Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Certified behavior analyst, founding former Director of The University of South Florida’s (USF) Wellness Resource Center, Founder of GLOW Women’s Gathering with credentials in Neuroscience for Business from MIT Sloan.

There is a woman I want you to meet (though I suspect you already know her) because she lives somewhere between your collarbone and your solar plexus, and she has been keeping watch for a very long time.

She can hold a catastrophe with both hands and not drop a thing. She has metabolized grief at the kitchen sink. Absorbed shock in the school pickup line, the boardroom, the bathroom floor. She keeps going with the particular ferocity of someone who learned that stopping was not a real option. And then she keeps going some more.

She is extraordinary at handling hard things.
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even now—
there’s a part of you that can handle chaos with frightening elegance.
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you’ve done it.
again. and again. and again.

You learned the choreography of survival so well. You could mask and perform at any moment. (i’m fine. You said through a flip-flopping lurch in your stomach.)

you scan for the catch.
you downplay the good.
you hold the laughter at half-volume.
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this is the quiet theft of survival mode.
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She is extraordinary at handling hard things.
She has almost no practice with the alternative.
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We got something skew-whiff about healing. We thought it meant becoming better equipped to carry weight: thicker skin, a longer fuse, less crying in the Farmer’s Market parking lot. (Those cries count. They count enormously. But that's not the finish line, Reader.)
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I saw this on quote on the inter webs:
“You are not healing to be able to handle trauma. You are already extraordinary at that. You are healing to be able to handle joy.”

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I’ve sat with this, maybe for a few years. I sat for real understanding of how I was conditioned to believe the opposite.
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Read it again. It shifts on the second pass.
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Because here is what survival fluency actually costs: it teaches your nervous system to treat ease as suspicious. To hold happiness the way you'd hold an unfamiliar object
at a slight distance,
watching for what it might do.
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It trains you to read good news as a promissory note on whatever's coming to collect it. To experience love arriving & immediately run a quiet inventory of all the ways it could leave.
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I have watched us — crackling-brilliant, warm women — come utterly undone in the presence of sustained okay-ness. A season of genuine ease arrives and we manufacture a crisis, because ease without a crisis feels structurally unsound. A compliment lands and we’ve deflected it before it can take root. Something tender extends itself and we: reflexively, quickly, almost tenderly skooch toward an exit.
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Because joy, at this point, is the unfamiliar country. Pain is the known place.
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Conditioned. By a very long curriculum of evidence, written in experiences you did not choose and were not the right size to carry.
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And healing [the real, full-bodied, makes-your-whole-life-larger kind] is learning a different language. After years of fluency in bracing, in vigilance, in the low-grade hum of not-quite-safe becoming your baseline weather:

• you are learning to stay when something good arrives.
• you are learning to let it find a location in your body.
• you are learning to trust the quiet.

this is harder than it sounds. sometimes it is the hardest thing.

And it is also: the.whole.point.
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Fear of positive emotions is a documented, measurable psychological phenomenon studied extensively by psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo, whose Fear of Happiness Scale has mapped this territory across cultures and populations for over a decade. A significant portion of people, particularly those with trauma histories, or those raised in environments where joy reliably preceded loss; experience genuine physiological anxiety in response to positive emotional states. Not ambivalence. Not wistfulness. Fear.
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​The brain, loyal to its primary directive of keeping you alive, has done its arithmetic: last time things were good, something came to take it. It has filed that conclusion under safety protocol. It is running a joy-autopsy on every good moment before that moment has even finished arriving. Scanning for what's wrong, what's missing, what it's about to cost.
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​And it can be updated.​
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Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory — one of the most replicated frameworks in positive psychology — tells us that positive emotions are not decorative. They are generative. They widen the aperture of attention, increase cognitive flexibility, and build psychological resources over time. Joy does not wait patiently at the end of your healing like a prize. It is, in measurable part, one of the mechanisms through which healing occurs. You do not earn your way to it. You practice your way toward it, imperfectly, in the middle of everything else.
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Which brings us to the body…
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Neurobiologist Stephen Porges' polyvagal framework describes the physiological state from which genuine ease is even possible: the ventral vagal state, the biological home of safety and social connection. From a sympathetic nervous system running its ancestral threat-scan, you can technically experience joy the way you can experience a beautiful landscape while driving too fast: you see it, you note it, you are already past it. But you cannot inhabit it. The real exhale (the one that actually reaches your belly) requires a nervous system that has been given enough evidence of safety to stand down, even briefly, even tentatively.

That standing-down is the practice. It is a physiological skill, and like all skills, it is built through repetition.

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson describes the brain's structural negativity bias as follows: the brain Velcros threat and Teflon-coats ease. This is exquisite engineering for survival on a savanna. It is a significant inconvenience for a woman trying to actually live her life. The brain requires deliberate, repeated exposure to positive experience. Stayed with, not just noted, before it begins to encode joy as expected rather than exceptional.
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​A PRACTICE​
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I invite you to try something more specific, and more honest than positive thinking.

The next time something good arrives: a moment of ease, an unexpected kindness, a stretch of genuine okay-ness. Notice the impulse to move past it. To qualify it. To boot it before it can disappoint you.
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And instead: stay there. Twenty seconds. Let it find somewhere to land in your body. Notice where. Name it aloud if you can, even quietly because naming emotion activates the prefrontal cortex and turns down the alarm, a move researchers call "affect labeling."

You are doing something wonderfully radical: you are teaching your nervous system, one small evidence-of-safety at a time, that good things are permitted to stay.
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​This is not the whole of healing. But perhaps it is micro moments where healing actually lives.​
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In sharing, you contribute to a bigger picture - a world pulsating with well-being and wholeness. I'm grateful for you!

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p.s. You have spent years becoming extraordinarily capable in the language of hard things.
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Now, Reader, slowly, gently, in whatever increments your nervous system will allow, let yourself learn the other one.
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Start small. Start now. Start with twenty seconds of staying.
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