An idea that floats around many spiritual circles is that happiness is a choice you can make. That, in any moment, you can choose to be happy, and thus, any unhappiness is entirely your responsibility. I think most sensible people can immediately see the absurdity of this maxim of toxic positivity, but like many clichés, there is some truth to it. The fact is, it is possible to “choose happiness,” but it’s not as easy as the glib tone of the trite sentiment makes it sound. For most of us, especially those of us with pronounced mental health issues, it takes a lot of work to get there.
Before getting into this, I want to get three things out of the way. Important things that are often ignored by the “just choose happiness” crowd.
First: Medication is necessary for some of us. I personally have three psychiatric drugs I have to take daily to maintain some stability and focus, and a fourth for when anxiety gets particularly overwhelming. It’s a simple fact that some of us have brains wired in ways that will make happiness inaccessible without pharmaceutical assistance. Any component of “choosing happiness” for us will include finding the right medicines or combination of medicines. Now, most people only need medication temporarily. For example, when a life event brings on overwhelming sadness or grief that deepens into depression, they may need some help jump-starting the atrophied neurons that need to regrow to make happiness a possibility again. But others of us, such as myself, will probably need the medication the rest of our lives.
Second: Therapy is necessary for some of us. So many of us, probably most of us, have had some kind of trauma in our lives. We’ve had some painful experiences, emotional or physical, that overwhelmed our capacity to deal with them, and that did some psychic damage. We developed responses to those situations that enabled us to survive them, but those responses have become maladaptive and are no longer necessary now that the danger has passed. We will need to work through these traumas, these painful backgrounds, before any “choice” can be made for lasting happiness. Indeed, choosing therapy and medication should count as part of what it means to choose happiness.
Third: It is disingenuous at best, but most often just plain cruel, for someone from the outside to tell a person whose material conditions are painful that they should “just choose happiness.” Telling that to an innocent person the Trump administration has kidnapped and trafficked to CECOT is reprehensible, especially if no other aid is offered. Someone whose family is starving is not someone who should be told their fear and sadness is something they can change if they just try hard enough. Yes, there are people in these terrible situations who find joy, and they can provide inspiration to others. But those of us who have never experienced such deprivation have no standing to push the idea. It is far easier for a person to get to a place where happiness can actually become a realistic choice when that person is in an environment supportive of their health, safety, and well-being.
Setting that trio of points aside, then, we take innumerable actions every day—some tiny, some major—that prevent us from being happy. That is, unhappiness is a thing we are actively doing to ourselves. The problem is we don’t know we’re doing it. We could call these little actions “choices,” but only if we also acknowledge it’s possible to make choices that you don’t even realize you’re making. Choices that you don’t even see exist as choices. I don’t want to get into a semantic argument about whether those are “choices” or not; I just want to make it clear that just because you’re taking an action that will bring suffering doesn’t mean you are doing it deliberately to bring on that suffering. In fact, with no degree of self-examination, your deeper intentions will be hidden from you.
This is where the training comes in. We learn meditation, and we start practicing introspection. At first we begin to see the way our actions, whether of thought, word, or deed, are harming us. And then we begin to realize that things we never were choices can become things we can consciously choose. Before this, we usually don’t even realize some of the choices are even possible to make. But then we lift the hood, or look at the source code, and see how the mind responds to certain situations. We may even see that we put ourselves in those situations intentionally, though the intention is an unconscious one. We will begin to see what our minds do with the raw material of experience, and we will begin to uncover the ways the mind hides what it’s doing.
To be clear, I am not victim-blaming anyone in an abusive situation. To whatever extent a person has “chosen” the situation in some sense, the entire point here is that the set of “choices” that led to that situation could not be made deliberately. In fact, most abusers hide their abusive nature until they feel safe to mete out the abuse, so it is actually impossible for most abuse survivors to make a well-informed choice; and by the time they have that information, they are sufficiently cut off from support that getting out of the situation is also extraordinarily difficult, and potentially impossible. In general, I am not referring to that which one in no way could have chosen. Again, an immigrant whom the Trump administration has kidnapped and trafficked to CECOT or some other international torture facility may have complied with all relevant laws, made all the right choices, and it is only because the majority of those who cast their ballots put a fascist regime into office that they are facing such hardship. Seeking to fault or blame a person who is in a bad situation is never going to be helpful.
With that further caveat, we may continue.
As we go through life, we experience things. Those things give rise to certain feelings. If they are good feelings, our minds will grab onto the feelings, and the thing connected to those feelings, and try to hold on. If they are bad feelings, our mind will grab onto the idea of getting away from them, and getting away from the thing connecetd to them. Either way, our minds take hold of what is happening and call it me or mine: These are my thoughts, these are my feelings, and I must do something about them. These feelings arise from our predispositions, which were set down by choices we made in the past. What we do with them in the present, what choices we make now, will affect the terrain of habituation in the future.
This lays things out in the simplest possible way, but there’s almost alwasy more complexit. To give a personal example, I get some degree of emotional satisfaction from ordering food for delivery and overeating. The physical feeling is always painful; I feel bloated and lethargic. The consequences are always negative; it is expensive, and any plans I had to read, write, or meditate later are shot. Despite this, the habit-energy is still there. My mind reaches for the thing it thinks will make it happy, and I have to work with that craving. In fact, most of the time, what I actually need is rest and not to read or write more, and my mind is trying to force rest on me. Also, the deficiencies in my endogenous neural reward circuits don’t help with this!
So the real question, once we get to a place we can even ask it, is: Why do we keep going back to those things, those situations, that we know will cause suffering? What draws us there? What is the allure? Once we understand that, we can really start to free ourselves from that pressure that pushes us to hurt ourselves.
As I mentioned above, some of it may be the result of trauma that has distorted our ability to properly discern what is best for us. This is because our brains created patterns of behavior that were the best we could do for ourselves at the time we were having the traumatic experience. Those patterns helped us well, helped us survive; but once we are safe, their persistence becomes a problem. Hypervigilance, mistrust, leading to self-sabotage…these trauma responses are real problems that prevent us from happiness. They prevent us from being able to choose happiness. And they are things we will need to work through, probably with the help of a professional therapist.
The good news is, as we work through these issues, those things we were not aware were choices are things we become aware of as choices. And those things we were aware were choices, but could not get ourselves to consistently choose better, start to come under our control. We start to be able to let go of things when they come up. We stop putting ourselves in situations when they will come up. Then, eventually, we stop picking up the thoughts and moods when they come up, and just let them be. And, finally, they stop coming at all.
So can you choose happiness? Yes, sort of, but for most of us, only after a lot of work on ourselves.
I will close with a poem by Portia Nelson:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE SHORT CHAPTERS
I
I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost...I am hopeless. It isn't my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.
II
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place. But it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.
III
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in...it's a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. IV I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.
V
I walk down another street.
I'm only going to reflect on the first part. Right now, for me, being happy seems tricky. Because even if I'm not unhappy, opening a few news stories is enough to demoralize me. When the whole world is dropping bombs on each other, I find it hard to put things into perspective. All this suffering seems to be in the air, adding to the burden we already have to bear every day. When the gurus of positivity come to bombard you with “you can choose”. Sounds tough. And it depends a lot on how you're made and how resilient you are.