The post modern paradigm, or prevailing perspective, is that you should be consistently "happy" at all times and, if you're not, then there is something inherently wrong with you, often requiring you seek out medications (drugs) that will neuro-chemically compel your brain's amygdala (emotional center) to ignore all psychosocial threats to maintain your emotions in a state of constant pleasure, even though your mood often changes for reasons beyond your conscious awareness and the natural order that allowed you life in the first place seems utterly dismissive of your demand for happiness, based on the stress that seems constantly thrust upon you, ignoring your pleas for a "happiness," that you really can't concretely define, because it has no empirical or physical anchor points and is only a feeling or emotional state that defies actual definition.
But you seek for it, nonetheless...relentlessly.
THE 3 HAPPINESS MYTHS
Your brain is not genetically constructed for happiness or pleasure, but for constant displeasure or negativity to insure survival. Thousands of years ago if you let your guard down while strolling through the Serengeti, you might become food for a Saber Toothed Tiger (negativity bias). This system of vigilant alertness is still tucked up in your noggin and explains why, when you have four positive and only one negative experience, you may become compulsively fixated on that one negative experience above and beyond the five positive.
I meet with individuals who experience almost unbearable limitations to their lives. Chronic pain, major depression, panic disorder, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia, fibromyalgia, OCD, CFS, social anxiety, PTSD, Lyme Disease (personal friend of mine), etc, etc, in which, for many, just leaving the house can be a test of physical and psycho-emotional endurance.
These individuals will never experience "happiness" in their lives and they know it. Yet, they find a way to accept their limitations and authentically adapt to that acceptance within the limitations that have been thrust upon them and in that authentic acceptance they report attaining, not the happiness the masses pursue and rarely acquire, but a deep state of peace that very few ever experience in their relentless search for "happiness." In authentic acceptance individuals engage a recovery program that includes values, goals and purpose, but has little time for fleeting episodes of "happiness" or ephemeral moments of pleasure.Engaging a recovery process is not simply about extracting from dysfunctional behaviors, but more about encountering new experiences inside and outside your "self" that seek to enhance the experience of being "you," within the limits imposed upon you that are outside your control.
HAPPINESS LIVES IN THE NEW
Inner peace comes from encountering and engaging life authentically and that requires a radical acceptance of your moods and emotional states within your limitations. Your continued need to escape your mind, and the physical and psychological limits imposed upon you, only entangles you in a downward spiral of symptomatic behaviors, because your mind is "you" and there is no escaping from that solitary experience, an experience that can be shared, but never fully encountered by another.
Authentic Acceptance acknowledges limitations and fully thrives within those boundaries, always on the lookout for occasions when those boundaries can be overcome, but never exceeding the lines when harm could come to you or others.
DEMYSTIFYING ACT: ACCEPTANCE
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