Wednesday
Nov212012
The Fantastic Trick of Being Alive
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
I am less interested in happiness these days than I once was.
I suppose you could argue that I am lying, what with my praising the glory that is my SAD lamp, but you would be wrong. There is a difference between no longer wanting to off yourself and feeling happy. There are myriad emotions on the other side of suicidal ideation, and only a narrow spectrum of those are about happiness.
There is a lot of talk now about happiness and how to find it, but I'm less and less inclined to buy what they're selling. We each define our sense of happiness differently, so a seller can say HAPPINESS, and we will each come up with our own product description. Most often, they're only selling us our own assumptions about a transient emotion.
Positive affirmations, a mainstay of the happiness-seeking self-help complex, have always made me feel like absolute shite. It is what they appear to do to a large number of us, (and Danielle LaPorte has interesting things to say about that). [Edited to add: you can find a study that supports the sometimes negative effects of positive affirmations here with a paid membership.]
I think positive affirmations can sometimes wound rather than heal because they act like a question in our brains rather than a statement of belief. Our brains automatically fill in their kneejerk responses, which are often the very opposite of the positive affirmation's goal.
What the positive affirmation says:
You are beautiful, and the world wants your dreams to come true.
What our brain hears:
Am I beautiful? Does the world care about me?
What our brain says in response:
I am a sub-par shit-pile and the world is, at best, ambivalent about my existence.
What I need is practical takeaway. Rather than tell myself I am beautiful — especially when that is something I am not even particularly interested in believing as a grossly oversimplified statement about a complex and far-reaching attribute — it is much more effective to go out and do something beautiful, give to the world.
The universe is both within and without us, and your brain, a finite and rather touchy instrument, is not always the best interpreter of the state of things.
Act outwardly rather than retreat inwardly. If you find affirmations triggering, this'll get you further any day.
I quit drinking two years and three months ago, and my worst struggles have all happened while I was looking for happiness over interestingness, happiness over knowledge, happiness over diversity of thought and feeling.
I had lazily equated loving my life with being happy, when what's true about love is not happiness but love itself. What's true about love is that it exists quite aside from happiness. Love is indivisible.
I loved an ex even as he made me feel lonely, I loved my grandmother even as I grieved her death, and I love writing even when I growl audibly over fussy sentences.
We do not have to see beauty in the mirror to love ourselves. We don't have to believe the world wants anything in particular for us, good or bad. Love happens anyway.
Happiness? It'll fail you every time. It is transient.
I don't know how to describe the steps to love. I'm feeling for them with my feet as I speak. How to get there is the greatest ongoing question of human existence. I do know, though, that it is here, greater than happiness and much more interesting. Love knows more, feels more, and does more than happiness could dream of doing in a month of Sundays.
Happiness feels good when it comes, but Love? It'll tear you apart, build you up, and make you a whole being, even when you think there's nothing left, and that's the fantastic trick of being alive.
----------------------------
PS. I am not, of course, discounting the positive experiences people have had with positive affirmations. I know people for whom they have worked quite well. The fact is, though, that the opposite is also true for some, and I mentioned them in the above piece to validate those experiences and let people know that it is not some kind of innate failure of the spirit that this negative outcome happened for them.
I suppose you could argue that I am lying, what with my praising the glory that is my SAD lamp, but you would be wrong. There is a difference between no longer wanting to off yourself and feeling happy. There are myriad emotions on the other side of suicidal ideation, and only a narrow spectrum of those are about happiness.
There is a lot of talk now about happiness and how to find it, but I'm less and less inclined to buy what they're selling. We each define our sense of happiness differently, so a seller can say HAPPINESS, and we will each come up with our own product description. Most often, they're only selling us our own assumptions about a transient emotion.
Positive affirmations, a mainstay of the happiness-seeking self-help complex, have always made me feel like absolute shite. It is what they appear to do to a large number of us, (and Danielle LaPorte has interesting things to say about that). [Edited to add: you can find a study that supports the sometimes negative effects of positive affirmations here with a paid membership.]
I think positive affirmations can sometimes wound rather than heal because they act like a question in our brains rather than a statement of belief. Our brains automatically fill in their kneejerk responses, which are often the very opposite of the positive affirmation's goal.
What the positive affirmation says:
You are beautiful, and the world wants your dreams to come true.
What our brain hears:
Am I beautiful? Does the world care about me?
What our brain says in response:
I am a sub-par shit-pile and the world is, at best, ambivalent about my existence.
What I need is practical takeaway. Rather than tell myself I am beautiful — especially when that is something I am not even particularly interested in believing as a grossly oversimplified statement about a complex and far-reaching attribute — it is much more effective to go out and do something beautiful, give to the world.
The universe is both within and without us, and your brain, a finite and rather touchy instrument, is not always the best interpreter of the state of things.
Act outwardly rather than retreat inwardly. If you find affirmations triggering, this'll get you further any day.
I quit drinking two years and three months ago, and my worst struggles have all happened while I was looking for happiness over interestingness, happiness over knowledge, happiness over diversity of thought and feeling.
I had lazily equated loving my life with being happy, when what's true about love is not happiness but love itself. What's true about love is that it exists quite aside from happiness. Love is indivisible.
I loved an ex even as he made me feel lonely, I loved my grandmother even as I grieved her death, and I love writing even when I growl audibly over fussy sentences.
We do not have to see beauty in the mirror to love ourselves. We don't have to believe the world wants anything in particular for us, good or bad. Love happens anyway.
Happiness? It'll fail you every time. It is transient.
I don't know how to describe the steps to love. I'm feeling for them with my feet as I speak. How to get there is the greatest ongoing question of human existence. I do know, though, that it is here, greater than happiness and much more interesting. Love knows more, feels more, and does more than happiness could dream of doing in a month of Sundays.
Happiness feels good when it comes, but Love? It'll tear you apart, build you up, and make you a whole being, even when you think there's nothing left, and that's the fantastic trick of being alive.
----------------------------
PS. I am not, of course, discounting the positive experiences people have had with positive affirmations. I know people for whom they have worked quite well. The fact is, though, that the opposite is also true for some, and I mentioned them in the above piece to validate those experiences and let people know that it is not some kind of innate failure of the spirit that this negative outcome happened for them.
categorized in health and tagged in affirmation, happiness, happy, inspiration, inspirational, love, positive affirmation, self-help
health and tagged in affirmation, happiness, happy, inspiration, inspirational, love, positive affirmation, self-help 
Reader Comments (15)
I am thankful I'm alive every day. Although even the stress of having to stay alive can sometimes cause anxiety to me. As in, I'd probably be okay with death but I know if I die my children, etc. will be heartbroken, so I have to live. Maybe this sounds worse out loud than it does in my heaed?
Also, about happiness... it's so hard to fall into a depression when everyone! on! the! internet! is so happy and going to Disney every week and living their dream life and working the dream job and lalalala. Meanwhile, I'm like... f*ck. I lost my job, I gained weight, my best friends live far away from me, I am in a funk. Where is my happy? And I can't blog as honestly as I would like because so many family members read my blog. So I'll just comment my frustrations here, and thank you for this beautifully written post.
Thanks for being so damn articulate. Also, get out of my brain.
I'm a person who, when I first started working with positive affirmations, literally felt my body's powerful response of appreciation and excitement to my spoken-aloud sentence "I love my body." That was more than 25 years ago, and I've been testing and using affirmations ever since.
You know, people like to poo-pooh the use of them. "Oh, that's just lying to yourself" and "She thinks if she wants something she doesn't have to work for it, all she has to do is wish for it." And so on, a sort of scornful cynicism that dismisses something without examining it closely at all, and certainly not actually giving the method a college try.
These kinds of statements usually come from people who haven't looked too deeply at how positive affirmations are efficiently used, or at how or why they do (and sometimes don't seem to) work. And from people who haven't consistently tested them over time, or used them for long. I wouldn't suggest affirmations are a magic wand by a far stretch—hell no, they are not—but I do think they are as good a tool as any for making conscious adjustments in our lives and in our ways of thinking about ourselves and our experiences.
We go around thinking all the time, no matter what we are doing. So why not choose our thoughts wisely, in ways that may benefit us instead of drag us down? It seems like a no-brainer, to me.
And yes, when you first replace a negative thought like "I'm old and ugly" with a positive one like "I love what I see in the mirror," your mind does throw up every thought it can that "proves" the new statement is a cruel softheaded lie. However, when you are persistent and keep using the affirmation, eventually the old "ugly" belief withers and dies and you find yourself loving what you see in the mirror. This does take time and dedication. It doesn't happen overnight. But it's worth it, because your body (okay, speaking for myself and my body) does respond.
That's my experience over 25 years or more. I am still learning, and I'm not suggesting it's made my life all feather pillows and rainbows. There is no method of self-discovery or therapy that can promise that, is there?
Yeah, the older I get the more I feel happiness is over-rated. I don't kick it to the curb if it comes calling, but I also know it's fleeting and impossible to sustain. Not unlike most emotions if you think about it. And I've also found most emotions don't come one at a time but often jumbled up together...joy and sadness, anger and hope. For my money give me the fleeting taste of joy and love.
When it comes to affirmations I've sort of used them in the past as a kind of way to fake it 'til you make it. Don't use them much anymore mainly because I find I'm not that interested in fixing what I used to feel was wrong with me. More interested in asking myself does it matter? Are these things that I feel are wrong with me keeping me from living my life? Surprisingly the answer is often ummm....not really. But that's just me....maybe?
Stubblejumpin Gal, I never said a negative response to positive affirmations was the only response, and I've known people that positive affirmations worked for, but they do not work for everyone. A case study in the journal Psychological Science confirms my experience (you need a paid member login to search for and see the study).
I'm glad they worked for you, but my criticism of them does not come from a place of cynicism or lack of trying or not having looked too deeply.
I think it's extremely important to validate the experiences of those who they didn't work for, because a 100% effectiveness rate is obviously not possible, and we are often made to feel as though it is we who are at fault for our negative experience with positive affirmations. It's not always the case that we are at fault for a negative outcome.
It's okay that it doesn't work for some, because there is always another way, and blaming the individuals for whom affirmations didn't work for not trying long enough or hard enough isn't helpful.
I'm torn between not feeling like I can summon up a comment equal to this post and not wanting to just register my presence and admiration. And now I have typed and erased and typed and erased, and my skin doesn't fit today so I am just going to register those aforesaid things and go back home.
Allison, yay! Comments are my gold doubloons :)
"I think positive affirmations can sometimes wound rather than heal because they act like a question in our brains rather than a statement of belief. Our brains automatically fill in their kneejerk responses, which are often the very opposite of the positive affirmation's goal."
I get this. My default is self-doubt, so when I'm in a particularly low place, affirmations either make me automatically question the statement's validity (in reference to my worth) or I simply disqualify the positive and come up with reasons why it can't be true. I'm my own self-esteem's debate team rival.
But, I think a lot of it has to do with our perspective at the time. Like you said, the brain isn't the best interpreter of things and so positive affirmations may "work" one day, and not the next. I think that is also why happiness is transient.
A constant state of happiness is such bull shit anyway. It is that: a state. It has a changeable nature.
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Schmutzie, I apologize if it seemed I was "blaming" anyone for whom the committed practice of positive affirmations hasn't had the effect they hoped. You seem to be saying there are those who have used them for a long time, consistently and correctly, and not noticed any (or enough) lasting change. That's a different thing than making a dismissive intellectual judgment without basing it on sufficient practical application (and unfortunately that's often what I see; I am not talking about you, here). And of course there is nothing that works for everyone all the time; that goes without saying.
What I get from use of affirmations changes as I repeat the same few meaningful statements over months or even a year or more; they cause things to come up that I thought I'd already dealt with, or that I didn't know were there, or would have denied existed in me. It's not anything fast-acting, usually, and by itself it doesn't solve anything. For me, with dedicated effort, affirmations are eye-opening as well as hope-giving. It's a neverending practice though. It's not "I'm fixed, now my life is perfect," and I agree that anyone who preaches that affirmations alone are the efficient healing ointment for every unhappiness is deluded.
Has the use of affirmations made me happier? I don't know about that; but affirmations have seeded personal change and helped me maintain it. That's their value for me.
I heard a speaker once who said that "happiness," "joy" and "pleasure" were all different things. I wrote about it here: http://www.chookooloonks.com/blog/2009/10/30/on-joy-happiness-and-pleasure.html and I said, in part:
Happiness is a favourable condition caused by an outside circumstance. You feel Happy when something good happens to you.
Pleasure, he said, is really more of a fulfillment of a corporal desire. You derive Pleasure from things like a good glass of wine, for example. Or a delicious rich chocolate.
But Joy, he said, Joy was something entirely different. He described it as something that can only be understood by experience. Joy, he believes, is deeper, stronger and cleaner than either Happiness or Pleasure. He believes true Joy is something which finds us; we don't find Joy.
Nonetheless, he said, there were two ways to make it easier for Joy to find us:
1. To be joyful, we need to do what we were meant to do. He describes this as fulfilling the "extraordinary dream." He believes we were each hardwired to do something in a way that no one else can do it, and that "when we find it, it will absolutely light us up." He stressed that this didn't necessarily mean that we should all make a living doing this; however, we should definitely carve time to do it as often as possible.
And the second way:
2. ... he believes that there is a unique joy in helping fellow human beings move up the fence post. We are joyful when we can help others succeed.
And finally, one of my favourite parts of his speech: "Whoever said 'money can't buy happiness' was broke. Of course it can buy Happiness. What it can't buy, is Joy."
I would add a third way that joy happens: it happens from gratitude. I believe that those two things are inextricable, and that by creating a practice of gratitude (which, maybe affirmations are a part of that, maybe they aren't), you can't help but cultivate a joyful life.
And personally, one of the things I'm most grateful about in my life is love. And in that way, love and joy are connected.
My $0.02, which in this economy, doesn't by a lot. ;)
K.
Karen, I love your talking about joy and its connection to gratitude, because I wanted to write about joy and gratitude, but I'm trying to avoid writing a book at the moment and stuck with what I wrote :)
I think you're $0.02 are spot on.
Nothing insightful to add, right now, but I love this. Love it. And you, but you knew that already.
"I loved an ex even as he made me feel lonely, I loved my grandmother even as I grieved her death, and I love writing even when I growl audibly over fussy sentences."
How did you manage to be right inside of my head? Oh, nevermind, you weren't. You're in your head - we just happen to have similar thoughts. May I double-down on this and say that I'm still loving an ex who has made me feel lonely and love to write even though it sometimes is the most difficult thing I do.
I've had friends send me all sorts of 'happiness' books and links and tweets and I keep saying that I am happy - just not the way they are. That's the personal affirmation I should have tattooed somewhere. :)
Thank you for such a beautifully written post.
Positive affirmationy-type of things have a similar effect on me. It's not that I'm anti-positivity, just that I always feel like they're trying to get me to lie to myself. I really enjoyed reading this.