How do I start feeling positive emotions?
For many trauma survivors, this question can feel strangely backward. Wouldn’t it make more sense to struggle with negative emotions such as anger, fear, or sadness, rather than the good ones? Wouldn’t people who have been through so much pain be so welcoming and ready to feel positive moments?
Yet for adult children of emotionally immature parents, adult children of alcoholics, and anyone healing from relational trauma, managing negative emotions may come quite easily out of a desire to not inflict unnecessary pain, to mitigate the degree of suffering in the world. Accessing positive emotions like joy, pride, and connection can feel even more difficult than the effort it takes to manage big, heated, or heavy feelings – due to the vulnerability it takes.
Underfeeling goodness is an intelligent adaptation, and it shielded your joy from being stolen, betrayed, mocked, or even just misinterpreted by the people around you. And whether you have had the chance to leave families, groups, or relationships that gave you cause to suppress your smile, or if you’re still in them but figuring out how you can reconnect with feeling good, you can learn to properly feel good again.
So: feeling good things is a majorly underestimated key to trauma healing. Pleasure, satisfaction, healthy pride, happiness, and connection all communicate safety to the traumatized mind and body. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say feeling good is a requirement to healing from trauma. Without an internal felt sense of safety, the parts of you holding traumatic stress can’t release their grip. EMDR, Somatic IFS, and psychodynamic therapy all recognize this truth: healing isn’t just about processing pain—it’s about reclaiming joy.
TL;DR
If you grew up with emotionally immature parents or in a home shaped by generational trauma, you may under-feel positive emotions like joy, pride, or connection. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a survival adaptation. Shutting down emotions helped preserve attachment and safety in childhood, but it can limit your relationships and well-being in adulthood. Healing involves gently retraining your nervous system to tolerate and savor goodness. This blog offers four somatic and relational practices rooted in EMDR, Somatic IFS, and polyvagal theory to help you expand your capacity for positive emotion and build a life that feels meaningful and connected.
Why Adults Raised in Toxic Families Struggle to Feel Good
If you grew up in a dysfunctional or emotionally unsafe home, shutting yourself down was a survival strategy. Especially if there are multiple generations of your family carrying dysfunction, survival attachments. In toxic families, the child’s nervous system learns to prioritize attachment over authenticity. Why? Because attachment to a caregiver—no matter how harmful—is the only source of food, shelter, and protection.
If your self-expression threatened that bond, it had to be suppressed. This includes not only anger or sadness, but also excitement, pride, and joy. Positive emotions can be loud, they can draw attention, they can be punished. And if your caregivers didn’t allow themselves to feel good things, you may have learned that joy was unsafe, excessive, or shameful.
Childhood Scenarios That Reinforce Emotional Shutdown
Here are a few examples of how this adaptation might have developed:
Shutting down negative emotions:
You cried after being teased at school, and your parent responded with “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
You expressed anger when a sibling broke your toy, and your caregiver punished you for “talking back.”
Shutting down positive emotions:
You proudly showed your artwork, and your parent dismissed it with “Don’t get a big head.”
You laughed too loudly with friends, and your caregiver snapped, “You’re being obnoxious.”
Adaptations to generational trauma:
Your parent survived war or political violence and developed hypervigilance as a coping strategy. When you expressed joy or playfulness, they responded with fear or irritation, believing safety required constant seriousness and control.
Your family lived in deep poverty, and your caregiver, who was overwhelmed by survival stress, viewed your excitement over small pleasures as naive or wasteful. You learned to suppress joy to avoid being shamed or seen as ungrateful.
These patterns teach children that emotional expression, particularly positive emotion, is risky. Over time, the nervous system adapts by muting joy, pride, and connection to preserve safety and attachment.
When Survival Strategies Become Roadblocks
While emotional shutdown may have protected you in childhood, it can quietly sabotage your adult relationships and well-being. Here’s how:
Difficulty feeling close to your partner can lead to emotional drift and disconnection.
Difficulty feeling warmth with friends can make it hard to maintain meaningful friendships.
Underfeeling gratitude can amplify everyday discomforts, making life feel harder than it is.
Over time, this can harden you into someone bitter, joyless, and emotionally isolated.
The goal isn’t to feel only positive emotions. It’s to feel both—fully and freely. Your emotions are messengers. They help you navigate life with wisdom, connection, and vitality. But it’s the vulnerable element to good feelings that makes them so challenging to open ourselves up to.
Vulnerability Is the Capacity to Receive Goodness
Survivors of relational trauma understandably associate vulnerability with danger. When you’ve been hurt in close relationships, openness can feel like exposure – exposure to criticism, judgment, attack. That’s the traumatic association with vulnerability. The connected and secure person’s understanding of vulnerability is capacity – the open spaciousness within you that allows beauty, love, and connection to enter.
To feel joy, you must be open. To feel love, you must be receptive. Vulnerability is what makes that possible.
Think of vulnerability as a wide receiving bowl. It’s not fragile—it’s expansive. It holds sorrow, and it holds wonder. It’s the part of you that can be moved by a sunset, touched by kindness, softened by laughter. It’s the part of you that can say, “I want,” “I care,” “I’m grateful,” and “I’m here.” Desire, love, thankfulness, and presence.
When you shut down vulnerability to protect yourself from pain, you also block access to goodness. That’s why expanding your ability to feel positive emotions requires reclaiming vulnerability not as a liability, but as a mystical power that creates doors than open where there were brick walls.
Four Tips to Rebuild Your Capacity for Positive Emotion
Let’s get cellular: expanding your capacity to feel good is built in the body. Healing from relational trauma means building new neural pathways—especially in your social engagement system, as described in polyvagal theory. This system connects your prefrontal cortex to the nerves in your face, neck, and chest that regulate connection and safety. You can build consciousness of as much neutral and good sensation as you can during moments of stillness and connection. Here’s how to begin:
1. Pendulate Between a Positive Memory and a Neutral Anchor
In somatic therapy, pendulation means gently moving between a charged emotional experience and a neutral or calming anchor. Try this: recall a recent moment of joy—laughing with a friend, finishing a project, watching a sunset. Then shift your attention to something neutral in the present, like the feeling of your feet on the floor or the texture of your clothing.
It’s normal to feel muscle tension or nervousness as you do this. That’s your system learning to tolerate goodness. Stay gently with that tension, and stay with the goodness of that joyful memory. Float your focus between these two poles without any agenda.
2. Be Mindful During Positive Moments
When something nice happens, pause. Do a gentle body scan. What thoughts are you having? What sensations are present? If you feel anxious, pendulate to a neutral anchor. Then return. Count to seven as you rest your attention on the good.
You are tuning into nervous system glimmers, which are the opposite of triggers. While triggers orient you to danger, glimmers are environmental cues that orient you towards safety.
Remember: the brain takes longer to register safety than danger. It takes milliseconds for the brain to register that you are unsafe, and 30 times as longer to register that you are unsafe. Pendulate and work your way up until you can stay with a good moment, for 30 seconds, without cringing.
3. Share Your Positive Memories with Others
If you had a great date, tell your friends. If you saw something beautiful, talk about it. If you did something hard, even if it may seem like a small thing to others, let someone know about it. Sharing joy spreads joy. And when others mirror your happiness back to you, your nervous system learns that it’s safe to feel good.
Notice the anxiety that comes up as you set the intention to do this. Notice the stories and thoughts that form that block you from sharing good things. Notice the parts of yourself that assume others don’t want to hear it. Notice when people light up and want to hear more – they aren’t always faking it. You can learn to tell the difference between your past naysayers and the people around you now.
This is especially healing for adult children of emotionally immature parents, who may have learned that joy was selfish or disruptive. In adulthood, you get to rewrite that story.
4. Share the Moment with Someone Around You
If you’re enjoying a walk, a meal, a laugh… invite someone in. This is how you create new memories with patterns you didn’t have. You may have learned it wasn’t okay to express joy with others, but that it was okay to feel happy when you were alone. But now, you have the power to choose differently. Now, you can take a small risk with people you do trust, who have shown that they are interested in your life, who are in the same spaces and share the same values as you, and ask to do something together.
This is how healing happens: one moment of joy, shared and savored. New memories collect in your library of memories and can contrast memories that have caused pain.
Are you ready to reclaim and receive what’s good in life?
If you’re already practicing these steps, thank yourself. You’re doing brave work and building a new generational cycle capable of holding more beauty. And if you’re trying but feel stuck, you don’t have to do this alone.
Trauma-informed, somatic-oriented therapy can help you troubleshoot, deepen, and sustain your healing. You deserve a life that feels meaningful, connected, and alive.
Schedule a consultation today to begin your journey toward emotional freedom and joy.
About the Author
Chelsea Adams, LPC is a licensed therapist with over 7 years of experience supporting clients in their mental wellness. She specializes in intergenerational, relational, religious, and systemic trauma and uses a decolonized model of evidence-based approaches such as EMDR, Somatic Internal Family Systems, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and therapy intensives to help clients connect to their own wisdom, voice, and power. Chelsea is committed to providing compassionate, expert care online for clients across Pennsylvania.
