Creating "Joy Theory" 3.0

I have no idea if this quote is accurate.

In testing out this theory with clients over the past week, these are my findings and analysis.

What I believe clients will get out of it:

1. Increased Awareness

   1. I've had a few clients comment on how they didn't recognize their emotional reactions as much before doing this treatment method. The quick shifting of emotions during session helped them get more in tune with their emotions and how it feels distinct compared to others.

   2. This method creates awareness in what clients pay attention to throughout their day when not in session.

2. Influence of Joy

   1. I've had many clients react negatively to feeling joy because it feels scary. Google summarizes: "Brené Brown states that joy is the most vulnerable emotion because it requires a deep connection to something fragile and fleeting, which can trigger a fear that it will be taken away, a phenomenon she calls 'foreboding joy.'" I have definitely seen this in session. For those that experienced foreboding joy it was simultaneously informative and disconcerting to them because it helped them recognize their own discomfort with higher level positive emotions and the level of fear present in their lives. I believe this is crucial information.

   2. Other clients started to recognize that they don't focus on joy very often in their life, don't even know what joy feels like, or don't know what that would look like in their life. Again, this is extremely important because if you don't focus on joy, you will most likely never attain it.

3. Power of Choice

   1. The most important single understanding of any is this: that our emotional state is a choice. That IS NOT to say that you should numb, neglect, ignore, repress, or any other word suggesting that a person shouldn't feel their emotions. That isn't healthy. Nor is it saying that your emotional reactions aren't instinctual. What this is saying is that you recognize, through the meditation, that you can change your emotional state at will by working through the negative emotions in a healthy way, and it's not even hard to do! This information is by far the most impactful because it helps you understand the amount of power you have over how you feel on a moment to moment basis.

Things I've tried this week:

1. Visualizing daily routine.

   1. Probably the least effective of the various things I've tried. It seems to be too broad to work. I'll test it a bit more but I'm leaning towards ditching it right now.

   2. There is potential for it to work, but I currently think other techniques are better. I will continue to test this infrequently.

2. Having a client feel joy in a situation that joy was inappropriate for.

   1. I tried having a client feel joy while an argument was happening. In retrospect that made no sense at all. Emotions should be congruent to the mood of what is occurring and joy during this type of interaction basically borders on psychopathy.

   2. This will not be incorporated into the final version of Joy Theory.

3. Focusing on a specific thing that bothers the client.

   1. This seems to have worked the best. Most clients were able to feel completely different about themselves or their trigger situation including body image, family dynamics, self worth, and others within one session in addition to the insights and awareness into themselves that they got.

   2. This will be incorporated into the final version of Joy Theory because of how well it worked.

4. Working a client up the emotional frequency chart.

   1. This has worked amazingly well. Certain clients struggled to identify a high level emotion so we started with neutrality, moved to acceptance, then love, then joy. Knowing the difference between the emotions and what they would look like (pre-meditation which is more evidence for the power of visualization!) in that scenario seems to be very important.

   2. Some clients needed to go through more steps than those four emotions.

   3. Some clients couldn't get to neutrality immediately but they could after they imagined a lower frequency emotion such as desire and pride.

   4. This will be incorporated into the final version of Joy Theory because of how well it worked.

5. Using Mind-Body Release (MBR) or Radical Accountability Theory (RAT) when clients struggled getting to the next emotional state.

   1. MBR worked beautifully for this. Once clients worked through the physical discomfort they experienced while trying to visualize and feel the specified emotion they were able to visualize and feel it without a problem.

   2. This will be incorporated into the final version of Joy Theory because of how well it worked.

6. Different Visualizations

   1. I've found that different visualizations have better or worse impacts on efficacy overall. It may be more beneficial for a client to come up with visualizations that resonate with them rather than me dictating the exact visual meditation to do.

   2. Will test this further but I feel pretty good about it right now.

New Ideas to Try:

1. Color Visualization

   1. There is such a thing as light therapy which uses different colors (frequencies) of light to heal people. I've used light in other meditative techniques I use and it's worked really well for some people. Having them visualize either a specific color of high frequency light, such as blue or violet, could be one way of approaching this.

   2. The other way of approaching this would be imagining a healing color of light based on the color spectrum and incrementally working one's way up the color frequency spectrum (which also happens to be the chakra spectrum).

   3. Another way would be to have the client imagine whatever color of light they intuitively find healing and have it fill visually their body.