"How can I be happy?"
"I know it's my responsibility to make myself happy, but I can't keep it up."
Clients trying to emerge from depression often seek a path toward happiness.
Sometimes they achieve a feeling of happiness, even euphoria, but it doesn't last. When depression returns, the client may feel that they failed at the goal of finding happiness. In my experience with seeing clients emerge from depression into well-being, the real failure might be that they were seeking an unsustainable goal.
After the impulse to flee from depression into buying stuff, love affairs, entertainment, reassurance, deep insights about better ways to think, sometimes clients actually latch onto a new activity or interest that they like pursuing in an of itself, not as a psychotherapeutic intervention. Or they may drop habits that were part of the depressive lifestyle and adopt new ones, by choice rather than routine. Or they may take a fresh look at the people and roles that are part of their daily lives, and take initiative in those roles and interactions.
Ironically, these acts of engaging with the world may lead to more lasting contentment than seeking happiness itself. Waiting to find the happy place can leave you feeling lost and disappointed, and back into depression.
If depression includes an element of learned helplessness, then actively making choices and initiating changes in behavior creates an intuitive experience of learned involvement, purpose, mastery, control.
As I found myself saying to a client this week, in my inspiration for making this post: Sometimes, for some people, the opposite of suicidal feelings (or apathetic resignation, for a client earlier in the week) might not be happiness, it might be: engagement.
Addendum: this idea of seeking engagement rather than happiness has worked for an anxious client too: it was a relief for her to drop the agenda of figuring out how to discover some ideal place called happiness, and instead just decide what action she wanted to take next, even if that was to simply drop her simulated happy face, be silent, and rest. Even rest can be a form of being more actively engaged: instead of putting on a fake smile to be "strong," lie down and really let your head nestle into that pillow.
In this insightful entry, Mr. Foley has stumbled upon something even broader than the challenges of his clients. He notes that the path might be one of "seeking engagement rather than happiness", and as I read this it brought to mind my years spent in Asia (where I worked as a designer and design professor). I've read, researched, and consulted a great deal on cross-cultural issues, but Mr. Foley has put forward an idea that to me was rather amorphous with incredible concision. Western societies tend to focus on the "pursuit of happiness", and Mr. Foley's blog entry here illustrates how that may lead to "a feeling of happiness, even euphoria, but it doesn't last." Traditional Asian societies, by contrast, focus on daily engagement, an artifact from Confucian teachings. According to Confucius, each person has a role, and that fundamental aspect of that role is maintaining proper relationships: a friend should be a friend, a student should focus on being a student, a father should be mindful of being a father, and so on. One scholar calls this "role ethics", and really it is about engaging in life. In this Asian model, there is no "higher" goal, no abstract concept of "happiness" -- instead one simply asks oneself, "Am I active engaged in what I am doing?" The "goal" then is simply living life in this way, but it's not an abstracted "end point", but rather a process or (as Zen Buddhism puts it) a daily practice...
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