The Only Way Out is Through

Life is difficult and trouble is inevitable. While the desire to avoid trouble is understandable, it is ultimately unrealistic. 

The only remedy to trouble is perseverance, not avoidance, which tends to have the opposite effect. It solves problems in the short term, but multiples them in the long-term. 

Dwelling on problems doesn’t work either because it increases their impact and their ability to harm someone. Most problems people encounter in life come and go quickly, but dwelling on their problems allows them to take up residence in their minds and affect them for much longer than they would if a person could simply let them pass along.

The power a person has is in their ability to choose the attitude they take towards their troubles.  

Start Small. Speak Truly.

It’s not easy to find your own voice, but it’s worth the effort, and it’s better than the alternative. Most people use someone else’s voice when they speak without even noticing it. They have adopted someone else’s beliefs and values and keep on repeating them and using them to solve issues that arise, even when there are better options. Which creates another problem. When you don’t take the time to find your own voice you become stagnant mentally and emotionally. 

It seems like the longer you wait to find your voice the harder it is to find it at all. The more work you have to do to wade through the thoughts and opinions that are not your own. Thoreau talked about the men who lived lives of quiet desperation. There are many ways to live a meaningful life, but a common theme among all of them is choosing not to resign themselves to this quiet desperation.  

Finding your own voice is an act of rebellion. Sometimes it is a battle, but it isn’t always drama-filled and world-shattering. Breaking out, rebelling, can happen through small daily actions that might not be noticeable to anyone else, but they still have an impact and you know they matter.  

The Fall Comes First

The journey towards mental health often starts in reverse. What I mean is that people usually start to elevate and rise towards mental health only after they have fallen, after they have experienced a descent that has taken them so far down, they are not sure if they will be able to get up again. 

Falling is a common part of life. We do it all the time as children, but with enough perseverance, most of us master the art of walking. The same process applies to the art of living. Most people learn how to get along well enough, eventually. The Fall takes place after you think you’ve got life figured out, and the reason it’s so difficult to overcome is because all the knowledge and information you’ve used to get through life becomes insufficient. 

Most of us feel like failures at this point. The confusion and inadequacy that come with the fall are enough to break some of us, at least temporarily. But it is in that very moment, when you are sitting in your brokenness that you are able to begin your journey to being healthy again. It’s impossible to ascend without falling. In the end it’s even possible to be thankful for our struggles. Sometimes we need them to learn how to heal and overcome difficulties.

How Vague Goals Produce Vague Results

It is impossible to find success if you don’t start out with a clear vision of what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes people don’t know what they want and choose to adopt the wishes and desires of other people because it is easier than deciding for themselves. 

But just as bad is when a person doesn’t clarify what they want. Most people say they want to be happy, but happiness is a vague and subjective term that means something different to everyone. Even if you simplify happiness and say it consists of the basic necessities like food, clothing, shelter, etc., there is still a lot of difference amongst people in terms of what and how much of each they think they need to be happy. 

Having a specific goal in mind that you can measure and track your progress towards gives you a daily routine to follow. It gives structure and order to your existence because you know what you are working towards. It also tells you when the journey is over, which is just as important. One of the qualities that successful people share that is not talked about enough is their ability to recognize when it is time for something to end. When it is time to change directions and embark on a new journey, a moment that usually comes well before the majority of people realize it. They keep the end in mind even when they start, because they realize that a decision not to plan for change, for the time when something is over and done with, is a decision to court stagnancy and complacency. It’s deciding, in essence, to fail. 

The end goal in therapy might involve helping a person resolve whatever issues initially brought them to therapy, or being able to accomplish the goals outlined in a plan of care. Most people come to therapy with a combination of the two, some things they want less of in their lives, and other things they want more of. Therapy is such a dynamic process that inevitably new issues will surface throughout sessions and new goals will be formulated beyond the initial ones. This can make it difficult to determine when therapy has come to an end. There’s a fine line between needing to continue helping someone with new problems as they organically arise, and looking for problems to avoid having to say goodbye. The latter could be considered a form of self-sabotage. 

For that reason, I judge therapy to be over when a person is living the life they want to live, paradoxes and all. This means they have resolved or gotten control of most if not all of the problems they initially came to therapy for, and they have accomplished their personal goals. Having this end in mind at the very beginning helps to guide the therapeutic process.  

How to Overcome Normality

At every stage of life there is a pressure to fit in with the crowd. People feel this pressure whether they are children, teenagers, adults, or elderly. This pressure is internal as well as external because most people want to be liked and have a desire to belong. This desire leads people to adopt the thoughts and behaviors of others, typically whatever group is seen as the majority. When this occurs, it is an adjustment to the norm, and while normality does have some benefits such as a sense of belonging, increased popularity, and less potential for being persecuted by others, it can also feel stifling. Normality can limit personal growth, which is why it is important for a person to think critically about the norms they are following and at times choose to break free from them.

It is true that people learn about themselves through their relationships with others, but they also need time alone to aid in their growth as well. Spending time in solitude, away from others, allows the individual to clarify what they really think and feel. It allows them to figure out what makes them unique and different from others. These unique qualities, whatever they may be, are often the foundation from which a person is best able to express their creativity. Recognizing what makes a person different also serves as an opportunity to practice self-acceptance. Rather than negatively comparing oneself to others or thinking about the ways they don’t measure up, through compassion a person can come to cherish the qualities they have that others may not possess, even though it is a difficult task. Most of the stories of successful individuals are stories about people who were willing to break away from the norm in order to do what they really wanted to do. 

Overcoming Normality

Normality is overcome by setting personal goals that align with the true self and the things one genuinely values. Only then can a person take action to move closer towards those goals, which might feel scary at first, but as they keep going, they start to build more confidence in their ability to take risks and step outside of their comfort zone.

I referenced success stories of people who have done this, and it’s important to also state that their success is not purely individual. People who embark on the journey to become themselves often find that they are met by others all along the path. They are surrounded by like-minded individuals who can provide support that is not based on them being alike, but is based on them being the most authentic version of themselves.

Dealing with challenges 

It is not easy to give up the benefits of fully embracing normality. The challenges of doing so have already been outlined–loss of a sense of belonging and popularity, as well as likely persecution from others who don’t understand.

The way for a person to deal with these challenges is to commit to values-based living, making choices that are based on the values they hold most important rather than making them on the basis of what is easy or convenient. This helps a person to become more resilient and to overcome their fears and doubts. Support will come from a group of like-minded individuals, but until it does one must provide their own support and validation and protect their own well-being. Overcoming these challenges is worth it in the long run because in doing so a person truly understands what it means to be fulfilled and happy within themselves. 

How to Become Yourself: Living Authentically

In order to become yourself you must first get in touch with the self that already is. Before you fully grasp the concept of a self, it is already formed, already having things added to it and taken away from it by virtue of experience, the impacts of which we are not fully conscious of in the moment. Becoming yourself requires taking psychological ownership over those core characteristics that define who you are. Characteristics which may or may not be amenable to change, so that ownership becomes something more closely related to guardianship, and the development of a self that is consistent becomes about protecting those core parts from negative influences. 

There are many who think that changing your physical appearance is the quickest way to demonstrate that you have become yourself. This is the personality ethic approach that Stephen Covey wrote about, defined by taking of shortcuts and making superficial changes in hopes of appearing different, but without doing the inner work on yourself these attempts fail because they are not authentic. 

Even if I do have success with this strategy, if I am constantly changing for others, for their approval or appeasement, or whatever else I’m angling to get, the core self gets lost in this process, and the only way to get back in touch with it is to find wrestle with that question of who I am. The answer to which can only be found by understanding why I feel the need to keep making changes in the first place. That’s the core of the issue, the behavior most often carried out, which by default comes to define my existence. That’s the making of the inauthentic self. 

Exactly how the self is made is still mysterious and ultimately might not matter–there are things we have to accept as inevitable and outside of our control, and how I got to be who I am might be one of them. It might be that the assumption of responsibility is more important than the act of creation. After that moment of discovery, when you get the first inkling of how significant the phrase I am really is, then you have to intentionally decide about how you will develop the self. If you don’t, it still develops on its own, but it does so in the shadows, trapped behind whatever part in life you feel you must play. Which leaves you weak, fragile, and insecure, like everything else that is forced to live without light. 

The goal is not to become disagreeable, but you should certainly want to nourish the self you are creating to the point of it becoming tough, immutable, and essential. 

Meaning & Truth

It’s okay to feel lost sometimes in life, to feel as if you don’t know what you’re doing. Feeling lost from time to time is something everyone goes through, and it may be closer to the truth to say that people go through life feeling this way most of the time. Life is complex, and when things feel overly simple, as juxtaposed to things being simple as they can be, one should start to wonder whether or not they’re missing out. Simplicity isn’t a bad thing, but neither is complexity. It can mean that a person is more engaged in life, that they are living and striving instead of merely existing.  

Part of the challenge is for a person to find out what is true for them. This is made more difficult by the fact that it is easy to find an abundance of people who will tell you what you should believe and what you should do. It takes discipline and restraint to practice discernment and not passively absorb all the information floating around. If a person does that, the truth will soften until it is devoid of any form and definition. It won’t be black and white, or even gray, but as clear as liquid and only capable of producing the image of whatever belief is most convenient to them at a given moment in time. Through this flimsy definition of the truth, a person might garner favor, but it’s not how you create the meaning and purpose that is necessary to guide you through the difficult times in life, when public opinion is not on your side. The search for meaning and truth is a collective endeavor that everyone engages in, but the truth that is discovered, no matter how similar it appears on the surface in comparison to others, belongs only to the individual. In order to find it, a person has to make their own meaning, test their own theories about living, and learn for themselves the strength or weakness of their views. 

It can’t be given. It can’t be arrived at secondhand. You can talk to other people, listen to them, watch movies, and read books. They can show you what it looks like to be searching, and what it feels like to discover truth in the most unpredictable ways, but they can’t give it to you. They can reveal the places where it makes sense to look, including the places within yourself, but they can’t go there. The space between people exists for this reason. So that each person can and inevitabley has to look for themselves in order to find truth. The differences between people serve to bring into sharper relief individual values, and these differences, instead of being negative, are opportunities to discover something new about the world and what it means to live in it. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean any of this is easy or pleasant. Searching for truth isn’t a Saturday in the park, and it isn’t supposed to be, but it also isn’t as bad as people make it out to be, not always. It’s important to stay curious and allow oneself to be surprised by whatever it is that resonates within, even if it shocks you. Moreso, it’s important to keep going, keep searching, keep doing whatever it is one needs to do in order to join the chorus of people living with meaning and purpose.  

Depth for Truth

Depth is a defense mechanism. One that is an off shoot of intellectualization, one that is meant to ward off and keep at bay any sign of mental and emotional discomfort. 

It makes perfect sense to my mind, to keep asking questions when you don’t like the answer that you’re getting. We all do this, but I’ll use children as an example. A child wants something and someone comes along and says no, you can’t do that, you can’t go there, you can’t have this. At this point anyone, but especially a child, gets full of indignation. 

Why can’t I go? Why can’t I have this or that? 

Because you can’t, or, worse than that, Because I said so. That’s the usual response, which speaks to the fact that some things are too complicated to explain, but mostly is about the self-righteous indignation adults have about children having the nerve to even ask them to reveal their motives. It won’t happen, and children are experienced and observant enough to know that, which makes their questioning disingenuous, but not ineffective. Questions serve multiple purposes. They can illuminate the path towards truth, or they can be the means through which we contest reality. 

Again, everyone does this, uses questions in this way. Most of us, when faced with difficult realities, ones that we cannot evade or attack, tend to question the validity of them. I don’t begrudge the fact. Reality is certainly a difficult predicament that takes time to adjust oneself to, more time than some of us will ever have, but fortunately the task doesn’t always require that much of us.

It is a mistake to assume that you must plume the depths of your heart and mind to find the truth because the truth is often visible right there on the surface, in plain view. Many times in life it either is or it isn’t. Trying to be profound and come up with complicated explanations for why things aren’t going your way is a method of trying to soften the inevitable blows of life. It might be useful, but it’s not particularly effective if one’s goal is learn how to tolerate difficult situations in life. Self-awareness is not necessarily about sinking into the depths, endlessly asking yourself why you feel the way you do, and having more to find might in the end only provide excitement without further clarity. Sometimes it takes courage to stay on the surface and take things as they are, to go forward instead of going down, moving towards one’s challenges instead of away from them. You make progress not only by learning how to look for and find the truth, but also by increasing your capacity to tolerate it.

When Self-Medication Doesn’t Work

By work I mean make problems go away or resolve them. Self-medication, especially through the use of drugs, is rooted in impatience, and an urgent desire to make things better. Usually with the intent to do so as quickly as possible and with the least amount of effort. There is a type of logic to this thinking that is understandable when you consider the fact that people exert a tremendous amount of effort to bear their pain and hide their suffering from others.

It makes sense to look for easy solutions in such circumstances and expecting anyone in this position to double down on the work of eating well, sleeping enough, exercising regularly, and maintaining social connections is asking a lot. And yet, this is exactly what is required, what should be asked, and what should be promoted. All of these are called forms of self-care, but they are also forms of self-medication because engaging in these activities affects you in all of the same ways, altering your mood, emotions, brain chemistry, your life.

Discomfort is a side-effect of change, and what most people mean when they say they dislike change, is that they dislike being uncomfortable. When people are reasonably sure that change will lead to more pleasure and comfort they embrace it openly. The issue with adaptive methods of creating change is that the positive results are usually not immediate and must build up over time, and time, along with patience, are luxuries not often given by those who are suffering. Improving the diet, starting the exercise routine, taking the medications daily, attending the therapy sessions weekly. They all yield positive benefits, after the initial challenge of starting. Substance abuse, on the other hand, provides immediate relief without posing any initial challenges, which makes it an enticing choice, until one considers the painful side-effects that come after and last much longer than any ill effects that come from making other types of changes.

Failure to thoroughly consider this reality is what sets off the intolerable cycle where the remedy is also the source of pain, which can only be alleviated, one thinks, by getting more and more of the remedy. The record of the chaos this cycle produces is well-established: in reality the only way to experience genuine relief is by accepting that the journey towards healing will be undertaken with a certain level of discomfort. Accepting that working on oneself in all the aforementioned ways is worth the effort of pushing past one’s current capacities, and maintaining, if only for a little bit, the hope that things will get better.

The Consequences of Not Standing Up for What you Believe In

There are many moments in life when the most difficult thing and the rightest are one and the same, and in those moments all too often, there is a temptation to stand down and not say anything. Past a certain point there are psychological consequences for not standing up for yourself, and far enough removed from speaking out on your own behalf, it becomes difficult if not impossible to ever resume the practice.

It is, unfortunately, perfectly normal to assume that children do not have voices to express their own thoughts and feelings, or at least they shouldn’t. Some children are clever enough to find ways to maneuver around these assumptions and find ways to be heard. Some are patient enough to wait it out until the day when they can establish more equitable relationships with their peers. And some are left with the lasting imprint of being silenced too long and too often. These are the people for whom speaking out remains difficult. Barring some kind of unexpected trauma, it is rare to find an adult who all of a sudden loses the will to speak. Such habits are are not easily changed because they are ingrained in childhood during important windows of development.

Moments of difficulty exist to help you find out who you really are and what you really believe in.

If you are unable to stand up for yourself, for whatever reason, you are unable to achieve full psychological maturity because important psychological tasks are left unattended to. These tasks include the formation of identity and learning how to skillfully navigate relationships with others. The first and sometimes most crucial element of someone defining what their identity is, is being able to define what it is not, and inevitably this requires making choices and sticking by them, despite opposition. It also requires an environment that is tolerant if not supportive of a person’s desire to question and push back against the established norms in a system. Without such tolerance, growth and development becomes much more difficult to accomplish. This is when a person is left to either choose to open rebellion against their environment or silence.

Without a clear sense of identity, a person is at risk of becoming enmeshed and being consumed by the fantasies of others. The way it happens is that other people begin to shape and mold such a person into whatever version of them fits their agenda, and this person feels powerless to stop it. In part because this shaping and molding is often done without malicious intent, and when a person’s identity is underdeveloped, they often cannot respond to identity threats unless they are overt and dramatic. It is the lack of worth communicated through a lack of self-protection that places an individual at risk of assuming a victim mentality, which is the only identity left open to the powerless person who experiences everything as happening to them.

Obviously, I believe it is better to stand up for yourself, and that doing so requires not only learning how to speak, but also learning how to tolerate and lean into discomfort. The point I will continue to make is that anxiety is a part of living and has to be leaned into at times. Part of the work of achieving psychological maturity is learning how to stay present, make choices, and protect yourself in the face of anxiety, instead of experiencing the world as happening to you, which leads to a feeling of powerlessness. There is always an element of nervousness in important matters, an anxiety that comes with speaking up when there is something to lose, but there is also something to gain from doing it anyway.

These moments of difficulty exist to help you find out who you really are and what you really believe in. They exist to help you find your chosen community, the ones you want to engage with precisely because you do feel like you have power and a voice when you’re in their presence.

How Loving Yourself Transforms Your Ability to Love Others

For even the hope of healthy and long-lasting relationships to exist, you must first learn how to love yourself. Statements about needing to love yourself before you can love someone else are commonplace, and I agree with the sentiment behind these statements, but the understanding and the practical application of self-love is much less common than the many cliched references to it.

Loving oneself implies having a relationship in which you express patience and understanding towards yourself. You exercise discipline and practice taking responsibility in your personal life. You spend time in reflection, and work to maintain awareness of your thoughts and feelings, your wants and needs, nurturing them, without necessarily indulging them at every opportunity. This is roughly what it is to love yourself. Most of the time loving yourself is not glamorous. It is the consistent habit of doing so over an extended period of time that adds up to a significant achievement. Which is the case in any relationship.

The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed.

Loving others requires exercising the same qualities and behaviors but directing them outward. The question is why is it necessary to develop this love for yourself first before developing it for others? It’s necessary because without self-love, relationships between people are prone to become unequal and unhealthy. Relationships are actually incredibly fragile and more often than not would be avoided if people really considered the cost of attempting to merge one life with another in any kind of significant way. In order for this process of merging to be successful, both parties must be able to maintain an equal level of independence. They must be able to maintain equal freedom of thought, feeling, and expression. The inevitable tension in any relationship is that two people become one, and at the same time, remain two. Self-love is the source that eases this tension and makes it possible to carry the stress of it without becoming overwhelmed. Self-love is a protective force that simultaneously works for the good of the individual and the couple, or the group.

Without self-love you are at risk of becoming enmeshed, depending on another person to provide your mental and emotional stability through their own presence. This creates added pressure because individuals are no longer taking care of themselves and have lost their independence. They also forfeit their freedom or rob another person of their own. If I depend on you wholly for my well-being, I am admitting that I am no longer interested in the freedom (and responsibility) of providing for myself. I am also saying to another person that you cannot think, act, and be however you choose because I need you to take care of me. This level of dependence makes love impossible.

Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.

The only alternative to enmeshment is avoidance, which is difficult to identify because it is easy for people practicing avoidance to be mistakenly identified as loving themselves or working on themselves, when they are not. Self-love does not imply isolation, nor does it imply always putting oneself first. The misperception is that you need to go off into the wilderness for some unknown amount of time and learn to love yourself before you can come back to the tribe, but this is not the way self-love works. Self-love is a practice that occurs alongside establishing relationships with others. It is about maintaining a healthy regard for yourself alongside the emotional investments you make into others.

What self-love does imply, if anything, is that there is always at least one condition for loving others, and that unconditional love is rare and difficult to find. To say that you have to love yourself before you can love others, or even amend that statement to having to love yourself alongside loving others, is to place a condition on love. I think it would be healthier if we realized that there are almost no relationships without conditions, and were more careful about the pursuit of unconditional love. It’s an entertaining fantasy, but for the most part an impractical reality. For unconditional love to be realized, it would not only have to exist without conditions, but it would have to be given in perpetuity, without the option of it ever being taken away, no matter what a person says or does. This kind of carte blanche arrangement is similar to the unhealthy dynamic that exists in an enmeshed relationship. The more I think about it the more I get the sense that it is a sign of loving someone well to place conditions upon them, assuming those conditions follow loving principles.

Self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love.

Love is a learned skill and most of the information we receive says that we should practice this skill with and for others. It is much less common to receive the message that one should make themselves the focus of a loving practice. This contributes to the tendency to first seek love from others before seeking it from ourselves, and to give love to others in hopes of receiving love from them, instead of receiving love from ourselves. Most people have a general awareness, even without full acknowledgement, of their limited capacities and their need for others in order to be successful. This way of thinking, that others are needed to accomplish most things, probably layers on top of the way we think about love and makes it natural for us to rely on others for love in any and all forms. In that sense, self-love is also an important psychological development, a shift from thinking of oneself as wholly reliant on others for love to realizing one’s own potential to be a source of love. To recognize that you are not only a recipient of love, but a creator and a co-conspirator of it.

Does Being Unhappy Play a Role in Having a Fulfilling Life?

Irvin Yalom tells a story about the writer Andre Malraux asking a parish priest what he had learned about mankind after taking confession for 50 years. “First of all,” the priest replied, “people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown up person.”

This brief little story is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is that one wonders if this is really what the priest said, or if it is only what Malraux heard. Words have a tendency to take on distinct shapes and different meanings when filtered through the lens of experience. In the case of Malraux, experience was anchored by the early divorce of his parents and the subsequent suicide of his father following the stock market crash of 1929. After that came the multifaceted devastation of The Great Depression and the second world war. All of this happened during Malraux’s early years and provided the context in which his life would be situated.

Whether the priest said this or not, Malraux did not have to look far or wide for the evidence of unhappiness in the multitude of lives scarred by overwhelming amounts of adversity. Proof was all around. It is possible Malraux, capable of being boisterous and shy, reserved and full of action, understood the priest to be answering a question about himself, which essentially he was. Questions about mankind tend to conceal something personal about the person who asks. Some questions double as a type of confession.

Regardless of his intent, the answers given are interesting from a psychological standpoint. To say that people are more unhappy than we think is different than making the obvious observation that people are unhappy. The wording of the response gets at something else, namely our tendency to hide our unhappiness from others. We are primarily driven to do this by two emotions, fear and guilt.

FEAR & THE ENTERTAINER

The popular entertainer represents many things in society, some positive and some negative. Because of their public status they are easily signified upon by others. This process of signifying is a part of the ongoing exchange that takes place between the entertainer and society. The primary goal of the entertainer is to provide their own stylized version of fun to the masses, but they can also represent other things besides having a good time. They can be symbols of hope, and they can be cautionary tales, which is the part that is most relevant to this discussion. When we talk about the disastrous effects of hiding your feelings it is usually in reference to some tragic event involving an entertainer or some other public figure. Losses like Robin Williams come to mind, but others losses have also occurred more recently. The public’s reaction to these events tends to be a microcosm of grief, ranging from anger, confusion, shock, and abject denial.

It begs the question of why and how it can be so late, and sometimes too late, when we discover the fact of someone’s painful unhappiness? Fear comes into play because of the natural tendency to compare, which all animals must do on some level in order to survive, but none with the toxic efficiency of human beings. Hasty judgments used to keep us safe and in some cases they still do, but measuring our social status against others and feeling the need to hide certain feelings out of embarrassment does not move the pendulum of our safety in any direction. Or at least it shouldn’t, but the truth is that realities, whether real or imagined, do sometimes produce terrible effects. To think of yourself as unhappy is an essential ingredient, maybe the only ingredient, needed to be unhappy, regardless of the context.

Fear might not be so consequential if people could talk more openly about their struggles and find common ground, since unhappiness rests on a negative view of difference. Having someone join in your unhappiness with their own, or simply show a willingness to bear witness to it has the effect of shrinking the difference, of chipping away at it.

Without this support, one’s mind can become like a hardened shell without any cracks or crevices where light can get inside. The only sensation becomes the unpleasant echo of your own self-defeating thoughts. In this mental state the cost of revealing ourselves is judged to be too high because of what happened last time, every other time, becomes the symbol for what will happen every time. Rather than risk hurt and rejection, our thoughts push us towards a self-imposed exile.

Terrible as that sounds, I have no doubt it is the mind's way of trying to help us survive, and it is impressive that beings who are fundamentally social can and do indeed survive in isolation for significant lengths of time. But the overconsumption of fear as a motivating factor and the overreliance on isolation as a coping strategy force you to pay a heavy price.

GUILT

Apart from being afraid, we are also embarrassed to acknowledge the fact of our unhappiness. Even though our thoughts and ideas about happiness are not much better than second-hand sketches handed down to us by people who themselves are unskilled in the art of happiness, we take them very seriously. We believe that being anything less than happy as we have lazily imagined it is to be a failure. Instead of realizing that happiness and unhappiness are informed by chance and circumstance we view them as being solely the product of our own decisions. Therefore, if I’m unhappy, I’ve done something wrong.

This idea is so popular because it aligns with the way many of us naturally perceive events in childhood. As children we tend to exaggerate the amount of influence and control we have so that when things go well we have the confidence of “knowing” we made it happen. Unfortunately we use the same type of thinking when things don’t go well, assuming it is because we made it happen. As adults we usually make this judgment based on the same criteria we used as children–does it make me feel good or does it make me feel bad. Pair this type of infantile thinking with our other tendency to compare and it becomes easy to be personally convicted about one’s lack of happiness and choose to hide out of a sense that you are doing something wrong.

COMING TO TERMS

Maybe you have done something wrong. That is sometimes the case and in those instances guilt does serve an important function in helping us to correct our behavior. Guilt is not always an unearned emotion, but it is frequently a fabricated one. The benefit of being skeptical towards the feeling of guilt and occasionally bypassing it is that it allows you to be honest about what’s really going on, share it, and possibly experience relief for having done so.

It likely requires both personal and social changes to make being unhappy more acceptable and less of something deemed unacceptable and necessary to hide. Social pressure to perform, (especially online) seems to be at an all time high, so only the latter seems viable. A personal commitment to time spent in solitude and reflection balanced by the fostering of a few close relationships based on truth and honesty might be the best way not to get swept up in the tide.

Unpleasant as it may be, the reality is that human beings aren’t really designed to be happy. No more than we are designed to be angry or sad, brainiacs, or olympic athletes. We don’t come prepackaged. There are entire industries built on the singular hope that people will refuse to acknowledge that fact.

GROWING UP

The second half of the priest's answer is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person. A statement that essentially reduces comparison to a useless act. Compare yourself to what? To who? We are too biologically and psychologically complex to be stable in the full sense of the word. We are always moving. To compare is to judge yourself against something that isn’t there or won’t be in the next moment. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who pretends as if they have themselves all figured out, should be met with skepticism. The best that anyone can do is articulate their own experience through whatever method they like as long as it is arrived at through careful contemplation.

Going back to the title, this means that everyone at times is a patient in need of help from another, and everyone is also at times a guide helping point the way towards healing for someone else. Both labels are social constructs that should be held onto loosely. The fact that certain people are more likely to become patients than others is often because of reasons that have nothing to do with illness or wellness. The patient label is usually applied to whoever is most willing to speak up about their need for help at a given moment in time. The label can also be applied to the person for whom other people, for whatever reason, are willing to speak on behalf of. In either case the label is not necessarily for the person with the greatest need.

That priest really was speaking about all of us when he answered this question, himself included. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a grown up person because we are all still growing. Rather than being an excuse for perpetual immaturity, it is an opportunity for continuous self-exploration. The latter choice is how a person might one day find themselves outside of the unhappy rank and file the priest was talking about.

How to go From Autopilot to Authorship: Taking Ownership of Your Journey

To be responsible, as Jean-Paul Sartre defines it, is to be “the uncontested author of an event or thing.” Authorship is a stand-in for the word creator, of which an author is one kind, and for whom the task is to fashion from the materials of their imagination a work that is complete and new. This imagination being the main tool applied, there can be no doubt that the author is the source from which the story originates. It is clear that several people are involved in the making and publishing of a book, from editor’s, proofreaders, cover designers, type setters and more. Each of these serves an important role in the process, but their roles are created in reaction to the author and defined in relation to the author’s original efforts.  

Applying his notion of responsibility in a psychotherapeutic setting has benefits and risks. Doing so moves me towards a more internal locus of control when discussing issues and sets up an expectation that the client will shift to a similar orientation. And when more emphasis is placed on what a client can control and change, less time is wasted on issues that can be affected by neither the client or myself.

Of particular interest is the fact that the client is now allowed to approach the issue of suffering differently. To say that someone is responsible for their suffering runs the risk of being insensitive, but to say a client’s suffering is theirs, and that they alone are responsible for what they do with it moves them out of a helpless role and into a more active one. Challenging and often unfair, accepting responsibility for one’s suffering is still the best option for someone who intends to do something about it. A significant amount of suffering self-induced and unwarranted. It is a kind of suffering psychologically born in the aftermath of what has already occurred and added unto one’s burdens through the stories people tell themselves about what their suffering means.

When you focus on your role in events you understand that almost nothing in your life is the way it has always been or the way it must always be. This is true of life generally, and expands your possibilities once you realize it.

Admittedly, an emphasis on responsibility is most comforting to people who highly value individualism, partially because it ignores the reality of interdependence. In societies that are increasingly more complex, where accomplishing most tasks involves help from others, cordoning oneself off might be possible, but it would not be desirable. We need other people to survive and to flourish. We need other people to achieve our full potential. As the African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

There is the risk of veering too far on the side of responsibility assumption. This attitude becomes unhelpful when you begin to assume responsibility for things that you are not actually responsible for, which allows others to potentially take advantage of this and use you. For example, if a client complains about mistreatment from their family, and I am too quick to focus on the client’s role in the situation, I give the impression that the client’s concerns are illegitimate. It is possible for a client to remain the author of their feelings while also being shown respect and compassion for the difficult conditions under which their feelings arise. Conditions which they of course, are not the uncontested author of. Responsibility should not be heaped on an individual without considering the constant pressure that other people exert on them.

Most clients, at the time we first meet, are limited in their ability to assume responsibility for their lives. As it is in life, so it is in therapy. They must be encouraged to increase this capacity, and a large portion of success in therapy and in life is attributable to ones willingness to do this. One must always come back to their role in events, no matter how large or miniscule, no matter how many times they stray from it, because it is the only perspective from which change takes place.