Joe describes joy with a family metaphor: she is the matriarch of a family of emotions, and she won’t enter a house unless her children are welcome.
“Joy is the matriarch of a family of emotions and she won’t come into a house unless her children are welcome.”
The point is that you can’t selectively admit joy while turning away the harder feelings. If sadness, fear, anger, and grief are unwelcome, joy stays away too. So the path to joy isn’t to chase joy directly or to suppress everything unpleasant — it’s to welcome all the feelings, all parts of yourself, and the feelings of others as well.
“If you want to feel joy, the job is to feel all the feelings and welcome all the feelings and all your feelings and all parts of yourself and other people.”
This pairs with Joe’s closing emotion, love — an emotion of such safety that it lets attachment wounds surface so they can heal. Both joy and love depend on the same willingness to let everything be present. Joy, he adds, is an inherent part of who we are, so all of us have access to it; the access comes through welcoming the whole emotional family rather than admitting only the pleasant guests.
Related Concepts
- Joy is the matriarch of the emotional family
- Every emotion is a signal pointing toward an action or a need
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses them all
- Joy requires welcoming all emotions
- Joy won’t come into a house where her children aren’t welcome
- Joy is the sign that emotional fluidity is working