“Why do we have experiences that too much happiness is followed by doom?”
Hannah writes: “Thank you for your answer last week about the part that doesn’t want another part to be too happy. I do wonder: why do we have experiences like this — that too much happiness may be followed by doom, meaning the happiness was a deception?”
Dear Hannah,
Well, happiness is going to be followed by something. Fabulous, OK, bad, horrible — something will happen. And if we have a part that is afraid happiness will be followed by doom, then that part of us will only notice and remember the times when happiness IS followed by doom.
A “part” (Barbara McGavin and I also call it a “partial-self”) is a habitual reaction sequence that has emerged around a stoppage. It’s trying to solve a problem of your life-energy being stopped, but it doesn’t have the full resources of your Self. It has a narrow view. It cannot see — literally — experiences that contradict what it believes.
An example: I recently started a Focusing session with the statement that my father never hugged me and never held me. This felt connected to a deep sense of loneliness. It seemed obvious that the feeling of loneliness was connected to my father never holding me. He had been cold and distant. I knew that his distance was connected to his own pain but it still hurt.
In the Focusing session, I spent time sensing and being with the part of me experiencing the loneliness. As that inner relationship deepened, I began to feel a relaxing and a softening in my body. That lonely part of me was beginning to experience what it had been missing — like something that had been frozen beginning to flow again.
And suddenly I had a memory of my father holding me! And then another! There was a whole series of memories of times my father connected warmly with me, including memories of photographs that showed me as a baby happily on his lap. These were not new memories! But to a part of me, they were inconceivable — until something shifted.
A part that is capable of bending perceptions like that would also be capable of giving us lots of memories of times when happiness is followed by doom, and suppressing memories of times when there was happiness and no doom.
Magical ‘thinking’ with emotional states
When life feels unpredictable and out of control, we look for ways to try to get a bit of control. A child with a sick mother walking home from school thinks, “If I don’t step on any cracks in the sidewalk, then my mother will be well when I get home.”
The idea that our emotional states, good and bad, have some connection with whether good or bad things happen to us, is this type of magical thinking. When our beliefs are strong enough, we can even create the outcomes we expect… but not with our emotions, rather by the actions we do and don’t take.
My friend, the German author Mike Hellwig, points out that “positive thinking,” when it is done to try to control reality, is like a devastating addiction. We tie ourselves into knots and betray our own feelings in a vain attempt to control what is uncontrollable. (Look for Mike’s book, Wie wir uns vom positiven Denken heilen, forthcoming in April from Herder in Germany.)
What I love about Focusing is that I get to accept and make space for ALL my emotions and feelings. I don’t have to be afraid that either negative emotions or positive ones will lead me to bad outcomes. (But if a part of me is afraid of that, there is room for it to be there too!) As I keep company with and listen to all my partial-selves and their emotions, I can feel myself getting bigger, calmer, and wiser. I have access to my full resources. I can deal with what needs my attention. It’s not a guarantee that only good will happen. It’s a guarantee that whatever happens, I’ll meet it with my full, resourceful Self.
