Happiness oh happiness, be not so arcane, / Let us access your domain and make it our address.
The key to happiness has been discovered, say researchers in psychology. They claim that happiness is secured when we’re able to initiate and maintain trusted relationships and when we’re open and friendly with strangers. This claim is discussed this month in an article in The New York Times Magazine, titled “How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding.”
Of course, we feel happy about intimate friendships and being able to connect in a friendly, gracious manner with strangers. Yet this article gives the impression that good relationships are the answer in themselves. I say instead that our happiness derives primarily from our psychological health and secondarily from our relationships. To be happy, we must be relatively free of neurosis and inner conflict.
This is not to douse the benefits of relationships. We need these connections, however imperfect or flawed they might be. Fleets of friends and strangers passing by day and night help us to navigate this weathered world.
For most of us, becoming happy is a learning process. We learn to be happy by discovering how we make ourselves unhappy. We participate more than we realize in making ourselves unhappy. Primitive appetites, energies, drives, and defenses flood our psyche. These dynamics generate misery and self-defeat through hidden processes of inner conflict. When we recognize this disharmony within ourselves, we liberate ourselves from inner conflict with its accompanying suffering.
Inner conflict has us bouncing between feeling good about ourselves versus feeling bad or wrong. Consciously, we want to feel good, but unconsciously we are prepared (if not compelled) to plunge emotionally into feelings of being deprived, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, and betrayed. We feel happy in one moment and miserable in the next because oppositional inner dynamics, especially the strife between the inner critic and inner defensiveness, weaken and bamboozle us. We’re compelled to act out this disharmony with others.
What we “get” from a relationship certainly provides some happiness. Yet the richest happiness arises from the quality of the presence and integrity we give to others and get from others. In healthy relationships, we feel our integrity, and we give to others the best of ourselves from the richness of that integrity. Being at our best, we see the best in others, and we connect with that quality in ourselves and in them. When we’re psychologically healthy, we possess the inner power to align ourselves with goodness, justice, generosity, and inner peace. So, happiness arises first from this inner connection to our better self—and next from the sharing of this better self with others.
Our happiness resides largely in the quality of our relationship with our own self. Unfortunately, we’re highly resistant to seeing how we degrade this relationship through our unconscious collusion in inner conflict. We all have resistance to establishing a new, more evolved relationship with ourself, and it’s important to be conscious of this resistance. Through resistance, people are unwittingly engaged in the cover-up of our unevolved consciousness.
When we liberate ourselves from inner conflict, we discover our inherent value and better self. Now we don’t need others to validate us, to bolster our sense of self. We become grounded in a sense of value because, for one thing, we’re no longer absorbing self-denigration from our inner critic and identifying with the passive, defensive side of inner conflict. With this awareness, the pleasure and happiness we feel from connecting with others spring from within. Pleasure and happiness arise as we experience the strength, integrity, and generosity of our deeper, better self. Happiness also arises from our newfound ability, now that we’re breaking free of inner conflict, to avoid becoming reactive to (triggered by) the quirks and irritants that others might display.
What are these “triggers” that sabotage relationships? When entangled in inner conflict, we are overly sensitive to feeling hurt, and we blame others for depriving, controlling, criticizing, and rejecting us. Yet we ourselves are unconsciously on the lookout for these experiences. We’re often triggered by the slightest evidence that these hurts are being inflicted upon us, even to the point of experiencing these hurts through our imagination and our speculations on the future.
Through relationships, we’re unconsciously willing to recycle and replay these hurts. Doing so produces, through inner conflict, experiences of guilt, shame, moodiness, cynicism, victimization, and oppression. All the while we blame others for what we generate in ourselves. Or we blame ourselves, but for the wrong reasons. Other people dump their unresolved issues on us, and we dump ours on them. Now we are unlikely to make sincere, trustworthy connections with other people because our inner conflict sabotages trust and intimacy.
When we expose the dynamics of inner conflict, we begin to recognize any falseness that might pervade our connections with others. For instance, we might unwittingly be displaying friendliness or charm to cover up our repressed identification with unworthiness. The feeling is, “I have value and I’m significant because this person I am charming is impressed with me.” Our friendliness can now become an unconscious defense that goes like this: “I’m not willing to go on feeling a passive disconnect from my goodness and value. Look at how thrilled I am that this person is so taken with me.” This unconscious double-dealing is a major theme in romantic love.
The above-mentioned article notes that people experience “mood boosts” when they try—on public transit or in a coffee shop, for instance—to connect in a friendly way with strangers. But why? Why do we feel better? The article doesn’t say. The answer is simple: We’re connecting with our better self. We’re giving from an inner abundance that comes from a strong connection to our better self. As we overcome inner conflict, we feel our inner richness, and we’re inspired to share it with others. That produces not just happiness but also joy.
When we reach out to connect with others, we’re also being less passive, less identified with the passive side of inner conflict. Our assertiveness overrides the passive disconnect from self that most of us experience in varying degrees. Often the passive disconnect is itself a main source of unhappiness, particularly in terms of how the passivity creates an inner disconnect and makes us less able to deflect the incoming self-denigration from our aggressive inner critic.
Many people snap out of this inner passivity and function at a higher capacity. But this newfound strength might only be temporary. With deeper insight, inner strength becomes more stable. Lacking insight, inner conflict easily draws us back into weakness and disconnection. In our ensuing unhappiness, we can become desperate to connect with others, sometimes to have them “validate” our indulgence in victimization and self-pity.
In the magazine article, a researcher is quoted saying, “When I do an act of kindness, it makes me feel more connected to the person I’m helping, or just humanity as a whole … I would say that 95 percent of things that are effective in making people happy and that have been shown to be true through happiness interventions are because they make people feel more connected to other people.” Yes, people can feel more connected to others, but what if the connection is being used as a balm for one’s weak sense of self. The comforting effect is felt, but inner growth is missed.
Many of us are troubled by inner conflict that involves the conscious wish to feel connected versus the unconscious compulsion to recycle unresolved feelings of disconnection and victimization that go back to childhood. Our psychological defenses now kick into action to cover up the humbling realization that we identify with inner weakness and easily plunge into emotional convictions of victimization. These defenses can generate bursts of happiness as part of the process of self-deception. “Look at how happy I am to connect with this person,” the defense has us believe. “That proves I want to feel connected, not disconnected.” But feeling disconnected remains the old emotional identification that clings to us like barnacles. Relationships in themselves can’t solve this problem—unless the relationship is with a good psychotherapist.
In relationships, we often create an illusion of connectedness. Many of those with whom we “connect” are prepared to use us mainly for self-validation or as a sounding board. Or we ourselves are using others for such self-serving purposes. Any happiness derived from such superficial connections is going to be fleeting or unstable.
People often unconsciously choose romantic partners for the unhealthy purpose of recreating unresolved emotional issues. People often blindly, passionately “fall in love” with someone who, others can readily see, is psychologically unhealthy. This unhealthy person is actually the “best” candidate with whom to act out and recreate experiences that resurrect all the other person’s unresolved and painful issues. The old hurts are now going to be recycled and replayed. What started off in romantic bliss soon ends in misery, with the participants usually staggering away ignorant of these psychological undercurrents.
Relationships can’t save us from ourselves. Our best relationships might ease our suffering and provide much happiness, but we’re shortchanging the evolved person we can become if we try to make them the mainstay of our happiness.
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