen that are quite beautiful, often only to the eye of the beholder. Once while playing basketball, I was lucky enough to catch a “baseball pass” from a teammate and make a layup. A few minutes later another teammate graciously said my play was “a thing of beauty.” There are many such things of beauty that the “eye of the beholder” might see that others might not including shapes of objects, like elements of nature, human-made objects, or the human body. Use your imagination.

With all of the senses we are discussing, consider if for you it is easier to focus on the negative compared to the joyful. Then you might just share this joy coming from one or more of your senses, or you might be just as pleased to recognize it and remember it.

Further reading

Previous 7 blogs on Feelings

Forthcoming Feelings IX: joy from the sixth sense (intuition)

Feelings VII: It’s Not All About Hurt

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, happiness, mindfulness, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

How odd it must seem to start this blog with what seems like a contradiction to the title of the previous blog, “It’s All About Hurt.” All about hurt? Not all about hurt? What am I trying to say? I am saying that both are true, however paradoxical that sounds. In Feelings 6 we talked about the centrality of hurt, something that began to talk about in Feelings 2. If we knew how to process hurt, we would reduce wars and divorces to a minimum and reduce arguments to zero. Yes, hurt is very central in the business of human relationships, and I work diligently to help people understand hurt and effectively process it. The centrality of hurt that we discussed in the previous blog has to do with the origin of hurt. Hurt always originates from love. We can’t prevent hurt and we don’t want to prevent hurt. Why? Because without hurt we would have no improvement, no excellence, to success because all of these important matters of life depend on being hurt, recognizing that we have been hurt because we have lost something that we love, and then becoming better as a result of this lost love. So, we begin the current discussion by affirming that hurt is a central ingredient in life and that we have to recognize it, understand it, resolve it, and learn from it.

This is the seventh blog about feelings, and it is feelings that drive us, however impossible it is for us to define “feelings.” Hurt, and the emotion of sadness that is the core of hurt, is an important feeling but it is not the most important feeling we have. It is just the most difficult one, at least in this North American culture. Recall from Feelings 1 that there are two basic feelings that erupt from love: joy and sadness. If you want to improve your emotional and interpersonal life, you need to recognize and value both joy and sadness. In our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, we talk about the importance of sadness. But joy is equally important. If you want to have a fulfilling life, you need to learn how to express joy at least as much as you express sadness. Learning how to express joy, the practice of it, is just as important as learning and practicing hurt

We have spent a lot of time in the last blog on defining and discussing hurt.  Now we want to define and discuss joy. And even though it might seem peculiar, many people do not know how to really engage and express their joy.

Joy

All four basic emotions have to do with love. Joy is the feeling of having something, whereas sadness is the feeling of losing something, anger the feeling of having lost many things, and fear the feeling of potentially losing something. There are many forms of love, perhaps as many as there are experiences in life, but it is the experience of loving something that we call joy. If we love something, the loving of this something causes joy in our lives. But everything we love we eventually lose, so it is important to know both the emotions of joy and sadness that always accompany love. We will lose the people we love, the property we love, and the ideas we love…eventually. The fact that we will eventually lose something that we love should not keep us from loving, but it often does. The only way we can protect ourselves from feeling hurt and sadness is to avoid loving something. But in avoiding sadness, we also avoid joy. If we are going to love something, we need to experience the joy of having this something as well as allow for the process of feeling sad when we lose this something. Joy and sadness are companions in life as we love, lose, and love again.

We previously discussed the emotion of sadness that accompanies hurt. In this and following blogs we want to begin to discuss the other half of love: joy. As we go forward with this discussion, note how often you have some form of joy in your daily life and then note how often you express this feeling. If you really want to enhance life, you will get better at expressing the joys you have in life. Sometimes joy is a simple, indescribable, ineffable experience like Deb and I had the night before I wrote these words. We were sitting on our dock “up north” at our cabin in the waning dusk of the day and saw three loons pass in front of us just a few meters away, seemingly completely disregarding our presence. We had earlier seen two other loons that day and thought that this group of three might be the brood now on their own. We just watched as the three took turns diving into the water only to surface some 100 meters away barely visible in the dusk. This was one of those ineffable experiences that brought a sense of joy that was multifaceted: we felt a peacefulness, a connection with nature and a felt sense of gratitude as well. (Watch for Deb’s forthcoming blog on Grieving Loons) The moment passed quickly but the memory stayed. It was a moment of genuine joy.

Wondrous as the loon experience was last night I remember a time some years ago when a severe storm damaged the loon nest that was situated on the island just across from us on our little lake. Lost to mother and father loon were their young ones, and we heard the most woeful waling of the loons for several hours. They had loved their little ones and now they had lost them. These two very different experiences with Nature showed us how joy and sadness are intrinsically related to love. In this series on Feelings we have previously focused on the hurt, sadness, and relational difficulties that result from loss. The feeling of joy could come like it did last night, simple and wondrous, but it can come in many other forms, times, and places.  We want to turn our attention to the other half of the love phenomenon, the joy of loving something, which means the joy of having something. In forthcoming blogs we will be discussing:

  • How we experience joy in our five senses
  • How we experience joy in our sixth sense, which we might call intuition
  • How we experience joy with people
  • How we experience joy alone
  • How we experience joy with property
  • How we experience joy with ideas, hopes, dreams, and plans
  • How we express the feeling of joy in each of these experiences

Consider your own experiences and expressions of joy as we explore this important emotion. And as always, please feel free to comment, correct, or otherwise add to this and all our blogs. It is a pleasure to be of service.

Further Reading

Previous Feelings blogs

Forthcoming Feelings blogs on joy

West, M. (2007). Feeling, being, and the sense of self. London: Karnac

Damasaio, A. (2003). Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. New York: Harcourt Books.

Feelings 6: It’s All About Hurt

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

We have talked about the phenomenon of hurt in previous “Feelings” blogs, primarily in Feelings: 2 (Expressing Feelings), but it behooves us to return to hurt and unpack it a bit. I will cover the following things about “hurt”:

  • Hurt is another of the important undefinable words that we can have an understanding about without an exact definition.
  • Hurt comes from an “assault.” What is “assaulted” is something that you love. These assaults are usually unintentional. Sometimes they even come from yourself.
  • Hurt is the substantive cause of all arguments, most divorces, and most wars.
  • Hurt is very difficult to adequately express, much less communicate, much less understand when someone says they hurt you.
  • Unfortunately, when someone tells you that you have hurt that person, this often comes as a kind of assault on you, usually causing you to defend yourself.

Hurt is a love problem

I want to bring the expression, “I am hurt” out of the negative appearance that it normally has. Hurt is actually a very positive feeling, positive because we feel hurt when we have lost something that is important to us. We get hurt when we have lost something that we love. When something we love has been lost, we feel sad. Recall that sadness is a love-based feeling. I feel sad when I have lost something that I love, or value. First, I love something; then I get attacked in some way; then I l lose something; then I feel hurt; and then I get sad because I have lost something that I love. Hurt naturally makes us sad. We discuss this at length in The Power of Positive Sadness, which we would suggest you peruse for a more cogent explanation of this love-attack-loss-hurt-sad phenomenon.

Hurt is about me

“You hurt me” is a very important statement to make and a very important statement to be heard and understood, but it is extremely difficult to do on both counts. When I say, “You hurt me” to someone, this statement is about me, not about the other person. This is not a concept that is easy to grasp, mostly because when people say, “You hurt me,” they tend then to indulge themselves in saying what is wrong about the other person. Thus, “You hurt me” usually leads into a criticism of the other person in the form of, “You shouldn’t have said this or that…” or “You should have said this or that….” When most people say, “You hurt me,” the focus is on the you, not the me.

So, how is the statement, “You hurt me,” about me? It seems I am talking about the other person when I say that s/he hurt me. But think about it: when I tell someone that they have hurt me, I am really talking about the emotional effect the other person had on me. Yes, the other person said or did something (or failed to say or do something), but their words, action, or lack thereof hurt you. Why? Because something important in you was assaulted in some way. I have heard people say that instead of saying, “You hurt me,” that you should say, “I feel hurt.” I hotly disagree. “I feel hurt” lies flat and says nothing about me, nothing about the relationship, much less what really happened. I know I am asking a lot of people to say, and to hear, “You hurt me” because it sounds like an attack on the other person. Once people get used to saying and hearing, “You hurt me,” they will begin to understand this very central ingredient of human relationships. We hurt each other all the time, and we need to have a meaningful and honest mechanism to deal with it. If we can’t feel hurt through and think it through, hurt migrates into anger, resentment, fear, or punishment.

When hurt turns to resentment

Hurt turns to resentment when it is not felt for what it is. Hurt is essentially sadness, or perhaps sadness results immediately after you have been hurt. If you can stay with hurt and sadness, you will stay with love, namely something that you have loved that you have lost. If you fail to acknowledge that you have been hurt, this hurt/sadness will almost immediately turn to anger, resentment, and fear. And possibly to punishment. Anger, fear, and the like come about because people have not adequately expressed hurt (and sadness), and/or have not heard hurt (and sadness). It is not natural to become immediately angry when I have been hurt. The natural process of hurt and its resolution is the following:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted
  • I lose that something that I have loved
  • I feel hurt. I naturally feel sad
  • I recognize that I have loved something and focus on this love
  • I may choose to say I am hurt or allow the hurt to finish on its own

Hurt turns to resentment, anger and fear because normal (not natural) way people process hurt is:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted and lose that something
  • I feel hurt but quickly move beyond hurt. I don’t want to be hurt again so I defend myself by being afraid and angry.
  • I may say, “I am hurt,” but I will say it as an attack.
  • I remain hurt, but now I have added resentment, which might never go away.
  • Hurts and resentment tend to pile up. I have new hurts over old hurts. (We all have unfinished and unresolved old hurts that are unfortunately brought into any new hurt, but this is a more extensive discussion that we will delay)

Hurt in work, play, and personal contacts

Hurt doesn’t always come from parents or from intimate partners. Hurt can come from work and other relationships. As adults, work is where we spend most of our time with people, and it is the place where most hurt actually occurs. But because we are at work, and work is not the place to express feelings, we have more hurt stored up there than anywhere else. And it is a primary reason we are hardest on our intimate partners because they take this hurt home and expect their partners to somehow fix it. Hurt easily occurs in extended family settings where you see family members once a year and do not have intimate relationships with these folks. Again, this hurt is often taken home because it can’t be resolved at the family reunion. Hurt can even occur in recreational activities. Much of this is due to the competition that is often part of recreation. Too many pickup basketball games end with some kind of verbal clash, if not even physical. Even a friendly card game can bring some kind of hurt, much less an intense game of chess. A baby shower, however benign in its appearance, can lead to hurt depending on what is given, received, and appreciated. Hurt comes in many forms, in many places, and at many times.

Daily hurts

It is a rare day that I am not hurt in some way. Recently, a patient expressed dissatisfaction with a report I had completed for him. He had every right to be disappointed with what I had to say. It doesn’t matter how much I worked on the report, what I thought of the report, or even the ultimate value of the report to him. In his mind he expected something other than what he got, and he has every right to be disappointed. And I have every right to be hurt. In this circumstance, namely in the therapy room, it did not behoove me to express my hurt, but I knew that I was hurt and did not let it migrate into fear or anger. In fact, I actually understood why he has some trouble with relationships in the way he challenged my report and what his expectations are. But importantly, my cognition of his demeanor and the reasons for his challenge did not diminish my hurt. I did my best in my report; it was not good for him; he was hurt; he expressed his disapproval; and I was hurt. This kind of daily hurt, unavoidable hurt, needs to be recognized, felt, and finished. Sometimes, you will say you are hurt and sometimes you won’t depending on the situation.

Sometimes you hurt yourself

Hurts don’t always come from someone else. They can just as easily come from a mistake you made, a misunderstood word spoken to you, or no word of appreciation spoken to you. If you recognize that you are hurt by these small things, you will be better able to deal with the larger hurts in your life. This is simply saying to yourself, “My bad” and allowing yourself to feel a moment of hurt and accompanying sadness. If you can allow yourself to be hurt by some mistake you made, you will become more aware of other people’s hurt, and accept it as normal

Knowing others’ hurt

We had an experience recently with friends who wanted to take us out to dinner. The request came when we were actually quite exhausted and needed a simple night home reading a book or playing a game. These friends are good people and some of the people we most enjoy being with, but on this particular night we didn’t want to be with anybody. This sometimes happens after a hard day’s work listing and working with people struggle with their lives. When we told Sam that we appreciated his offer, but that we were truly tired, he accepted our regrets with a kind demeanor. We came to know that our declining his invitation had hurt him. It wasn’t his initial kindness and demeanor that stuck us, but rather his words and actions afterwards. He said that he wanted to stop by and pick up a tool that he had left in my garage but that he was in a hurry and just buzz in and buzz out. It seemed quite clear to me that he was hurt, and that he was avoiding us because of his hurt. Now, this is no big deal, and we will likely never talk about it, but it was important for us to know that we had hurt him. I wonder how a conversation might have gone if he had simply said, “Ron, I was really hurt when you declined our offer for dinner.” I don’t think Sam is ready for that kind of conversation, so I will simply need to know that I hurt him and do my best in the future to be kind to him. It can be a bit of a burden to know your own hurt, know someone else’s hurt, and wisely choose to keep it all to yourself.

Resolution of hurt

So, what do we do with all this hurt: hurt at home, hurt with my intimate, hurt with my relatives, hurt with friends, hurt at work, hurt at the grocery store, and hurt in play situations? You do the following in order: (1) recognize hurt when it happens, (2) prevent hurt from migrating into anger or fear, (3) remember that hurt always comes from love, (4) determine whether you have the place, the time, and the person with whom you can share hurt, and if not, (5) note this hurt in your memory as something you might want to come back to at another time; (6) note that the feeling of hurt may have evaporated on its own. The key is # 1: recognizing hurt.

Further Reading

Feeling blogs 1-5

Forthcoming blog Feeling 7: It’s Not all about Hurt

Forthcoming book: Let Me Tell You How I Feel.