Why Can’t We Be Happy?

A few days ago I finished reading a book that a student once gave me. I confess that she had leafed through it, and that she had read its first chapter, but she had not advanced much further in reading it, despite its very suggestive title, “Addicted to unhappiness”. Its authors, a couple of American psychoanalysts, professors and researchers at the University of Chicago, spouses Martha Heineman Pieper and William J. Pieper.

Apparently, when they gave me the book I wasn’t feeling so unhappy, or at least, if I felt that way, I hadn’t become aware of what it was causing me to feel unhappy. I am of the opinion that readings take on a special significance when one is sensitive to them, when one is vulnerable to the topic in question. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, when the disciple is ready, the master appears.

This book gave me a lot of light to analyze the problems we face during life. The Piepers are of the opinion that we have a series of behavioral habits that prevent us from enjoying the life we ​​want (1). The origins of this, as of most of the habits that shape our behavior, are located in the childhood As children we assimilate the patterns of affective behavior that accompany us in adulthood and that are very difficult to modify, since they have an involuntary and automated nature. We are slaves to our habits, precisely because to do them we don’t have to think about what we are doing, they speed up our lives. When a situation gets in the way of our behavioral stereotype, a load of anxiety ensues that makes us feel uncomfortable, upset, agitated. This is typical of addictive behavior when something gets in the way of its achievement.

Our parents try to educate us based on their concepts of authority and discipline, with the full conviction that they do so for our good, in most cases. The child is born with a whole series of physiological needs such as breathing, drinking water, eating, eliminating waste, sleeping, etc. During the first months of life, other emotional needs arise, such as communication and acceptance, and other cognitive needs, such as curiosity about the world around them. A lot of these needs are frustrated by the prohibitions, punishments, threats, fears that adults impose on the child, according to the educational models they believe are relevant.

Parents are often unaware of these emotional and cognitive needs of the child and they interpose their psychological ignorance to their satisfaction. The child interprets these emotional and cognitive deficiencies in terms of abandonment, guilt, lack of esteem, etc. This is minted in his unconscious; only form of reflection in the first stage of life. As the main need that the child has is to feel love from his parents, the connection is established at an unconscious level, between what they are capable of giving him and the feeling of well-being, which he later comes to define as happiness. For example, if we were very punished children, or very limited, we interpreted in our childish minds that that is what loving is. That is to say, if our parents punish us, or force us to do something we don’t want, then, since they surely love us, that is what love is. Therefore, we feel “loved” in this way, leading us to false happiness or false well-being.

This, in a general sense, means that we do not achieve true happiness, but rather a false happiness or a special type of masochism, where we fall in love with the person who makes us suffer the most, despises us, abandons us or is unfaithful. However, the person who goes out of his way to protect us, loves us, accepts us as we are, then becomes invisible to our eyes, or we find unacceptable defects in him, according to our opinion. We simply become “hooked”, like a drug addict, to suffering.

There are times when things are going very well for us, we are about to achieve what we are looking for and, suddenly, a problem arises that makes us take three steps back, when we had advanced one. We justify this inconvenience and even feed it, because we need to feel that way unconsciously. Our thoughts become our worst enemies, because we begin to justify all inconveniences or obstacles to achieve what we want and even a secret magic happens around these facts.

Our thoughts, although we cannot see them, exist, they have energy and strength that are projected into the universe. Allow us a little digression. We will briefly refer to a very interesting theory about the functioning of the brain. According to Karl Pribram, a neurophysiologist at Stanford University and one of the most influential architects of brain interpretation, deep structure of the brain is essentially holographic In other words, the brain is a hologram that interprets a holographic world. Holograms are three-dimensional images projected spatially with the help of a laser. This does not mean that the brain is made up of laser rays, but rather that it has the properties of a hologram (2).

Pribram considers that the brain is In fact, a kind of lens, a transformative machine that converts the cascade of frequencies we receive through the senses into the familiar realm of our internal perceptions. In other words, everything we perceive is about holograms created inside our minds while what we call the “external world” would be nothing more than a kaleidoscope of energy and vibration. Memory storage is not the only neurophysiological enigma that is easier to address using the holographic model of the brain proposed by Pribram. In this way In this way, the brain manages to translate the avalanche of frequencies received through the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, etc.) until they are transformed into familiar sensory perceptions.

This projected energy causes certain events or other energies to join it. It is as if it were a telephone, you dial a number and on the other side they answer, based on the number you have dialed. More or less, like the idea that God hears our prayers. It is a physical phenomenon, or metaphysical if you like, but real, objective. That is why the universe or that energy that lives in another dimension that is not what we see, connects with what we think, a magnetic attraction occurs. It’s as if the universe pleased us, or responded to our “call.”

We may not be aware that the thoughts we project are addictive to unhappiness The “phone number” that we have in our brain “file” is that of unhappiness. We consciously think that we are looking for happiness, that we want to be happy, but what we have is a distorted idea of ​​happiness, it is a false happiness, it is a sado-masochistic happiness, the result of our childhood experiences. That is, we consciously seek happiness, but unconsciously, we need a certain degree of discomfort to maintain inner balance.

Professors Pieper define true satisfaction as the well-founded, inner certainty that one is affectionate and worthy of affection, and that we choose for our lives that which is constructive and appropriate. True satisfaction makes life always better, never harmful, neither for oneself nor for others. That there are ungrateful people, there are, who try to harm us, but we will decide to distance ourselves from them, in the name of happiness, because we do not deserve them and we will not seek them. Only the addiction to unhappiness would lead us to remain hooked on those people who violate us, who despise us, or who want to abandon us.

For this reason, when we are about to achieve things, bang! They evaporate in our hands, because an unforeseen event arises that ruins our plans (an illness, a refusal, a loss and even an atmospheric phenomenon). This is because from our unconscious That happiness seems unattainable to us.

They made us believe, while we were children, that for “misbehaving” (deep down all we wanted was to satisfy our natural needs of curiosity, affection, physiological, etc.), we deserved a punishment. How many times did they force us to do something we didn’t like (do homework, throw out the trash, tidy up our room, etc.), so they would let us play, walk, watch TV, etc.! It’s not that we should be allowed to do whatever we want. On the contrary, it was about teaching us to understand our needs, to learn how to prioritize them or satisfy them at the most convenient moment, with joy and not, necessarily, link them to rewards and punishments (it is also very common in the religious field to see the happiness as a reward, if we comply with the established precepts). Our parents showed us a list of duties, which had nothing to do with the needs of a child (they force us to be adults before our time), as synonymous with behaving well, and that only in this way would we obtain their long-awaited approval and with it , his affection.

This is how one becomes a addicted to unhappiness, to suffering, to renunciation, to frustration. When we are well, problems “fall from the sky” for us. I say “fall” because we begin to give ourselves justifications for why we should assume this or that. Instead of considering other alternatives that do not involve giving up what we must do, we let ourselves be carried away by rigid moralistic codes of what is right or wrong. For example, I give up getting married or going to work somewhere else, so as not to leave my mother alone. So if I do the opposite, I can be called selfish. If I am selfish, I feel guilty. If I am guilty, then I will not be able to be calm wherever I go. So, I better stay, I sacrifice myself, I spend my whole life dreaming of a happiness that never comes and that when Mom is no longer here, then I will be too old to undertake anything and I will die very frustrated, but deep down, with an overdose. of “the cocaine of unhappiness,” just as most addicts die, “happy.” It is not about abandoning mom to her fate, but rather about considering other alternatives so that she is well cared for, without requiring our direct presence.

We must recognize these sabotaging mechanisms of our conscious mind, because the main enemies in this war are ourselves. The weapons we use against ourselves are a string of moralistic, fixing, puritanical, beneficent, sweetening, hypocritical justifications, which turn us into “maskers”, leading us to forget our true face (our individual needs), in the words of the Lebanese poet. Kalil Gibran. We forget to satisfy our needs in an act of “detachment” and compassionate sacrifice, when in reality it is nothing more than an act of addiction to gratuitous unhappiness.

Since we were children we were told that seeking our satisfaction was being selfish. We were told that sacrificing oneself for others was a highly valued duty. That being honest with ourselves was wrong, because we didn’t really know what we wanted. Only parents or adults could know our needs. I remember when as a child, I went to eat at a restaurant with my parents and another family. I was barely 5 or 6 years old and I didn’t want to eat what they served us and I started to get restless. Nowadays I don’t know if it was because I didn’t like the food, or because I wasn’t hungry at the time, but my father got very angry and even spanked me. How does the childish mind interpret that?… Something like: “We must not pay attention to our needs, we must please others, so that they are happy with us”… That is what the childish mind begins to code as appropriate. And that, repeated over and over again, becomes a habit. We already know how difficult habits are to eliminate. It is as if, being left-handed, you had to eat, write, brush your teeth with your right hand, quickly and perfectly. You will feel very uncomfortable, desperate and even frustrated when you see the mistakes you make.

You have to make a very intense and deep meditation process to discover the roots of our conditioning to unhappiness. New connections must be established to eliminate old habits.

The first thing to do to create new connections is to repeat yourself several times a day, as if it were a prayer, which we were born perfect beings, with a peculiar nature that is given to us at birth. It is not our fault that our parents would have wanted a different person for a child. We are not guilty of anything. We deserve love and that love is synonymous with protection, respect, acceptance, affection. We should not feel guilty about anything, nor ashamed about anything. We can receive love without conditions, and we can also give it without limitations (3).

That must be repeated a thousand times. When you go to bed, when you get up, whenever an idea comes to you that worries or discourages you. It’s hard at first, but remember that to break a habit, nothing is better than breaking the chain of conditioning, learning a new chain. If a rusty, corroded chain is replaced with another made of pure, shiny gold, it will be very advantageous for us, because we will no longer look so ugly, but we will also shine with that new garment. It’s like seeing two people, one poorly dressed and dirty and the other elegant and perfumed. The best opportunities will come to the person with good appearance, by law of attraction.

When we are addicted to unhappiness, we are like that disheveled and detestable person, whom no one wants to approach, because they only know how to talk about misfortunes and sadness. The Universe answers our call. If we call the number of Unhappiness, Happiness cannot answer us. On the contrary, when we are satisfied, we know what we want we have confidence in our resources and we defend our needs, we are that beautiful person whom everyone admires and respects.

You may have noticed that almost all of us are, or have been, addicted to unhappiness. If you have read this far, you may be asking yourself the question of How to overcome this peculiar addiction The first thing we have to do is convince ourselves that we are addicts. The second thing is to have a perception of the consequences of that addiction on our health. Perceiving risk is identifying the threats to mental and physical health caused by a certain behavior. If we are convinced that the bad habit of sabotaging true happiness is related to depression or any other illness, we must learn to recognize the danger signs and avoid them by all means.

To break a habit, it is enough to break a link in the chain of operations that make it up. If we are obsessed with the person who exercises any type of violence against us, or simply who no longer loves us, we must be aware that this is the stimulus that unleashes the chain of suffering. It is necessary reprogram our behavior free from these threats.

In order to be able to reprogram ourselves, we must delve into our childhood experiences. He will surely find memories, images, that will lead him to almost faithfully evoke what is happening in his life today. The past holds the key to understanding ourselves, if we want to live a different present. To understand what you are questioning today, for example, why your partner has abandoned you, why you have a boss who overloads you with work and does not recognize your efforts, why you have a disloyal friend, or why you feel so alone, you must do a process of self-analysis and seeking many of these answers in his childhood. It is very likely that you are reproducing behavioral patterns from that stage. Abandon “masks,” defense mechanisms or justifications. Don’t deceive yourself, be honest with yourself.

If we fail to be kind to ourselves, we will be feeding the enemy within us. Become kinder to yourself, means being more harmonious with our nature, that is, recognizing our true needs and working to satisfy them. True satisfaction always makes life better. This way you can be happy and make others happy. Existence is lavish with you and gives you what exactly you need. You just have to “dial the correct phone number”.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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