The Threat of Happiness
Authored by Brian O’Donnell, PhD
Every person has an ingrained, inborn longing for happiness. It is a core part of our humanity. Just as a plant gravitates towards the sun, or the rivers move towards the ocean, we are inherently designed in our inner most psyche to seek happiness, in our depths we know it is our birthright.
For many of us this idea feels natural and like common sense. We automatically seek pleasure and happiness.
Yet, in truth, most people do not live in a state of happiness. Some fortunate people touch happiness, while the majority of humanity lives in a grey zone. In this zone there is a sense of lack - of missing out on the best in life. In this grey zone life often feels difficult and has a persistent state of meaninglessness.
What is the source of this state of unhappiness for the majority of humanity? How can it be that our basic drive for pleasure, joy and fulfillment is unrealized? What blocks this most natural of all longings?
If we are honest we recognize that we are ambivalent about happiness. We want it and we don’t want it. We fear the very thing we want the most. This recognition is startling at first. We go looking for happiness and we push it away.
This whole process is largely unconscious to us. It is out of our everyday awareness. As anyone who has studied psychology knows, much of our deepest self is out of everyday awareness. This hidden territory of the unconscious includes forbidden thoughts, feelings and memories. The unconscious also includes our greatest potential - to love, to create, to have joy.
One of the best ways to grasp this profound ambivalence of our longing for happiness and our fear of it is to notice that as happiness gets closer to us we shrink back from it. If the object of our desire is further away we can risk feeling our longing yet as it approaches we cringe back and prefer the “safety” of our grey zone. All this is often subtle and unconscious.
To realize that it is us, not anyone else, that limits our happiness is life changing and has a dramatic impact on our psychological lives. We alone create our own fate. No one else is truly to blame for our unhappiness, it is our creation.
Even if the world and people around us are limited and imperfect it is us that is the ultimate source of our suffering. One of the main causes of this suffering is the fear of what we desire and the thwarting of it.
This largely unconscious rejection of happiness leads to two different psychological states that can exist in the same person, although one is usually more predominant.
The first state is a grabbing for happiness. There is an impatience, restlessness and insistence. The psyche says “I must be happy and now”. This condition can be the basis of anxiety. The other inner state is a giving up on happiness. There is a resignation and doubt about ever being happy. The psyche says “I’ll never be happy”. This can be the basis for depression. These two inner states underlie the vast majority of psychological problems.
Truly knowing that it is us that rejects happiness is the very beginning of changing this condition.
So, the essential question is why do we reject happiness. Why do we consider happiness as a danger or threat. Basically we reject happiness, pleasure and fulfillment due to the fact that we reject ourselves. To the exact extent we reject ourselves we will reject fulfillment.
Why do we reject ourselves?
It begins in childhood. Many of our real needs and desires were rejected by those close to us. Our needs for warmth, affection, understanding, consistency and the freedom to explore are just a few of the healthy needs that may have been denied us. Some of those needs may have been blocked for our own protection yet most were rejected due to the limitations of those close to us. These family and community members were passing along their own rejected needs and wounds from their childhoods.
When we were so young and felt such rejection we didn’t have the capacity to understand this whole process. We did the best we could do. Our primitive emotional response was pain, fear, anger and even hate. These feelings can often mutate into cruelty, being self centered and indifference.
Our mental response was to conclude that life is against us - life is hostile - so we developed strategies to control others, we hardened and decided to take more than we give.
Since these feelings and thoughts were unacceptable to those around us and even more of an opportunity for them to reject us further we covered them up. We hid all this from them and eventually ourselves.
One of the main ways we have of hiding these feelings and thoughts is that we pretend. We pretend to feel and think in ways that are not true. So, we may pretend to be loving to hide our festering anger. We pretend to be open and trusting to hide our basic fear. We pretend to be strong and tough to hide our fragility and we pretend to be smart to hide our confusion and unknowing.
All of this is a very complex process and takes place largely outside our awareness.
Even though there is a lack of conscious awareness of these feelings, thoughts and behaviors our deep psyche registers all of this and rejects ourselves. We reject ourselves for our anger and cruelty (even if only in thoughts), our selfishness and our attempts to control others since we believe they are untrustworthy. We also register the untruth of our pretenses, our pretending to be more than we are.
Our deep psyche knows that anything that is contrary to love and truth obstructs happiness and joy. True happiness requires an inner climate of trust, truth and love. Where we still live in a state of fear, anger and control our bodies and minds will be tight and contracted. When we can let go, when we are at ease in our bodies and minds we become compatible with happiness.
The deep psyche knows that only when we give our best to life, can we receive the best from life. If we are dishonest with life and withhold our best we won’t feel deserving of life’s beauty and abundance. We will shrink from it or push it away.
What is the remedy for this existential problem of wanting and fearing happiness?
The first step is to cultivate a willingness to see ourself as we truly are with an attitude of acceptance and curiosity. This is not an easy practice since most of us have spent a lifetime looking the other way.
We are not as bad as we fear and we are not as good as we pretend!
Accepting the truth of ourselves as we are now - in our imperfection and greatness - is one and the same as accepting happiness. They are interchangeable and interdependent. Acceptance leads to relaxation and trust.
When we are truly willing to see ourselves with eyes wide open we will see our denied pain, our misconceptions and defenses, and our attempts to control others. This is a brave act and opens the door to self acceptance. Self acceptance ushers in happiness.
What I have just described is the common territory of psychology. In my practice as a psychologist I help people face and speak the truth of their lives. I assist in making the unconscious conscious. Healing is being intimate with the full story of our lives - the pain and the glory.
The full remedy not only includes the psychological work but also invites a spiritual dimension. By spiritual I am referring to that arena of life beyond the mind, body and emotions. Even beyond the psychological.
This is the dimension that deeply understands and feels that life is limitless beauty, limitless wisdom, limitless love and joy. When we call upon the spiritual domain we are in touch with the recognition that life is on our side. Again the common psychological mind tells us that life is against us. Our spiritual self knows that life is ultimately safe, not only safe, but indescribably magnificent!
Blending the psychological healing with an embrace of the medicine of the spiritual realm ensures a solid foundation for enduring happiness.
Collectively we are at a new threshold of human development. We are witnessing a growing capacity to see and accept ourselves fully and to sustain genuine happiness.
Brian O’Donnell Ph.D