What Is Really Robbing Us Of Joy?

Sadly, I have more close friends than I would ever wish who have lived through untimely tragedy.

The kind that splits your life into a before and an after.
The kind you would never choose.

And yet.

There is something about these friends, these extraordinary humans.
They live.
Not cautiously. Not half-heartedly. They take life by the balls. They live joyfully.

One of them says to me often,
"Life is for living, not pondering."
And I believe her.

I find it enormously inspiring.

In the last couple of years, I've had my own small window into fear. Losing both of my parents back to back. It was different, timely, the circle of life, a good life well lived. And yet it was still pain. Real pain. The kind that sits heavy in your chest and sometimes makes you gasp for air when you suddenly realise they really aren't here, even though their felt sense is still so very strong.

And it has made me wonder.

Is it possible that feeling huge loss opens the door to feeling huge joy?
Is there something about the fragility of it all that finally makes us truly feel?

For fifty years of my life, I woke up every day and the people I loved were healthy. I never once woke up flooded with gratitude for that. It was just normal. Expected. Invisible.

Now?
To wake up and know everyone I care about is well would feel like the greatest gift imaginable.

Nothing has changed in the external world.
But everything has changed in me.

Perspective shifts when you've seen the other side.

Deep emotional pain and deep love share the same circuitry. The attachment system that makes loss ache so fiercely is the very system that allows us to feel connection, meaning and joy.

They are not separate pathways.
You cannot selectively numb one without dulling the other.

This is why emotional suppression comes at a cost. Research by James Gross and colleagues shows that habitual emotional suppression reduces positive emotion and impairs connection (Gross & John, 2003). When we blunt pain, we blunt joy.

Of course, there's biology in this too. After loss there is often a drive to feel. To travel. To say yes. To seek sensation. Something in the brain responds to mortality awareness by intensifying meaning-seeking — a pull towards life rather than away from it.

But I don't think it's just biology.
I think it's perspective.
It's growth.
It's lived experience.
It's the understanding that nothing is guaranteed.
And that changes how you show up.

And then I draw a parallel with the work we do.

So many of the mums we support arrive utterly exhausted from trying to prevent their child's pain.
If they could wave a magic wand and remove every hard feeling, they would.
They step in. Fix. Rescue. Distract. Walk on eggshells. Dance the dance. Do anything to stop the big emotions from tipping over.

And I have been there.

They can't face the big emotions because they were never taught to face their own.
They weren't allowed to feel.
Even in loving homes, emotional attunement was often missing.
No one was truly there for them emotionally.
So now big emotions feel intolerable. Terrifying. Shameful.

But here's the question that keeps circling in my mind:

If we rob our children of difficult emotions… do we also rob them of the joyful ones?
Do we rob them of learning? Of growth?
Do we rob them of resilience?
Of the ability to sit beside someone else's pain one day?
Of the capacity to form deep, real human connections?

Because the same attachment circuitry that wires pain wires love.
If we smooth every edge, silence all the turmoil, fix every discomfort, do we accidentally dampen the full range of being human?

Perhaps what I see in my remarkable friends is not fearlessness.
They have met pain, not by choice, but by circumstance, and somewhere in that meeting there has been acceptance.

And here is the paradox we see again and again in our work:

When we allow pain, it softens.
When we resist it, it shouts.

Maybe the bravest thing we can do, as adults, as parents, as humans, is not to protect ourselves or our children from pain at all costs.
But to teach ourselves how to hold it.

Because on the other side of that capacity…
Is life.
Fully lived.