When Our Emotions Couple

Imagine you are riding a tractor.  And attached is a cart. Attached right there behind the tractor. Always. You like can’t undo it.  And so everywhere you go, the cart, it goes with you.
 
Now imagine that your tractor you are riding on, it’s Joy. That amazing feeling of deep Joy. You know the feeling. When you hold your grandkids. Laugh deeply with your sister. Love your husband. When the sun shines warm on your face. You get to dance with your daughter. Your dog hits your funny bone in just that right place.  That feeling. 
 
The tractor is that. It’s Joy.

And right behind it, attached, is Grief.  Stuck right on there. Soldered on. So everywhere Joy goes, Grief comes right along. A split second later. 
 
That’s emotional coupling. 
 
I need to make a distinction here.
 
I’ve written about the grief that comes with joy. I’ve shared my thoughts about this here. A number of times. When my son was first married. The birth of each grandchild. Other times of change and beauty and change and newness and change. And I thought this was the way it was. That grief comes with joy. That it just works this way.
 
It doesn’t. And it does. 
 
I wrote once before, there is loss in transition. And there is grief in loss.  
 
I was trying to make sense of emotional coupling. That I did not know about. Until recently.
 
But. And. There is a part of this grief that comes with joy that is not this. Not this cart and tractor trajectory.
 
There is the loss in transition, and grief in loss that is not a coupling of emotional constellations, but a circling of changes that transpire. Becoming a new mother is amazing and juicy and there is the loss of not mother. Being married to another extraordinary human means the loss of being not that. And we honor those things we leave behind when we step into what is now new and where we are at. So yes, there is loss—and so sadness and grief—with joy and the sweetness of growth. And an honoring. And a noticing. But not a coupling.
 
So the distinction.
 
So Emotional Coupling.
 
What happens is—often in trauma, usually in trauma, and usually when we are young, but not always—what happens is that the experiences we have with the people we have in our lives, illicit both things. Two things at once. Two emotions at once. And so the emotions couple. They bond. They fuse. They think they are supposed to show up that way. One after the other, right after the other. The tractor, then the cart. In an instant.  Because they are attached. Because this is the way that they learned to do that so long ago. And for such a long time,
 
Emotional Coupling.
 
What happens is—often from trauma, usually from trauma, and now that we’re not young anymore—what happens is that the coupling continues. The learned, one after the other, emotional response can’t not be. The joy and the grief. Joy and Grief. They have to come together.
 
Now, if Grief comes first…Joy…nope, she doesn’t show up. But Joy. When she comes first…Grief, he’s right there. In an instant. One second away. Joy doesn’t even get a nanosecond of a moment to sit in the euphoria that is her before…and here we are in grief.
In that order.
 
So joy feels like grief. Love is sadness. Happiness is fleeting.
 
Emotional Coupling.
 
The work is to detach the cart from the tractor. 
 
Step one is to notice that it’s there.  Simple, right? But like, woah. Like oh. Like wow. Wow. I never turned around before. I never turned around and noticed there is this cart attached to my tractor. I just thought that love feels like sadness. 
 
Step one is to notice the cart.
 
And you have to do this for a long, long time. This noticing. “The first step in behavioral change is awareness.” Yup.  Notice. Feeling joy. There’s a cart of grief behind me. Attached. Soldered on to my tractor. Feeling joy. Oh, grief. Love sadness. Happiness is fleeting.
 
I have had moments in my life that stand out where I got to sit in the good stuff longer. Like holding my new babies. Each one.  
 
The image that comes to mind, not any better than any other, but a clear one in my mind—my middle daughter just born and my first-born boy came to meet her in the hospital. My husband, fresh from holding my hand and cheering on the birth of this first new daughter of ours, had rushed back home to bring back the older brother. He fell asleep, in blue striped pajamas, curled with me on the hospital bed. And then, when he and my husband left to sleep in our home, the lights were dimmed. No overhead fluorescents with that constant hum. It felt like the entire hospital floor was sleeping along with this new daughter in my arms. She had so much dark hair and oh my god such big blue eyes. And there was just joy. 
 
The grief cart uncoupled for a couple of minutes that moment.
 
So yes, there have been moments, of just these moments. Of just Joy. I can count them.