Do you ever look at people running around enjoying life and wonder what you’re missing? Sometimes I thought I must be a terrible person. A lot has happened, but I’m still not happy. I ask myself if there is something wrong with me. am i a narcissist?
Then sometimes I decided that I was just going to be happy. I just pretended it until I succeeded and accepted that it was me. But it didn’t take long for me to become very depressed.
I always had a little dark hole that pulled me in, but I didn’t have the energy to keep ignoring it. When I tried to do so, the screams got louder and I got really confused. Of course, this reminded me that I must be crazy, which made me feel even worse.
As I progressed through my healing journey, I realized there were three main reasons why strength alone wasn’t enough to make me happy. We need to overcome these three obstacles to go from simply surviving and having happy moments to thriving and living a life full of joy and inspiration. Love yourself and what you do and live a life that gives you hope for the future.
Life is never perfect, but it sure is much more fun and enjoyable when we love, enjoy and fully experience the moment we are in.
So what are these obstacles, and what strategies can be used to overcome them?
1. Validate past experience
If we don’t fully examine and process past painful experiences, the energy of those experiences becomes trapped and trapped in our bodies.
Consistent and continuous emotional energy is required to keep the walls high around those experiences and to keep the energy contained within them. Inner energies and emotions are deep and strong, and in order to keep these emotions out of our consciousness, we cannot allow ourselves to experience deep and strong emotions, even good ones. you can’t.
When you remove these barriers and allow yourself to grieve all the deep and strong feelings you have inside, you release your emotional energy and also feel deep and strong happy feelings.
For me, this meant feeling and dealing with the sexual abuse I suffered as a child.
For years I have told myself that I am fine and that happens to almost everyone. I tried to minimize my experience and leave it in the past. The walls I built to keep all the sadness and pain of those experiences away from my conscious everyday awareness drained me and prevented me from feeling life in real time. I was guarded and didn’t have much access to my emotions.
No one wants to go back and live with the pain of the past, but I have found that doing grief work with a therapist allows me to truly let go of the pain and live in the present.
2. Let go of the need for control
When you’ve been hurt in the past, it’s normal to want to live a life that will never hurt you again. We create a sense of security by ensuring our lives are as predictable as possible. Whenever someone in our circle acts out of our control, we let them “get back in line” so we can feel safe.
For example, if your partner didn’t text you back right away, you might get mad and lash out at how rude their behavior is. If your kids don’t seem as concerned about their grades as you think they are, you might panic and shame them by saying they’ll be working at fast food restaurants for the rest of their lives. yeah. We want everyone to feel comfortable, safe and predictable in our world by doing what we think we ‘should’ do.
Zoom out and see this scenario…can it get any more boring? No wonder it’s impossible to feel true joy and happiness. Joy and happiness come from the ability to be spontaneous, light, free and unpredictable.
I think a lot of people confuse security with happiness. Always looking for safety keeps us in survival mode. Knowing yourself safe no matter what happens allows you to step out of survival and into a higher consciousness that brings joy, joy and happiness.
It is true that many of us carry very serious pain from our past, and we hope that by trying to arrange a life in which we have complete control, we will not feel that pain again. is perfectly normal. This is an unconscious decision we make to protect ourselves.
Choose to make a conscious decision to let go of control. Trust that you have all the resources within you to make you feel safe, no matter what happens. Release the need to control and you will be able to feel joy, pleasure and enjoyment again.
This was difficult for me and took a long time to integrate. Because of my abusive childhood, I overcompensated for my worthlessness and insecurity with my drive for success and perfectionism to control how others viewed me.
If my co-workers weren’t working hard, I would stay late and work the weekends to make sure the work was done and well done. If her husband doesn’t spend time with me or plan dates, I plan dates, put all bookings in her husband’s name, and he is me and me. We made it look like we were investing in our relationship. If my kids weren’t interested in wearing clothes that I thought would make my family look perfect, I would bribe them with candy so we could look better and stay together as a family. .
I thought that me and my family seemingly together meant that we would be together and therefore happy. No, this is not far from the truth and has actually moved not only me, but everyone in the family system in the opposite direction.
No one likes to be manipulated, and we feel it even if we can’t pinpoint exactly what’s going on. To be honest, I was feeling a bit of an identity crisis when I let go of how I wanted my life to look and embraced living and feeling life in real time. All I can say is that since I let go of control, life has been more peaceful and joyful than I thought.
3. Looking for Happiness
We always find what we are looking for. There’s a reason people keep hearing words of appreciation. When we look for the things we are grateful for, the things we enjoy, and the things we love, we create more of those things in our lives. We begin to realize how much joy and happiness we already have.
We are so conditioned to see and experience everything that goes wrong that we often completely overlook the good that surrounds us.
This third step is caused by not completing the first two steps. When we have not validated past painful experiences, we seek validation of all present painful experiences.
Those experiences seem to haunt us until we take the time to look back. They cloud our ability to see the happiness that is already around us. We cannot experience the innocence and joy of children. We also can’t accept the love and connection our friends are trying to instill in us, or appreciate all the great things that are going well at work.
When we get bogged down in our need for control, we don’t look for all the joys and joys that life already has, but for all future consequences that help us stay safe. I don’t have enough bandwidth to do both at least at once. For example, if we spend our time unconsciously looking for ways for someone to hurt us or abandon us, we will not have energy left in our relationships to seek pleasure and enjoyment.
One day I had a choice. I decided I was sick of being tired, frustrated, and miserable. I knew it would take time for my situation to change, but that didn’t mean I had to feel stuck, isolated, frustrated, and alone.
I made a difficult choice to find happiness. At first, I wrote in my journal what made me happy, but over time it became more subconscious than conscious. It also helped to discuss this with a good friend, and we challenged each other to find happiness.
I still struggle sometimes. If you’re not careful, this is the first thing you’ll ski. I start going back to old patterns of looking for how life is messing me up. We know that self-care as often as possible keeps us feeling happy.
If enough is enough and you’re ready to move on from feeling like you’re just surviving life, follow these three strategies for overcoming obstacles to joy.
First, start journaling about past experiences and processing your emotions. Depending on your previous experience, we recommend that you have this step done by a professional.
Then identify how much control you have over your life and the people around you, and see where you can loosen the reins a little.
I can hear you talking back to me. “But if you let me go, everything will fall apart!” You don’t want a partner or child who lives just to satisfy you and make you “happy.” Let life get a little confusing. They (and you) will be much happier if they allow themselves to make mistakes and make connections out of pure love and respect, rather than fear of failure and mistakes.
The last method is very simple. Start looking for joy. Be curious when you find joy difficult or upsetting. In many cases, turning things around is just a choice. Change your subconscious conditioning from looking for what’s going wrong to looking for what’s working.
These three steps will help you attract the people and experiences that bring you everything you’re looking for.
Before you know it, the pain of the past becomes a distant memory and no longer affects your daily life. Instead, you will feel the freedom and joy of being able to live life in the present moment, resetting your assumptions to look for the good, rather than predicting the outcome in your head. life wherever you go.
This is what it takes to be one of those “those” who just seem happy and full of life. Which strategy would you try first?
