Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
I have a friend who, until lately, always seemed upset about something. If he wasn’t complaining about how someone in his personal life frustrated or let him down, he’d be angry about some current event in the world. If someone asked why he was so upset, he’d usually insist that any reasonable person would be angry about what was happening, and that if the other person knew what was really going on they’d feel the same way.
Recently, my friend had a sudden shift in his perspective. He was talking to his girlfriend, and—not surprisingly—complaining about something going on in local politics. Eventually, she became fed up and rather pointedly suggested that, if he had a problem with what was going on, he should do something about it. Otherwise, if the issue didn’t mean enough to him to inspire him to act, he should forget about it.
On one level, my friend later told me, he realized the truth of his girlfriend’s words. He wasn’t accomplishing anything by bemoaning what was going on in his life or the world except making himself and others unhappy. At a deeper level, my friend had a strongly negative reaction to what she said. This was the part of him, he recognized, that was firmly attached to his habit of complaining. The reason, he realized with disturbing clarity, was that complaining made him feel smart.
Somewhere along the line, my friend saw, he’d developed the belief that people who were happy and satisfied with their lives were either ignorant or kidding themselves. After all, he thought, there are so many things in the world worth getting upset about, and anyone who isn’t angry about them must simply not be paying attention.
Because he wanted to feel and look intelligent, he adopted the habit of constantly griping about some event or problem in the world. His girlfriend’s frustration reminded him he had a choice in how he reacted to life, and armed with that knowledge he decided to change his attitude.
This story started me thinking about the wide variety of ways in which human beings get attached to being negative. Although most people wouldn’t admit to wanting to feel unhappy, many of us have adopted patterns of thinking and behavior seemingly designed to keep unhappiness in our lives. Whether we criticize ourselves, create drama in relationships, hold onto grudges, or something else, each of us seems to have a unique and long-standing strategy for holding onto our negativity.
As my friend’s example illustrates, many of us have had these habits for so long that they’ve become unconscious and automatic, and we’ve forgotten there are other possible approaches to living. When someone with a fresh perspective makes us aware of the ways we’re bringing negativity into our lives, often just having that awareness is enough to start loosening the grip our habitual patterns have on us.
In the interest of fostering this kind of awareness and change, I’ll describe several common ways of acting and thinking we use—often unconsciously—to keep unhappiness in our lives.
1. Trying To Change A Situation Through Mental Resistance. Some part of our minds seems convinced that, if we get irritated enough about a situation in our lives, we can change it for the better. The frustration we feel and express when our cars break down is a common example of this tendency. When we have a flat tire, for instance, some of us kick the tire or pound on some other part of the car, in the seeming hope that we can beat the car into submission and make it work properly again.
To most of us, it seems “normal” to react to events in our lives with annoyance, even if there’s no possibility that getting annoyed will help and all we’re doing is making more suffering for ourselves. We may even be so accustomed to behaving this way that we no longer see ourselves as having a choice, or don’t even consciously notice we’re doing it anymore. As psychologist and shaman Serge Kahili King writes in Urban Shaman, “criticism is such a subtle thing when habitual that it can race across your mind before you notice.”
Our perspective quickly changes, however, when we start observing ourselves as we’re reacting to situations we dislike. By observing yourself, I mean getting a clear idea of the sensations arising in your body as you start becoming irritated, and the behaviors you usually engage in to express that irritation.
For instance, perhaps irritation manifests for you as a sinking feeling in your chest, a tightening in your shoulders, a heat in your forehead, or something else. As for the behaviors you do when you’re irritated, perhaps you yell at people, withdraw from contact with others, clench your fists, and so on.
When we gain an understanding of how we normally tend to react, often we suddenly feel a sense of freedom in how we respond to our circumstances. Once we recognize the ways we usually behave, feel and think, we begin to become conscious of that our way of being isn’t the only possible way. Equipped with this knowledge, we can choose a more constructive and less stressful way to respond to situations we encounter in life.
2. Making An Identity Out Of Our Negativity. It seems human beings have a deep-seated need to create an identity—to incorporate certain things we do, think and have into our idea of who we are. We get feelings of security and power from thinking and saying things like “I’m a computer programmer,” “I’m a father,” “I’m a member of this or that political party,” and so on—as if programming computers, raising children and having a party membership were aspects of our being or essence, rather than just activities we do from time to time.
Sometimes, consciously or otherwise, we treat our craving for an identity as more important than our happiness. This occurs when we make an identity out of unhappy situations in our lives. For example, perhaps we get into the habit of telling ourselves and others “I have an illness,” “I lost a loved one,” “I was mistreated as a child,” and so on, and deriving a feeling of safety or uniqueness from saying these things.
We limit our growth and happiness when we treat these events as part of who we are rather than simply experiences we had. Instead of letting our pain pass away, we cling to and even celebrate it. As Buddhist teacher B. Alan Wallace sagely writes in Tibetan Buddhism From The Ground Up, “identification with depression obscures the fluctuations that are taking place from one moment to the next, replacing them instead with a sense of homogeneous continuity.”
Awareness, again, helps us end our identification with our difficult experiences. To gain awareness in this area, we need to watch ourselves for those moments when we get perverse satisfaction from telling people how unhappy we are, or how terrible past events in our lives were. These are places where we’re deriving a sense of self from our painful experiences. Simply recognizing where we’re creating an identity out of our misery helps us see that we have choice in how we define ourselves, and that we can leave behind the aspects of our identities that no longer serve us.
3. Feeling Superior For Being Unhappy. As Bertrand Russell observed in The Conquest Of Happiness, we often meet people who “are genuinely unhappy, but they are proud of their unhappiness, which they attribute to the nature of the universe and consider to be the only rational attitude for an enlightened man.”
Some of us, like the friend I discussed earlier, derive a feeling of superiority from being perpetually unhappy or dissatisfied. We might, like my friend, complain constantly because we associate negativity with intelligence. Perhaps we adopt a jaded, cynical attitude toward the world because it makes us feel well-informed and cultured. Maybe we relentlessly criticize others to feel morally righteous. And so on.
While we may get a temporary high from judging and condemning people and circumstances in our lives, this attitude ultimately holds us back. Our negativity keeps us in an unhappy, unproductive place and damages our relationships with others. When we watch ourselves carefully for places where our negativity has us feel better than other people, we take a significant step toward restoring peace and focus to our mental lives.
“If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” says a popular bumper sticker in the United States. If you aren’t angry about the current political situation, in other words, you must be uncaring or ignorant. But is this really true? Isn’t it possible to understand, and work to change, what’s going on without getting “outraged” and bringing extra suffering into your life? Just considering this kind of question can do much to free us from our habitually negative patterns of thought and action.
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