Happiness is weird.
As an opening gambit this maybe falls short in profundity, but bear with me.
As a therapist I do a lot of work with ‘uncomfortable’ emotions (the whole thing about there being no ‘bad’ emotions probably merits a separate blog in itself). So anger, sadness, fear – the stuff we imagine will be tricky to sit with (often because it is!) And I talk a lot about pacing because you don’t want to get overwhelmed with these emotions, particularly if your coping strategies have always tended towards numbing. And that approach makes sense to us because we know those emotions often don’t feel very good.
But recently what’s been striking me more and more is that happiness is also often uncomfortable. Which in some ways doesn’t make sense because logically happiness feels good and it’s surely what we want more of, so what’s going on with that?
I think potentially a few things.
The first is around capacity – when we’re dealing with intense stressors and trauma we often go into survival mode, fight/flight or freeze. When we find ourselves in a place of relative calm and safety, surrounded by ‘good-enough’ relationships (happiness even), our nervous system settles and we can often find the difficult unprocessed trauma resurfaces. Which can certainly be frustrating, but is not necessarily bad.
The other thing is that maybe that we have been feeling ‘bad’ (anxious, numb, disconnected, lonely, etc) for so long, that feeling ‘good’ now feels weird, or even dangerous. Or that if we feel good now, we’ll miss it more when it inevitably ends (like the Phoebe Bridgers lyric ‘And I get this feeling, whenever I feel good, it’ll be the last time’). Often until we can start to interrupt the pattern, our brains and bodies might also feel a sense of familiarity around dysfunction if that’s what we’ve been accustomed to (so for example if you grew up around addiction this can be why meeting an addict as an adult can feel like ‘coming home’ and you can feel ‘inexplicably’ drawn to or connected to that person, sometimes against your better judgement).
It may also be that we have specific experiences around ‘bad things’ following on from us feeling good (being punished as a child for being excited for example) so that now feeling good comes up on our radar as dangerous: ‘something is going to go wrong here, I’m going to get punished for this’. In this context ‘self-sabotage’ actually makes sense as a strategy because at least you’re in control and this isn’t going to happen *to* you.
This maybe makes for unhappy reading, so is there a way through?
I think, as so often, understanding why this might be difficult is a great first step. Otherwise the tendency is for our inner critic to get a hold of this and try to beat us into feeling better ‘What’s wrong with me, things are really good right now, why can’t I enjoy it, I’m never going to feel happy’ or variations on this theme. Understanding that happiness can also be an emotion we need to grow our tolerance to, just as fear or discomfort might be, can start this shift. There may also be work around processing some of the past difficult experiences that are bubbling up and separating the then and now, allowing ourselves to really take in that previously our happiness might have seemed a precursor to something bad happening, but that our situation, environment and relationships have now changed.
To find out more about therapy with me and how this can help, you can get in touch to book a free 20-minute introductory/consultation session
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