When I saw that the main characters in Inside Out were a person’s emotions I knew that I absolutely had to go see it. I wasn’t disappointed. In fact several times I was moved to tears by how familiar the experiences were, and by this hugely important, complex, and rarely-expressed message being communicated so simply and profoundly in a ‘kid’s film’.

If you’d rather not be spoilered for the movie then please do go see it before reading the rest of this post. Also do be aware that it may well tap into lots of different emotions as you’re watching it – if you’re anything like me – not just the joyful ones. As we’ll go on to see that may not be a bad thing!

The rest of this post is divided into three sections:

• Experiencing all of our emotions
• Shutting down our emotions
• How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Experiencing all of our emotions

Inside Out follows an eleven-year-old, Riley, and her emotions – Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear – as her family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco. Previously her inner world has been dominated by Joy. Joy has made it her business to ensure that Riley remains as happy as possible, building up a store of mostly joyful memories which have, in turn, shaped her personality. However, following the house-move, many of these memories become tainted by Sadness – who can’t seem to stop herself from touching them and turning them blue.

In her attempts to prevent Sadness from causing any more damage, Joy manages to get both of them ejected from the control room to the outer reaches of Riley’s inner world. This leaves Anger, Fear and Disgust in charge while Joy and Sadness try everything they can to get back before Riley runs away from her new home.

The message of the movie is that we require all of our emotions: not just the so-called positive ones. We soon realise that Joy’s tendency to ignore and suppress Sadness is actually getting in the way of them finding their way home. It seems like things work pretty badly when just one of the emotions takes charge, and much better when they all work together through being equally valued.

One of the most poignant moments in the movie is when Riley’s old imaginary friend is devastated to realise he’s lost his last chance ever to be with Riley. Joy’s attempts to cheer him up or force him to keep going fail. However, when Sadness sits with him and shows that she understands how hard it is for him, he’s able to experience his own sadness, to cry, and eventually he’s ready to move again.

The theory that kept coming back to me as I watched the movie was Emmy Van Deurzen’s compass of emotions. In this, Van Deurzen imagines the emotions on a wheel which we travel round all of the time, moving from ‘high’ feelings like joy and pride, through anger and fear to low feelings like sadness, and then up the other side through envy and hope, to joy again.

Critically, Van Deurzen argues that we need to be able to experience all of the emotions to go around the compass like this. If there are emotions which we shut down or avoid then we’re likely to get stuck in certain places. Paradoxically, as in Inside Out, if we disallow one emotion – like sadness – we’re likely to become stuck and find that we stop experiencing joy much too. If we lose the capacity to experience some of the emotions entirely – as when Sadness and Joy are lost in the film – we risk falling into depression and all of our emotions becoming shut off. This is rightly depicted as the darkest moment in Inside Out.

It may not be that we always move in the same direction on the compass, or that certain emotions always follow others. Indeed, as Inside Out shows, we can often experience seemingly opposing emotions at the same time (e.g. joy and sadness, anger and hope, fear and determination). Indeed, when the first memory comes in that reflects these kinds of mixed feelings we see that it is perhaps even more beautiful and valuable than some of the ones which reflected only one of the basic emotions on its own.

Shutting down our emotions

The problem is that, through our lives, most of us learn that certain emotions are not acceptable: either to express or – often – even to experience.

This is what moved me to tears several times during the film as I remembered moments in my own childhood and adolescence when – like Riley – I learnt that certain feelings were unacceptable. It made it even more powerful that – for me like Riley – a critical time was the sudden experience of starting a new school with strange and different rules. However, of course, these moments are different things for different people, they happen at different points in life, and they can be gradual, or sudden, or both.

The film underlines what a terrible impact such messages can have as elements of Riley’s personality – that we’ve previously enjoyed watching – turn grey and gradually disintegrate entirely when her emotions are lost. Most devastating for me was the moment when Goofball Island disappeared. Now that it wasn’t safe for Riley to experience all of her feelings there was no way that she could goof about in the way she used to as a child.

Where does this shutting down come from? We can see it on multiple levels like those I wrote about in the recent zine that I posted about here.

On the outer level our wider culture gives us strong messages about which emotions it’s okay to feel and which it isn’t. Generally in western cultures we’re encouraged to have happiness and ‘positive’ emotions and not ‘negative’ ones. The British ‘stiff upper lip’ also discourages expressions of fear. And messages also differ depending on our individual identities, with certain emotions being seen as more or less acceptable for people of certain genders, classes, ages, or nationalities, for example.

On the next level in, our communities and institutions also reinforce many of these messages. In the movie we see how, in her new school, it isn’t acceptable either for Riley either to show too much enthusiasm for the things she’s passionate about, or to show sadness about what she’s lost. The cool girls will judge her for it. It’s easy to find ourselves joining in this kind of tone-policing in our communities – of whatever kind – whereby certain emotions are deemed unacceptable to admit to or express – for certain people or across the board. It’s worth being mindful of this whenever we find ourselves judging how somebody ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ feel about something.

At the interpersonal level we learn a great deal about acceptable and unacceptable feelings from our close relationships, particularly from the family and friends who are around us growing up. In Inside Out Riley’s parents inadvertently give her the strong sense that they appreciate her being happy and strong during the house move. She takes this as a message that it isn’t okay to be struggling in any way about it. Riley is even described as their ‘happy girl’: fixing her in this way. We then see how Riley’s – and Joy’s – attempts to keep her joyful tragically have the opposite effect. By trying to sustain her joyful persona in the face of great pain she actually becomes angry, anxious and cut-off, and risks losing the love of her parents as they don’t recognise her any more. In another key moment Riley’s old friend doesn’t seem to realise how envious Riley will be of her new friendship. When envy doesn’t feel acceptable, Riley goes straight to anger, and ends the friendship.

How to sit with our emotions: A practical guide

Fortunately for Riley, Sadness and Joy are able to make it back to the control room – once Joy recognises the value of Sadness. Then Riley is able to take the risk and show her parents how sad and frightened she is. Even more fortunately, perhaps, her parents are able to accept her emotions, to share some of their own, and to let her see that they love her as much when she’s sad as they do when she’s happy.

Most of us are not so lucky. Our parents – and the other close people in our lives – live in the same wider culture as we do with all of its crappy messages about unacceptable feelings. They’re also part of institutions and communities that have done a number on them. And they’re in their own family systems wherein certain emotions have been deemed too dangerous or threatening. So they may well have responded to moments like Riley’s by giving us a clear message that our fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust, or other feelings, were not something that they could be around, or even that they couldn’t love us if we expressed them.

We will have internalised this. Either we’ll have managed to find a way of shutting down those emotions entirely, or – perhaps – in trying to shut them down we’ll have managed to make them shout even more loudly so we’ve become defined by them. Or a bit of both. There are so many ways that this can go.

The urgent question is what we can do now. Here we are, as adults, with all these imbalances, exaggerations, and silences in our emotional states. What can we do about it?

The answer that many different therapies, meditation practices, and belief systems have come up with is the idea of ‘sitting with’ our emotions. I’ll briefly describe one of these practices – a person-centred therapy technique called focusing – here, but there are several similar practices in other therapeutic and spiritual approaches if this one doesn’t work for you.

Focusing reveals perhaps the main flaw which I found in Inside Out which is the fact that the emotions are located in Riley’s brain and not in her body. It’s good that Inside Out doesn’t buy into the popular idea that emotions and rationality are separate things. Instead it expresses the existential view that we’re always in emotion: propelled towards things or away from things by our feeling states. However, the film does buy into another ‘dualistic’ split: that of separating the mind and the body, and seeing the mind as the most important bit. Actually, this kind of focus on the mind can be part of how we lose touch with our emotions: We stop being able to tune into our bodily sensations and the important things we can learn from these about our feelings, and instead try to figure things out, or fix things, on a purely intellectual level.

In focusing practice the attention is right on these bodily states. It’s most basic form goes like this:

• Sit comfortably and quietly and bring your attention slowly to your body and how it’s feeling.
• Ask what wants your attention. Focus in on any sensation that you notice in your body (a tightness of the throat, a clenched stomach, or a sense of emptiness, for example).
• Say ‘hello’ to that sensation: welcome it warmly, like Sadness sitting down with Riley’s imaginary friend.
• Really listen to the sensation, try to find the best way to describe it (e.g. it’s like a dense ball stuck in my throat).
• Check back in with the sensation to see whether that description fits well enough, or whether you need to change it or add to it (e.g. it’s not just stuck, it’s like it’s rammed in there, like a cork in a bottle).
• Sit with the feeling, with interested curiosity, not trying to change it, or to force it to communicate: just being with it gently and curiously. Try to understand it from it’s point of view. Notice any words, images, or metaphors that come to mind. In focusing books and websites you can read about different questions that you could ask it at this point, if it feels okay to do so.
• When it feels ready to finish you can express gratitude to the feeling, and to your body, and reassure it that you’ll keep coming back to listen to it – and other feelings – in this friendly way.

Going back to Inside Out this is a lot like Riley actually giving kind attention to each of the emotions inside her whenever any of them want her attention, instead of putting one of them in charge, or trying to get rid of others. However, when we do this practice what we often find is that the feelings we become aware of are the ones that are preventing us from feeling other feelings (like Joy in the movie). You might start feeling a sensation of fear or sadness, for example, and then a strong feeling of anger or disgust at yourself for having that feeling. When we have these feelings-about-feelings the thing to do is to sit with them just as gently and curiously as with the original feeling. It can help to remind ourselves that – like Joy in Inside Out –  these feelings are trying to keep us safe, even if what they are actually doing is the opposite.

Of course, given how many years most of us have spent suppressing and avoiding certain emotions, it can take a while to open up this kind of line of communication. Practices like focusing can feel very unfamiliar at first and can take a while to get the hang of. There are ways of doing them with a friend, or with a therapist, if that feels easier and more supported than doing them alone.

However I am convinced of the power of these kinds of practices. Elsewhere I wrote about what happened last year when I sat and noticed a couple of feelings that usually felt too overwhelming, or too insignificant, to sit with.

Earlier this year I went to a focusing workshop. In the first practice I found it fascinating to see how my own throat tightness shifted and opened up when I finally gave it some gentle attention. In the second practice I used focusing to go back to a specific memory when I hadn’t treated myself very kindly. sitting with the memory I suddenly became aware of a side of myself that I hadn’t seen there before: A playful side of myself that wanted to do something silly and outrageous to cut through the situation. I got a strong image of Mr. Tickle from the Mr. Men books. So much so that I went out a bought myself a Mr. Tickle mug the following week. Perhaps my own Goofball Island hasn’t been completely destroyed after all!

Find out more

The ideas in the post are also presented in my Staying with Feelings zine.

You can find out more about the compass of emotions in this book and video by Emmy Van Deurzen.

A great book about the messages we receive about emotions is Transforming Emotion by Glenda Fredman.

If you want to find out more about focusing practising, The Power of Focusing by Ann Weiser Cornell is an excellent introduction to it (and nowhere near as wacky as it looks from the cover!) There are also lots of resources on The Focusing Institute and British Focusing Association websites.

Note: Some of the images in this post are Copyright (c) 2015 The Walt Disney Company and Pixar Animation Studios, to whom I express my grateful thanks.

The post Inside Out: Getting in Touch with Our Emotions appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I was therefore troubled recently to hear somebody use the idea of embracing uncertainty in a way that was hurtful to their partner. I realised that I’ve been guilty of doing the same thing myself. We hear a frightened partner seeking reassurance and a sense of safety and, feeling limited and trapped by their demands, we point out that life is uncertain and use that as a way out of making any kind of commitment to them. ‘How can we know what’s coming down the road? You need to embrace uncertainty baby.’

Such an exchange can leave us with a comforting feeling that we are by far the more evolved, rational and philosophically sophisticated, person in the argument, as well as absolving us of any sense of responsibility and enabling us to avoid facing up to the pain that somebody we love is feeling. No wonder it is an attractive position.

The last few weeks I’ve been returning to my favourite source on uncertainty, Pema Chödrön, as well as thinking a lot about how it applies to my own life. I want to share some of my ideas about what embracing uncertainty means beyond this kind of basic understanding of life being uncertain (which, of course, it is).

If we subscribe to this more nuanced understanding of embracing uncertainty then we could see it as coming from a place of deep commitment rather than from an attempt to escape commitment. Also, instead of being about a liberation from pain and difficulty, embracing uncertainty becomes about facing up to these things in a way which is both hard and courageous. This is why Chödrön calls it a warrior path.

Going slowly

The first thing about embracing uncertainty is that it takes time. When faced with uncertainty in life we often find it incredibly painful and rush to resolve it as quickly as possible. In the example I gave before, of telling a partner to embrace uncertainty, we are not really embracing uncertainty ourselves. Rather we are rushing to resolve the situation by writing our partner off and denying what they are feeling. To embrace the uncertainty of such a tough situation of relationship conflict we would take the time to really listen: to both our partner and to our own panicky, trapped feelings which are driving our impulse for a quick resolution.

In times of profound uncertainty in life it is tempting to act quickly. We’re having a difficult time at work: quit. Our relationship is in difficulty: break-up. Somebody is out of line: reprimand them. Whether our action involves lashing out or running away, it is a quick response that gets us out of painful uncertainty because we either insist on the rightness of our way of seeing the situation, or escape the situation entirely.

Embracing uncertainty involves being prepared to sit with the situation in all its uncertainty for as long as it takes for us to be sure that we’ve seen it from all angles, and until we know that the response that we have come up with is that which is the most compassionate and ethical possible under the circumstances and for all involved (including ourselves and others).

During the time of uncertainty we need to refrain from acting however tempting it may be to do so. This may also involve asking others to give us the time that we need rather than giving in to their demands to come up with an answer. Thus it can also be quite a socially radical thing to do in a cultural context of quick fixes and immediate responses: being prepared to say ‘I don’t know what I think about this yet’ or ‘I’m not sure how best to respond, let me get back to you’.

Vitally though, embracing uncertainty is not about failing to act at all. Another misuse of embracing uncertainty would be to use it as an excuse for apathy or avoiding doing anything. Instead it is about a commitment to act in the most thoughtful and kind way possible having given ourselves enough time to look closely at the situation.

Leaning into pain

An idea which is frequently mentioned alongside embracing uncertainty is that of leaning into pain. When we take time to embrace uncertainty we are deliberately avoiding our usual instincts to avoid fear and suffering and, instead, determining to turn towards them, to lean into them, to really understand them.

This might sound fine in the abstract but we are actually talking about incredibly hard, messy, difficult work where we will be called upon to look directly at the things about ourselves that we feel most vulnerable and ashamed about. The situation wouldn’t be so uncertain and difficult if it wasn’t touching something deep and painful in us.

Therefore leaning into pain also involves knowing when we need to look at the situation and when we need a break from it to build up our strength . We simply cannot look at the situation constantly. If we do we risk getting so caught up in the tangle of different ways of understanding it that we can’t see it at all. We need to retreat, to look after ourselves, to treat ourselves kindly as somebody in a tough situation, as well as time – when we’re feeling stronger – to lean into the pain.

Leaning into pain involves taking a good hard look at what the situation means for us, what our habitual reactions are telling us to do (Fight! Prove them wrong! Run! Hide!), and why that might be the case. The partners in the example before might usefully ask themselves what they are bringing to bear on the situation. Have there been other times (in their past, in other relationships) when they’ve felt insecure (on the one hand) or trapped (on the other)? What vulnerabilities do they carry from such times? Are they convinced that, on some level, they are really unloveable? Do they believe that they are destined to hurt the ones they love? In what ways do we fear that we are ‘not really okay’ and how is this influencing the current situation?

Whilst leaning into pain can be incredibly hard, the clearer picture that we gain when we face these things that we are so used to running from can bring a massive sense of relief, once we’ve taken the time to really look at them. When we do then have conversations with those involved there is often a similar sense of relief that – however painful those conversations are – they are coming from a place of honesty where nothing is being hidden from view.

Getting off the hamster wheel

The real value – for us – of embracing uncertainty is that it offers us a chance to get off the hamster wheels which we all seem to create for ourselves. Perhaps we are all about gaining approval, or becoming a success, or avoiding danger, or a combination of these and other things.

The ways in which we respond to the stuff of life becomes driven by these motivations such that we find ourselves going round and round in the same patterns.  Perhaps we find ourselves taking on a new project every time we get to a much longed-for endpoint. Maybe we burn our bridges every time we get bored. We might realise that we always shy away from opportunities when they appear. Or we might recognise a pattern of pushing relationships to breaking point.

Whatever our (many) hamster wheels, embracing uncertainty gives us the possibility of stepping off temporarily – perhaps even permanently. Slowing down means that we can see the patterns that we’re embroiled in. Leaning into pain means that we can understand better why we do it: what is so fearful that we are avoiding it by running faster and faster, and still getting nowhere.

When we embrace uncertainty we can start to see our hamster wheels and the ways in which they are hurting both ourselves and others. As well as engaging with the current situation in a more thoughtful, compassionate, and ethical way, we have a real possibility of stepping off the hamster wheel and beginning to forge a different path.

How to embrace uncertainty

So how do we actually do this in practice? The answer to this question will be different for each of us. Some find meditation a good way to slow down and lean into pain, others prefer journal-writing or talking things through with a trusted friend or mentor.  It’s important to remember that balance of retreat and engagement: we need to build in time away from the situation to see it more clearly. I like to go for a walk in a wide open space where the big sky seems to relieve me from the pressure of the tangle, but retreating too will look different to everyone.

It is certainly worth – in calmer times – thinking through what works for us. How will we notice when we have become embroiled in the tangle? And how will we ensure that we take time to embrace uncertainty and lean into the pain instead of reacting quickly to close it down according to our usual habits?

The post Embracing uncertainty: What does it really mean? appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

In this post I will summarise a few of the key reported findings of the survey and then mention three potential problems which we need to be aware of when considering its implications.

The findings

The average rating of life satisfaction overall was 7.4 out of 10, but one in five people rated their anxiety yesterday as greater than 5 out of 10. Women reported being more satisfied than men, and 16-19 and 65-79 year olds seemed to be the happiest age groups. Black British, African and Caribbean groups scored quite a bit lower than any other ethnic groups.

People in rural areas seemed to be happier than those living in in industrial and built up places, and owning property also seemed to be related to higher satisfaction. Married and cohabiting people reported more satisfaction than single people (including widowed and divorced people). Good health seemed to be related to satisfaction, without guaranteeing it, and unemployed people were less satisfied than those in employment.

Problem 1: Correlation does not equal causation!

The first vital issue with the findings is the old chestnut familiar to anybody who has studied psychology or statistics: correlation does not equal causation. It would be easy to look at the results and say ‘people in couples are better off than singles, we should encourage everyone into relationships and make sure that they stay together’ or ‘people in rural areas are happier so being around nature must make people feel better’.

However, just because there is a relationship between two things does not mean that one causes the other. It could equally be that there is a causal relationship in the opposite direction. For example, it could be that happier people are more likely to get into romantic relationships (because they are overly optimistic about how easy they will be perhaps!), or that people who are more satisfied with life tend to move to the country (maybe because they feel less need to prove themselves in high-power city jobs).

Also it could very well be that some other factor is responsible both for people being happier and for the other aspect. For example, it could be that wealthier people are more likely to get married, to live in the country and to be happy: so in that case being better off is the causal factor, not anything to do with relationships or where people live. A good way to remember this possibility is to consider the correlation between ice-cream sales and drowning deaths. As one goes up, so does the other, but obviously eating more ice-cream doesn’t cause drowning. The reason they are related is that both go up in hot weather.

Problem 2: Happiness or normativity?

Continuing on from this point about correlation, it seems to me that, for quite a few of the reported statistics, another factor which could be of relevance is what is regarded as culturally ideal or normal. In the UK, it is generally seen as normal, or ideal, that a person should get a job, get married, and own a house. Therefore perhaps it is unsurprising that people who do so report more satisfaction. They have more of a sense of ‘belonging’ to the culture and of having ticked the boxes which are expected of them by themselves and others.

However, those things may not be intrinsically related to satisfaction. Perhaps in a culture where it is considered more normal to rent property (as it is in many other European countries) home-ownership would not be so related to happiness, because all the problematic aspects of having your own house (mortgages, keeping it in good repair, being responsible, etc.) would not be balanced out by the plus side of fitting in, meeting expectations and the perceived security of owning property in a culture which generally believes that it is the safest thing to do.

The gender findings are also interesting from the perspective of normativity. In the current economic climate it may be harder to meet up to norms and ideals of masculine roles (which have traditionally been based on being a provider and having an identity linked to what you ‘do for living’), than norms ideals of feminine roles (which have traditionally been about looking after others, and being approved of by others).

A further point about normativity is whether the overall findings (the 7.4 out of 10 statistic) reflect people responding in a culturally normative way (‘mustn’t grumble’). It is important to remember that people are doing something whenever they speak or write (for example, when they complete a survey) rather than simply expressing their inner state. For example, psychologists find with opinion polls around election time that people often don’t respond truthfully about who they plan to vote for, but rather strategically, hoping to give the message that parties should improve otherwise they won’t get their vote.

It is very possible that cultural differences in happiness ratings or satisfaction indices could say more about how people in that culture think they are supposed to feel than how they actually feel.

Problem 3: Striving for happiness?

A final point about the whole endeavour of eliciting happiness or satisfaction ratings is the big assumption implicit in it all that it is good to be happy, and that people who express less satisfaction should be made more happy.

Unfortunately this message may have the opposite impact to its intention as many philosophies suggest that striving after happiness, believing that one is entitled to be happy, or expecting some kind of constant happiness in life, actually make us suffer more. Recognising the inevitable struggles that life involves, expecting our moods to fluctuate, and learning to accept difficult feelings rather than trying to avoid them, may well be better approaches.

It is also important to challenge norms about the kind of life one needs to lead in order to be happy because these reinforce the marginalisation of those who don’t fit these norms. We need to recognise the diverse things that can bring satisfaction to life if we let them. Perhaps then people might be able to be equally satisfied on a busy street as in the country, with friends or alone as with partners, or in diverse forms of accommodation or daily life.

Find out more:

The report itself

Links to further articles about the report:

BBC

Independent

Guardian

Guardian analysis

Links to other blog posts by me on happiness:

Happiness

The H-word

The post Measuring happiness: The well-being index appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

The focus on lesbian, bisexual and queer women is appropriate because both women, and lesbian, bisexual and queer people, are particularly highly diagnosed with mental health problems such as depression and anxiety (when compared with men, on the one hand, and heterosexual people on the other). They also self-report higher levels of distress and lower levels of happiness and well-being than other groups.

My brief presentation at the event focused on the social aspects of such suffering. Women’s experiences of depression have been linked, for example, to the ways in which women are socially expected to demonstrate distress (sadness and fear, rather than anger), and to aspects of conventional femininity such as having identities which are strongly bound up with other people’s well-being and feeling a lack of agency over their own lives. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people have higher rates of such problems because of the challenges of living within a heteronormative world and related experiences of homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Recent research has found that rates of depression, self-harm and suicide are particularly high amongst bisexual and queer people, which is likely linked to their lack of visibility in wider culture. It is difficult indeed to have one’s identity questioned, ridiculed, and/or disregarded by heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities alike.

Suffering is often exacerbated when distress which has such a strong social component is regarded as being something which is internal to the individual themselves. Currently there is a powerful cultural tendency to see all distress as being internally caused. Many people believe that when they are depressed or anxious there are only two possible ways of understanding this: Either they are ill, and they need help, but at least this means that it is not their fault. Or they are not ill, and therefore don’t need help, but this means that they are to blame for their own suffering (the ‘pull your socks up’ attitude). Both of these understandings are internal: either there is something physically wrong, or there is some kind of personal deficiency on the part of the individual. Such understandings can prevent us from seeing – and addressing – any social element to our suffering. They also catch us in a double bind whereby we have to accept that there is something wrong with us or that we are blameworthy, neither of which is a great outcome. Also, either understanding continues to haunt the other even if we dismiss it. If we accept that we are ill we often worry that somebody will discover that we are not really ill and will be ‘found out’ for faking in some way. If we accept that it is up to us to deal with our problems we often fear that there might really be something wrong with us and that that will be exposed.

An alternative to this internal perspective is to see all forms of human distress as complexly biopsychosocial. Of course there are some physical vulnerabilities which we have to experience distress in certain ways, and social experiences like being the victim of prejudice write themselves on our psychology and biology in various ways (affecting brain chemistry, thought patterns, and the way neurons wire up, for example). However, our biology is intrinsically interwoven with the ways in which we experience the world, and the ways in which it treats us. The statistics on mental health problems in women and LGBT people alert us to just how important these social aspects can be, and may leave us asking whether ‘depression’ or ‘oppression’ is the more useful word to apply. Opening up the possible role of social forces also opens up potential for other ways of addressing struggles than the common individual modes of drugs or therapy. Both community involvement and activism because important possibilities to consider.

This finally leads us to the H-word and why I find it somewhat troubling. We hear a lot at the moment about the importance of individuals achieving happiness through positive psychology. However, there is a real danger that this throws us back into an internal understanding of such things: ‘Everyone should be happy and here are some techniques you can use to achieve it. If you can’t achieve it then there is something wrong with you’.

In her book, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed talks about the ways in which happiness may be more available to some rather than others (often those who can more easily conform to the ‘norm’). She suggests that we require ‘feminist killjoys’ and ‘unhappy queers’ if we are to reach a more equal society where pleasure isn’t always found at the expense of others or by conforming to problematic power hierarchies.

There is a related idea in the mindfulness approach which I find useful. Buddhists believe that it is actually the craving for happiness which is the cause of suffering. Our consumer culture constantly tells us what we need to be happy (more money, fame and success, the perfect partner, the ideal body, the product they are selling etc.). As Sara Ahmed points out, such things are more accessible to some than others, but even for those who can get them they are never enough. Mindfulness advocates an alternative approach of bringing our attention to the here-and-now, rather than constantly striving after whatever we think we need to be happy. It also advocates being with whatever emotions we’re experiencing rather than privileging one (happiness) over all others.

I was interested that the H-word event description talked about finding ‘happier, more meaningful lives’ as if these two things necessarily go together. From another perspective we might regard constantly grasping after happiness as the very thing which will prevent us from achieving it. It might be that in order to have a meaningful life we need to let go of the quest for happiness. If we turn our focus to welcoming all emotional states and what they have to tell us, and to compassionately seeking to improve society through mutual support, perhaps we may find that happiness sneaks up on us after all.

Find out more:

There are more blog posts by me on happiness here and here.

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