Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert

Author:Paul Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626250635
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2014-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

Fear of Happiness

We also know that some people are anxious about having any positive feelings at all and even fear being happy. There can be a puritan taboo surrounding pleasure that derives from feelings of fear and guilt. Many books now focus on how to be happy, but few of us have really thought about the fact that many people are surprisingly frightened of happiness. Once again, it is Paul’s patients who have been his best teachers, and he simply turned some of the fears of happiness they talked about into questions to see how common these fears are and how they relate to states like depression. In the course of the research previously mentioned, we asked people how much they agreed with statements like “I am frightened to let myself become too happy”; “I worry that if I feel good, something bad may happen”; “I feel I don’t deserve to be happy.”

When we did the study with students, we were surprised to find that this fear was very highly associated with depression, anxiety, and stress. In other words, people who are vulnerable to depression may well have fears of happiness; they struggle to allow themselves to feel happiness, and when they do feel it, they can become anxious. One of Paul’s patients noted that “It’s when I feel happy and think things are going well that ideas come into my mind about what would happen if my husband or one of my children died or something went wrong. When I am depressed, I don’t think about these things so much.” Happiness reminded her of life’s fragilities.

Feeling undeserving of happiness can be common to and can arise in families where a parent is ill. Karen’s mother was divorced and had a number of physical conditions, which meant she couldn’t get out much. When Karen was a teenager she recalls “never really feeling okay with going out and having fun because I would always be worrying if Mum was okay and feeling guilty that I was out having fun and had left her at home alone.”

Mindful compassion allows us to acknowledge these thoughts without blaming and shaming, to see them as understandable and often linked to social backgrounds in which life was difficult and happiness fairly short lived. In these cases we are living with the programming of our pasts. It’s not surprising then that people stay depressed if they are constantly blocking off their ability to experience positive feelings, and it’s not surprising that eventually their positive feeling systems will take a nose dive.

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