This is the FOURTH in a five-part series on Joy. We both read a little book by Dr Marcus Warner and Chris Coursey: The 4 Habits of Joy-Filled People: 15 Minute Brain Science Hacks to a More Connected and Satisfying Life. And thought it would be great to share with our listeners.
I (Renee) wish I had this information when I was raising my kids!
Many of us are walking around with an inner world of fear. A fear house. And those of you listening who have a fear relationship with your parents or your employer or with God, know that it is not sufficient to create a life that is rich and full.
If you missed the earlier episodes, we recommend that you go back and listen to them because we laid a foundation for all the future episodes. As a reminder, we said in the introductory episode that in Western cultures we tend to see joy as a choice. But joy happens predominantly in the relational right hemisphere of the brain, while choices and cognition happen in the left.
This is significant, because the data flow in the brain moves from right to left, not the other way around. Right brain activity informs left brain activity, not the reverse.
Joy is primarily a relational experience that is more like a reflex anchored in the relational part of our brain. so our choices can help us move toward Joy. we can choose to visit a friend who lights up to see us. we can choose to dwell on memories of relational joy. We can choose to spend time quieting and appreciating the good things in life. At the time of birth the part of the brain that grows with the experience of joy is barely developed. how well it develops and grows is largely influenced by relational activity. These essential skills can be developed before we are even old enough to speak. and we can develop them all throughout our lives no matter our childhood experiences.
There are four habits you’ll need to build your joy house, the authors use the acronym CASA, which means “house” in Spanish.
C – Calming
A – Appreciating
S – Storytelling
A – Attacking Toxic Thoughts
Today, we are talking about STORYTELLING.
The whole goal of this series can be summed up in this sentence: We must learn how to manage our emotions so that we stay our relational selves under stress.
Most of us have stories of reacting in some regrettable way. maybe we flew off the handle and lost it. or maybe we threw in the towel and gave up. when it comes to storytelling, we could tell these stories and end with the defeat and the regret. but we choose to tell the stories as lessons we have learned about the importance of returning to Joy before we make life changing decisions. how we tell our stories determines how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
How to Tell a Joy Story
A joy story explains how we faced a negative emotion in one of three ways.
- We dealt with the hard emotion, but still acted like ourselves.
- We dealt with the hard emotion, but we were able to recover and return to Joy.
- We dealt with a hard emotion, but learn to helpful lesson even if we learned it the hard way.
Here are some keys you need to know about joystories.
- Talk about small or moderate emotions. don’t start with the worst thing that ever happened to you or the biggest example of an upsetting emotion that you can remember.
- Describe how your body felt when you were upset and how your body felt when she recovered.
- Make sure your face expresses the emotions you are feeling and make eye contact and use your whole body to tell the story.
- Keep the story brief. Two to 3 minutes is usually plenty of time.
Here’s a basic outline you might use it spells STEP to help you remember the steps needed for a good Joy story.
S–Setting: invite people into the setting. are you at home, school, work, vacation? Describe what it looked like.
T–Trigger: explain what triggered the emotion.
E–Emotion: give the emotion a name and explain it with both words and with nonverbal body language.
P–Point: make your point. explain how you acted like yourself or how you recovered or the lesson you learned.
If you are wondering where to start, the authors suggest starting with each of the six core protector emotions. you can remember them by the acronym SADSAD: sadness, anger, disgust, shame, anxiety (fear), despair.
Note: There is a whole chapter on the stages of emotional development and how each stage handles the SADSAD emotions. It’s worth discussing:
Infant
Child
Adult
Parent
Elder
Infant
An infant has no emotional capacity. every new emotion a baby feels is overwhelming. This is because the elements in the brain necessary for dealing with negative emotions or largely undeveloped at birth. infants are completely dependent on someone with more developed maturity to regulate their emotions for them. Thus, we cuddle and soothe and sing and rock and talk in a way that we hope will help them return to joy. If this happens over and over again, the baby will learn to feel safe and form secure attachments. If this does not happen, the baby’s brain will not develop properly.
If we reach our adult years without receiving the infant Level Training we needed, we may find that we still handle many of our emotions like an infant. For example, we may fuss and whine and pout about our problems because we never learned how to ask for what we need. The skill of asking for what we need is a child level skill. If certain emotions keep us from doing that, it is a clue that we are stuck in infant level maturity.
Emotional infants are good at letting people know they are upset. They get angry easily. They tend to be addicted to non-relational substances like drugs or alcohol and two non-relational experiences like sexual addictions, constant entertainment, or the adrenaline rush that comes from fear. It is important to state that most people are not stuck in infant-level maturity because they choose to be there. They are stuck because they missed out on something they needed in order to develop that maturity when they were the age to do it easily. If we want to grow our emotional maturity and live with greater joy, we need to admit where we are and start working on the skills we missed.
Child
A child normally has more capacity than an infant. their brains are more developed, so it takes more to overwhelm them. They also have more skills and more experience in dealing with strong emotions. One of the primary tasks that needs to be Mastered by the time we reach our childhood years is learning to regulate emotions. We do this by being with people who can do it when we are upset and, over time, we learn to identify how we feel and how big our emotions are. children learn to use their words when they are upset and ask for what they need.
If all goes well, I will reach my adult years with a well-developed joy house in my inner world. Joy will be the default setting and the way I live so that when I am upset I can recover and return to Joy. I will be positioned for success as an adult. However, if trauma interrupts my development, I may find myself entering my adult years still living in a house of fear. As a result, I will have fewer relational skills and less capacity to handle life’s challenges. The lack of a joy foundation will make me want to avoid becoming an adult. I will resist responsibility.
In order to grow their emotional maturity, children need adults to validate their emotions, comfort them and help them recover. and this needs to happen over and over again. Parents should validate the big emotions and respond to the situation at their level. This would mean bending down to look the child in the eyes and show on your face that you can see how much they are hurting or scared or whatever. The more this happens, the more fully developed the joy Pathways and the child’s brain will become.
Adult
People with adult level maturity have mastered all the infant and child level skills needed to tend their own emotions.This doesn’t mean we never get overwhelmed. It means moderate level, negative emotions don’t make us blow up, shut down, or meltdown. But those stuck at infant or child level maturity, who are trying to navigate an adult world, can find themselves constantly living on the edge of their capacity.
In a sense, we can think of adults as people who have learned to live on the fuel of joy. They have a well-built joy house and can return to a place of internal peace and joy on a regular basis. Because they have developed the four habits of joy-filled people, they have enough joy and strength to endure hardship well. As a result they are stable and relational – the kind of people who keep relationships bigger than problems and handle big emotions without turning into a different person.
If you are not sure what we mean by turning into a different person, think of a person in your world who is normally a kind person, but who gets scary when they become angry. Immature people often change their personality depending on the emotion they feel. Others tend to walk around them on eggshells because of it. One of the characteristics of adult level maturity is the ability to act like ourselves even under stress.
Parent
Parent level maturity means I give life. I can take care of myself and sacrificially take care of my children at the same time. a parent is a life giver as opposed to a life drainer. A parent doesn’t just teach a child to obey or master the skills needed for school. A parent guides a child in the art of living. When our world is filled with parent level people, it means there are a lot of people around who are not easily overwhelmed and have learned how to navigate the ups and downs of life with confidence, creativity, and resiliency.
Parents with well-built joy houses in their inner world have greater ability to enter into all of the big emotions their children face, deal with their own big emotions, and still find their way back to a place of calm and appreciation at the end of the day. parenting is still hard. It still demands a lot of sacrifice. but parents whose inner World Is Anchored and joy will navigate those challenges with greater resilience than those whose inner world is built on fear. parents confidently protect, serve, and enjoy their families.
Elder
Elders are people whose children have become adults. Decades of navigating the challenges of parenting have grown their capacity to handle more emotional weight. As a result, elders often add value simply by their emotional stability. It takes a lot to overwhelm them. They stay relational During trials and remind people who they are in tough times. Elders bring the wisdom that can only be earned by enduring many hardships well and recovering when things go wrong.
People at elder level maturity are often good at seeing the holes that need to be filled, both in the people they meet and in the communities they serve. They often make great surrogate parents or are simply good friends who help the rest of us bear the weight of life. Some people spend a significant part of their lives as elders. those years will be much more satisfying with the secure and stable Joy house in the inner world.
A culture filled with mature Elders is truly blessed. These individuals help bring stability to the entire community. They excel at facing the challenges of life without losing their joy. They also excel at helping those around them face hardship with grace. businesses, schools, families, and churches all benefit from the presence of people with elder level maturity.
Give examples from our lives for each of the options as we proceed.
Option 1: Stories About How We Acted Like Ourselves
Option 2: Stories About How We Recovered
Option 3: Stories About a Lesson We Learned So We Don’t Do That Again
Option 1
Joy stories acknowledge that we all have weaknesses and face difficult emotions. the point isn’t to celebrate how mature we are, but to remind ourselves and others of what maturity looks like even when emotions are running high.
Acting like ourselves refers to being the best version of ourselves. Too often we focus on who we are when the worst version of ourselves gets triggered. Learning to tell Joy stories where we feel heart emotions but still act like the best version of ourselves helps to reinforce our true identity.
There is more to us than what we do wrong. Sometimes we tell stories about our most cringe worthy moments, and conclude that we are bad people. Instead, we need to tell those stories and realize that a better version of ourselves was possible. There are times we temporarily forget who we are. We say and do things we wish we could take back. our emotions often cause us to speak and behave in hurtful ways so that we do not live according to our values.
Acting like ourselves means we stay relational while we feel the emotion. we respond as we would if we were feeling joyful and peaceful. We continue to reflect the priorities and values that are important to us while we feel upsetting emotions. We behave in ways that reflect our character and personality. so, by acting like yourself in an emotion, you behave in a way that is satisfying.
Option 2
The expression returning to Joy can sound like we stop feeling upset or overwhelmed and suddenly feel happy again. However, the phrase does not refer to the end of a negative emotion. it refers to recovering our ability to be glad to be with someone in spite of the emotion. When we get triggered, our relational self disappears and we act like someone else. Returning to Joy is the process of getting our true self back online. This happens when we can find Joy with another person even though our emotions are still upset.
Learning to stay our relational selves is an important skill, but our brain also has to learn how to recover when we feel upset. Let’s be real, it’s no fun to stay stuck in unpleasant emotions with no path back to joy! Returning to joy and peace means making the shift from the back of our brain where we isolate ourselves when things go wrong to the front of our brains we’re our relational self resides. When we share these recovery stories, we describe what the upset was like and how it felt, then we focus on the shift back to joy and how this joy feels in our body and mind.
Option 3
We all wish we could have do-overs in life. These are moments in which we handle the situation or feeling in a way that caused us to temporarily lose track of who we are. we say and do things that later make us cringe. Thankfully, even our mistakes are not in vain. We can use these situations where we failed to stay ourselves as an opportunity to update our brains with the better example by reimagining what could have been.
In these do-over stories we share how we dropped the ball and failed to stay ourselves. We then interject with a vision for how we would have wanted to handle the situation. We say,” if I could redo this moment, I would say and do this and that instead.” We take that approach to better capture our values and character and include how we would have wanted to handle a particular moment of weakness or temporary forgetfulness.
This kind of story engages our brain’s identity Center to stimulate how we could have handled the situation better in some way. It uses our “ as if” circuits in the brain to demonstrate how to stay Ourselves and recover when feeling emotions and navigating circumstances that are demanding, painful, triggering, and simply too intense.
Conclusion
Hopefully you have not only been listening to this podcast, but you have started doing some of the exercises to help build your own Joy house. In the final episode we will talk about Habit #4: Attacking Toxic Thoughts.