An article in the Huffington Post carried the title listed above. I read a lot of advice from the advice gurus. To them, it seems so simple. Your mind can will itself to accomplish what you need to accomplish by employing platitudes like "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". "Overcome your fear of failure and fear of what others think." "Be resilient." "Get out there and do it." News flash. It was not that easy for me, and the data suggests its not that easy for others.
I have a regular conversation with my sons about happiness. It’s not an easy conversation for me to have because I spent many years looking for it, without much success. And what I found was transient. It came and it went. I tried lots of things in my life. I sang, a lot. I played sports, a lot of them. I was an academic success (one who found you could get a good reputation for academics without tackling the truly tough coursework). I flew an airplane, climbed a mountain, scuba dived and skied double diamond terrain and moguls. I hiked, camped and fished. Now I realize I was searching for something—acceptance. Three marriages later, I still have not found it, but I am getting closer. My children have a better chance at finding it at a younger age and benefit for a lot longer than I have.
Growing up in a trauma-transmitting household changes a part of you that makes it difficult to seek true inner happiness. I was always seeking approval and praise. That’s what excited my brain and made it feel better—for a little while. As Dr. Vincent Felitti said in his lecture in Juneau last week, “In plain-speak, it’s hard to get enough of something that almost works. ... Maybe the next mouthful, maybe the next drink, the next cigarette, the next woman, the next man, the next dose of whatever I buy on the street, and if not, surely the one after that.”
I add praise as a drug that works, as well as exercise. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins are the happy brain chemicals, and when the brain finds a reason to increase them in a trauma-filled child or adult, it seeks the behaviors that generate the chemicals.
This is the reason I don’t believe in the current foundation for resilience. If you believe that there are positive, neutral and negative stimuli for the brain, then the positive stimuli are those that make you look good and earn you enough approval to stimulate production of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. Neutral behaviors are those we have no judgments for such as mild gambling, social drinking and casual dating. Negative behaviors are those that society doesn’t like, some of them listed in the quote by Dr. Felitti above.
Why did I write this? If we accept simplistic explanations for our problems, we do not put ourselves in a position to resolve them. And not all guru advice works for the traumatized. Our behaviors come from possibly decades of exposure, and that exposure can’t be overcome with a few simple words (unless they are words spoken by a clinical hypnotist, an EMDR practitioner or an EFT session). We need to recognize our trauma and formulate a strategy to address it. It's not as simple as the article makes it out to be.
Happy healing.
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