subconscious fear of happiness explained (+ journal prompts)
Do you have subconscious limits on how much success, intimacy, happiness and connection you can experience? Most of us do.
It sounds counter intuitive, because on the surface almost everyone would say they want to be happy. But, even when we consciously want happiness, success, emotional intimacy, and other beautiful things in our lives, there can be subconscious parts of our psyches that hold us back. Author Gaye Hendricks refers to it as our upper limit problem which is when invisible forces in our psyche act like a thermostat to keep us in our familiar old comfort zone - never letting us get too happy or content.
In this video, I outline the 5 most common reasons you may have a subconscious fear of happiness and then I’ll give you some journal prompts to help you reflect on and overcome that fear.
If you’re always afraid the other shoe is going to drop, or something always seems to happen to drag you down just when you thought you were finally going to achieve a big dream, or if you’re just generally resistant to showing up for yourself and going for your dreams, then a subconscious fear of happiness may be holding you back!
Watch the video now!
The 5 most common reasons you may have a subconscious fear of happiness or success.
Our subconscious psyche has many primitive parts that are acting to keep us safe. And to these primitive parts, familiar equals safe. So, we often unconsciously recreate the feeling tone of our childhood because that feels familiar to us. This can block us from being truly happy because happiness may feel unfamiliar. In fact, feeling too much joy or happiness may actually be dysregulating our nervous system in some cases.
Similarly, if someone we closely identified with in childhood was chronically unhappy then when we feel happy, we may subconsciously fear betraying or outshingin them. In infant studies, it has been shown that when an infant expresses joy and their caregiver reacts negatively, the infant experiences shame and will start to show less facial expressions of joy starting as young as 4 months old!
We all had specific roles in our family of origin. Maybe your role was to take care of everyone else by sacrificing your own needs or to be quiet and meek and never rock the boat. Maybe you were the black sheep, the scapegoat or the parentified child. Whatever your role was, the spoken and unspoken rules of that role often become deeply embedded into your core sense of identity, and breaking these rules in any way even as an adult can feel threatening to vulnerable parts of your psyche. Ask yourself: What role did you play in your family? And would feeling worthy, happy and expansive still allow you to fit into that role?
Speaking of your core sense of identity, If you were regularly made to feel small, wrong, unworthy or like a burden as a child, those feelings may have become part of your implicit sense of self. You then may subconsciously believe that you are unworthy of happiness or deserving of rejection or carry any number of core beliefs that would cause you to sabotage your own chances of feeling happy in your life.
And, lastly, joy is actually one of the most vulnerable emotions. It’s incredibly vulnerable to love, to be loved and to feel deep joy. This is especially true if you have relational trauma in your past. So, you can only truly feel joy to the extent that your nervous system and psyche can tolerate vulnerability.
TRANSFORMATIONAL WORKSHOP ALERT
Here are some journal prompts you can use to begin to identify and shift your subconscious fear of happiness, success or any other joyful, expansive state of being.
What was the feeling tone of your family when you were a child?
Who were the happiest and least happy members of the family?
And which of these had more power to set the vibe of the family ecosystem?
Who did you most identify with?
What reaction did you get when you embodied your authentic joy as a child?
What role did you play in your family? And What would the consequences be if you broke out of the role?
Would being happy be seen as a betrayal to someone?
Were you worried about outshining anyone?
What’s your internal sense of worthiness and value?
How deserving do you feel to be happy?
Now, imagine that you can send love and compassion to any parts of you that find joy to be vulnerable. Notice where that love and compassion go within you. How much of you feels vulnerable? What do those vulnerable parts within want or need?
What would it be like to expand your ability to feel vulnerable and safe at the same time?
What if your capacity to fear joy could increase everyday?
As you’re using these journal prompts, remember that things can start to shift just by compassionately acknowledging how you truly feel.
And, if you want to dive deeper, I’m teaching a powerful workshop next week called Breakthrough Your Blocks (and become who you were born to be) where I’ll be teaching a super effective mind body technique to help you unpack the invisible baggage that’s been holding you back!
About me
Hey, I’m Karena!
I’m a trauma informed emotional healing coach here to help you quickly identify and heal the subconscious blocks, old emotional wounds and self-sabotaging core beliefs that are holding you back!
Are you ready to move your life forward by ditching the invisible baggage holding you back?