Glad: The Feeling Most People Never Receive

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Mark Twain quotes is that there's no humor in heaven.

Yeah. Right? Because there's no pain. Right. And humor gives us relief for that pain. Right. And that's my prayer. I don't want to go to heaven. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I I think you're right about the pain and the delight. It's it's the thing that goes I mean, it happens all the time and that thing that goes it's

not gonna last. Yeah. Somebody's gonna cut them down or, you know Yeah.

Somebody's gonna cut them down. It's not gonna last. Yeah. And a child doesn't have any concept of that, and so they can be fully present with the delight. And and gladness has that in it, that idea of being present.

Right? Being able to be here now.

Present. Mhmm. Which is fully in your body, fully in your mind, fully in your soul, fully in your spirit, fully in your emotions,

fully in your senses. Yeah. Yeah. It's what we did as children. That's exactly what we did. And that we're all still there. We're all still That's exactly right. We're all still there.

Am I making a case for going backwards? No. I'm making a case for going forwards.

Yeah. Going forwards to see if we can actually recapture some of the

things that were there before we had to protect ourselves.

Right.

Yeah. That's, that's really that's really good. And and I really appreciate you saying that gladness is is the most painful of feelings. That's a fascinating statement.

Mhmm.

I I think that that is is what makes it so difficult to enter into it.

Even happiness. Or people just don't don't do it.

Yeah. And and, you know, we can talk about there's some there's some feelings that are secondary to the feeling of glad. I mean, we can be we can be happy, which is different than glad. Right? Or joy, which is different than happy. Yeah. But when you're talking about glad, you're talking about the fullness of the

experience of what what those things point to.

Right? Yeah. And the emotional maturity of a person is is characterized by their capacity to their capability to be in life on life's terms.

Yeah.

Just because a person is glad doesn't mean that they don't feel other things.

Right. It's really about not being defended against those other feelings, but being able to embrace all of them. And I I love how you talk about that, in your books, but also with with people that you're working with. Just that whole idea of that we we have this idea that if I I'm glad, well then I'm not hurt. Right? But we know that this is not true. Right? That there are feelings we can hold in combination.

Right.

And and that gladness is not the absence of hurt or sorrow or or grief.

That's exactly right. In fact, one of the great, sensations of being glad is that we've become okay with the fact that pain is a part of the

process.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is different than saying that we like it.

That's

exactly right. Yeah. But it's just that all of a sudden, we've become adept

at it.

Yeah. Or as as as we would say, resilient.

Yeah.

And and, you know, we know, resilience is something that we all want, but nobody wants to go through what it takes to be resilient.

Right. Which just means

I'm okay with life on life's terms. Yeah.

Right.

Wow.

Yeah. Well, I I think of, we've mentioned this before, but the the passage in Hebrews that talks about, that Jesus, for the joy set before him,

endured

the cross, right? That there is this the both and both of these are together, that he had joy and he had suffering and pain and

hurt.

Mhmm.

And and they're not

mutually exclusive.

Yeah. That's exactly right. In fact, it's the it's the ability to hold on to hope and

hurt.

Yeah. And to know that hurt is real,

but

hope is real.

Right.

And and it doesn't in inhibit us from being able to move to another place in life.

Yeah. Well, and hope in and of itself has both. Right? Because hope is a is a longing, but it's also a it's also a a promise of something coming.

Right.

Right? And so it's it's inherently both.

Yeah. And and pain is the it's it's the it's the tunnel we go through in order to get to hope. Yeah. Right? In order to get to the place of, of gladness.

Well, and I think and this is where, some of the shadow of the impairment stuff will come, but I think there are all these ways in which we we we

think we're pursuing gladness, but we're pursuing something else, and it it it ends up

leading to a worse pain than the pain we were avoiding.

Yeah. That's exactly right.

Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Or that in the pursuit of trying to avoid or run from the pain, that we we we run right into it. Yeah. Right? Like the you know, like the tragic hero, in in in Shakespeare or something. Right? That we we in trying to avoid or run from that pain, we we run right into

it. Yeah. That's really good.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we're gonna wrap this one up here in just a second. Anything else that you wanna say about about glad and the

gifts?

Yeah, my sense is that, I do want to say something. My sense is that if you if you're a person that's been very disciplined and doing your work

and I've had

people say, well, I'm doing my work, but I I don't have this. I don't have this. And now that we're gonna do these podcasts, if you don't have the fruit or the gifts of the feelings, if you're not experiencing them, don't be down on yourself.

The reality of

it is, it may be that you have a some sort of impairment based on the feeling of glad and or based on the other feelings and how they've come into your life.

Yeah.

Just because you don't have the fruit of the emotion doesn't mean that you're not doing your work.

Yeah.

It's just that you don't have it right now, and don't beat yourself up about it. Yeah. In fact, be curious about it.

Yeah. That's really good. Yeah.

That's really good. Yeah, absolutely.

Because those feelings are your friend.

Yeah. Yes, they are.

Yeah, our our what we're presenting here isn't to give you a list of

things

to shame

yourself with.

Right, exactly.

It's

to help you get curious about about your own emotional life and

how it works.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's good.

Alright, well, we'll wrap this one up here. Thanks for joining us. If you've got any questions or

or comments or things you want us to talk about,

you can send those to us at podcast@chipdotson.com. And you can

find the show notes at

chipdodd.com/podcast.

And, if you would like to hear this on iTunes, please leave us a review. It helps other people find the podcast

and

we appreciate you doing that. And we'll see you next time.

Thanks

for listening.

There's a Mark Twain quote: without the rocks in the stream, the river would have no song. And you can hear that quote as a kind of cheesy cat poster, right? Like "love it or lose it." Or, "success is around every corner, you just gotta go for it," that kind of thing. But I think there's something in that for me — that it's really the beauty and the noise and the music of our life. What we're grateful for, what we appreciate, is formed, is shaped, by heartache, by loss, by love, by disappointment, by our joy being completed. Because there are times in our lives — we can't deny them — that I thought it wasn't gonna turn out. And I kind of hedged my bet that it wasn't, and I wasn't giving my heart to it. And God did what God does, and my joy was completed in spite of myself. I can't deny those either. I can't deny the surprise of joy in my life. I can't deny the surprise of beauty in the midst of a lot of willpower to shut that one down.

And so that's where I think gladness is so risky, because it creeps up on us, and it creeps up in us. Letting ourselves be surprised, being surprised by things. You saw the daffodils before. You didn't go out this morning looking for daffodils.

No. In fact, I was going somewhere that I knew certain things were gonna be pretty trying. I also knew that it would be very late by the time I got home that night. So I was willing to have those feelings, and I looked over. And also, in that wondering and appreciating — because yellow and blue, by the way, is really pretty magic. Whether it's fall leaves or whatever.

There's yellow and blue fall leaves?

Yeah. I mean, the yellow leaves have the blue sky. It's gorgeous. This coming fall, look for the blue leaves. This coming fall, lie down underneath the maple tree. Look up through it into the blue. It does something to the brain. I don't know what, but something. Those are complementary colors.

And I remember being a kid. See, when I looked at the daffodils, I remembered being a kid. We were at school taking a walk, and the teacher said, "These are jonquils" — I think they were purple. Somebody correct me, but I remember they smelled so incredible. And I remember being a kid. So there's that wonder. And remembering being a kid is going to be a sad experience and a wonderful experience, right? I remember something really, really good that was really good. I remember liking being six. So gladness shatters the compartmentalization. It takes us back to our childhood. Long-term memories are in your heart.

You know too, Stephen, there's nothing wrong with happiness. No, I'm all for it. It happens — and that's exactly where the word comes from. But if we don't have an internal life and aren't willing to feel life on life's terms — its ups, its downs, its pains, its joys — then we're trying to create life or control life, which makes us dependent upon external happenings or circumstance. So happiness becomes an external job of shaping our environment.

Which is just the top cream of glad. Glad's this thick thing, and happiness — certainly there's happiness and glad at times, but it's just the top part. And happiness becomes dependent upon the external circumstances to try to create an internal experience. Happiness is really dictated by: what do I have to do to not have the other seven feelings?

And that's where we move into the impaired gladness, which is sensuality without heart. Sensuous and sensual. It's the attempt to stimulate my brain and stimulate my body without having to have my heart, without having to bring my heart into it. That's where satiation comes from. The impaired gladness is sensuous and sensual experiences without heart, without the willingness to have — it's processes and practices and substances and behaviors that I do or use to bring me that feeling, to manufacture that feeling that gets close to glad. To make my heart shut up. To make my heart quit having feelings.

There's a beautiful thing now that — I've always focused on being old, but now that I'm old...

Like, really old?

Old, really old.

You're not really old. You're just kind of old. Very young. You're like a young old person.

Yeah, I'm a young old person. Everyone I'm treating now — before long, they're all going to be younger than my sons. That's old. But I've noticed that in relationship, there is a sweetness and a delight in spite of the aging. There's a missing, a sweetness, a delight and appreciation, a wonder, a curiosity, an interest in the welfare of the other, and all of these extraordinary benefits — but all of them have come from a willingness to share pain, a willingness to be in pain, a willingness to even admit creating pain.

Take responsibility.

Yeah. And then having sorrow for having done so, or telling the truth about the other having created pain. So there it is again. We talked in the other podcast about doing an audiobook. And I said, in The Voice of the Heart, it holds true because it is true. It is true not because I said it, but because it's been around forever. We'll do a podcast sometime on ayeka, but when God said "Where are you?" it's a question of where you are emotionally. So what's amazing to me is that it holds true, and here I am twenty years after writing The Voice of the Heart, thirty years involved in the field of tragedy and regeneration both — here I am talking about the very thing that I've been talking about, living it. Here we are twenty years later, and my relationship is twenty years older with Sonya, and I'm finding gladness to be even truer because of a willingness to have those other seven feelings than I would have been able to actually say experientially before. So this is real and true. It is philosophy and poetry that hits the dirt and grows something. Seeds in dirt. This is real. This is very real.

Well, may everyone who's listening experience some beauty today. May they see a daffodil or a child smile, or experience being generous toward somebody when they don't have to be. And have the sadness of it. Have the sadness of the joy, so that the joy comes with it. Because even with that — my own sons are older, they all love it, it's fabulous, it's fantastic. And I miss them growing up.

See, there it is. Beautiful. Thanks, Chip.

Thank you, Stephen.

Thanks for listening to the Sage Hill podcast. I want to take a second to let you know about something coming up that we're starting called the Sage Hill Leadership Lab, which is an opportunity for leaders — men or women who are leading in a professional context, entrepreneurs or doctors or nurse leaders or managers or church leaders or principals — to come meet four times a year to be in a process of learning to lead more fully from the heart. To find out more about that, you can go to sagehillconsulting.com.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the glad module. Or explore all eight feelings.