Helen and I have some new episodes of the How to Hold a Grudge podcast to record for Season 3, which is starting in November. What better setting in which to grill her about the thorny issue of We Make Ourselves Happy versus Other People Make Us Happy?
Episode 9 of Season 3 is called ‘Against My Better Grudgement’. This is the blurb I drafted for it, long before I set myself the task of solving the happiness mystery:
Being judgemental is bad, we tend to think, but using our judgement is essential. So how do we distinguish between good judging and bad judging? Having a lower opinion of some people than others has to be okay, surely, even if one’s aim and wish is to be all-forgiving and grudge-free. Sophie and Helen discuss the ways in which our own ethics and opinions in relation to infidelity and meat-eating, among other things, can influence how lenient/empathetic we’re able to be where those issues are involved.
Over dinner, once we’ve finished recording, Helen reminds me that we discussed the matter of whether we’re solely responsible for our own feelings of happiness or unhappiness in Season 1 of the podcast. She is as unequivocal on this issue now as she was then.
Helen: I don’t agree with anyone who says that our thoughts are solely responsible for creating our feelings. Human beings are social animals. We have relationships with other humans, and the way they treat us is obviously going to affect us emotionally. And sometimes people treat us badly – they just do. And when they do, it can harm our psychological recovery to believe that it was our own thoughts, rather than them, that harmed us.
Me: Though we probably would suffer less, overall, if we loved everyone in the world no matter what, and decided that whatever anyone did was totally fine.
Helen: But it isn’t.
Me: I agree. I don’t think it is either. Some things people do make me unhappy, and I don’t like some people as much as others – and Brooke does say that we might sometimes choose to feel sad or angry. The important thing, she says, is to realise that only our thoughts, and never the words or actions of others, create our feelings. I think that’s probably completely true. I’m choosing to think some things are grudge-worthy, and I like my choice and its results, but … it is a choice based on my thoughts.
Helen: I don’t think it’s true that we can always choose what to think – though obviously we can work on changing our thoughts. But in the moment, especially if someone treats us shockingly badly, we have spontaneous thoughts and feelings that arise in response to what others do and say to us. And we always will! And … should we necessarily try to brainwash ourselves out of our original thoughts?
Me: No, not if we don’t want to. And if we don’t want to, then that’s our thought, isn’t it? It’s our voluntary, deliberate thought – which is fine.
Helen: But Brooke seems to want to claim that it’s all within our power, and it isn’t. We are transactional beings, and we are affected by other people. It’s not all about us and always within our control to create our experience. Some thoughts we can’t change, no matter how much inner work we do – and then we might end up feeling like our suffering really is our fault. The American life-coach approach feels much too close to gaslighting. Imagine if someone has been really cruelly treated by someone else and then a life coach tells them that the person who’s been awful to them hasn’t caused their suffering – that only their own thoughts have caused their suffering. It absolves the truly blameworthy person of responsibility, and makes the victim feel that she’s causing her own pain.
Me: Katherine and Brooke, and possibly Lyssa too, think it’s empowering to realise that you have the freedom and power to think whatever you want – whatever’s going to benefit you most – about everything that happens in your life. I agree with that. If it matters to you to think, ‘He treated me appallingly’ and you have a good reason for thinking it, Brooke wouldn’t tell you to change your thought. She just wants everyone to be aware that they have 100 per cent of the power to decide how they want to feel about everything from now on, and to choose the thoughts that are going to create those feelings.
Helen: But, like I said, we can’t always change our thoughts and feelings. It’s too easy for Katherine’s approach, or Brooke’s, to be used by people who’ve treated others terribly to let themselves off the hook. ‘It’s not my fault you feel awful. Yes, I did say you were a worthless waste of space, but it’s not my words that hurt you. It’s the thoughts you had about my words.’ It’s a kind of victim-blaming.
Me: I see what you mean, but I don’t think it is. It’s not intended that way. It’s basically saying to people, ‘Whatever has happened and whatever others are doing, you don’t have to think of yourself as a helpless victim, and it’s always better for you if you don’t. You’ll be better off if instead you think, ‘This is what I want to believe about this situation, and here’s why, and no one but me can control how I feel.’ I’m definitely ‘all in’, as Brooke would say, up to that point. The part I struggle with is the unconditional-love-for-all-and-never-judging-others-makes-us-happier bit. When I told Katherine that I wanted to like my weird-ego friend less, she definitely thought that wasn’t ideal.
As I’m saying all this to Helen, I find myself thinking that there are problems with both of the extreme positions:
Extreme 1: accepting that other people’s terrible behaviour is the cause of our unhappiness.
Extreme 2: never judging anyone, unconditionally loving everyone, and believing that no behaviour is objectively unhappiness-creating because all circumstances (including other people’s actions and words) are inherently neutral until we have a thought about them.
I am confident that neither of these is the solution to the mystery of happiness – at least, not without caveats. The first is too disempowering. The second seems to ignore some basic facts about human nature.
Helen: It’s interesting that you never want to talk to anyone about it when they’ve upset you, though. I’m the opposite. If a good friend or someone I care about hurts me or makes me angry, I usually tell them how I’m feeling, and I’d want them to tell me. How else can you sort it out?
Me: I know. It is interesting. I think as a child I learned a lesson that … maybe isn’t true? But it’s very difficult to unlearn it now.
Helen: What lesson?
Me: That life is vastly easier and I suffer much less if I pretend to be totally fine with other people behaving in ways that I dislike and disapprove of, or that cause me pain. Like, as a child and young adult, if I’d said, ‘I think you’re behaving like a tyrannical, emotionally manipulative bully’, to people who had power over me, I’d definitely have suffered more.
Helen: Yes – and, as you say, those patterns are formed so early in our lives.
Me: Also … if the form the emotional tyranny takes is endlessly getting yelled and bellowed and sulked at for everything you’re supposedly doing wrong in every aspect of your life, and having affection and approval totally withdrawn whenever you disappoint someone just by being who you are, aren’t you more likely to turn into an adult who instinctively feels that to even hint towards a criticism of someone else’s behaviour, ever, would be a form of you bullying them?
Helen: Yes, definitely. This is somewhere where you probably could change your instinctive thoughts if you wanted to, though it might be hard. You could think, like me, that if you care about a relationship being as good and close as it can be, then you can sometimes explain to someone how you feel about something they said or did. You can do that without yelling or sulking or withholding affection. They might welcome the chance to explain what they meant.
Me: I know. You’re right. But it feels to me so controlling – and such bad manners too – to tell someone that something they did made you feel bad. I can’t imagine that ever feeling like anything apart from ‘Please dance to my tune and behave in ways I prefer in future’. But then I know from listening to Brooke’s podcast that withholding my true feelings about the person or the situation is just a different kind of controlling behaviour – one in which I retain all the control because they don’t know there’s a situation and so can’t respond to what’s truly going on.
Helen: Yeah, which is less honest. I prefer to be as honest as possible.
Me: God, I don’t. Not about my feelings. But maybe I should try it just once – total honesty, with either the weird-ego friend or the totally uninterested friend.
One of Brooke Castillo’s favourite sayings pops into my mind: if you don’t know what to do, just do something.
She’s right. What if I’ve been going about this the wrong way, trying to find a theory that works for me 100 per cent? What if searching for the solution to the mystery of happiness isn’t about working out a perfect theory? What if, instead, it’s about doing more rather than thinking and philosophising?
I know what this means. Or at least, I know what I’m choosing to think it means.