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As a survivor of attachment trauma, the hardest part of recovery has been letting joy in. 

Joy doesn’t feel safe. What if I let down my guard and another terrible, traumatizing thing happens? I’ve had enough of that. I don’t think I can take more. Joy feels like a trap. 

When I started the Values Based Integration process I was excited to tell stories of when I felt fully alive, and it felt like a breath of fresh air to begin a coaching session with what is going right, instead of what is going wrong. I was on board with the principle of it; to build from a place of love. To capture the factors and elements that make up the joy, wholeness, and fulfillment that I want to help clients find. That I am searching for myself. 

But an ache tore through me at the same time. An ache that tried to have me believe that those happy moments were things of the past. The nostalgia of those memories pained me because I believed that the stories of feeling fully alive would be the closest I ever came to feeling fully alive again. 

Joy also doesn’t feel like something we do as a coaching or therapeutic modality. Would people pay my hourly rate to tell stories of when they felt fully embodied, uncensored, safe, expansive or in bliss? Don’t people come to me to share their darkness with the hope that I can help them create light? I worried about charging for the sessions where we “just” uncover our values. I held a message that unless people were crying in grief…the session wasn’t helping. I used to believe that the “real” work – the transformations – didn’t start until we got to the stage of interrogating our limiting beliefs. The rest – the joy – was tertiary. Joy was something that would emerge only after we explored and fully exhausted our awareness of the pain.

But isn’t joy always something that seems tertiary to the “real” work of life? 

Aren’t we constantly told suffering is a virtue? Isn’t that why so many of us get really comfortable in our masks?

I didn’t appreciate the power that simply sharing these stories could have on my body and on my capacity to let joy in. To let love, freedom, and wholeness in. I realised there was a difference between telling one’s story, and feeling one’s story. That in sharing times that we feel fully alive, we are allowing our body to re-experience a sensation that it may have kept locked away as a matter of self-protection or self-preservation. 

I work with survivors of childhood attachment trauma. I am one myself. So I have an understanding of things like structural dissociation, not feeling safe “in one’s body”, and of distancing ourselves from pain by intellectualizing instead of processing and “feeling fully”. 

I will admit, I love intellectualizing. And it has its place; self-awareness and connecting the dots can be a powerful way to reclaim your voice and narrative. Especially if you were robbed of your truth via betrayal, injustice or the constant pressures to conform and perform. Especially if you have been told that the only “acceptable” you, is the “masked” version.

What I learned by sharing my fully alive stories was how to speak and feel at the same time. Something I wasn’t able to achieve when I just was sharing stories of my pain. My body doesn’t want to be present in the pain. How was I supposed to reassure my body it was OK to have feelings if all I exposed it to was pain?

My Fully Alive stories allowed me to bring my body back online in a way that felt safe and non-threatening.

But it’s more than that: It’s not just telling the stories, it’s starting with the stories. The reason we start with the stories (before we explore “the scars”) is because we need to know what we are building towards. We need to have something there to fall safely into when we start to dismantle the coping and survival strategies that have been keeping us stuck. When we chip away at the defence mechanisms that we built to protect us – when we lower our masks – we need to know that there is something stronger, safer, healthier, and more abundant already there to take its place. Otherwise, it can feel like we are sent back into battle…but this time without our armour.

It also helped me establish a relational dynamic with my coach based on my inherent awesomeness, not all the things that I feel shame about or am struggling with. I firmly believe this improved my feeling of safety with my coach because it reduced my need to “people please” and perform in order to get them to respect and like me. Sharing my stories meant I started my work with my coach from a place of them really seeing me, and seeing me with my strengths at the forefront. This meant I didn’t have to feel the need to “earn” their respect. Because I embodied it for myself.

Starting with the fully alive stories – which for some may include stories of immense joy – is also a grounding strategy. In my experience, it didn’t push me too far out of my zone of protection. Once the session was over, I wasn’t required to paint a happy smile on my face, or always be seeking that fully alive feeling in everything I do. I didn’t have to find silver linings or throw away my mask when I felt I really needed it.

At first, talking about joy was terrifying because it reminded me of how far away joy can sometimes feel when I am in the trenches of my recovery journey. And yet, it is powerful enough just to remember at a physiological level that my body has the capacity for joy. Telling the stories reminds my body it has the capacity for wholeness and the capacity for fulfillment. And if I have the capacity for it, that must mean that I also deserve it. 

I deserve joy, love and to feel fully alive. And you do too.