We are used to the fact that those who find it difficult and difficult to live turn to psychologists for help. But there are many people for whom everything in life is going well, safely, successfully – and yet they cannot feel happy in any way.
It has long been known that success can bring happiness closer, contribute to its onset, but it cannot guarantee happiness to us. “Recently, I realized,” Alexander, 23, writes to me, “that I never manage to be happy, because deep down I am convinced that I do not deserve happiness in life. Do you think it is possible to change this habitual thought and turn it into the opposite: yes, I have the right to happiness?
Not everyone can formulate this problem so clearly for themselves, but many of those with whom I spoke suffer from the fact that they forbid themselves to be happy, they themselves limit – more or less unconsciously – access to happiness. They feel like they don’t deserve it.
Maybe it’s a kind of masochism? But more often than not, it has nothing to do with it: a real thirst for suffering is actually a very rare thing. As a rule, failed happiness is the result of accumulated psychological mistakes, very banal and very old, which have already managed to turn into reflexes.
Bad habits (in a situation of great and small difficulties to succumb to melancholy and feel “sweet sadness”), stubborn delusions (“it won’t work anyway”, “why?”), a tendency to worry (“I am afraid of happiness because it will hurt me too much when it’s over”), perfectionism (boundless happiness – I won’t settle for less) and so on…
First, identify the cause of the problem, and then take care of your “garden of happiness” every day.
Fortunately, these automatic reactions can be overcome by working in two directions. First, determine what is the cause of the problem (parents also failed to be happy; lacked love in childhood; too strict upbringing; painful life events …). And then understand that happiness can be built and do it every day: learn to manage your negative emotions (spleen, irritability, anxiety), grow your receptivity to small pleasures and generally take care of your “garden of happiness”. It seems to me that everyone can convince himself that he has the right to happiness. Not because we deserve it, but simply because we are all human.