A reader commented that in last week’s essay, I failed to consider how events could affect our happiness. I thought I did when I said that things (and thus events) can’t make us happy (or sad), but I will expound on that today.
When we are young, we tend to notice a pattern; events happen and we respond, either positively or negatively. When we experience that over and over, as we do as children, we tend to link the two, that is, the event that happened caused our response.
However, if we take the time to reflect on that situation, we will see that the event didn’t cause our response at all. Sure, it may have contributed to our response, but it didn’t cause it.
Perhaps an example will clarify my point. Let’s take three people, Mary, Jane and John. Let’s say Mary is a dog lover, Jane is totally indifferent to dogs, and John is deathly afraid of dogs. If those three are sitting outside and the neighbor’s German Shepard gets loose, I think you’ll agree that there will be three different responses.
The question is, did the dog cause the response? The answer, of course is no, because how could the dog cause three different responses? Well if the dog didn’t cause the responses, what did? I hope you see that it was each individual’s beliefs about dogs that triggered the different responses.
Each of us carries beliefs about a multitude of subjects that we have picked up on life’s journey. Some of those beliefs we formed after giving the subject matter careful thought, but a good number of them we formed unconsciously.
Now it seems logical that the beliefs we consciously chose would be stronger than the ones we picked up without conscious thought, but that’s not the case. Many of the beliefs we formed on a subconscious level are just as strong as and sometimes even stronger than some of those we consciously chose.
This is a long-winded way of saying that it’s not the events of our lives that make us happy, sad, angry, depressed, lonely etc. Rather it is our interpretation, our beliefs about those events that cause us to feel the way we do.
Victor Frankel called this the final freedom, the ability to choose how we feel about, and respond to, the events in our life. He should know. He was a psychiatrist who spent the war years in a Nazi concentration camp and chronicled his ordeal in Man’s Search for Meaning.
If something bad befalls us, Frankel doesn’t suggest that we should feel happy about that event. He says that we should feel appropriate to the event, and not add on a whole bunch negativity that will not help us in our ability to deal with the situation in a rational manner.
In the end, it is difficult if not impossible to change the way we feel about a thing without first changing our beliefs about it. Of course that is easier said than done, and is one of the reasons psychologists and psychiatrists remain employed.