Why do so many of us reflexively dampen excitement? Joe says it was trained in, almost universally. When a child gets super excited, the adult around them—often overwhelmed—says “calm down, settle.” Over and over, excitement gets met with suppression.
“If you got excited as a kid, it was calm down. … that’s where it was trained. Trained in all of us, almost all of us.”
The timing matters. This conditioning lands mostly between ages zero and eight, when the brain is in theta wave states and most absorbent. So the impulse to clamp down on our own aliveness gets wired in early and runs automatically in adulthood.
Joe pairs this with the intellect’s stories that keep all emotions at bay: you can’t be excited because the other foot will fall, can’t be sad because it’ll last forever, can’t be angry because you’ll destroy what you love, can’t be scared because you’ll be less capable. Each is false—crying relieves, anger clarifies, feeling fear makes you more capable—but together they teach us to push feeling away until we become less and less capable of it.
Related Concepts
- Anger repression gets installed through three childhood pathways
- Anxiety is often repressed excitement
- The intellect’s ‘other shoe will drop’ story blocks every good feeling
- Feeling excitement cracks the identity open
- Young children regulate through emotional connection, not rational words
- Saying ‘I’m excited’ while feeling it can unkink anxiety