The Daily Write

The fear of joy

How being happy can be terrifying

June 4th: What are you most afraid of, and why?

I have been afraid of death & dying for as long as I can remember. It started when I was 13 & my Grandad ‘Granf’ became very unwell in the middle of the night & we were woken by my Dad to take my sister & I to my aunt’s house to be with our cousins.

To this day I remember it as clear as day. I remember the smell of the night air, of my Dad coming into my room to wake me & passing the ambulance as we drove in the opposite direction to their home.

It was my 1st ever experience of someone close dying & I was old enough to understand what was happening.

Since then I’ve lost others, most notably my Nan in July 2000 followed less than 3 months later by her son, my Dad.

I have written about my experience of grief in another article you can see it here

The finality of it, the sadness, disappointment & feelings of how unfair it was laid the foundation for my underlying anxiety about losing other people.

The vulnerability of loss seeped into relationships, into my trust in the world & my ability to be joyful when I found myself waiting for the next thing. It stole time with my children that I should have been enjoying. If they were on trips in cars it would leave me at home pacing as I was terrified that they wouldn’t come home.

I pictured the car rolling, what they would be saying, how scared they would feel. It was in full HD.

My spiralling thoughts as I was at home waiting for them would get to the point of imagining the police at my door & planning funerals for them.

Unprocessed trauma does this, I knew at the time it was irrational, but I couldn’t help it.

The moment I felt joy, I felt vulnerable. A friend suggested reading Dr Brené Brown so I downloaded the audiobook & listened whilst out walking. You can watch her Ted Talk here

I cried.

It was me — I finally understood what was happening, and from there I began to heal.

I still have ‘moments’ of irrational panic, especially now my boys are adults & driving / out with friends clubbing, but I can manage them much better.

Training as a counsellor helped me enormously, during the course I lost a close childhood friend. It was awful, she was so young, but thankfully I was going to therapy & I had the space to process it all.

I had begun to learn how to be present in the moment, to recognise the fear & to finally be able to experience joy after almost 20 years of dreading it.

KEY MESSAGE: Being vulnerable can be terrifying, but through learning to be present in the moment, you can begin to experience joy without fear

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