When Joy Feels Like a Threat

Plenty of research shows that therapeutic success depends less on specific interventions and more on how well we meet the client where they are. When we overemphasize a particular technique instead of staying attuned to the person in front of us, we risk relational failure.

The biggest relational failure of my career happened when I tried to suggest joy to a client. It was 2020, and I had been diving into research on joy, hope, and gratitude from the field of positive psychology. I was building tools and worksheets, testing them in groups and individual sessions – and they were working. Clients who had felt hopeless were starting to shift. It was a dark year, and I was thrilled to be helping people find some light. I was so thrilled that I made myself blind to the client in front of me.

She was deep in crisis and had spent most of her life that way—stuck, angry, desperate for change. I brought up joy. Well-intentioned, yes, but deeply mistimed. To her, it felt like I was suggesting yoga to someone who was drowning. She responded with raw anger, closed her laptop, and ended the therapeutic relationship. My timing could not have been more wrong. It was a moment I’ll never forget.

Losing that client’s trust and rebuilding from a place of humility forced me to revisit the research more critically. Did these practices work for everyone? What about the people they didn’t help? Was something getting in the way? Could that something be named, understood, softened?

What I discovered was a missing bridge between trauma and joy. And I realized it was my job to build it. As I peeled back layers of shame and resistance, I identified six common barriers, patterns I began to call the six thieves of joy.

• Hypervigilance: Constant scanning for danger that keeps the nervous system too activated to rest or receive joy.
• Emotional Numbing: A survival strategy that protects us from pain by shutting down feelings, at the cost of blocking pleasure too.
• Fear of Loss: The belief that if you let joy in, it will only make the next loss more unbearable.
• Fear Conditioning: A learned association, joy is unsafe because something bad always follows.
• Guilt: The inner voice that says it is wrong to feel joy when others are suffering.
• Shame: The deep-rooted belief that you are fundamentally unworthy of joy.

Resistance is not failure. It’s not a character flaw. It’s a coping mechanism, a system trying to protect itself from what feels overwhelming or dangerous. When we meet resistance with curiosity instead of force, we begin to uncover what is actually in the way.

The truth is, while joy seems universally positive, it isn’t always experienced that way. To someone locked in hypervigilance, joy can feel like a threat. To someone emotionally numb, hope or imagination can feel jarring. And for those burdened by shame or trauma, gratitude or awe may seem completely out of reach. But that’s the beginning of the story, not the end.

How do we build a bridge between trauma and joy? Here, somatic experiencing offers a helpful framework: pendulation—the gentle rhythm of moving between activation and calm, and titration—the slow, gradual processing of traumatic material to avoid overwhelm. Just as we titrate exposure to pain, we can titrate exposure to joy. We pendulate into small, manageable experiences of pleasure, moments that feel good but not overwhelming, and then return to safety. Over time, this builds capacity. Joy becomes not only tolerable but sustainable.

A practice I developed from this idea is called tiny little joys. Once a day, you pause and name one small thing that brought you a flash of joy: a patch of sunlight, the smell of fresh coffee, a lyric in a song that was playing in the grocery store, a text from a friend. It doesn’t need to be profound—the smaller the better. The key is to notice it and imprint it by lingering on it for a few extra seconds. The intentional pause helps your brain mark the moment as meaningful.

When we’ve lived through trauma or prolonged stress, our brains become wired to scan for danger. Tiny little joys interrupt that pattern, not by ignoring the pain, but by slowly expanding our capacity to hold both. Over time, these little joys accumulate. You start to see the world differently. The tiny little joys slowly shift the nervous system’s baseline. They gently whisper: connection is possible. Safety is possible.

The biggest relational failure of my career taught me that joy is possible, but only when we build a path to it that honors the terrain we’re crossing.