Happiness isn't the opposite of depression -- resilience is

Very good point, Kathy, that the only way to feel the good feelings is to feel the bad as well!

 Thank you Jane!  ACE trauma often has us grow up dissociated, and as "Scared Sick" shows, this means that to deny the fear we feel, we learn to stuff most or all emotions.  But the emotions are still down there, so the stress chemicals keep roiling around and start to destroy body parts, per Felitti & Anda's findings.

    But if we get good healing and un-freeze, one of the first things we learn is that suddenly we can feel ALL our emotions - the enjoyable positive emotions, and the negative, ie fear, anger, sorrow.  Plus we're likely to feel all of them more strongly than the "average" person who's never had to grapple with all this.

    Feeling both, and feeling both thoroughly, is good news for at least three reasons.  Most important, the good emotions feel so fantastic that it's totally worth it to learn to ride with the bad.  Second, we need to feel bad when we're treated badly, so that we can know to get out of there!  Third, any emotion when stuffed causes all those stress chemicals to keep eating away our body parts - so any emotion is far better felt and dealt with than stuffed. "Better out than in," we'll live a lot longer.

You know that "buddy bench" for lonely second graders posted earlier here on Acesconnection?  We need something like that for adults.  There are SO MANY lonely people out there, who haven't a clue how to go about changing their lack of social support.  Great article!