Even though our traumatic experiences happened a long time ago, their grip on our lives is sometimes still too tight to be ignored. This usually prevents us from accessing joy and hope, making it so much harder to tap into our positive emotions. Timothy J. Hayes sits down with MaryCatherine McDonald, Ph.D., author of The Joy Reset, to discuss how to bring down the barriers hindering us from experiencing genuine joy and profound healing. She explains how to discover happiness even in your lowest points by reframing trauma and recognizing your unique strengths. Dr. MaryCatherine also discusses how hypervigilance results in a false sense of safety and how tiny little joys can help recalibrate our systems.
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MaryCatherine McDonald, Ph.D. Author of The Joy Reset: Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness and How To Get It Back
Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald is a PhD researcher, author, and trauma specialist with over fifteen years of experience. She has written extensively about trauma, grief, and the power of the human spirit to heal. Through her writing, courses, and coaching, she helps people reframe trauma from a strength-based perspective and reclaim joy after hardship. Her latest book, The Joy Reset, explores barriers that prevent us from accessing joy and how to recalibrate to welcome back positive emotions. When she’s not working, she can be found dancing in the kitchen, walking in nature, or helping others rediscover their inner light.
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Thank you for joining me. It’s delightful to see you again.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk to you.
Introducing MaryCatherine McDonald, Ph.D.
I’m hoping you can get us started by telling us a little bit about how you got into the work you’re doing and what drives your passion for it.
I would love to tell you this organized story that I set out to do exactly what I’m doing. As you probably know, many stories are not like that. In fact, I’m not sure I know of a single story like that. My story is bumpy and rambly and random. I started in the field of the philosophy of psychology. I was looking critically at the history of psychology, how we define certain mental illnesses, what we have done right, and what we’ve done wrong. Sometimes I think people think a critical stance means 24/7 criticism, but it isn’t.
It’s just looking critically. What’s going well and what needs work? I love that field. I think it’s fascinating. I was in academia for a long time. I found that there were a couple of things that I kept continuing to get drawn to. They were the darker themes of our lives, like loss and trauma and suicide and incarceration and war and reintegration after prison or war, things like this. I earned the nickname Dr. Sunshine at my first academic job because I’m a pretty sunshiny person, but I’m always studying something quite dark.
There’s a contradiction in that. As I was working within academia, I found that even though folks talk a lot about wanting an interdisciplinary critical voice, that is also something that people rail against because it goes against the tradition and the education that’s currently being offered. When I was diving into things like trauma and trying to redefine trauma, I found that a lot of academic spaces weren’t warm to that. I could find individual clinicians, and I would have amazing conversations at conferences with people who agreed with me, but on the whole, the academic project there had a lot less traction than I hoped.
I started writing for a more general audience. I have a couple of books that came out in academic spaces. In 2023, I wrote a book called Unbroken, which was for anybody who was touched by trauma or knew somebody who was touched by trauma. The idea behind that book was to redefine trauma. Like, what if we started with the belief that trauma is not a weakness, it’s not a disorder, but that it’s a sign of strength and function, and that one that can go significantly haywire and cause symptoms, but that at its base, it is a strength response.
What would happen then? We can peel some of the layers of shame away and start the healing process from a more empowered perspective. In that work, I started thinking about joy, because as you know, there’s this whole field of positive psychology that focuses on things like gratitude, and imagination, and joyfulness, and things like that. I found that there wasn’t a lot that built a bridge for folks who were dealing with trauma to get themselves to joy.
The clients that I was working with, previously incarcerated gang members and folks who were dealing with significant trauma, were pretty resistant to joy. I embarked on this project of like, “How do we build this bridge for folks who feel skeptical about joy?” That is where that’s us up to, which is The Joy Reset comes out next week. That’s the focus of that book. Similar to unbroken, it aims to redefine joy and also build some practices to help people lean into it when they feel skeptical of it or when their nervous systems frankly don’t have time for it.
I like that at the end of your preface, you say that you’re going to get into some of that heavy, dark black stuff. If people get triggered, feel free to put the book down for a while, throw it across the room, etc. You used a phrase, it’s one of my favorites. It’s helped me take my personal work many levels higher is “Please be gentle with yourself.” It’s up there in like the top 5% of things that I repeat to patients over and over again. I repeat to friends and family and the support groups because we are so well trained to be judging and evaluating intellectually and comparing to some outside standard that it’s a very easy trap for us to fall into, beating ourselves up.
Soaking ourselves in that shame that then becomes like a huge barrier to healing, and so you can cognitively want to be walking yourself down a healing path. I always say that if you have shame, it’s like trying to walk up a mountain with a Toyota Corolla strapped to your ankle. You can try, but you’re not going to get very far.
The Joy Reset: Six Steps
The book, The Joy Reset: Six Steps, what do you want to tell us about the role of joy in healing and what these six steps are?
To start off, one of the things that happens is that we get joy wrong. It’s been defined in this way, which is not true to the biology of joy. When I say joy, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?
You’re talking to the wrong person because I have that instead of that happy, joy, I have the sense of connectedness and solidness and awareness of your personal safety and awareness of connection to source. I have a wonderful piece of writing that I was exposed to, it’s called Joy In Disguise. It was published by the Haven Group, Erika Vega, as a woman who had been through a number of losses and chose to look at it as though she gets to keep living, she gets to keep going. She counts it all joy as the pendulum swings from magnificence to misery, etc.
I love that. What an image. Magnificence to misery.
I’ll help you by sending you a copy of that article.
I would love that. Typically, when I ask that question, people will say things like joy is like lightness and joy is fluffy, and joy reminds me of Tinkerbell, like a little fairy floating around.
Happy dogs.
Exactly. This is a very light, airy thing. When I ask them, “Do you have room for that in your life?” They say like, “Not right now. Maybe when I was a little kid, and maybe later when I get through this hard year, or when I have time, when I’m on vacation, maybe I’ll have some time to fit that in.” The truth is that joy and hope are the pillars of resilience biologically. They are profoundly healing, and they are incredibly strong. They are not these like flighty luxuries that we should tap into only when we have the time.
They are things that we should learn to bring with us into our deepest battles, to our darkest night of the soul, because they have a profound healing capacity. Just to give you a glimpse of this, neuroscience is significantly complex, as it always is, but we know that fear inhibits joy. If you’re at a fearful point in your life or something really scary is happening, or you’re actively being chased by a lion, you don’t have access to the parts of your brain that are responsible for hope, for future planning, and for feeling joyful. Imagining things and whatever, you’re just trying to survive.
If you have shame, it is like trying to walk up a mountain with a Toyota Corolla strapped to your ankle. Share on XWe know that fear inhibits hope. What is also true is that we learned more recently that hope inhibits fear. We are wired to have fear when we need it, like when we’re being chased by a lion. In modern society, we are not often chased by a lion. Most of the time, we’re sitting at our desks and we are marinating in anxiety and fear that is not necessarily on par with where we are in the world right now.
When we’re not in danger, how do we learn how to turn those fear centers and then all of the other things they control down? One of the easiest ways to do that is to practice very easy exercises that enable you to notice and imprint joy in tiny little ways in your daily life. Doing this, I want to say non-characteristically, but I’ve certainly had hard years before.
This has been a really hard year, just personally. It’s a hard year in the world. We’re going through a global hard time, but then I’ve also had a lot, a series of things that were unexpected that happened this year, that this book comes out about joy. One of the things I’ve been doing is walking the walk. At the beginning of the year, I promised the World Wide Web via social media that I was going to do this practice that I do called Tiny Little Joys every single day of 2025.
I was going to take whoever wanted to come along with me. Every single day, I was going to make a video imprinting one tiny thing in my life that gave me a spark of joy. Hoping that it was going to be an easy year. It isn’t. It’s a hard year. The benefit of that, the gift of that, is that I’m getting to see in real time.
The benefit for focusing on joy in the middle of your not-so-easy year.
This is another thing I think we get wrong about joy. We assume that if bad things are going on, we need a big joyful thing to counter it. It’s like a dent in your car. If it’s this big, then you need to bump it out with something that’s this heavy. That’s not true. Joy is something that, when we engage with it, gives us a more realistic worldview because, since we have a negativity bias in the brain, when bad things happen, we start to see the world as a bad place. The world is a scary place, but it’s not wholly one thing or the other. When we do something like practicing tiny little joys, we are just making sure that our worldview is accurate. It’s not the case that a sip of coffee is going to heal the fact that I had a friend die, but it is that I see that they coexist. That’s so important.
Visceral Response To Fear
As you say that the evidence is that you cannot be in these two states at the same time. Yes, fear will inhibit hope, and yet building hope and focusing on it short-circuits the fear. The other thing is, as you were talking, I thought about fear and a definition for it. Many times we get into these discussions, and we aren’t even defining the words we’re using.
We’re assuming that people know. I talk so much to people about the idea that there’s this visceral response that my system can generate when it believes I’m in some form of serious threat. We commonly talk about it as fight, flight, or freeze, a response, but there’s also the stress response leading up to that. What I try and talk to people about is the idea that if I’m sitting with thoughts of fear of something, that’s not natural. That’s not the reflexive response to keep me safe in a dangerous situation.
That’s me spinning in negative thoughts that have been programmed into my mind. As you mentioned, this negative bias. If we can separate those two and understand that if I engage and give value to my negative thoughts that produce this sensation of fear, or that when they’re paired with my physiological sensations, I label it fear. If I can recognize that if it’s not happening right now, those thoughts are false and I don’t need to keep pouring my mind energy, then I could choose to pour my energy into, for instance, hopeful thoughts or joyful thoughts. I break the cycle and I experience different internal, what they call, introceptive sensations.
I think we don’t realize that we have that control over our lived experience, that you can turn the knobs up and down on fear and hope, because our emotions feel so compelling sometimes that we believe them without inquiry.
We’ve been programmed to believe them, and we’re living in a culture that says, “What you do up here in these frontal lobes, that’s the most important thing.” By the way, just forget everything below the neck and all the feedback that might be available there, because that’s all bad and that’s useless, and it’ll just distract you from getting the right answer and put it on the test thing.
By the way, the job of the frontal lobe, if you’re doing it correctly, is that you manage all this stuff underneath your neck so that you never feel it. That’s enlightenment in the modern picture, I think, and it’s completely a sense of total failure.
I hope you’re not spreading that. That’s not a good idea.
No, but I think society teaches us that, Like we, obsessed with there’s Foucault wrote a book called Discipline and Punish, and in the very first chapters he talks about, there’s a section called Docile Bodies about how we are taught from like almost literal day one of being on earth to be docile and to control our bodies and the expressions of our emotions and how damaging that is. In fact, he relates it to, it’s almost like a prison. We’re taught to live in a prison for our whole lives. I think about that all the time because it’s just so evident. Think about all the embarrassment and shame adults feel when they have the audacity to have an emotion in front of another adult.
I’m with you. It’s to say he’s taken to a bit of an extreme. When you put the two together and say that that’s enlightenment, I’ve never labeled that as enlightenment.
No. A thousand percent. I was being cheeky.
The true enlightenment is the ability to be aware of all of it and use it as good information. We are living in a very unhealthy culture that is over reliant on the intellectual and what they call the rational. I’m trying to come up with the name of the woman I interviewed not too long ago, who wrote the book on embodied code switching. It’s just beautiful. She’s got a multicultural background.
Native American, Pueblo, and maybe French and Brazilian, or Italian and Brazilian. She really went through, as she went from one part of her family to another, these huge differences in the way people have their personal space and comfort level of volume and rate of speech. She wrote a beautiful book about being able to embody awareness of this code switching that we all have to do as we move from one environment socially to another.
I love that, I’m going to check that out. I think we inherit these embodied practices. Again, we don’t often think about them because we’ve inherited them. They’re just second nature, but then, when we stop and gain some awareness of them, everything changes. Going back to your point about fear, I think that was so well said that sometimes we have an adaptive thing, a mechanism in the body, fight, flight, or freeze, as you mentioned, that becomes maladaptive in the wrong situation. When you’re in a different context, when you’re sitting at your desk and you’re not actually in danger, your body is then having this incredible stress response. All these hormones are coursing through your body and changing your physiology based on something that isn’t currently happening.
We burn ourselves out by staying at that level. Russell Carr said?
He was the head of Walter Reed for a long time, and he said that “Traumatized folks are the only people who are living in two times at once because of this.” You’re sitting at your desk, you cognitively know you’re here in this moment and that you’re safe, but there’s another part of your body that is still at war. Your physiology is experiencing this incredible disconnect between the past and the present, which puts an incredible amount of weight on your body.
The world is a scary place, but it is not wholly one thing or the other. When we practice tiny little joy, we are just making sure that our worldview is accurate. Share on XIt’s because you spend so much time that when that’s happening, in a decreased functioning of your immune system response, it wears the body out faster. Yep. The author of that book is Marcia Bonato Warren. The book is titled Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness and Embodied Code-Switching.
How cool.
The idea that we can learn, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but there was a documentary, it’s about an hour long, titled Stress Portrait of A Killer, which talks about exactly what you’re talking about here. A lot of research has revealed about how when we put ourselves in these levels of stress that approach fight or flight, and we stay in that space for an extended period of time, it’s detrimental to our physiology as well as our mental and emotional health.
Think about this, so let’s say you’re like you watch this documentary, which I wrote down, and now I’m going to go watch. You think like, “Crap, I’m stressed. This stress is eroding all of my systems in my body, and it’s causing inflammation, and my hormones are going haywire, which is affecting my metabolism and all these things. Now what do I do?” You’ve been in this space of hypervigilance. Now this movie has made you feel maybe even more hypervigilant. Now what do you do? The science will say, “If you bring in some healing things like hope and joy, then you can counteract some of that inflammation on your body and some of that stress in your body.”
You’re asking a hypervigilant system to put its guard down. You can have a snapback effect where cognitively you’re like, “Let me welcome joy into my life.” When you try to do it, your body rejects it because it is used to being hypervigilant, and it has learned that if we are hypervigilant, then we are safe. We must stay hypervigilant, and joy is asking me to put my guard down. Joy is asking me to calm down and trust. “I cannot do that.” What is the answer?
The Danger Of Finding Safety In Hypervigilance
What you’re talking about is that the individual who has responded to trauma in a way that develops hypervigilance to stay safe and survive, or survive and then stay safe that individual has literally learned to define. We were talking about defining words earlier. That individual has learned to define safety as being in a state of hypervigilance. Safety has nothing to do in truth with the external situation. It has to do with the definition the person’s operating under, which says, “I’m only safe when I’m hypervigilant.” If you ask me to lower my hypervigilance, and if you’re a therapist, say in a setting, “I may be able to do it for you a little bit, but then as soon as I leave here, I’m that bounce back.” That rebound is going to flood in.
That’s why we have to build a bridge. In the joy reset, I identified six thieves of joy, and hypervigilance is number one. Hypervigilance is going to try to trick you into letting go of joy. It’s going to tell you that it’s not safe. That hypervigilance, like you said, comes from a place that makes sense. It’s a learned thing. We don’t arrive here hypervigilant. We learn to be hypervigilant because of experiences.
Chronic stress, trauma, lots of different things can cause that. Even just I think the climate in the world, it’s hard not to be hypervigilant about the news. Even if you’re not someone who tends to be that, or maybe you don’t have a trauma history, you might find yourself more hypervigilant now. If someone comes in and says, “Look at this funny little thing that I just saw on TikTok, and I want to show you this.” You’re going to say, or you’re going to at least have the impulse to say, “No, not right now. We need to stay in this place.” The question is, “How do you then build a bridge from the place of hypervigilance to let in joy?”
I think one of the answers is to scale way down. I think sometimes we set ourselves up for failure or at least at the very least incredible frustration when it comes to healing because we say, “I will know that I’ve healed when I can feel joyful every single day. When I can let in a huge joy and I can celebrate it, I don’t have any negative or middle negative feelings about it.” The truth is that that’s not realistic. What’s much more sustainable and will work right away is if you scale down and try to give yourself a tiny dose of joy, and then go back to hypervigilance, because it’s not that that’s necessarily wrong, it’s that that’s the state your body is currently in.
You’re defining scaling down as what I would call lower your expectations. Lower the bar and then, in increments, work your way up.
Yeah, or Peter Levine might say titration or pendulation. You swing into the good feeling. You feel it a little bit, and then you let yourself go right back to your hypervigilant state rather than saying, “There’s something wrong with me because I’m hypervigilant and I cannot feel joy. I’m going to try to approach this from a shame perspective.” Again, you’re back to that situation where you’re trying to hike with a Corolla attached to your ankle. It’s not going to work.
We can make progress if we use a process like desensitization or small enough chunks and give up the habit of comparing ourselves to some idyllic, healed, healthy, strong, joyful model and just use as a reference point, “Where was I a week ago and where was I yesterday and where can I be today that’s a little bit more flexible or comfortable?”
Also acknowledging that it’s not a linear process at all. You may be in a situation today where you are a little bit less resilient than a year ago because you’ve had an illness, and you’ve got a financial stressor, and there are other things that are going on in your life. I think sometimes we try to assess ourselves on this linear path and say, “I hear this from clients all the time.” They’ll say, “I thought I had healed from this. I thought I was over this.” It’s like, “What does that mean to be over something? That you’d never encounter it again or that when you encounter it, you feel resourced enough to recognize it and cope, maybe a little bit better than a year ago.”
That’s what I’m encouraging people to do, to use that thought, “I thought I was over this, or I’m so glad I’m over that.” I coach people to use that as the signal to start doing some more work on that issue. I was in grad school, and the first big thing I remember that I didn’t like that they taught me in grad school is that once you identify your core issues, “By the way, Tim, this is a core issue for you.” I said, “Once you identify your core issues, you will take them with you to your grave.” There is no question about that. The only question that remains is, will you admit it, own it, and work on it so you get better and better at dealing with it, or will you start to blame it on others when it comes up?
React out of it instead of soften to it.
Instead of understanding that it’s a response pattern you developed that helped you in the past, and it’s not necessary to keep doing it. You’ve got other ways to respond to it now, but you’re still having the urge to go back to the old response pattern. It’s okay. There’s an education for me in my responses. Guy Finley says, “The lessons we need to learn in life, right into our lives on the back of the events we don’t want, and the importance of the lesson is directly proportional to how much I do not want this event.”
I’ve been thinking so much about, there’s this poem by Rumi, The Guest House, where he talks about inviting each emotion in, even if it’s sorrow, even if it robs you of everything in your house. I think that imagery is really powerful in imagining, “Anxiety, that’s not someone that you want knocking at the door, but they’re here. What would it look like if you invited them in and had them sit with you at the table?” It just changes the whole thing.
It changes it in so many ways. In one way, now I’m not just my anxiety. I’m stepping back and observing it. I’m offering it some space or comfort.
You’re assuming that it has something to say that’s worthy. It might not be that it’s reporting reality accurately, but it is asking.
It might be educating me about negative beliefs I downloaded in the past that aren’t necessarily true.
How False Beliefs And Negative Thoughts Are Formed
Did you see Inside Out 2, that movie?
We do not arrive in the world hypervigilant. We learn to do it because of chronic stress, trauma, and other experiences. Share on XI haven’t seen two. I saw the first one.
Two is wonderful. This is not a spoiler, but they do a really beautiful job with these really difficult neurology things like memory formation and retrieval and memory consolidation, and things like that. They talk about the way that a belief gets formed, and they have this cool image for the way that an experience can turn into a belief about yourself, and how that then becomes part of yourself unless you go in and intentionally do some work around it. Any belief that we hold about ourselves is going to be motivating our behavior in ways that we are conscious of and not conscious of. The false beliefs are especially tricky. Maybe anxiety is knocking at your door to alert you of a false belief.
What I tell people is I have a list of bottom-line observations I give people in a first or second session. The tenth one is the last one to earn its way on the list, says, “If I have a negative thought about myself or someone else or a negative emotion active in my mind, I can instantly know three things.” The first one is whether it’s a lie or based on a falsehood. Even if I have a tremendous logical structure that all fits together that shows me how this is the truth, on closer examination, I will find out that that logical structure is based on a false premise. It’ll fall apart. The second thing I can know is that this is not about what’s going on in the moment.
This is an old tape playing in my mind. Maybe something that the bullies imprinted in me, or my parents, or whatever I heard from family arguments. It’s not about the present moment. In the present moment, if I stay right here, I don’t have terror and fear, and I’m right in the moment. The third thing I can know is that if I let myself sit and spin thinking about this, if I speak or act from it, it’s just going to make my life worse, not better. I tell people it’s akin to throwing garbage on the buffet table right before dinner. It does not enhance the dining experience.
I love that. That’s such a useful framing because it is so logical. I think that one of the things we run up against, and I see this with clients all the time, is that they have a ton of evidence to support their negative beliefs because they’ve been spending decades gathering. That part of themselves is gathering all this data that says, “No, I’m not worthy.”
Building the logical structure.
You’ll love that movie. You should watch it because the visuals are very cool around that.
I watched the first one many times and referred patients to it, and family and friends to it. I will look at that. Thank you. You’re talking about how my belief that I need to be hypervigilant to stay safe, and the therapist or the world that tells me, “You’re being silly. You don’t need that. Relax. There’s nothing dangerous here.” We need something to bridge to get from one state to another. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and the things that you found that help people make that bridge?
First, I want to, if it’s okay, spend another minute talking about that disconnect because I think that’s so important when you’re having this experience and everyone is telling you, like, “You don’t need to be hypervigilant.” That’s like telling somebody to calm down when they’re in the middle of a panic attack. Like no one who has never worked. It’s not. Part of the reason it doesn’t work is that you don’t meet the person where they are.
When someone is in a hypervigilant state, they may even be saying to you, “I know that I don’t need to be here and I don’t want to be here.” I think it’s important to say, “You are.” The fact that you are comes from intelligence and wisdom in your system. That trauma response that imprinted that and took it on as the job. We have to be hypervigilant to be safe, we’re trying to protect you. We can talk about adaptation moving into maladaptation, but I think it’s critical that we start with the understanding that the state that you’re in makes sense.
There’s nothing wrong with it. It may not be the way you want to live, but it makes sense. It’s there for a reason because I think when we know what is driving us, then we get a lot of information. When we can look at that without shame, we get a lot of information about what we need. Someone who’s hypervigilant can practice gratitude lists from positive psychology all day long, and it’s not going to have an impact because you’re not dealing with the hypervigilance at its core. You’re not meeting the person where they are.
You’re not changing a feeling state. You’re just staying up here at the intellect.
There’s no felt sense of that. I think that building a bridge requires first figuring out, like what land are you on? What land do you want to get to? When you think about joy, when you think about freedom or peace or safety, what does that look like for you? Have you ever felt that in your body? Something I do often very early on with clients is to have them do like a joy timeline where they think about what was the most unabashedly joyful thing in your life when you were 5 or 6 or 7, somewhere around that age.
They’ll say, “Riding my bike in the neighborhood with my friends.” You can see their whole body change as they’re talking about that. You’re like, “What about eighteen? What about 25? What about in the last year? How have you felt joy?” That does two things. Number one, it helps the person understand that this feeling that might feel very distant from them in this moment is something they have felt. It is something that’s possible.
It’s within the realm of possibility. Two, it’s also a way to start introducing your nervous system to these cues that you had before the trauma. You felt joy in your body. That means what your body feels like when it feels safe enough to revel in something. I think we get so good at naming and mapping out our triggers, as we should, that’s important. We don’t talk a lot about like, “What does my body feel like when I feel safe? What happens to my heart rate when I’m having a great, engaging conversation with someone who’s listening?
What does it feel like when I’m excited? Where does that energy sit in my body?” Things like that. I think introducing people to these feelings that may feel foreign is a good start. It is beginning to develop and work with practices that are small enough that your nervous system doesn’t react negatively to them, and repeatedly doing that so that you can condition yourself to have the feeling without the fear that the feeling is going to take away the tools that got you here. Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s this individually focused. There’s not like you cannot just map this out and say here step 1, step 2, step 3, because for some people, step one needs to be ten levels. Step one, etc., or a hundred levels. Other people can jump right to the fifth step and go, “That’s great. Thanks for introducing me to this.”
That’s so important to meet them where they are because we’re all in a different space. We can sketch out these frameworks that help people navigate, and these signposts that help people tell where they are, but not everybody is going to be at the same place. Figuring out like what thieves are active for you, what is getting in the way of your experience of joy.
That is probably impacted by lots of different things in your life. It’s not just hypervigilance. It can be emotional numbing. It can be a fear of loss. It can be guilt. That’s the one I’m seeing the most commonly is that when I go give a workshop or something, the first question is “How can you possibly be talking about joy? How can I possibly be focusing on joy? The world is falling apart. People are dying in Gaza. There are American citizens being deported to El Salvador without recourse. How can you be talking about joy?”
I think this is a good place to talk about the collective nervous system, and that when we are doing these individual practices of healing for ourselves, yes, we are healing our own wounds and regulating our own nervous systems. Also, every moment that we spend in a state of nervous system calm is a moment that we are contributing to the collective sense of calm versus the collective sense of chaos, which is fed by this guilt of like, “I don’t deserve joy. How dare you feel this?” You need to, it’s your responsibility to, or we won’t.
To bring it into the physical realm as much as possible, because you’re one of those, whether you realize it or not, your body is an energy system that’s capable of bringing that joyful, loving energy, compassionate energy into being.
Building a bridge requires first figuring out what land you are on and what land you want to get to. Share on XOr the opposite, right? Whatever you’re energetically experiencing is going to ripple. That’s perfectly said.
When To Give Up Hope And Joy
We clearly have some of the same source material we’ve been dipping our fingers in. What’s another takeaway that you want people to get from the book, The Joy Reset?
That’s a great question. The one thing is that joy is coming to you, and it is here. I also think that one of the negative things that we get, and it’s dressed up as a positive thing, is that people tell us all the time, “We cannot give up hope. Don’t give up hope. Don’t let go of joy.” What I always want to say is, “Don’t give up hope, is the worst thing.”
I think we need to understand that there are circumstances in life that necessitate that we give up hope. That hopelessness is a feature of human life, and that you don’t actually need to believe in hope and joy for them to continue to exist. Sometimes your job and your task are just to hold on and that’s it. That’s all you can do. In that space, asking someone to have hope is too big of an ask. I think if you can say your task is just to hold on and when you’re ready for it, be open to the hope that shows up and the joy that shows up.
In my own life, and this is true for my clients as well. In fact, I was just talking about this. Joy shows up whether I want it to be there or not. Now that I recognize it more, I see it all the time. The first example that I always give is that my father died really suddenly when I was 24 on Christmas Day. The loss was stunning and astonishing. I had no coping techniques for it at all.
Did you say 24?
Yeah. I was a child. I’m thinking I was an adult. Living in this like, “I’m supposed to be able to get this together.” It’s funny, I called a therapist and I said, “I had this loss and I’m dealing with these panic attacks and they’re getting in the way of my work. I would like to do like maybe six sessions and figure this out.”
Fix it.
She told me much later, like four years later, that she thought, “Thank God she called me.” Like, “I hope I can get her to stay for more than six sessions because clearly we have more work to do.” In those early days, that acute grief that just takes your body over, and you’re just on your knees. I would be lying on the floor of my apartment, just keening. There was nothing except that pain.
The light would shift, and I would notice a rainbow across the floor, or there would be somebody laughing hysterically in the street, and the corners of my mouth would start to turn up against myself. Part of me wanted to stay in the grief and that acuteness of it, because there’s something satisfying in that, but joy showed up anyway. I think this is one of the things we miss when we define joy and hope as these flimsy things. They’re not. They are standing there right next to you in all of your darkest moments. If you’re aware of that, then you will notice it.
I think noticing that and changing the way we relate to hope and joy means that we can have a better relationship because it’s like, “I can give up hope.” Telling someone they cannot give up hope is like telling, again, back to this thing of like telling someone, “It doesn’t make sense for you to be hypervigilant. Calm down in the middle of a panic attack.” “No. If I’m at the point of hopelessness, I am.” I guess you asked what would someone want? What would I want someone to take away that joy and hope are right there with you, even in your dark night of the soul, and you can give up on them? It’s okay. They’re going to be there anyway.
Wonderful. The experience of being more solid and more durable than most people are trained to believe they are. The idea that if I have a panic attack, it somehow means I’m fragile. It’s never really made sense to me. I’ve got all these years of experience in therapy, and some of the strongest people I know are the people that live with levels of anxiety that go through the roof. They live there every day, but they still function.
I’ve found myself for decades now telling those people, please reevaluate your assessment of yourself as damaged or broken or weak, because what you’re doing, you’re exhibiting strength that most people will never even imagine, because you’re still functioning. Life is torturous for you this way. One of the things I do a lot for people is refuse to buy into their definition or somebody else’s definition of them as fragile.
I love that. That was one of the reasons I called the unbroken, unbroken. We’re not, your emotion is not a sign that you are broken. That’s not a thing.
Not Shying Away From Taboo Topics
Dr. Roger McPhil is spending a lot of time these days banging the gong about how we’ve really mislabeled and pathologized regular human emotions, and it’s counterproductive at many levels. If you take a breath and get centered and think about whatever we’ve talked about for 45 minutes or so, and I think is there something you want to go back and highlight or something else that we haven’t even touched on yet about your work or this book that you want to put into this discussion?
Two things come to mind. One, I want you to know that I stopped believing in joy in the middle of writing it, and I almost gave the advance back and canceled the project. That’s the level of like, I cannot in good conscience write a book about joy because I was not believing it.
You weren’t feeling it, right?
I was not feeling it. One of my closest dearest friends was diagnosed with glioblastoma two months after I got the book contract. I was in the heat of writing the book, and he called me one day and he was like, “I cannot feel it.” Like, “What do you do when you cannot feel it?” He’s dealing with this terminal sentence, and in a young, beautiful unfolding life, it just felt so senseless and relentless. “I stopped believing in it.” Again, going back to what we were just talking about, joy kept finding me. I was at the point where I was like, “God damn it.” I was going to free myself of this project and not have to worry about this. Now here you are and teaching me that you’re still here. There’s that thing. The second thing is that there’s a chapter on suicide. I think that it’s important to talk about. If we’re going to talk about the light, we need to talk about the darkest darks that we find ourselves in. That is a topic. It almost didn’t make it into the book. There’s a lot of nervousness around that topic in general, as I’m sure you know. I think that makes it even more important that we talk about it and are aware that sometimes the circumstances of our lives are not things we can carry and that we don’t all survive this. We need to look at that impulse before.
We don’t all survive it in the physical sense.
Yes. Exactly.
I’m glad you did put it in there.
Joy shows up whether you want it to be there or not. If you recognize it more, you will see it all the time. Share on XThank you.
I know something of the challenge of bringing out the more taboo or difficult topics. Andrea Gibson just wrote a piece and put it out in her email about speaking the truth. This is the hardest winter she’s ever had. Her parents were coming for a visit, and she thought, “Should I just put on my bright face like I always do for them?” She thought, “Maybe this time I’ll tell them the truth.” We all know that if we’ve been through it, what it leads to is greater intimacy and connection when we tell the truth about the hard stuff. We don’t try to polish it over or pretend it’s not there.
Hide it because that’s when it gets unwieldy. That’s when it becomes the monster under the bed, and it gets bigger and scarier and it’s more intimidating, but if you can bring it into the light and talk about it with someone safe, then you can look at it, try to dissect it, figure out what’s going into it? What is it telling you? What do you mean?
At every level, if I try to keep a secret, I’m pouring an equal amount of my mind energy into the conclusion that I’m damaged or broken and unlovable. If the person I’m hiding this secret from finds it out, they’re going to either attack me or run away from me.
James Pennebaker was just on a podcast called The Good Life Project. He’s done a lot of work on free writing and narrative therapy. For a good amount of the conversation, they talk about how corrosive secrets are to the body. Again, going back to the stress, this silent killer. It’s amazing.
You had one thought you wanted to put out there, which was about including the dark stuff, like the suicide. What was the other thought you wanted to bring up?
The other one I had already said too. That was the one that I had, that I gave up believing in hope while I was writing it. I didn’t believe in joy in the middle of the project. I think the reason I want to say that is because you will have times in your life where you stop believing in joy. That’s okay. That’s part of the arc. What I ended up doing in the book is just writing a chapter about what happens when you don’t believe in joy. What do you do when you don’t believe and you cannot feel it?
Shariann Tom wrote a book titled The Call of Cancer: A Loving Pathway to Wholeness, Healing, and Transformation. She’s somebody who’s had either 4 or 5 diagnoses of cancer. Just a wonderful book about using life as it comes up, the Guy Finley thing. “Here’s another lesson for you. Here’s an event you really don’t want.”
Great. Invite again.
It’s because the lesson is in that event, and as Guy Finley says, “If I resist the event, I push away the lesson.” Resistance is the lesson stealer.
I love that. I’m going to check that out as well.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
Thank you so much for being willing to share this time with us and for the work you’re doing. I look forward to getting a copy of that book and adding it to my repertoire.
Thank you so much. I appreciate that. It’s been lovely to talk to you. I have a bunch of things I’m going to use. I’ll quote you, I promise, but I’m stealing a lot of your tools.
No need to quote me, but if the idea is good and put it out there. Getting the good ideas out there is far more important to me than having my name attached to them. Thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to reading the book soon. When is the publication date?
May 13th.
If people want to reach out to you, how do you prefer to have them contact you?
They can find me on social media @MC.phd, and also my website is AlchemyCoaching.life.
Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been wonderful.
Thank you.
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Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald is a PhD researcher, author, and trauma specialist with over fifteen years of experience. She has written extensively about trauma, grief, and the power of the human spirit to heal. Through her writing, courses, and coaching, she helps people reframe trauma from a strength-based perspective and reclaim joy after hardship. Her latest book, The Joy Reset, explores barriers that prevent us from accessing joy and how to recalibrate in order to welcome back positive emotions. When she’s not working, she can be found dancing in the kitchen, walking in nature, or helping others rediscover their inner light.
Important Links
- MaryCatherine McDonald
- MaryCatherine McDonald on LinkedIn
- MaryCatherine McDonald on Instagram
- MaryCatherine McDonald on TikTok
- Unbroken
- The Joy Reset
- Tiny Little Joys
- Discipline and Punish
- Movement and Identity: Multiculturalism, Somatic Awareness and Embodied Code-Switching
- The Call of Cancer: A Loving Pathway to Wholeness, Healing, and Transformation
About MaryCatherine McDonald, Ph.D.
Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald is a PhD researcher, author, and trauma specialist with over 15 years of experience. She has written extensively about trauma, grief, and the power of the human spirit to heal. Through her writing, courses, and coaching, she helps people reframe trauma from a strength-based perspective and reclaim joy after hardship. Her latest book, The Joy Reset, explores barriers that prevent us from accessing joy and how to recalibrate in order to welcome positive emotions back in.
When she’s not working, she can be found dancing in the kitchen, walking in nature, or helping others rediscover their inner light.
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