Some don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being miserable, angry, jealous, paranoid, depressed, in mental and spiritual pain.  From time to time I’ve shared my pain with others, especially those close to me.  In that I don’t mean that I’ve sat down and had a quiet and reasoned discussion. On the contrary, I’ve shared my pain by attacking people close to me verbally and in writing, or by just disappearing, or by getting drunk on the very spurious grounds that it would make others worry about me.

Just what part of my subconscious mind was hard-wired to think that being unhappy would do anything for me?  Except to exist in a state of unhappiness and pain being unhappy achieves very little.  To a sane mind, being unhappy should act as a spur to change whatever it is about one’s life that is making you unhappy ~ except it almost never does, because very few people have that degree of grounded and mindful sanity.

For many people being unhappy, miserable, angry, jealous, paranoid, depressed, in mental and spiritual pain becomes their normal state of being, it becomes their comfort zone.  And how utterly sad that one’s comfort zone is a place of utter and total negativity.

For some others those negative feelings act as a spur to find an escape ~ in alcohol, drugs, binge eating, gambling, pornography, inappropriate casual sex, self-harm, attempted suicide, making a big geographical change…..  For me, the escape from being in a bad dark place was always alcohol ~ and that worked for a while, just as all those other addictive behaviours may work for a while.  However, very quickly the cure becomes far worse than the problem of unhappiness, mental, emotional, and spiritual pain.

Addictive behaviours are not a cure, they are just another facet of the kaleidoscope of some serious underlying issue deep in the subconscious mind of the sufferer ~ it’s like throwing a drowning man a concrete lifebelt, or trying to put out a fire by throwing petrol, (gasoline), on it.  Giving someone with depression a bottle of booze and encouraging them to go out and fuck the first person they meet in a bar is just as bad ~ all it will do is destroy any feelings of self-worth they had left.

So why are so many people seriously unhappy, to the point that it can be classified as a mental illness?

Because we learned to be unhappy before we were old enough to know any better.  Before we were seven years of age, deep and undying unhappiness was inculcated into our subconscious mind by our parents, carers, older siblings, teachers, et al., and now it’s hard-wired into our subconsciousness.  And it doesn’t work.

How we break out of the downward spiral of misery will have to be the topic of another post.  This post is too long already.

Some say that they are unhappy because the world is a bad place.  And it’s all going to be OK because their doctor has given them some happy pills.  All I know is that unhappiness and misery doesn’t work.

~

jack collier

jackcollier7@talktalk.net

booze is a bad way to try to find escape from mental, emotional, and spiritual unhappiness