The Upper Limit Problem à la Brené Brown and Gay Hendricks Part 1: Lost that Loving Feeling

Have you ever felt like all is right with the world, the stars seem aligned, everything is going your way? You feel intense love for your family, waves of benevolence roll over you so that you let people cut in front of you in traffic. It is the happiest day of your life! Inevitably, this warm and fuzzy feeling is thrown out the window as intrusive thoughts of dread and impending doom flood your imagination. You picture your loved ones suffering car accidents, panic seizes you as you imagine losing your job! For inexplicable reasons you fall and hurt yourself. Somehow a favourite vase slips through your hands and crashes to the tiled floor splintering into a thousand pieces. There is something about life being “too good to be true” when we are in a state of contentment.

Brené Brown (Daring Greatly, 2012) talks about these thoughts as foreboding joy. As she did her research on vulnerability, she found that “the experiences that left them (interviewees) feeling the most vulnerable is joy” (Brown, 2012). We start ruminating about disaster stories almost immediately because we are so uncomfortable with the good. To be so high means that we have far to fall when this beautiful moment passes. Our experience in life teaches us that “it is too good to be true.” Thus, to be joyful makes us vulnerable to what we anticipate—future suffering.

Gay Hendricks, a psychologist who writes about personal development, has a whole book dedicated to this idea (Hendricks, The Big Leap, 2009). As humans we know how to feel bad and anxious because these emotions and thoughts are old survival tactics left over from the era where our existence was contingent on hyper vigilance. As I understand it, the idea here is that having a moment of triumph/bliss/accomplishment/contentment is so out of our comfort range that the brain wants us back into familiar territory of blandness and routine or abject misery for some of us. He observes, “When I reached my Upper Limit of how much positive feeling I could handle, I created a series of unpleasant thoughts to deflate me” (Hendricks, 2009).

Both Brown and Hendricks, came to the same conclusion from investigating this phenomenon from their particular disciplines, psychology and ethnography. If two independent researchers come up with similar hypothesis, it is worthwhile to consider where and how do I see this in my own life? Where have a missed an opportunity to lean into joy and take it for a ride as far as it goes? What other lessons and insights have I squandered as I allowed myself to return to a place of familiar blandness?

Ground Hog Day, the movie, is a Hollywood example of this idea. Bill Murray’s character is drawn to Andie McDowell. Initially he pursues her for ostensibly to be selfish reasons—he just wants to get her into bed. I think this is a long standing self-sabotaging move by this character. In his attempts to woo Andie’s character, he steps into an attitude of arrogance thereby suffering rejection. Bill’s character subconsciously is so afraid of the pain of rejection that he actually chooses to harm his chances for real connection with another person. While this makes sense from a survivalist viewpoint, it limits our ability to grow and move towards a new status quo. Who wants to be stuck reliving their Ground Hog Day over and over? Even Bill Murray was finally able to push up and out of his same day, same outcome life into the potential of love with Andie. Now he has a new status quo from which to move to the next level of joy.

An example of this pattern can be drawn from the Hebrew Bible. My all-time favourite Old Testament hero is the mighty prophet, Elijah. Let’s see how Elijah at his most famous epic role in the Man Who Called Down Fire from Heaven, suffered from the foreboding joy. Tune in text time, same bat station, same bat time for Part 2: Elijah—Triumph on the Mountain to the Ditch of Despair.