Joy: Why Is It Needed And Where Does It Go

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is joy for:

1. Joy gives a sense of life. It is the experience “I live”, not “life-pain”, “tired of dragging out a miserable existence,” etc.
2. Joy gives meaning to life. On the one hand, this is in itself the feeling “I am not living in vain”. On the other hand, the feeling of joy directs “where to live” - where there is joy, there and go, what brings joy, so to do, with whom it is joyful, and build relationships with that.
3. Joy gives rejuvenation. It is both energizing and relaxing (compared to the exhausting tension of anxiety, for example).

When a person ceases to experience joy, his life loses both vector, and activity, and brightness, fullness, becomes mechanistic. There is no strength, no desire, no mood to do anything. In general, it is not clear what to do and why. Questions arise: “Why do I live? What for all this is needed, and when will it finally end?"

What a person can experience joy from:

1. From contact with people. With someone with whom it is good, pleasant, safe, interesting. With loved ones, with loved ones, with friends, with new interesting acquaintances, etc.
2. From contact with nature.
3. From the contemplation of beauty.
4. From creativity, creation.
5. From cognition, learning new things. Interest is also included in this process.
6. From activity. Both from the result and from the process. Interest is also included here.
7. From reaching the goal. (Although there may be a decline in the uptrend here.)
8. From successfully overcoming obstacles and difficulties.
9. From play and mobility. Look at the dogs frolicking on the lawn or in the snow. It also includes pleasure.
10. From contact with the spiritual.
11. From being. From being in the world, from your incarnation. This is something that children and animals are good at. In the course of life, a person may lose this ability. But it is recoverable. This is spoken of in spiritual, philosophical, mystical movements as to celebrate life. This is not idleness in the sense of idleness, but celebration, in the sense of joy from the very fact of life, from every moment. It is the joy of feeling the "correctness" of life, of the feeling of the unity of the body and the spiritual, of the feeling with the world.

To be. To be in contact with yourself, with the bodily, with the spiritual. Be in contact with the world, with people, with nature. Be in productive activity: cognitive, creative. Be relaxed and contemplated. Be in motion: physical, mental - in the direction in which your own deep essence points.

As a combination of many of the above aspects, one can single out such a form of joy as the experience of a deep orgasm. When it’s not a nerve discharge from genital stimulation. And when it is a total experience of contact with oneself, with the higher, with a partner.

This is not a call to have sex more often. On the contrary, after a superficial experience, you want more and more, because there was no full-scale discharge and saturation, and after a deep experience, time is needed to integrate the experience.

Why does a person stop feeling joy:

1. Prohibition of feelings in general. Perhaps this message came from the family system. Perhaps the person chose this method of protection against something very painful.
2. Ban on joy. Perhaps from the family system. Perhaps the choice is due to the fact that something unpleasant has been “glued together” with joy.
3. Unlived feelings. For example, anger or sadness. They can be "frozen", then they block the joy. They can, on the contrary, be overly active, a person “sticks” in them and joy remains “buried” under their layer. There are also character structures that are formed as a result of certain circumstances in childhood, in which there is some kind of leading feeling, which, as it were, pushes back all the others, so a person is constantly offended, angry, in fear or upset.
4. Shock trauma (life-threatening situation - real or imagined) and developmental trauma (situations of violence, humiliation, neglect of needs, which regularly occurred in childhood, etc.).
5. Alcoholism and other addictions. The use first creates the illusion of increased joy, and then, as it were, breaks the neurophysiological mechanism of joy, after which the joy becomes inaccessible, and the use becomes necessary in order not to fall into the "emotional minus".

In the case of psychological reasons, emotional balance is restored in the course of therapeutic work and joy returns to life.

It is also worth highlighting the physiological reasons, you can read about them on medical portals. To what extent physiological disorders are associated with psychological causes is an open question. However, in certain cases, both medical treatment and therapeutic work are required.