Expression

Joy is antigravity. It leaps upward and outward. Children and animals jump and bounce for joy. Adults feel 'high.' In fact, our center of gravity becomes higher; in joy our chests fill, our shoulders expand, and we become taller. Our step becomes springy. Our features are drawn upwards. As Darwin pointed out, a smile lifts the corners of the mouth, the upper cheeks become raised.

Our voices in speech contain higher frequencies when we are joyful, and although we cannot distinguish these frequencies separately, we sense them. Music expresses this in terms of pitch—in Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the voices rise higher and higher like steps of sound. Joy is soft expansion. Our skin becomes warm and pink. It 'glows.' Our eyes sparkle. Joy is also light. Glowing light and antigravity light.

It is at the top of a scale of steps. At the bottom is depression. Down, not high. Cold, not warm, low frequencies in the voice, not high. Lustreless, not light. Depression is gravity.

There seems to be a whole series of steps between joy and depression:

Joy

Rejection

Rage

Hate

Grief

Detachment

Depression.

Perhaps the sequence varies, but the key step is the one just below joy: rejection. We reach out in joy and are blocked by a wall in someone else. From then on it may be a tumble down the steps, part or all the way down.

Joy seems to be the emotion evoked by contact itself. It is impossible to imagine joy with a sense of isolation, unlike grief, anger, and fear. A person can, of course, be alone with joy, but there is always contact with something, if not another human being, nature itself. Even in the sight of the first flower of spring or of the ocean for the first time after a long stay inland, joy is at least doubled if shared. The sharing does not have to be with words. There is often silent sharing with joy, as if contact between organisms is occurring at levels almost of the plasma in the tissues.

Experience

How accessible is joy in you? If you stand up, shift your weight to the balls of your feet, spring slightly on your heels, let yourself smile, and draw in a gentle deep breath to your chest, do your eyes begin to look around for something to enjoy? Or is this simply embarrassing? It is hard to simulate joy, perhaps because it requires contact. Perhaps a memory will help. Often a memory of the first time you did or saw something that turned out to be special. First meetings, first expansions in a new way, seem to leave us changed inside. There has often been an element of wonder, what Wordsworth called 'surprised by joy.' It is difficult to simulate joy 'cold,' but easier if you begin by simulating wonder: let your eyes and mouth open wide and take a soft breath into your chest. Imagine perhaps a child seeing a birthday cake brought into the room. The natural follow up in breathing out is a sigh of 'Ah!,' which tends to leave the face in the joy expression: an open smile with the corners of the mouth turned up, the cheeks pressing upward to crinkle the corners of the eyes.

But in imitating the first stage of joy, the expression of wonder, you may become aware that it is not unlike the expression of fear: both are an opening of the mouth and eyes as if to take in the maximum impression from the environment. Only the pace and the feeling are different: wonder is soft where fear is hard, and the expansion of the chest is steady, not abrupt. When wonder is sudden enough to be surprise, it becomes very like the startle reflex of fear.

It may be useful to imitate various degrees of surprise, ranging from gentle wonder through abrupt fear. The taking in aspect of both joy and fear, or in energy terms the apparent fact that both are preceded by a charging of the organism with excitement and impression, means that if a person has become blocked against the expression and experiencing of fear, the capacity for joy has also become blocked. The price for all emotional blocking is a progressive immobilization of parts of the organism. Joy, which is mobile, reaching, and expansive if allowed to let go, becomes trapped inside the armor of pain.

Distress

In the cases previously discussed, distress has consisted of the emotion pressing for release and being held in. When joy presses for release, it may also be held in, but since the sensation of joy rising in the organism is pleasurable, distress is perceived less acutely. Rather, the person deadens him or herself slightly. This deadening may be seen by the person as self-control, modesty, politeness, or moral behavior. It often forms a wall of self-satisfaction. The person's self image is involved. For this reason, although Emotional First Aid for blocked joy can consist only of a few simple measures to open the way for its sharing, even simple measures of contact can be seen as threatening.

Why does the capacity for joy become deadened? Surely it is by definition pleasurable, and human beings naturally seek pleasure. The answer must be that, when the pleasure of joy moves the organism, it is experienced as anxiety, not pleasure. It has already been mentioned how the first sensations of excitement and of anxiety are a similar tension in the upper abdomen.

When excitement presses against a block, it becomes anxiety.

Restraint has its place. Many of us have had the experience of learning good news and restraining our joyful reaction until we can share it with a particular person whom we love. We know this sharing will be more intense than if we spill out our joy to the first bystander we meet. Such restraint can be seen as part of the energy economy of a healthy organism. But in our society, restraint has become pervasive except for special occasions. We need permission to express joy, and this is given by certain social situations that institutionalize it: we are allowed to express joy when we have drunk too much alcohol and are 'high,' or when our home team has won a game. These occasions permit us to slap each other's backs, hug each other, or jump up and down exuberantly. This institutionalization of joy seems to ensure that we experience it in a safe context and, most important, in a situation where other people are permitted, even socially required, to be joyful too.

In the presence of our own blocked joy, the sight of another person's joy produces in us unbearable pain. We may feel empty, hostile, conscious of our own deadness or despair. The next section of this chapter, on provocation, discusses the important social phenomenon of envy. One of the main causes of the suppression of joy is envy avoidance.

The most usual sign of distress in blocking joy is embarrassment. It may be hard to even talk or write about joy. When I wrote the beginning of this chapter, an internal censor told me it was 'too corny.' I have to get through my own embarrassment to let it stand. Public embarrassment causes blushing and the avoidance of eye contact. Physiologically, the organism has expanded with pleasure, and contact with another organism might lead to movements or actions or avowals of feeling that are not socially permissible. The elaborate social mechanisms of the repression of joy indicate first that this soft expansion of feeling is acknowledged to be extremely powerful, and second that it is perceived as dangerous.

The roots of this danger seem to be in the very capacity of joy to overwhelm self control and urge the organism toward contact, especially sexual contact. We know this from adult experience. Joy can be more infectious than fear. People get high at parties and may become involved in rash sexual adventures. (Afterwards, they have the excuse that they were drunk, which serves to integrate the experience into normal life: alcohol and drugs have formed part of the institutional joy of many societies apparently for this reason.) At victory celebrations after the end of a war or the liberation of a country, complete strangers end up making love. At times people do genuinely foolish things that they regret. A perpetual, unrestrained permission to 'enjoy' would, in most societies, lead not to freedom of emotional and sexual expression, but to license and abuse. This may be regrettable, but has to be acknowledged. Writers such as Reich and the educator A. S. Neill have discussed the fact that a healthy adult or child functions in a self-regulating manner that is instinctively 'moral' in the sense that it does not abuse the rights of others (a sensitive person respects the rights of others because of a capacity to identify with them), but that in most societies the repression of pleasure in children has led to the accumulation of destructive emotions that genuinely have to be restrained. As the saying goes, 'freedom cannot come overnight.'