The Deepest Sacrifice Made to Avoid Pain: JOY

Do words have exact equivalents in every language?

When we translate from one language to another, do they truly carry the same meaning? And if each person carries a language of their own—an inner language—does a word that sounds the same from the outside really mean the same thing to everyone?

I don’t think there is a clear answer to that.

What is happiness, really? A state, a feeling… And what about pain or anger?

While working on emotional dysregulation during my master’s studies, one of the most challenging parts for me was defining emotions. I first noticed how deeply philosophers had grappled with this question. Starting from Ancient Greece, I read interpretations of the concept of emotion—and of individual emotions—across different centuries and schools of thought. Then physiology entered my reading list. There were studies exploring how the experience of feeling is shaped by bodily perceptions created by stimuli such as taste, smell, sound, texture, and light. Experiments attempting to demonstrate that emotions are generated by the body…

Neuroscience explained the relationship between neural network activation and emotional perception. Psychology, on the other hand, developed methods aimed at defining, regulating, and often “correcting” emotions through cognitive processes.

In one of the books I read, I came across a sentence along these lines: There are as many definitions of emotion as there are people who study emotion—scientists, philosophers, poets, or artists.

If even the concept of “emotion” itself has a different meaning for each person, then it follows naturally that the experience of each individual emotion is also personal. Of course, there are facial expressions, sounds, and bodily reactions that are considered universal. There are even studies examining similarities between animals and humans to support this universality. Yet when all these layers come together, the way emotions manifest in an individual becomes unique—almost like a fingerprint.

The emotion I have reflected on the most is joy. To me, joy contains a childlike innocence, curiosity, awakening, and vitality. It feels like the first inner light from which happiness emerges. Happiness, by contrast, seems to be a more sustained state nourished by external stimuli and conditions. As if joy is an inner source of power, and happiness is what happens when that source meets the outer world and is crowned by it.

When the heart is open to feeling, joy steps in immediately—like the first spark that spreads aliveness.

So what does it mean to be open to feeling?

At the core of many emotional, mental, and even physical difficulties today lies this very question. From a more spiritual perspective, I might say that this is precisely why we are here in the world, in a body. But for now, I will continue from a more grounded place.

When I began my training in systemic constellation work, my intention was to learn a method for resolving intergenerationally transmitted trauma. What I encountered instead was a profound wisdom about the power of our nervous system. At its most basic level, the nervous system is a multilayered structure that enables survival, drawing on ancient knowledge inherited from our reptilian ancestors. It contains fundamental mechanisms that allow us to flee from threats larger than ourselves and to fight when the threat is smaller.

Sometimes, however, the danger is so overwhelming that neither fighting nor fleeing is possible. At that point, a third response—experienced by many mammals—comes into play: freeze.

In fight-or-flight responses, there is an intense urge to move. In freezing, however, there is a deep stillness. This immobility can be so profound that it may resemble playing dead from the outside. If this state lasts longer than necessary—if the danger does not pass, or if it passes but we are too frozen to perceive it—the nervous system enters a collapse phase. In this phase, the system withdraws or locks itself down to such an extent that numbness appears in the body; even responses to physical pain may diminish. We do not feel pain. Because in a moment when we believe we cannot cope with pain, the body moves into self-protection. This is a powerful survival mechanism.

But are we really here only to survive?

What we call living is rooted in feeling. And for any emotion to be experienced, the first spark that ignites it is joy. There is a sentence I often hear—from clients, friends, family members, or characters in books and films: “I just wanted to be a little happy. Is that too much?”

Yet to experience happiness, peace, excitement, delight, passion, or enthusiasm, we first need to be able to feel at all. And once we begin to feel, pain and anger are inevitably part of that landscape as well.

Sometimes it is a past experience, sometimes a childhood memory, sometimes a deeply traumatic event, sometimes defense mechanisms passed down through generations—and often the capitalist system itself—that pushes us toward numbness. Happiness is squeezed into a universal definition and measured by what we possess. Pain or unhappiness, meanwhile, is labeled as “wrong” and something that must be quickly transformed.

But trying not to feel pain or anger—because we believe we cannot handle them or because we judge them as wrong—can distance us from all emotions. We freeze. We grow quiet. When we cannot cope with our own emotions, we assume others cannot either, and we begin to limit our expression, cutting off communication.

And yet, when we open ourselves to feeling—yes, it is not always easy, and it sometimes requires a safe support system—something shifts. When we allow ourselves to feel - to express the pain and anger we have postponed, the nervous system begins to relax. Our senses come alive again: tastes, smells, and colors become more vivid. Space opens for rest, ease, peace, dance, social connection, chatter, laughter, tears, and love.

And it is precisely at this point that we begin to recognize and claim the meanings emotions hold in our own inner language.

When we are able to touch this full spectrum of emotions, even pain can become a kind of grace. Because when we move through grief, for example—fully experiencing longing, attachment, and remembrance—we feel alive. Our body and consciousness know this: If pain exists, the other emotions exist too.

When we make room for pain, it becomes possible to soothe it. And then joy is there as well—the first spark of feeling.

We are no longer just surviving. We are living.