For all unhappy women - how to be happy in spite of everything - Step 4

Starting the Journey

This series is an exploration I started some time back about human beings quest for happiness. Step1 could be called the Discovery, Step 2 the Importance and Step 3 Dive into the meaning and need for happiness. Now to begin the journey.

The journey to happiness I feel, needs a two pronged approach - the first involves learning about ourselves and the second about learning how to handle painful situations and incidents.

We all feel that we know ourselves very well. But do we? We know how we feel - true. We know when we are happy, Angry, Sad, Thrilled etc. But do we know our motivations? Do we know why we feel what we feel? Why we want what we want? Rarely. When things are going well, we do not feel the need to introspect. It is only when we face deep and prolonged unhappiness that we try to understand 'why'. And that begins our journey out of the mire.

So the question then is how do we explore this very familiar being. How do we understand the reasons behind our unhappiness?

As in all explorations, the answer lies in the questioning. We start with the most obvious. Since this is about happiness, we start with "why am I unhappy". All of us, invariably, will answer this with the 'who' or 'what' is making us unhappy. The spouse, the boss, the missed promotion, not being able to buy the car and so on.

Wrong answer! Go back to the question!!

The question is 'why'. Invariably, the answer that emerges is that certain needs/wants are not being met and that is what is making us unhappy. Once we know these, the next step is to pick out the most crucial one out of these.

To be able to pin-point the most essential 'missing element' we would need to look at each one more closely. If you first feel that the most crucial one is not getting the promotion, then you need to explain to yourself why it is more important that the others.

In most cases, this exercise of trying to justify a reason (for unhappiness) weeds out some items on that list. You are likely to be left with the ones that cause most unhappiness and these are usually relationship issues and very rarely the material or social issues. Therefore the personal issues are the ones that need to be worked on for us to reach our goal of happiness. And among these personal relationships, spousal relationships top the list of unhappiness quotient.

That is why the focus here is what to do to when one is in a miserable relationship (not abusive relationships).

One of the questions that has helped me in this quest is - "what one thing will make you the happiest person on earth". This question would very likely be the other side of the coin to the first question we asked - the question about the reason for unhappiness. When you get the answer to this..... ask the same question again......and again and again. You will find that each time you will find more things that create happiness in you and with each repetition the things you come up with will become smaller and more specific.

If in the first round you thought that your husband (or wife) treating you like a queen (or king) will make you happiest, by the end of this exercise you would have isolated something small and achievable that would make you happy.

(Of course, when you reach this point you would need to affirm once again - like we did in the beginning - that this manageable piece is giving you true happiness and not just pleasure......but that's ok - by this time you're surely an expert at judging such things anyway!)

And THAT is the beginning. Here will start the road to happiness. That one small achievable thing is the thread you need to catch hold of to reach your goal of happiness.

When I went through this process, I was surprised when that small manageable thing turned out to be something I could do for myself and not something my husband had to do!!!!

More about that next time......
​