Why It's Hard to Savor the Good Stuff (in Trauma Healing)

Pleasure isn't something that comes naturally to those of us with unresolved trauma. How many times have we turned away the simple warmth of a hug? Or the chance to take some much-needed time to relax with friends?

Even when we’ve worked so hard for it, we often resist letting the good stuff in.

Our nervous systems might focus so keenly on survival that we push enjoyment and even connection aside. If we’re not careful, this aversion to pleasure becomes a baseline state and hard to budge.

Underneath our excuses and rationalizations lie a simple fear that we can’t trust feeling good. It might not be real. It might even put us in danger. Or we don’t dare to savor it because it might not last.

Trauma resolution means giving ourselves new permission to enjoy life. It’s so much more than just excavating the past. We must teach ourselves how to create the experiences we always told ourselves were out of reach.

For high performers, it often feels counterproductive to take time for simple pleasures. Sooner or later, we realize that deferring rewards to some distant point in the future leads to burnout. Instead of storing up all the goodness for later, we can learn how to balance achievement with enjoyment.

When I trained with leaders in the field of trauma resolution, I also learned the neuroscience of pleasure reclamation. I understand how important it is to effectively rewire our nervous systems to move out of intensity and overwhelm. And I know how to lead people to recover from shutdown and numbness.

My work requires pendulating between the depth of trauma healing and recreating pathways to pleasure. Yes, pleasure. It’s easy to cringe and hide from that word.

Most of us who carry unresolved trauma find it easier to go towards the pain and the struggle. We often balk at the invitation to explore pleasure, dismissing it as frivolous or out of touch with reality.

When we secretly push pleasure away, it’s often because on some level – usually unconscious — we don't know how to savor it. We simply haven’t retaught our nervous systems that feeling good is safe.

We might rush or dissociate, when we're meant to be enjoying something special like a birthday dinner or anniversary trip. Or our minds might intrude with runaway thoughts about work tasks, attempting to push away any experience of goodness.

With our partners, we might start fights to avoid moments of closeness or feel an urge to leave the minute we embark on intimacy. This can take us by surprise because our avoidance of pleasure usually happens below the level of conscious awareness. In moments when we “should” be enjoying, we often don't realize that our bodies are activated in fight or flight because we don't feel safe.

Pleasure Reclamation and Nervous System Healing for Trauma

Unresolved trauma keeps us out of our bodies. Trauma responses are intense and overwhelming, so it’s adaptive to stay in our heads and shutdown our feelings and even physical sensations.

The problem is that over the long-term, this survival strategy comes at great cost.

We hope to avoid the discomfort of the pain and fear our bodies are holding, but in the process we turn down the light and color on everything. 

We might try hard to enjoy, pushing ourselves to stay present and not dissociate, but this only makes things worse. 

It’s easy to tell ourselves a story that we don’t really need pleasure, fun, or enjoyment. We might lie to ourselves about how we’re fine without it. But underneath the shutdown and the numbness, our bodies long to heal. 

And when we do heal, we get to enjoy the lives we’ve worked so hard to build — and that are waiting for us to fully inhabit.

First, we must teach our nervous systems that it's safe to feel. Maybe it wasn’t in the past, but it is now.

Then, we learn how to savor the good stuff — the moments of warmth, of pleasure, of connection — and rebuild our nervous systems’ capacity for joy.

This might sound like fun. In reality, it feels risky and often confusing, scary, frustrating, or even impossible.

Decades of choosing safety and survival make our worlds smaller and smaller, and learning new ways involves creating new neural pathways in the body and traveling them with persistence.

To feel the good stuff, we relearn how to feel. That means not just the brilliance of awe and beauty, but also the panic and loneliness that we've been carrying around all along.

Healing in this way is more about gently turning towards pleasure. We don’t need to remember or revisit what happened in the past.

Trauma resolution work happens naturally, when the body feels safe enough.

Our nervous systems bring up stored emotional content with the hopes that, this time, we can turn towards ourselves with enough presence and compassion to reconsolidate our memories. Our nervous systems always hope we’ll let go of our burdens and turn towards the goodness available now.

The Utility of Pleasure for Trauma Healing 

Training our nervous systems to orient towards goodness and warmth takes time. Just as trauma can be overwhelming, intimacy and pleasure can too.

It’s important not to rush. We learn to savor by slowing down. We orient to our five senses and explore what it’s like to soften into an experience of beautiful sounds, vibrant colors, soft textures.

Simplicity is safe. So is going slow.

As we learn to experience life in a new way, we attune to what brings us authentic joy.

Far from being superfluous, learning how to savor and let in goodness teaches our bodies that it's safe to be here.

We learn what love, safety, and belonging feel like to give and receive.

And slowly but surely, we learn that we can trust pleasure. We can trust ourselves to discern what's good for us and what isn't. We can trust ourselves to say "no" when something doesn't feel good. We can move towards people who feel good to connect with and gently move away from those who don't.  

Trauma resolution requires reorienting towards pleasure. Each time we heal, we learn how to let the light in. 

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Elie Losleben supports individuals and couples internationally through trauma resolution and embodied healing. She brings extensive training in somatic approaches and a deep understanding of how the nervous system shapes our capacity for connection. To learn more about working together, you're welcome to reach out.