Why People Are Afraid to Be Happy
Watch people for a while and you start to wonder if some of them work at staying miserable. There's an old line about how we're our own worst enemy, and it holds up. Human beings lean toward the negative without being taught to. A news report comes on, a headline shows up in the paper, and the mind reaches for the worst possible reading of it. Turning that tendency around takes real effort: some personal growth, a bit of self-development, a working grasp of a few basic ideas from psychology to retrain the mind toward what's actually good in a life.
We also tend to pick whatever asks the least of us. Call it the path of least resistance. It shapes the careers we chase, the people we marry, pretty much every large decision we face. With work, most of us grab the first offer or the role that needs the smallest amount of training. (One thing about that second case: if something comes to you easily, there's a decent chance it's the thing you were built to do anyway.) The same instinct keeps us from pushing through obstacles even when we can see the payoff on the other side. Get a diagnosis of depression or some physical ailment and the reflex is to ask the doctor for a prescription, when in a lot of cases a few changes to how we live would do the job. Sickness is often the body's way of saying the whole arrangement has tipped out of balance.
So why the fear? Part of it is that most people are frightened of change, and happiness, for someone wired toward the negative, would require a lot of it. Doubt is wired in too. When a positive thought finally arrives, we still have to argue down the doubt behind it and genuinely believe that things are not as grim as they tend to look. What begins as a struggle hardens into habit over time, until you can do it almost without thinking. Sometimes the cost is social. You might have to find new friends if the old ones are pumping out too much negativity, and that's hard, because the law of attraction pulls similar people into each other's orbit and the emotional ties can run deep enough to make leaving painful. For some, staying negative is simply the cheaper option.
Psychology offers a way out here, and it's called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The idea is to deliberately retrain the brain toward thoughts that tilt positive, and the results have outperformed medication. That matters, because the side effects of most psychotropic drugs are rough enough that plenty of people can't tolerate them. Still, many never try the therapy, because questioning beliefs you've carried since childhood is brutal work. Religious beliefs are the hardest of all to touch, especially if you grew up being told that holding the wrong view of God would land you in hell. That kind of upbringing can produce what some have named Religious Trauma Syndrome, a spiritual version of PTSD.
Another trap: we chase things we're convinced will make us happy, and they leave us worse off. A person takes the high-paying job they can't stand because they swallowed the idea that money buys happiness, and so they never go after the work they actually want, out of fear of being broke. The fix is slow. You have to commit to getting to know yourself through personal growth before you can name what you really want from your life. Money isn't the only snare. Relationships trip up just as many people. Someone who could have built a marriage and raised kids instead grows old on their own, because they never did the honest inventory of what they needed in a partner. So they cycle through one relationship after another and come out each time more disillusioned. Self-development has to come first; figure out what you want before you go looking for someone to share it with.
A smaller group looks for happiness in knowledge, trusting the old claim that knowledge is power. Knowledge, though, has no bottom. Try to find contentment there and you can end up overwhelmed and worn out instead. The more you learn, the more clearly you see how much you don't know, and all the knowledge out there carries somebody's slant anyway.
The United States Constitution puts it plainly: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But being happy at anything depends on turning inward first, on the work of self-development and really knowing who you are. Underneath most emotional trouble, whether it shows up as mental illness or addiction, sits a low sense of self-worth and a failure to love oneself. Learn to love yourself without conditions, or you'll never manage to love another person or take any real pleasure in what you do.
E Bishop Wooten