Who Told Us Joy Was Unprofessional? The science and embodied practice of making room for more than survival
Somewhere along the way, professionalism started looking a lot like holding your breath.
Keep your face composed. Keep producing. Be warm, but never too expressive. Be passionate, but keep that laugh down.
And for women whose competence is already questioned through the lens of race, gender, or culture, those expectations can become a whole performance.
Whew. Even our joy has a dress code.
As a therapist and dance/movement therapist, I’m interested in what that performance costs us—and what becomes possible when care makes room for delight, pleasure, play, and cultural connection.
We have learned to ask, What happened to you?
We also need to ask:
What helps you feel alive? And can we make room for that before everything stops hurting?
Because joy deserves a place in the healing process from the beginning.
Your brain needs more than fewer bad days
Relief matters. So does having something to look forward to.
These experiences overlap, but they are not interchangeable. Feeling less anxious does not automatically mean feeling curious, connected, or interested in life again.
Research on positive affect treatment takes that distinction seriously. In a randomized clinical trial, Craske and colleagues studied a treatment designed to strengthen positive emotion through practices involving rewarding experiences, attention, and savoring. The findings support directly addressing diminished pleasure and interest alongside distress.
That matters for the person who says, “I’m getting through the day, but I don’t feel like myself.”
For the woman whose calendar is full and whose inner life feels strangely empty.
For the clinician who can support everyone else but cannot remember the last thing she did simply because she wanted to.
There is meaningful clinical work in helping someone reconnect with wanting, enjoying, anticipating, and choosing.
Functioning is valuable. Feeling present in your own life deserves attention, too.
Joy can make room for another possibility
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions can widen our momentary range of thoughts and actions. Interest invites exploration. Play invites experimentation. Connection can help us build relationships and resources we draw on later.
Think about the difference between moving through a day braced for the next demand and having one moment that opens something up.
A conversation where you feel understood.
A song that brings back your rhythm.
A laugh that interrupts the belief that everything depends on you.
Laboratory research has also found that certain positive emotional experiences can speed cardiovascular recovery following an anxiety-provoking task. That is a specific finding about recovery after acute stress—not evidence that happiness erases trauma. But it gives us a reason to take these moments seriously.
My clinical takeaway: when we help people notice what is nourishing, we may be supporting a broader range of responses to life.
Sometimes the next possibility begins with, Actually, I want something different.
Let the body have a say
You can understand that you deserve rest and still tighten when you sit down.
You can say you want connection and feel yourself brace when someone offers it.
You can know every affirmation and still struggle to receive a good moment without waiting for the catch.
This is where embodiment becomes useful: paying attention to how an experience unfolds through sensation, posture, movement, and choice.
In my work, that can mean asking:
What happens in your shoulders when you talk about that person?
Does that song make you want to move—or become still?
Can you notice something pleasant without making yourself stay with it?
Movement belongs in this conversation. A multicenter randomized trial found that dance/movement therapy added to usual care improved depression outcomes compared with usual care alone. That supports movement-based clinical work; it does not mean every dance break is therapy or that movement helps everyone in the same way.
Joy might arrive as a sway in the kitchen, a stretch, a quiet smile, or the relief of choosing your own pace.
The body gets a vote. We can listen without demanding a particular answer.
Our cultures have been making room for aliveness
In many Black families and communities, music, humor, food, movement, storytelling, and gathering have helped people hold experiences too complex for a single emotion.
Grief and laughter can share a room. A hard season can still contain beauty.
These practices hold meaning beyond what a clinical framework can measure. Their value does not begin when research gives them a name.
Culturally affirming care asks what these experiences mean to the person in front of us. Which traditions feel nourishing? Which feel complicated? What has been lost, and what might they want to reclaim—or create for themselves?
For women accustomed to being needed, a question as simple as What do you enjoy? can reveal how little space there has been for preference.
And listen: being capable does not cancel your right to delight.
Joy needs an invitation, not another assignment
“Practice joy” can become one more demand placed on someone already exhausted.
Now she has to heal correctly, rest productively, and be grateful on schedule.
Absolutely not.
In trauma-informed care, choice matters. Some people experience pleasure alongside guilt, grief, vigilance, or fear. Some feel very little at all. Those responses deserve curiosity and care.
We can begin with less uncomfortable. With a little interesting. With I didn’t hate that.
A gentle embodied practice might look like this:
Find something you choose. A color, a familiar song, a warm drink, or the view outside.
Notice your response. Perhaps there is warmth, ease, an impulse to move—or no clear change.
Stay briefly, if you want to. Let the experience exist without requiring it to improve your mood.
Choose what comes next. Continue, shift your attention, move, or stop.
This is an invitation to notice preference and agency. There is no required feeling and no gold star for staying longer.
Bring joy into the room and change the conditions
In clinical work, I want room for the whole person: what hurts, what matters, what makes them laugh, and what they still imagine.
That can mean opening a session with, “What felt nourishing this week?” alongside asking what was difficult. It can mean following a client’s humor, exploring a meaningful ritual, or helping someone plan an experience they actually want to have.
For clinicians and leaders, it also means examining the conditions around us.
A joyful workshop cannot compensate for an impossible caseload. A playlist cannot resolve discrimination. Staff should have access to protected breaks, fair compensation, manageable expectations, and support.
Joy has a place in sustainable work. So do boundaries, resources, and accountability.
When I speak about joy-centered care, I mean making room for pleasure, connection, and possibility within responsible clinical practice. I also mean refusing to make individuals responsible for feeling better inside conditions that keep harming them.
You do not have to finish healing to experience something beautiful
At Yemaya Wellness Center®, we make space for the parts of you that have been carrying—and the parts that still want to dance, create, connect, and be cared for.
You can be grieving and enjoy dinner.
You can be working through trauma and laugh until your cheeks hurt.
You can be deeply committed to your work and let people see that you enjoy being alive.
Your pain deserves care. Your delight deserves room.
What is one small thing you want more space to feel?