Be yourself: everyone else is taken.
Oscar Wilde
Being unhappy isn’t the greatest emotional experience. Let’s face it, few of us think, “Damn, I wish I was sadder!” But plenty of us hope for the opposite: “I just want to be happy.”
This encourages the wrong focus because happiness isn’t something to aim for. Sometimes unhappiness is actually necessary and appropriate.
But as I say to all my clients, there are no bad emotions. All emotions are useful, if they are appropriate to the situation. When they’re inappropriate it’s usually because the emotion is about something else happening, either in your life right now or that happened in your past.
Emotions are there for a particular reason: they exist to tell us something. To give us information or feedback, so we can make good decisions.
So happiness is a message from our mind, that we’re on the right track in life, and the question then is, what is the right track?
Of course, the reverse is true too: when we’re unhappy, it’s a message we’ve drifted off that right track. If we don’t address sadness, it becomes hard to dislodge. Like a World War One infantry squad, after a while sadness digs in, gets footrot, slowly intensifies, and toxifies, turns on itself. It becomes depression.
Depression has a big message, written in the sky in large letters: pay attention, your life has drifted way off course. Your soul is protesting. Things are falling apart. Something needs attending to!! The soldiers in the squad are turning on the Generals. Depression is a revolution of the soul.
How do you handle a revolution? You can put it down with violence: crush it with force, drive it underground with repression, with alcohol, with drugs or other addictions. But the answer isn’t to fill the void with immediate gratification: shopping, alcohol, sex, approval. These are all ways to avoid the issue, to silence the message. You can drive it out and away, using psychological mechanisms like projection and transference – give it to someone else. But the revolutionaries always return, better armed, more intelligent, more organised, more destructive.
Or you can ask: what truth do the revolutionaries of the soul have on their side? The answer is to go back to one’s life and examine: Where did you drift off course?
This isn’t to ask: how can I be happy? It’s to ask: how can my life get back on track?
Happiness is not the goal. A meaningful life – meaningful to you – is the goal. Happiness is the by-product of this meaningful activity. Meaningful activity then isn’t what you were taught by others to value. It’s what you with all your unique weirdness, with all your quirky eccentricity, consider meaningful – be yourself, as Oscar Wilde said, everyone else is taken. It’s not what you do for money or approval but as an expression of who you are. It will often run against most socialisation, which values all the wrong things in this world: looks, wealth, power over others, certain social circles, certain status symbols (this car, that watch, that type of handbag). Some of those things may end up being meaningful to you, but only because they are expressions of who you are. They can’t be done for the approval of others, or because you get social rewards.
Next newsletter I’ll provide some questions for you, to help you stay on track and create a meaningful life.
If you’d like to develop meaning in your life and overcome sadness with a compassionate therapist and coach, for a free 15 minute consultation, or to book in a session, email me at rjurik@me.com or find me on my website at primetherapy.net
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