Can't feel joy? Look at your anger.

A lot of people tell me they can't really feel joy and happiness. They've done the meditations and the gratitude lists. But they don't necessarily truly feel the emotion, they don't feel it in their body.

So they go looking for more self-help practices, which makes sense to an extent. But in my experience the missing piece is often an understanding of a deep program they've been running for years.

A lot of us were trained as kids to stop feeling certain things. Don't be angry. Don't make a scene. Be the easy one, the reasonable one. Be a good girl / boy. So we got good at pushing anger down.

In practice, we became very good at suppressing our emotions.

The problem is that when we choose not to feel we don't just eliminate the anger. We also supress our ability to feel joy. It's one volume dial. Turn down the anger and the joy goes down with it.

That means the habit that kept you polite may be the same habit that kept you flat.

Sadness and fear get turned down too. I'd look at anger first because it's the one so many of us were told to swallow.

None of this means yelling at somebody. It means letting yourself feel it and say it, privately, with no audience.

Quick caution. This is a self-awareness practice, not treatment. If you've felt numb or low for a long time, or this brings up more than you can handle alone, please talk to a therapist or a doctor.

Here's a simple place to start. Sit somewhere quiet. Say out loud, "I'm allowed to express my anger." Find where it sits in you, maybe in your heart or your stomach. Say to that part, "I see you." Sometimes that's the whole practice and you don't have to fix it or figure out where it came from. Sometimes you need to hit a punching bag, go for a run, write a nasty letter or do something else that helps to express the supressed anger - as long as the result isn't to go harm someone else, anything that helps to release that stored energy can often be transformative.

When the anger gets some room, I find there's more room for everything else too, joy included. If joy has felt flat for a long time, this is one place I'd look.