In the last two episodes, I shared three practices to help you nourish your joy—Tracking Glimmers, Orienting, and Taking in the Good.

These practices can make it easier to honor our needs because they help us notice when our needs are well-met, imagine a life in which our needs are well-met, and detect otherwise hidden opportunities to honor our needs.

But sometimes, it still can feel really vulnerable to feel or express joy. And if so if you do ever feel hesitant or nervous to really savor feelings of goodness, I created this episode for you.

Let’s start by discussing the work of clinical psychologist, Beatrice Beebe, around what she’s termed our windows of welcome.

For over four decades, Beatrice Beebe and her team have recorded and analyzed videos of mothers engaging in face-to-face interactions with their infants. Over this time, they’ve tracked how people’s earliest communications with their mothers affects how they communicate with themselves and the other people in their lives into adulthood.

Through their research, Beebe and her team made a discovery that has really big implications on how much joy—and other emotions— we allow ourselves to feel.

They named this discovery the windows of welcome. Here’s the basic premise:

When you and I came into this world, we had the capacity to express every possible human emotion—sadness, anger, fear, delight, disgust, excitement, you name it.[1]

But soon after we were born, we started tracking the emotional expressions which our caregivers displayed. And at around four months old, most of us began editing our emotional expressions based on what our caregivers accepted and reflected.

If our caregivers mirrored our emotions, meaning, when we smiled, they smiled back or when we frowned, they frowned back, then we knew they accepted our emotions.

But if our caregivers did not mirror our emotions, say they met our smile with a flat affect, we experienced less acceptance of what we were feeling and were apt to feel a sense of painful disconnection.

The process of tracking and editing out expressions shapes what Beatrice Beebe and her team named windows of welcome. 

Inside our windows of welcome are all the emotions that others reflected to us with warmth and that we developed relatively easy access to. Outside our windows are the emotions that we came to believe are unacceptable and that we therefore ignore, numb, or turn away from.

Windows of welcome are not only shaped during infancy but also during adulthood. For example, in many activist cultures, commiseration is a strategy for belonging. Many changemakers hold the belief that it’s wrong to feel joy in the midst of all the collective injustice and that if we allow ourselves to feel good, we’re betraying people who have it worse. If the people with whom we collaborate hold these beliefs, we are more likely to limit our expression of joy.

Another metaphor I find helpful for depicting how our relationships sometimes teach us to limit our joy is that of an emotional drawbridge. This one is from the work of Sarah Peyton and her book, Your Resonant Self.

When we humans attempt to share an emotion with another person, it's as if we extend one half of an emotional draw bridge toward them, reaching out across a chasm.

If the other person reflects what they see, it’s as if they’re extending their emotional bridge to meet ours. And we feel seen and understood.

But if the other person does not acknowledge our bridge or turns away from us, it can feel like our part of the bridge collapses down into a chasm. We’re apt to feel a jolt of shame like an electrical shock in response. This experience can be so painful that afterward, we might unconsciously decide it's safer not to fully experience or express that emotion, at least not with the person we’re interacting with.

If you’ve learned to unconsciously anticipate that other people will meet your delight with disapproval,