The radical grain #2

A client realized, to the best of his memory, that he has never been happy, only distracted. This was a cosmic understanding. He couldn’t remember, childhood on, any moment of good feeling that wasn’t either a self-medication (Little League, playing with a pet, masturbation, watching television, hanging out with a friend, playing a musical instrument, looking in the mirror, high school hijinks, college, job, ad infinitum) or a positive chemical feeling which a deeper fundamental anxiety would seep through and discolor.

It would be hateful if this were common, but we don’t know. People say and believe “happiness” in many situations because it’s preferable.

If everything is self-medication, there must have been some original or very early injury: pre-natal insult, birth trauma, the flawed mother-child bond that can implant personality disorder, neglect, religious indoctrination, child abuse. The point here is theory: If there is unresolved, unpurged early injury pain that causes the heart and soul to suffer, and if the heart and soul are prepotent, wouldn’t every voluntary, and much involuntary, behavior be the avoidance of that pain? Avoidance is not happiness.

Is there a reason to differentiate actual happiness from all the self-soothing and -diverting behaviors people do? I think so, especially if we are like my client. We all want to feel good (with the fine print that for some people, that means feeling bad, as in self-mutilation or a globally cynical attitude). What if we pursue this good, and reach it sometimes, but are aware that the feeling is polluted or sabotaged or just not very bright? Would we want to believe that for some reason we can’t own true happiness, or that we may still have good feeling, but it is necessarily discolored or self-medicative, and that there is no word for it?

Many people can’t accept a compliment. To feel good, proud, would feel worse. Many others cry tears in joy. There is something going on there, some undertow from the past that failed to win. But it is there, and it changes our color.