Can we choose happiness? - Notes from a therapist’s desk.
Here are my two cents as a therapist: Yes, but I won’t lie and say it is easy.
Happiness is never a choice that we spot easily. It hides underneath our pain and sadness, lurks behind our self-criticism, and is buried by automatic responses to events in our life.
We don’t want to react the way that we do. We head into the situation intent on things turning out differently this time and somehow by the end, we are left feeling the same as we did every time before.
We hold onto the hope of happiness returning when we are no longer sad but the longer sadness and pain persists, the less we believe things will actually change. Happiness is something other people experience and that we are incapable of.
What if I told you that you could choose happiness today but to do so you also need to accept that pain is inevitable in life?
When I ask clients that question in my therapy room the response is often that the thought of accepting pain is inevitable feels like defeat. They have been working so hard not to experience pain and negative emotions that the thought of accepting those feelings is terrifying.
I will ask you what I ask my clients: in the time that you have been working so hard to not feel pain, what have you not been able to do in your life? What have you stopped doing that makes you happy?
Our anxiety and sadness keep us from seeing our friends, we lash out in anger at those closest to us, and our mind feels too full to connect with the meaningful things in life.
The pain and suffering trick us into thinking that happiness and a connected life are things we cannot achieve.
But the secret is that doing all these things we’ve been avoiding is often the route to happiness. We just need to refocus our effort from avoiding our pain to embracing the things we value.
There is a saying in Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) that…
Suffering = Pain x Resistance.
When we must choose to make room for happiness, we also need to accept that while pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice. We must accept that we play a part in our own suffering. ACT illustrates this through the story of the ‘two arrows’.
A man is walking through the woods and he is struck by an arrow in the shoulder. The pain of that arrow floods through him and his body reacts the way it is designed to do. It signals to him that he has been injured. The physical reaction and pain are unavoidable. Then the man is struck by a second arrow.
This arrow is an arrow of his own making. It is all the thoughts and feelings that begin to flood through him as he thinks to himself: “Who shot me? Was it my wife? My brother? Will my arm become infected? How will I take care of my family if it does?”
That first arrow is pain and the second is suffering.
We react so quickly in the moment that often we do not realize that the second arrow, suffering, is a choice and a reaction to not wanting to feel the pain of the first arrow.
We feel the initial pain, and we get ‘hooked into a familiar way of reacting. We feel the pain of embarrassment and resist it by being drawn to anger. We feel jealous, and get drawn into feeling sadness. We replace the pain we are feeling with suffering that feels more manageable but the reality is, we are left feeling both. Suffering does a poor job healing pain.
In therapy, we call this moment a Choice Point.
On one hand, we have the automatic response that hooks us and on the other is the choice to act in a way that feels consistent with the direction we want to move in life.
One of my clients Sarah* was experiencing difficulties at work when she came to therapy which felt targeted specifically at her by her manager. That automatic emotional response to a feeling of injustice (the pain) hooked her and began to grow a deep anger (the suffering). The suffering grew even more once an official investigation was opened into Sarah by her manager and Sarah began to spend a great deal of time focusing on her emotions about her manager and the situation. Her anger began to spill outside of work into her relationship with her partner which caused more suffering as she added self-criticism and disappointment over her inability to manager her anger to the emotions she was feeling.
When she came to therapy, this pattern of feeling unfairly targeted at work, the subsequent anger over this injustice spreading into her marriage and the guilt she felt about her interactions with her husband had started to feel unbreakable.
Sarah had become ‘one of those always angry people’ that she hated.
I asked was her reaction helping her to change the unfair circumstances at work? Sarah said no. I then asked Sarah what her anger was keeping her from being able to do that was important to her? She said it kept her from being the partner she wanted to be.
Sarah was at a Choice Point. She could continue to be pulled into anger, or feel the injustice and yet choose to act in a way that felt more in line with her values.
Sarah chose to move towards her values and focus on her relationship and hobbies she had stopped engaging with. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t the choice she made every time but slowly it became the choice she was able to make most often.
One of the funny things that often happens when we accept pain and move towards what we value is that often the pain begins to lessen because we’re not adding fuel onto our emotional fire. No longer as angry, Sarah was able to find solutions to the problems at work and even began to improve her relationship with her boss.
Happiness can be a choice if we keep these four things in mind when we encounter obstacles in life.
- Ask yourself if you are carrying any second arrows. Is what you are feeling pain or suffering?
- Meet your pain with compassion. It is a reaction to something happening in your life and no matter the emotion the pain brings up, recognise the emotion as okay to feel even if you choose not to engage with it any further.
- What has your suffering been keeping you from doing? How would you like to react to the situation? These are the things that will guide you towards creating a new path to choose from.
- Commit to that value-driven action and accept that the pain may be felt again because pain is inevitable.
To be human means to have thoughts and emotions in reaction to the circumstances that you encounter in life. You can choose to behave in a way that embraces happiness, but that choice is rarely easy.
*Client name and all identifying details have been changed.
