0:00 This is kind of interesting here. Every time I start to feel genuinely happy, a wave of anxiety hits me as if I'm about to lose everything. Is this a sign of underlying depression? And how can I learn to embrace joy without being paralyzed by the fear of inevitable loss? Um, well, first of all, this is not uncommon. There are some people that can experience happiness and joy and just, you know, chew on it and savor it like it's it's going to last forever. Um, that's a good thing if you've got that. But what happens is a lot of times in people's wiring is that they when our
0:46 hard wiring gets laid down, it gets laid down you know along certain dimensions but all of the all of the wiring in those dimensions is asking you know the question first of all before anything else the organism everything in you is asking number one am Am I safe? Am I safe? Right now, your brain is doing that as you sit here and breathe. You're breathing carelessly because an algorithm is run through your sensory input and your smells and your, you know, your your skin and a bunch of other ways that the air around you is safe and it's determined that and you're not having that instant anxiety. Oh no, the air is going to go away. It's not
1:32 happening what you're describing because the wiring has told you it's going to be okay. Right now, if you started to feel intense heat, you'd look around cuz maybe, you know, the chair is on fire or you started to smell a fume or something. You would go, "What's going on?" And then you would get something um let's just call it uh vigilant. You're looking, you heard something, you got startled. That's a normal response to be vigilant when there is some sort of a stimulus that would make us vigilant when a horn blows or something. Okay? So, that's how we're supposed to be wired to feel safe and careless unless something bad is happening. Well, here's what happens in those dimensions that I talked about. The most basic one is your sense of
2:19 being safely connected to someone. that you have what psychologists call a secure attachment. That I'm in a connection with somebody and the person that I love and need is not going to go away because of something I do. They're not going to withdraw from me. They're not going to reject me. They're not going to abandon me. Well, when the wiring gets laid down and sometimes people, you know, don't have secure attachments. They have get attached and like you're saying feel happy in a wave of genuinely happy. Oh, what a moment of connection. And then their wiring is they had those as a child. But what they learned every time you have one, it goes away. Mom or dad gets upset and they scream at you or they get drunk or they
3:06 abandon the family or they give you the silent treatment or whatever. And so now being safe and connected also gets paired with a vigilance. But I got to watch my back. I got to be on guard because they might on guard because they might leave me or they might criticize me or I'm walking on eggshells. So your attachment, you know, I s in different contexts or dimensions that kind of gets paired with an experience of love paired with a I will lose love. Same thing with experiencing freedom. Well, how might I be controlled? Is freedom ain't going to last? They're going to or being criticized or bunch of other stuff. So basically that's kind of what's going on. You said is it an underlying depression? I I can't diagnose you
3:53 without knowing you. Um if you fear you might have a depression, be good to talk to a good shrink who can do that. But generally speaking, if somebody has a real depression, um, genuine happiness is kind of rare to experience because the system is kind of wound down and you have something called anhidonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure. So, you could have a complicated kind of depression underneath that. I don't know why I asked that. I'd encourage you to go get checked out, but it probably has more to do with some wiring that it's time to get rewired. Um, I can give you two quick little things to try.
4:42 Um, one is I want you to start noticing this. This is kind of sort of what mindfulness would do. Or, you know, the Bible's word is, you know, we take every thought captive or we observe our ways. And the next time you're feeling genuinely happy, I want you to just observe that and sit in it to savor it. Don't go to the future. Don't go to the past. Don't go to any thought life. Just feel it. One of the things that has to happen in post-traumatic healing is your whole system has to learn to feel safe again. And sometimes if you're exiting that too quickly and an exit thought, anxious thought comes, just let it go by and sit
5:27 and savor the moment. This is what living in the now is about. It's what Jesus said in Matthew 6. Don't worry about tomorrow. Enough today is enough stuff going on. Worry about today. So I want you to make a conscious effort to just sit with it. Okay? And then when the anxious thoughts come, observe those and just accept them. Oh, there's one of those thoughts. Doesn't mean anything. It's just a thought. Accept it. Don't try to fight it. Don't just accept it and just learn to sit in the happiness. Secondly, there's probably a specific patterning behind this and that's where a good deep vulnerable
6:13 therapeutic relationship provides what the old psychiatrist um Winnott said a holding environment where you're psychologically held in this safety and you learn to experience safety and internalize that and that and in other relationships and sex therapy that if you're vulnerable and sitting it that actually can internalize and kind of rewire us. And then the third one is just to eval evaluate your thoughts and learn to, you know, dispute them. No, that's not true. That's a stupid thought. Nothing's going to happen. Go back to being involved. Anyway, if you're a boundaries member, I have several courses that apply to this on there. You go to boundaries.me to subscribe. Arabi.
