How do you know when you’re ‘happy’? I don’t mean ecstatic or satisfied or enthusiastic – happy. What does ‘happy’ feel like? Describe it as a vibrational state or in any other form.
And once you’ve done that – tell me how to get it not just once but consistently even if I haven’t got it or had it for a long time; we’re talking here about having lost happiness for so long I’ve forgotten what it looks and feels like. Can you tell me how to get happiness back please?
That was the situation I found myself in near the end of 2004 – with my obsessions and my phobias and my panic attacks and my depression - I had forgotten what happiness felt like. I certainly didn’t know how to get it back. I had been asking advice from the professionals for a while and they weren’t telling me what I needed to know.
In 2004 I was 43; I’d been emotionally ill from age 22. Now, all this time later, I was finally giving myself permission to take proper care of myself; to get happy no matter what it took; but I wasn’t sure how to do it - or how I would even know when I’d finally ‘achieved’ it.
I am not alone in my forgetting. People with long-term emotional disorders, or who have been in a negative environment for a long period of time, are at risk of losing not just their happiness but also the understanding of what happiness is. They forget what it feels like; looks like; how to get it.
In this post I’m going to explain:
- Why we forget our understanding of happiness
- What causes us to lose it
- Chip Conley’s happiness formula and how we can take practical action based around it
- How we get happiness back by pursuing it directly which means:
- ending relationships; destroying pleasant memories and changing our ‘moral beliefs’ (at the bottom of the post you’ll find Amazon links for the books mentioned).
Why Do We Forget?
Happiness is our default emotional state. That’s why.
Prior to losing connection to our default happiness we don’t really know we have it. Like most default things in life we only notice our default happiness when it’s gone. Like when you’re in a store and they turn the muzak off and you realise you weren’t consciously listening but now it’s gone you’d like it back please (well I would, anyway).
So if we learn to regard happiness as our default emotional state this means we understand it cannot really be permanently lost; it can always and only be blocked from access by something else getting in the way. We gained something we need to lose – we didn’t lose something we need to retrieve.
Reconnecting to Our Default Happiness
Reconnecting to our lost default happiness means we need to do something we’ve not considered doing before. In my case it required an overhaul of everything I was doing; aiming for and thought of as important in life.
When I had emotional problems I felt disconnected from who I really was. I saw other people treating me as someone I wasn’t and then my reacting internally like someone I never intended to be. Most of the time I was figuring out ways to be ‘nicer’ and not so emotionally reactive. In reality I was reacting negatively to genuinely negative environments deliberately created for me by others but pretending I was some kind of super-tolerant person ‘absorbing the negativity’ on everyone else’s moral behalf.
As a child I had been turned into a bit of an emotional punch-bag by others; as an adult I still saw that as my role in life. To put up with. The turning point for me came when I accepted I needed to end or limit any relationships or situation causing me pain. Up until then I had always been concerned about whether or not certain other people were happy; (they never were) and whether or not I was meeting my responsibilities despite the fact I had almost no rights in those areas of my life. I was unhappy because, without realising it, I had unwittingly and repeatedly agreed to be.
In vibrational energy terms, when struggling with an emotional disorder or a painful life experience or environment, a negative vibrational state has been added to your overall tone and is blocking you from accessing your default happiness. It is this negative vibrational state we need to get rid of and, unfortunatel,y it may mean we need to consider taking real-life, difficult, long-term action to minimise environmental causes. Heaven forbid; you may even have to put yourself first.
Where Do These Negative Vibrational States Come From?
Chip Conley, author of the book Emotional Equations (link below), tells us the formula for achieving happiness is a question of dividing wanting what you have by having what you want:
Wanting What You Have
If you feel unhappy or have an emotional disorder it’s because your body is producing an emotional response your Pre-frontal Cortex; home to your ‘you’; does not want. Your you is refusing to accept what your body has given it to deal with; so you do not want what you have. You are trying to escape your organic self. The more you do not want it the stronger the negative vibrational energy response you produce in a bid to fight or run away from it.
Things in your life you have accepted, including all the other emotional responses which did not turn into emotional problems, have quickly become, in emotionally vibrational terms, ‘awareness neutral’. You feel neither positive nor negative about them. You only start feeling negative if you are threatened with their being taken away or somehow they are changed into something you do not want.
By default we are not designed to automatically want what we have. Wanting what we have – ‘gratitude’ - needs to be a deliberate practice. We need to either practice it on a regular scheduled basis or make sure, when we’re feeling negative, we deliberately give ourselves the ‘gratefulness’ response. Gratitude
There’s the straight forward approach of simply sitting quietly and focusing on different things in your life; allowing yourself to reflect on and feel good about them. For example: think about paper. What would life be like without paper; how much better is life with paper? Isn’t life so much better with paper? What an amazing idea to turn trees into paper! (we don’t need to think only about the ‘big’ things in our life – anything will do). Just think about paper for thirty seconds. All the things we use it for. Isn’t it amazing? There are people who process trees so we can have paper then there are people putting things on and in paper to benefit others then billions of us are using paper for all kinds of social reasons. All of humanity supporting each other, contributing to each others lives, simply through some thin dry plant-based material.
In addition we can insert mini-gratitude practices deliberately whenever we think it will help our mood. For example I often practice ‘relativity-gratefulness’ thinking. If I’m dealing with something difficult in the present and start to feel negative I’ll picture an experience from the past worse than the one I’m dealing with now and it changes my internal response (my most common relativity reference is ‘well, at least they’re not hitting me over the head with broken glass like they used to). Some of us might say ‘I’m not doing that because it’s not ‘real’ – but you will if you’re in the habit of deliberately prioritising, and taking full responsibility for, achieving your own personal happiness. It’s not an external reality, it’s an internal one.
At the biological level gratefulness has a significant affect on the balance between a number of neuropeptides (neuropeptides is a name describing both hormones and neurotransmitters that trigger our vibrational states). The neuropeptide Dopamine, for example, is a our motivational driver – it gives us that natural chemical high when we’re moving towards a goal both mentally and physically. Dopamine, however, acts in balance with Serotonin. Serotonin is the neuropeptide designed to induce a sense of satisfaction. Dopamine drives us towards while Serotonin tells us we arrived. Dopamine becomes depleted when we spend too much time and effort trying to achieve a thing without success. Depleted Dopamine makes us feel lethargic and depressed.
Practising gratitude stimulates the production of Serotonin which then rebalances the production of fresh Dopamine.
We can even create a mental framework for ensuring we practice gratitude in regards to our most intense negative life experiences and emotional problems. When I encounter something like this I immediately start thinking about how one day I’m going to use the learning experience to help others – I plan on feeling good about the fact I feel bad right now but will learn from it and use it. I concern myself with how it will raise my understanding about myself, life in general and how it will lead on to better things. It doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t all work out exactly to plan externally – for example I may offer the learning as support to others but they could reject it – what matters is I rebalance and carefully manage my own internal happiness. Happiness is the main plan.
Gratitude is an internal happiness-control model.
Having What You Want
The desire to have what you want triggers our Gratification mechanism. Gratitude and Gratification are similar sounding words but are the opposites of each other.
Gratification is an external happiness-control model.
Before achieving gratification we must first pursue something and then obtain it in order to trigger the satisfaction response (the gratification mechanism is also based on those two same neuropeptides, Dopamine and Serotonin, with a few others thrown in, but the balance between them is dependent on what happens outside of yourself).
Unsatisfied pursuit produces increased cravings to get a thing and then we suffer withdrawal. Withdrawal produces a cocktail of negative emotional responses including fear and rage, triggered by the release of neuropeptides such as Cortisol and Adrenaline.
Chip Conley points out in his book that to pursue means to chase with hostility. When we don’t get what we pursue externally we become frustrated. Our body produces negatively charged, hormonally driven, vibrational states.
Wanting something external is fine; in fact it’s unavoidable if you want to stay alive(!) and thrive, but you have to try and ensure you don’t ‘front-load’ your Dopamine levels too high by being too narrow-minded about results because when you don’t achieve exactly what you’re pursuing the intense withdrawal symptoms kick in. If you’ve ever dealt with someone operating with an ‘entitlement mentality’ you’ll see how they believe the external world is responsible for meeting all their internal needs.
Finding personal happiness is about effectively balancing:
- your internal versus your external dependencies
- your rights versus your responsibilities
- your dreams versus your realities
with a view to ensuring you get the happiness formula of wanting what you have and having what you want right for yourself; most of the time.
If you haven’t got happiness and haven’t had it for so long you can’t remember where or what it is there’s a journey you need to take.
The Internal Journey
Like all other animals equipped with a brain we are, also by default, creatures of journey. Our journeying never stops.
As a young boy if you told me to sit in an armchair and be quiet the armchair became a spaceship or a racing car. There’d be a moment when I knew I was sitting in an old armchair but suddenly it wasn’t an armchair any more. After a bit of armchair-spaceship-flying-time I’d get ideas about different types of alien worlds or the internal designs of spaceships and the only way to get rid of the excitement going on inside was to get it out onto a blank piece of paper. To express it.
The moment we stop moving externally is the moment we start moving, mentally and emotionally, internally. If we aren’t travelling out there, we’re travelling in here. We’re always on a journey – even when we sleep parts of our brain become more active than when awake.
If we stop moving, but remain conscious, unresolved social issues come up for Conscious processing. This happens automatically in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex at the front of the brain. This is one of the reasons sufferers of obsessions can never relax - when they stop focusing on an external distraction their unresolved internal journey kicks in automatically – an emotionally overwhelming experience they believe themselves powerless to stop. Do this for long enough, however, and the internal journey starts to shift from being emotionally intense to neutral to unnoticeable as the energies dissipate.
Just because you’re sitting or laying down does not mean you’re not going somewhere. In fact, in terms of becoming happy, sitting still could be the most important journey you’ll ever take.
Are You Sitting Still?
In her book In Stillness Conquer Fear: Overcoming Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Agoraphobia author Pauline McKinnon describes how she overcame anxiety disorders simply by sitting still.
We’re not talking here about meditating or focusing on positive affirmations – she did it just by sitting still. Pauline relates how she eliminated her anxiety problems in this way but when she let the practice of sitting still slide for a while her anxiety issues returned. She learned in order to achieve happiness she had to permanently manage the balance between journeying externally versus internally.
When we journey externally we produce primal energetic reactions designed to ensure we:
- overcome or avoid physical obstacles and threats
- obtain physical things necessary to our survival.
When life is genuinely more brutal, a case of genuine ‘do or die,’ these reactions are appropriate and tend to be released naturally and fully in the wild.
Most modern humanised environments, however, do not require us to fight off predators or chase and kill our prey (other than on the occasion it’s other humans). These environments are dominated mostly by intellectual concerns based on arbitrary cultural and personal value systems. Despite the fact these things are nothing more than electrical impulses in our own heads we still manage to produce full primal responses to them and we are left with an excess of primal energy to deal with because the Unconscious is unable to achieve full release in this mostly intellectualised world. Those primal responses are often inappropriately managed – for example some of us have energetic responses we don’t know what to do with and go looking for an alleged ‘cause’ to direct them at, instead of taking personal responsibility for managing them in private and in our own time; while others develop emotional disorders because they regard their responses as socially abnormal or irresponsible and invest time and energy in stifling appropriate primal emotional release.
Sitting still, in private or ‘safety’, ensures the necessary journey can begin. Where is it we go?
Lands of the Mind
I regard our internal journeys as journeys taken through ‘lands of the mind’. To the biological ‘you’ – a mixture of the conversations going on between your Prefrontal Cortex and your Unconscious - these internal journeys are just as real, made through just-as-genuine brain-mapped landscapes, as the external world. The same biological processes handle signals from both realities. The external and internal worlds are completely separate, but they are separately real and we need to regard each with the same respect.
I got rid of 27 obsessions, 14 phobias, unreleased rage, depression, panic attacks and I’ve forgotten what else(!) by agreeing with myself to do something similar. Using self-directed exposure therapy I ‘went into the out-of’: exploring, experimenting and surrendering to the true nature of my internal world and the need to journey through it systematically.
Our emotional responses, and memories of the environments to which those responses are connected, are mapped in layers in the brain, in chronological order. Thought patterns reinforce the neuronal ‘roads’ they travel through in the brain whenever emotional responses drive them (by the way, if you feel negative you will have negative thoughts; if you feel positive, or even emotionally neutral, you will have positive thoughts; positive thinking is much more dependent on positive feeling than the other way round and, paradoxically, if you agree to feel out your negative feelings whenever they occur you will automatically return to feeling and thinking positively by default).
By travelling internally through our feelings and our thoughts consistently and repeatedly we acknowledge and release the negative energies driving them and those scary internal ‘lands of the mind’ disappear because the energy patterns maintaining them are removed.
Just a quick note here because I’m not sure I made it clear just now: if you release your negative feelings this removes your negative thoughts which means your default happiness can’t do anything but show itself.
Physical and Mental Expression
With some intense negative states, however, sitting still alone is not enough. You may occasionally need to physically mimic or act out the negative vibrational state, in a safe environment, to gain a full emotional release. A safe environment is one where neither you nor anyone else will be harmed; nor will you verbally express something to someone affected by hearing it. I recommend you get professional support if you find it too difficult to do this alone.
I once advised a lady, frightened by her own urge to kill her long-term, physically abusive, husband, to give herself permission to ‘kill’ him repeatedly in her imagination, in private, without anyone else ever knowing about it, until the feelings had gone and she had accepted how much he had hurt her. Her fear of hurting him or others in external reality was stopping her making progress – she had been stuck for weeks in an intense emotional state. The fact he had beaten her for over ten years was not the trigger – she had recently discovered he had been having an affair with the only best friend she had (a friendship since childhood) but, even more hurtful, the rest of her own family had known about the affair from the start and were involved in hiding his betrayal from her.
She had physically moved away from them all and the whole experience had left her feeling isolated and, for the first time in her life, struggling to control an urge to kill both her husband and her friend in revenge. She told me she was now afraid to be around knives because every time she saw one she was overwhelmed by the imagery of stabbing her husband to death with it. This had become a major problem for her because she worked as a chef and had started to take time off work as a result. Her emotional state was so painful she felt suicidal.
Revenge is a primal urge few socially responsible people enjoy experiencing; particularly when it’s in regards to someone we feel emotionally bonded to. At the primal level what this woman’s Unconscious was telling her was that her personal, highly valued life, had been ended and her husband was the predator responsible.
I suggested that, with the help of a therapist, when she was ready, she could discharge how she felt by allowing herself in private to mimic those stabbing actions. She agreed there were some circumstances in life, such as if she were being attacked and in fear of her life - or someone she loved was being attacked - where she would find herself doing that kind of thing and finding it more acceptable. She was now torn between two worlds, two contexts, and at some point had to accept her natural reactions as she transitioned from the death of her old life and the development of a new life she felt worth having. I hadn’t given her any immediately useable solutions but I had given her more options and I’d accepted her state in a way she hadn’t yet come to terms with herself. She pointed to her own smile and said ‘this is the first one I’ve had in three months’.
I have a habit myself of writing or drawing things out. I’ll write 20 pages about an emotional issue then I’ll filter out the important points and re-write until I achieve final closure. I make ‘sense’ of things this way - by deliberately engaging the thinking brain in order to understand and accept both the content of my experience and my overall reaction to it. We often don’t want to do this kind of thing, even in private with no-one else around, because we believe in some way it will cause real-life harm. The opposite is true – by fully processing and releasing our most intense drives in private we remove the urges we’d rather not have when interacting with others. Eventually we discover our internal emotional journeys are just harmless, temporary processes but because of how painful they are we learn to, quite sensibly, avoid people, places and situations that force us to do this internal work repeatedly.
In their book The Way to Vibrant Health – a Manual of Bioenergetic Exercises authors Alexander Lowen, M.D., and Leslie Lowen, provide a number of physical posture exercises designed to enhance emotional release. There are also exercises in the book designed to stimulate a sense of well-being. You may have picked up a few ‘poses’ in your life here and there of your own. At the yoga classes I attend, for example, we are instructed to smile; laugh; hold our palms upwards in order to receive life and, my favourite part, breathe deeply and fully throughout. These types of physical actions may seem small, contrived or even silly, but they alter my vibrational state; they stimulate endorphin release making me feel good for several days after every session. I find it impossible to feel negative even though lots of minor negative life events occur during those few days.
I bought The Way to Vibrant Health after finally discharging a trapped rage problem I’d struggled with for over a decade by simply holding my body in a genuine rage pose while expressing my emotions and saying exactly what I wanted to say to someone not actually present. I realised holding my body differently, and imagining their physical presence strongly enough, enabled me to tune into exactly what I would have said, agree fully with what I said and discharge the emotion driving the problem within a few hours. The rage problem never returned.
Pursuing Happiness Itself
Happiness is a mid-point, in vibrational energy terms, where you are neither feeling:
- compelled to run from what you don’t want, nor
- compelled to pursue something you want but don’t have.
The best way of describing this mid-point for myself is I end up sitting still, looking at the world with a slight sense of wonder and thinking ‘eh, I could do anything I want next – what shall I do next?’. There’s nothing bothering me; I am in the moment. When I was emotionally ill getting back to this point had to become a direct goal in itself even though I had no idea what it felt like. I was desperate to get to it. I now know I don’t have to be achieving this mid-point all the time, I just need to know I can get there when I want to.
I advise a lot of people who have been unhappy, for whatever reasons, they must now directly regard personal internal happiness as their main goal. Far too many of us are dependent on our external world for management of the internal. We must be willing to spend time discharging negative (and sometimes even positive) emotional energies produced by our directional drives. That means taking time away from others things, including other people, we think we should be with, and instead working on ourselves. It also means we stop ‘putting up with’ people, environments and treatments causing us to produce excess amounts of those drives.
You’ll remember I mentioned above that Chip Conley tells us ‘to pursue’ means to chase with hostility. That still applies when you decide to pursue your own happiness. Getting happy can be really hard work. You’ll have to start things and stop things you don’t want to; connect and disconnect to and from beliefs you’ve avoided or held on to for years; and you’ll probably find because happiness does not come quickly you’ll have those negative withdrawal symptoms to deal with now and again too.
In order to find my personal happiness, for example, I had to:
- end my most important relationships
- destroy my most important and pleasant memories and
- change my moral beliefs.
I had to be willing to end or change all three if they weren’t contributing to my goal. I didn’t know for sure I was going to find what I was aiming for either – I was concerned I’d end up feeling even worse and get stuck there. I was giving myself permission to explore; experiment and engage with new options I hadn’t previously found acceptable and wasn’t confident would work - most of which I sensed would be permanent choices once made. It felt like risky stuff.
Ending Relationships
Other people tend to create vibrational environments for us – often directly but also sometimes even by their absence or by their subtle influences on our social background.
As I started to commit to becoming happy I took a closer look at all my close personal relationships – which at that point meant my ex-wife and my four now-adult children. I accepted not a single one of those people cared about me despite having built my entire life strategy around them. If I’d died they would have shrugged their shoulders and acted as though nothing particularly bad just happened. I’m not exaggerating – and they weren’t merely ‘acting’ - it really was a case of how they ‘didn’t feel’ about me.
My ex-wife had waged a long term battle to disconnect my children both physically and psychologically from me – I was always the last person they wanted to speak to about things; in my head and body lived a dream of being creator of ‘the Waltons’ but in my heart I knew I was regarded as an unloved version of Uncle Fester. I was trapped in a cycle of hope and despair. I was pleased my family were united in fighting a common enemy (nothing unites a group better) but unfortunately that enemy was me.
Over a period of several years I tried to salvage something from those relationships but my efforts failed and it was made clear to me by all of them the future was always going to be the same - unless I got out. One of my children actually said to me ‘it doesn’t matter how we treat you; you have no choice but to put up with it’. Things came to a head where I decided to disconnect from the whole situation. I sent a single letter to their mother wishing them all the best, and ended it. To my surprise, despite watching 28 years of personal investment drift away, I got happier. And happier. And happier … I’d removed something getting in the way, you see. I’d removed the triggering situations causing me to run away from what I didn’t want and I’d stopped pursuing what I wanted but didn’t have.
Now I began spending more time sitting still and working on my internal journey.
Destroying Memories
If you want to get happy but currently suffer with an emotional disorder; or you live in a long-term-abusive environment because, for whatever reason, you think you should, I’m afraid I have some slightly bad news for you. My experience is things have to feel a bit worse, sometimes even a lot worse, before they feel better. This is because, even after taking any necessary difficult actions in the external world to limit further negative stimulation, we still have to discharge the energy attached to our memories. Not just our unpleasant memories, either.
Any pleasantly charged memories, plans, hopes and dreams attached to a now-lost future have to go before we can move on because they keep us linked in to the unwanted negative memories of that past. Both our positive and negative memories form a structure of ‘attachments’ our brain has no choice but to operate with, as though those memories were still real, until we’ve acknowledged, accepted and started to work deliberately on the attachment/detachment process with the goal of personal internal happiness in mind. Emotional attachments underpin the structure of what I earlier referred to as those ‘lands of the mind’.
My marriage to my ex-wife lasted 13 years and I left her in September 1993. When I left her I was still deeply in love with her and I didn’t want to just destroy that love by demonising her – I wanted to transform it instead into a friendship that would benefit all concerned. She didn’t allow me to do that, however, but I hoped to adapt to whatever it was she planned on doing and have everything turned out ‘Waltons’, even if it was a divorced version, in the end. Ten years later, every Saturday morning when I started ironing my clothes for work for the following week, I would start a conversation with her even though she wasn’t physically there and hadn’t been for all those ten years. I didn’t want to have these ‘chats’ – they would just start in my head and run automatically. Do you remember my mentioning earlier how any unresolved social issues start appearing in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex whenever we take our minds off the outside world?
Every Saturday morning, for 10 years. On and on. You get the drift of how fed up I was with having it? I couldn’t stop it by just wanting to stop it and I had no idea how to go about dealing with it. The conversation always centred around why I’d had to leave my wife and children; what could I have done to stop it; what was wrong with me; what had actually happened; why couldn’t we have just made it work – was it me or had I been conned? My brain was still trying to figure it all out and couldn’t understand why or what it was I was trying to figure out. ‘It’s over, Carl!’ I would tell myself then I would finally come out of it until the next Saturday morning came round. I was still ‘tied in’ somehow to her and the ‘big dream’. I wanted to move on but I couldn’t.
I read a book called ‘How to Mend Your Broken Heart’ by Paul McKenna and Hugh Millbourn and it gave me the explanation and the answer I needed. I was tied in to all those unanswerable questions, leading to and driven by all my negative memories, by my pleasant memories and the hopes I still had for the future. No, I didn’t want to get back with her – I’d had enough of trying to make the marriage work – but we could be friends. Everything could still work out ‘nice’. Getting the message this all had to go was a relief but it didn’t mean I liked the message - those memories keeping me attached were important to me. They surrounded the births of our four children. Four lives we’d created together. I was present at all four births and I pretty much idolised my wife as the ‘perfect woman’ around those times; my children were ‘innocent angels’ and it was my job to protect them for the rest of my life. I felt, at those moments, we were at our closest and most committed (we weren’t but I was). Those memories bonded me to her and our alleged future together, despite the fact she never felt the same way about me - those moments were my life’s landmarks. All my future plans were built around them. Plus I was also facing the fact that destroying those pleasant memories in order to break my emotional ties to her would probably mean I would also break my emotional ties to my children. The issue of putting my personal happiness ahead of of the bonds with my children brought up the question of whether or not I should reverse my moral beliefs. Up until this point I’d operated under the approach that no matter what I felt my children’s needs, and my emotional attachment to them, came first.
In their book Paul and Hugh explain how, when a relationship ends, we need to overwrite any pleasant bonding memories by using negative memories to override and change how we see our ex-partners. So I started doing it with the memories of those four births. I went in to the pleasant memories, pictured how wonderful those moments were, such as when my then-wife squeezed on my hand during a contraction, for example, then I reminded myself of another memory when the ‘real Mrs Harris’ was acting in totally the opposite way. Gradually I overwrote the pleasant memories and I finally started to accept the ‘dream woman’ was nothing of the sort.
Changing Moral Beliefs – the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘should nots’
I’m always concerned with ‘doing the right thing’, aren’t you? But what is the ‘right thing’? What if your ‘right thing’ is someone else’s ‘wrong thing’? Do you have a right to enforce your right over their wrong? I came to see my attempting to do this as a form of bullying on my part. Moral beliefs form a code of conduct we live by in order to ensure no harm or minimum harm comes to others or ourselves as a result of what would otherwise be our own uncontrolled impulsive actions. They work great as long as everyone else is roughly sticking to the same system of beliefs. What if they’re not?
Quite often people disconnected from their happiness are giving themselves the wrong ‘shoulds’ or ‘should nots’ to operate with. Why should you be tolerant? Why should you ‘put up with’? Why shouldn’t you put your personal happiness first? Why shouldn’t you say that a bad thing happening externally is actually someone else’s fault and not your responsibility to deal with? Why should you pay the consequences for their actions?
I found myself with a bit of a moral dilemma to deal with when I was 19 and it was to last for another 28 years. I’d grown up as the oldest child in an unstable single parent family and my dream, at that time, was to have a stable family, just like everyone else seemed to have. I met a young woman just slightly younger than me who told me she wanted the same thing and she wanted it with me. I felt like I’d arrived; I felt complete; I fell in love.
My wife caught for our first child and within weeks, to my horror, began dumping me. Every time she did this I felt my life had ended. Everything would just shut down mentally; emotionally I was completely overwhelmed and would start grieving. I would beg her to get back together with me and she would for a while. Her behaviour changed dramatically in contrast to the pre-pregnant person I loved; she turned cold; began picking on me in my mother’s company. My mother and my wife teamed up together, which at first I thought was great because it fitted in with my ‘big happy family plan’, but both combined forces in order to achieve the same agenda - separating me off from my as-yet unborn child. My wife developed a separate relationship with my mother and would visit my mother’s, where I was living at the time, even on the occasions we had split. They would sit in the living room, right in front of me, talking with each other, knowing I was in pieces, acting as if nothing particularly bad had just happened. I had no idea how to deal with the situation.
I suspected my mother, who’d lived on state benefits most of her life, thought she had a right to my income once I went out to work and was engineering the situation to make sure she got it. Every time all three of us were together she would start arguments about petty things and drag my wife onto her side. Behind my wife’s back she would tell me ‘she’s no good for you; she’s not the right one’, but to her face she acted like a favourite sister. My wife started using tactics with the same intention in mind. By the time my first child was born I’d been dumped about six times and there were a number of explosive incidents; the most notable being my attempted suicide, which had the desired affect; it seemed to stop their joint plan for a while. I developed a bad temper as a result of the treatment and both my wife and mother now began telling me my bad temper was the cause of the whole problem. Part of me was buying into what they were saying – I decided if I could be ‘nicer’ from now on we might get back to being the loving couple we’d been before, eh? What I didn’t know at the time was the whole thing was a set-up. My lovely wife was play acting.
We set up home after our child was born and then my wife continued with the same tactics; she would take every chance she could to humiliate or dump me. But she still wanted to have more children with me. But she also wanted to dump me. She didn’t say it in a straight forward manner – she would give me the silent treatment; she would explode if I wanted to talk; she would treat me like an idiot. I would tell her the way I was being treated was unacceptable and she would tell me where the door was if I didn’t like it. She would deliberately provoke me because she knew I hated being angry; I’d get angry then she’d step back and work on damaging my self-esteem. But she still wanted sex and more children with me. I was a very confused young man. I was also suppressing a developing rage problem which occasionally leaked out – and I was terrified of what might happen to my son if I left. I had an inkling it would be the last time I had contact with him. Every time I was ‘dumped’ I would fall into a deep depression and start imaging terrible things happening to him and I believed it would be my fault because I hadn’t been there to protect and guide him. I needed to be a better man. A more tolerant man.
In a bid to get my wife liking me again I decided to please her by having another child – in for a penny in for a pound, eh? I felt morally trapped. If I stayed I was doing the wrong thing but if I left I was doing the wrong thing. But to be honest, at that time, because I was so angry all the time I began to believe the only real threat to my son; and my wife; was me. I couldn’t remember the origins of the dilemma; I just accepted I was a bad person and needed to become more tolerant. All I could focus on, whatever happened, was I was supposed to stay and keep trying no matter what until she made it absolutely undeniably obvious she wanted me to leave. She never did. Our second child was born and things seemed great for a while. She liked me! And then we went back to how things were before. I was in a constant state of confused tension.
Around this time, when I was aged 22, I read a newspaper article about something truly horrific happening to a young boy. I looked at my children, imagined it happening to them, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It wasn’t so much the imagery but the emotional response – I felt overwhelming disgust and anger. By this time I was so sick to death of being emotionally overcharged I had become habitually self-critical of everything I felt. My first obsessions were created because I hadn’t accepted my reactions to a newspaper article were normal reactions: I labelled them abnormal. I began experiencing panic attacks in regards to my obsessions because I found no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stop having the reactions or thinking the thoughts.
A decade, and two more children, later I began to realise my wife was never going to change and my sense of morality, my set of shoulds and should-nots, was destroying me. My wife had told me she wanted six children. I was gradually tuning into the fact there was a definite behavioural cycle emerging and I suspected once baby number six appeared our marriage would be ‘surgically’ ended. So I decided to test the theory and told her I wanted to stop at child number four.
Things began to deteriorate rapidly even further after that. I developed a ‘two year leaving plan’ and began trying different things to find out if there really was nothing I could do other than leave. I slowly got her to talk honestly without exploding. Eventually she told me she had always seen me as nothing more than a sperm donor; had never loved me and hadn’t told me before because she felt sorry for me. I had now served my purpose and she wanted nothing to do with me intimately ever again. I could stop for the sake of the children but she wanted me to start seeing other women. By this time I’d got used to the fact my wife almost always said the opposite of what she intended to do. For years I’d been under the delusion my ‘wonderful wife didn’t understand me’ but now I was becoming slowly and painfully aware my wife was in fact more fully aware than I was about what was going on and had been deliberately manipulating me - so what I heard was ‘I’m going to start seeing other men and there’ll be nothing you can do about it; when it suits me I’ll tell you to leave’. If I thought what I’d experienced so far was bad it was going to get much worse – and I sensed I was going to end up doing something really stupid if I stayed.
She was surprised when I told her I’d be leaving a month later. She agreed we would do our best to stay friends for the sake of the kids. Again, she was lying. Over the next 15 years she carefully dissected me out of my children’s lives to the point I finally said goodbye to the whole family. Again, she found temporary uses for me here and there. By the time I’d finally accepted the ‘moral’ thing to do was to detach completely and stop pretending I was in any way, shape or form, being allowed to protect and guide anyone, 28 years of my life had passed.
In hindsight I should have left her the very first time she dumped me, I suppose. That was what she actually wanted me to do but I wasn’t having it! All because I’d got my shoulds and should-nots wrong. Because back then my personal happiness was not my main priority. But it is now.
Where Am I Now?
You see all that stuff above? I’ve disconnected from it all. I’ve extinguished it. I’ve felt it all out through my emotional system; ended the affects it had on me and learned from it.
I am thankful to my ex-wife for what she did to me because I use that learning repeatedly in ensuring I have personal happiness and in helping others achieve it for themselves. Her behaviours, and the negative behaviours of others, have trained me well. Because I moved away from what I didn’t want and let go of those things I wanted but couldn’t have - and was then willing to take the internal journey needed to discharge the energies that had built up over the years blocking my conscious from connecting with my default happiness state – I now know for a fact I can achieve the happiness state whenever I want. I can sit in stillness, not feeling a need to run away or run towards and think, in peace, about what I might do next.
I’ve learned we cannot impose happiness – we can only expose it.
Sitting still? What might you do next?
Regards – Carl
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