Awareness Happening Anytime, -nywhere!
happiness
- Are you happy or are you simply not unhappy?
- Do you experience pleasure and joy on a consistent basis?
- Do you know what gives you a sense of sustainable purpose and meaning in you life?
- Do you know what your strengths are as a human being?
- Have you done all of the “right things” in your life but still feel dissatisfied most of the time?
For over a decade, I have worked with hundreds of people who experienced anger, depression, anxiety, trauma, and grief of all varieties. With each person, I assessed early childhood experiences, family dynamics, education history, abuse history, medical history, psychiatric history, legal history, military history, and relationship history. As my clients and I explored their lives with a fine tooth comb, I was on the look out for the moment(s), the underlying cognitive or emotional experiences that caused or significantly contributed to my clients’ problems. This is standard operating procedure in most contemporary forms of psychotherapy. What’s wrong with this you might be asking? Here’s what’s wrong with it:
- It assumes that people are simply the sum of their complex, negative experiences.
- It assumes that simply addressing peoples’ underlying issues will make them better. I would argue that confronting underlying issues is necessary but not sufficient. There’s a difference between being less depressed and being happy
- The emphasis on what’s wrong with a person pathologizes them and can lead clients to see themselves as problems: as opposed to people who happen to have problems.
In the last 10 to 15 years there has been a movement among mental health professionals to explore the “positive” attributes, qualities, and characteristics of people. This field of study, known as Positive Psychology attempts to discover what makes people joyful, excited, and happy. Positive Psychology evolved in response to the medical model of treatment, which focuses on what’s wrong with a person. Positive Psychology researchers and clinicians do not deny that problems exist: they assert that people also have strengths, traits that enable and empower people to enjoy life in the face of adversity.
The Positive Psychology perspective has made its way into popular culture in recent years. Tal Ben Shahar’s book Happier and Daniel Gilbert’s work Stumbling on Happiness have been bestsellers. Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness has gotten critical acclaim for its scientific rigor and elegant prose.
Much of the ground work for Positive Psychology has been done by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Seligman is often credited as the Father of Positive Psychology and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory provides the theoretical and empirical foundation for much of positive psychology.
The efforts of the aforementioned authors and scholars challenges all mental health disciplines to move beyond symptom reduction and management to the nobler goal of helping people live sustainably happier lives.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have been the guiding ideals for Americans and those who aspire to be Americans. If you’re reading this, you’ve achieved the first ideal of life. If you’re reading this, you’ve also achieved the second ideal of liberty: no one forced you to read this. However, my sense is that you are reading this because your pursuit of happiness has been less than satisfying or you simply want to confirm that you are in fact happy and not delusional.
Regardless of your happiness status, I believe that we all can be happier. At the heart of being happier is motivation and effort. Why do you want to be happier and what are you willing to do consistently to create it on an ongoing basis? One of the motivational issues I deal with a lot is the notion of “deserving to be happy.” Quite simply, none of us deserves to be happy. Happiness is not an entitlement program, it is not a hand out given to us by our parents, our communities, our governments, or our world. Happiness is a state of being joyful that we create through specific kinds of efforts. Like a car that does move without gas, happiness is not created without effort.
If you would like to learn more about the specific happiness creating efforts you can make today, please click here to email Heath Hightower.