Embarrassment has a sexual content, fear of exposure of what we really want. It is as if in exposing our joy, we expose our sexuality. If you doubt this, think of one of the most potent reasons for the suppression in children of the natural desire to share and express pleasure with strangers. We tell our children not to talk to strangers because we know there are too many strangers who will abuse or molest our children. We encourage our children to be mistrustful. Rightly so. In our society the open, innocent person ends up being badly hurt. But we often push this suppression of natural openness too far. Perhaps because of our own anxieties related to pleasure, we often suppress our children's capacity for joy even within the safe contexts of our own families and circles of friends.

All this is crucial in understanding how the pleasurable emotion of joy can cause distress. Emotional first aid cannot forcibly extract joy from people. This would be emotional rape, a taking of what is naturally a gift. The EFA of joy is somewhat different from that of the other emotions. It consists mainly not of something we do to help the other person, but of something we do in ourselves. We open ourselves, let our own joy come to the surface. This opens the way for others.

Chronic distress in the blocking of joy lies so deep that the way open is more difficult. Some people have become so depressed that their daily lives are dominated by melancholy, inertia, and envy. Their bodies are in such a state of deflation and subservience to gravity (need to lie down frequently, difficulty in maintaining erect posture) that they can only watch the opening of other people to joy as if from a great distance. Even a temporary blocking of joy because of embarrassment or fear of envy often has the outer signs of depression: lowered voice, slumped posture, fallen facial features. This is the opposite of the antigravity elation of joy.

Provocation (Envy)

This must be discussed from a different angle than with the other emotions, since provocation of others to joy is hardly a problem. Instead, joy becomes blocked because of fear of disapproval or malice from others. The various provocations of the blocking of joy can be summed up under the heading of envy.

Envy, at its roots, is a longing for joy observed in others. (The word 'envy' originates in a Latin word for desire.) A sociologist, Helmut Schoeck, has made a classic study of how the ramifications of envy are felt in all societies, causing elaborate rituals of envy avoidance. Most of us must know the instinctive feeling that if we show our joy too much we are inviting some kind of reprisal or revenge from others. It is almost a superstitious feeling, of the 'evil eye' that might see our pleasure and resent it. We have a word, 'killjoy,' for people who overtly suppress the joy of others. Envy is often more subtle, and at the same time easy to forget because of its omnipresence. But we placate it instinctively, downplaying our pleasure at success or at new discoveries or acquisitions. And we join the side of envy each time we dismiss as boasting a person's innocent expression of pleasure in achievement.

Why is envy so omnipresent? Schoeck places its roots in sibling rivalry, but not all siblings are envious. I would propose that envy is in direct proportion to a person's sense of deprivation. A person who has grown up in what Reich called an 'emotional desert' of lack of love and warmth experiences nothing but inner pain at the sight of another's pleasure, as this awakens the stirrings of longing ('envie' in French), which press for release but are blocked. A vicious circle occurs, since envy from others makes it even less likely that newly awakened joy will be allowed to emerge.

Depression is such a common disease in our society, rightly evoking sympathy and care, that its deep content of envy often goes ignored in the interest of this care. It is somehow more acceptable to draw on the psychoanalytic evidence that depression contains a large element of blocked anger than to acknowledge the even larger element of blocked desire for contact. It is even harder to acknowledge that blocked desire turns readily into killjoy behavior, which is based in envy.

Because of its associations with morality and the commandments, envy is something of a taboo subject. But if its roots in deprivation and blocked desire are realized, it can perhaps be seen as an unfortunate condition rather than simply as a vice, and some effort can be made to release it from its place in the person's character structure. This can be done in therapy by awakening in the person the very capacity for pleasure and joy that his or her envy normally seeks to destroy in others. In EFA, it is important to recognize envy in order, at least, to identify it in the person and try to explore its roots in blocked longing.

Contact (1)

The element of contact, so essential in the EFA of blocked grief, fear, or anger, becomes in the EFA of blocked joy a more active kind of sharing. In fact, the EFA of blocked joy can best be summed up in the word 'share.' This operates on several levels:

—If a person is outwardly depressed while communicating a joyous message, share your joy in their joy. This will give permission and, by infection as it were, possibly open their own expression of joy.

—If a person is outwardly depressed while observing someone else's joy, the same rule applies. If you share your joy, you may help open up theirs.

Words may touch and release any component of envy present in the other person if you confront it directly with a remark acknowledging your own desire mixed with pleasure at what a third party has. For example, 'I must say, I'd really like to have a house like that myself.'

The onset of joy is so quick that the normal EFA of making a preliminary contract cannot apply. It would be ridiculous to say 'Can I help you express your joy?' All you can do is make a verbal or physical gesture of sharing the joyful situation. If this does not work, there is nothing further to do.

In cases of depression that seems unjustified in the face of a basically positive situation, the basic verbal approach, touching possible feelings of envy and deprivation, is to ask 'What do you want?' 'Isn't there anything you'd like to have or do right now?' You might contract, in a cheerful or joking sort of way, to help try to cheer the person up, but this involves physical movement (see following section). A key question in identifying whether signs of depression are covering up suppressed joy, or at least the desire for pleasure, is whether there is a discrepancy in the person's expression and the content of what he or she is saying. If the content is relatively positive or cheerful, in spite of a gloomy expression, it may be worth pursuing the direction of joy. More often the content will be as gloomy as the expression, and the EFA of grief or anger may be called for.

Contact (2)

You can, of course, share joy through touching or embracing the person, if your relationship permits. Apart from this, in cases of depression, it may be worth trying to stimulate the person to a movement of expansion or reaching out, to 'lift' the person, attempt to raise their spirits. You might, in a light manner, try to get the person moving as follows:

—Ask them to stand up and spring up and down slightly with the weight on the balls of their feet.

—At the same time, encourage them to look around actively as if searching.

—Ask them to pull their shoulders back and to inflate their chest fully as if breathing in fresh air. Not to hold the breath, simply to take it in fully and hold it for a moment as if relishing it, then letting it out with an open sigh.

—It may help to encourage the person to open the hands and reach outward as if to embrace the world.

—Encourage a wide open smile.

Make sure the eyes participate in the smile. Have the person make some faces to loosen the muscles of the cheeks and then let the eyes narrow and the corners turn up along with the smile.

All this is an act, up to a point, but as with other simulations, it may open the organism to the channeling of the emotion. Done with good humor, making faces and artificial gestures may awaken some latent pleasure from whatever parts of the person have become temporarily dead with depression.

You may even have the person jump up and down. A final maneuver, which may seem ridiculous at first but is often stimulating, is to hold hands facing each other and jump up and down letting out short 'Ah!' sounds. Children spontaneously do this in such games as Ring-around-the-roses.

Switching

Sometimes a person is overwhelmed by joy, and the soft expansion of emotion causes a rush of tears to the eyes. This is distinguished from grief by the fact that the eyes remain open to take in the source of the joy and share it. Joyful people look at each other through their tears.

However, the tears may turn to genuine sobbing and hiding of the eyes, in a switch to grief. This is natural. Many occasions of joy contain an element of grief because of previous loss. After all, when you are overjoyed at meeting a long departed friend, the surge of contact and emotion may recall the original loss that was experienced with grief. Particularly, if this former grief was not fully expressed at the time, it may emerge now.

Resolution, problems, emergency

The main problem in resolution after an expression of joy is embarrassment at having been too open or intimate. All you can do here is to continue to express your own openness and permission, and share your own joy with the person.

Other problems have already been mentioned. Emergency may seem impossible with joy, but cases are on record of people having fainted or died from an intensity of joy. One theory has it that a surge of joy in a person who habitually suppresses it with a rigid armor of control is too much for the organism, and particularly the heart, to take. Such cases are apparently rare. And it would seem that a genuinely soft movement of joy could do no harm to a person who accepts it. Frantic, frenzied jumping around is a flight from this soft expansion, and basically must be treated as fear. As always, contact and breathing low in the abdomen will calm the person. Permission and sharing may then open the road to the joy that has been blocked, so often by fear.