Brené Brown

But we know from the research that if someone gets promoted or engaged or something really exciting happens, they're as or more likely to relapse.

Really?

Yes.

Because they're so overwhelmed by the positive emotion that

that they've also been numbing.

And the community doesn't surround that person in that moment because there's not a hard time.

So they're alone in these incredibly excruciatingly vulnerable feelings of joy, optimism, and gratitude, which they also don't have experience feeling.

And so it can lead to relapse.

I mean, to me, the hardest thing I've had to learn how to do was not grief or shame,

But joy, that's the hardest for me.

Why?

Because I want to just rehearse tragedy when it happens.

In our research, we call it foreboding joy.

So when something good happens, I immediately feel this quiver of danger.

This is going to be taken away from me.

Something bad's going to happen to balance this out.

I'm gonna get sucker punched by pain if I let my guard down.

So I push away joy and that was the hardest part of my recovery.

I can tell you this, in our research, we found that over 90% of parents, while feeling a very overwhelming love for their children, immediately pictured something terrible happening to their children.

You're tucking a baby in at night.