What is the dictatorship of happiness and how can we escape it

It was in one of those dark moments when things don’t seem to be going so well that Spanish psychologist David Salinas realized he was tired of the social imposition of having to always be well, especially when so much of his work is related to people’s well-being. .

From there came the idea of ​​writing the book. La Dictadura de la Felicidad (“The Dictatorship of Happiness”, in free translation), which led him to say: “I’m sad… and I’m happy about it!”

At first glance, one might dismiss the idea of ​​reading a book that defends the thesis that it is okay to “rejoice in being sad”, or to be satisfied with having an unfortunate life.

But the author cautions, of course, that the book doesn’t follow that path. What he criticizes is the “imposition” of having to “be happy” at all costs, in the context of a growing happiness industry that has been powered by an avalanche of self-help books, with recipes to achieve this supposed permanent well-being.

Tired of having to “be happy” (a mental construction that, in his view, is false, since happiness is not a goal to be achieved, but a transitory state), Salinas, 42 years old, analyzes his experiences professionals in his office in Malaga, Spain, and addresses the main myths about the idea of ​​happiness, in this interview given to BBC News Mundo (the BBC’s Spanish service).

He believes that by destroying these myths, it is possible to enjoy life more.

You are a professional who works with the strand of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Why did you choose this path and not the other existing schools in psychology to treat your patients? Because it’s a more past-centric type of therapy, like psychoanalysis. I try to be eclectic and I think the work done by other therapy schools is also very important.

But sometimes people come to therapy looking for resources, solutions and help, looking for tools that allow them to better cope with everyday life.

With this therapeutic approach, you also wrote your book, The Dictatorship of Happiness. What is this dictatorship? Everyone can understand the dictatorship of happiness as something different. I understand it as a sociocultural imposition, according to which it seems that you always have to be well and people are not allowed to be bad.

And that’s not all. It’s not just about always needing to be well, but always needing to be looking for happiness. With this, we must always be looking for a stimulus that gives us happiness.

Because of this, people feel very pressured and, paradoxically, when a person feels pressured, he does not feel happy. It seems that we live in a world where feeling bad is not allowed. If you feel bad, it feels like you’ve failed as an individual.

But if we look at it another way, people have a constant need to feel better, it’s an almost universal human aspiration. That is, it is not just an external imposition. Before this interview, for example, a colleague said to me, “Oh no, another writer who is going to say it’s okay to be unhappy — enough, I want to be happy!” Yes, I’ve been getting criticisms like this, but most of the comments went in the opposite direction — people who say, “stop telling me what I need to do to feel happy.”

We are tired of positive messages, of literature that tells you what you need to do to feel happy. And what we achieve with this is to make people focus too much on themselves and on the pursuit of their well-being.

But, when you focus on yourself, you will also realize your needs, your limitations, your complexes and your traumas, because we cannot be perfect. It’s normal to have all this. Of course, I also want to be happy, but I want to be happy with the awareness that I won’t achieve absolute happiness, nor a happiness that is permanent, because that doesn’t exist.

We buy into the message that if we follow a certain life script, if we follow some advice, we will achieve eternal happiness.

You say this idea of ​​happiness is imposed. By whom? Happiness has become a business. Books, conferences and congresses look at happiness as a business. And I don’t think that’s all bad, because if other less important things are sold, why not sell happiness?

The point is that you shouldn’t deceive people, you shouldn’t sell people an idealistic model of life that is unrealistic. You can tell people it’s okay to do things to feel good and learn to grow as a person, but not everything is based on happiness.

I am sure that in order to be happy, we must learn to be unhappy, we must learn to move in the swamps of unhappiness. Not everything is pretty or simple, but that’s okay.

If you allow yourself to feel bad, to be frustrated and to have uncertainties, you can move through these swamps of unhappiness and reach states of happiness. Because happiness is just that, a state.

You say that at times you are glad to be unhappy. Can this sentence not seem counter-intuitive? This came to my mind at a time of crisis in my life—because we psychologists also have our crises, like everyone else—at a time when I wasn’t feeling well.

It was at that moment that I thought: I’m sad… and I’m happy about it! The truth is that I felt very good, because what I was really saying to myself is that my state of mind does not constitute my identity.

We tend to build our identity around the things that happen to us and how we feel about them. So if I’m sad, it’s because I’m unhappy. If I fail, it’s because I’m a loser. This is totally harmful.

I can fail and that doesn’t mean I’m a failure. And, of course, I can feel bad and that doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. They are simply moments or stages of life and we can overcome them.

For me, happiness is a state and, therefore, it is transitory. It is a subjective state of mind, in which the person feels more or less happy, depending on the evaluation he is making of his life at the moment.

Therefore, happiness is not something immutable and it is important to take this into account. Feeling sad for a moment doesn’t make me unhappy. It makes me a human being, and as a human being I also feel unhappiness.

But patients come to your office looking for well-being, looking to feel happier. What do you do in your consultation? It depends on each case. I work especially with anxiety and depression issues, but there are people who come to me because they feel bad and want to feel better. One of the mantras that works best for my patients is to allow them to feel bad.

Sometimes we have stress issues and we are afraid of the fear itself, as we don’t allow ourselves to feel emotions. Getting nervous, for example, is normal as we need to face challenges in our daily life and we get nervous.

The same is true of sadness. We are very angry with sadness, as if being sad is for depressed people, but it’s a human thing.

But when people accept that they have a right to feel bad and that feeling bad is human, it’s not necessarily a pathology. What kind of resources do you use to make them feel better? It really depends on the person. It is very important, for example, to have activity, exercise and movement. Sometimes, we get too much into our mind and we have to get out of it, to realize that we also have a body and that it is very important to move the body, due to the impact this has on the nervous system.

The other issue is socializing, talking, being with other people, which is also very important. And, depending on the case, I also teach relaxation techniques, mindfulness [atenção plena] and how to put your full attention in the present moment.

In the same way that it is important to leave space to feel bad, it is also important to generate emotions such as joy and seek resources that help us feel more joy.

I also try to help people feel happier, but in a way that the person asks themselves what can help them feel better and what they can do to deal with what makes them feel worse.

To talk about happiness, it is also necessary to talk about unhappiness, that is, about what we do with the dark side of life.

I believe that when we give so much importance to happiness, putting happiness on an altar, we are generating a lot of frustration and a lot of guilt. I tell my patients to get the idea that happiness is a goal they need to achieve out of their minds, because it doesn’t work that way.

This text was originally published here