Stonyhill Newsletter

© Dick Rauscher April 5, 2010
Today we are going to be discussing happiness and it’s often rocky, conflict ridden relationship with love.

And you might be surprised by what you are about to learn.

We’ll begin by taking a look at why true happiness can sometimes be so difficult to achieve in our relationships with those around us, and then we’ll take a look at what each of us can do to begin creating the healthy and happy relationships we so much want to experience in our lives.

I think it’s safe to say that virtually everyone wants to be happy in their relationships……… with their friends, their homes, their children, and especially in their marriages and primary relationships.

Why is it that, despite the often significant amount of time and energy we invest in attempting to achieve happiness in our lives, many of the important relationships we have with those we love so often end in sadness and conflict?

Why is this true?

Building Healthy Relationships:  The first reason why true happiness is so difficult to achieve in our relationships with others is because we spend most of our adult lives under the control of a powerful alien presence.

I’m not kidding! But continue reading, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

The alien inside the psyche of each of us is the unconscious primitive ego of our inner-child…the part of our ego that ran our lives when we were very young children.

What we don’t know is that this unconscious inner-child still continues to exercise a great deal of control over our day to day lives as adults…especially when we are stressed!!!

Our primitive ego is not bad. And it is primitive only in the sense that it is a very young and immature part of our overall psyche.

But the primitive ego of our inner-child it is very powerful and it often makes us do and say things that are not in our best interest. Especially when it interferes in our relationships with others.

Because it’s young and immature, our primitive ego tends to be very self focused and more than a little narcissistic. It is very self-focused on it’s own feelings, needs, and wants!!

It is also very invested in always being right!!!  It gets very angry when others tell us we are wrong or attempt to criticize us!!

Our primitive ego also gets angry when someone takes away something it feels is ours or when another person assumes that their needs and feelings are more important than ours!

And when someone tells us to do something we don’t want to do our primitive ego can quickly become very oppositional and irritated.

In other words, we may look like mature, mild-mannered, civilized adults on the outside, but when we are overwhelmed emotionally, or when someone or something challenges us or creates stress for us, our self-focused primitive ego will very quickly and aggressively take control of our psyche.

When that happens, conflict is almost certain to enter our lives.

See video relating to this subject.

Love Is Not A Feeling:  The second reason why happiness is so difficult to achieve is because virtually all of us assume that love is a feeling!

It’s not!!!!!  Love is a behavior!!!!!

Lets take a look at why this is true.

As a therapist in private practice for 25 years it was common for clients to want me to help them heal the hurts and disappointments that had built up from years of unkind, unloving behaviors in their relationships.

They had forgotten the most basic law of the universe…the reality that every choice we make in life, and every behavior we send into the world, will always have a consequence.

They had lost touch with the reality that if they wanted to create happy relationships with others then it was their responsibility to learn to behave lovingly…especially in those situations where they were not feeling very loving!

They had forgotten the simple truth that we create happiness and love in our lives and our relationships with others one choice and one behavior at a time.

The consequence those choices and behaviors, can either be kind, compassionate, and loving, or they can be self-focused and hurtful.

Fortunately, the responsibility for the choices and behaviors we manifest, whether consciously or unconsciously, is always ours. 

In other words, those unhappy clients had unknowingly allowed the unconscious narcissistic, self-focused primitive egos of their inner-children to take control of their day to day lives….and their relationship with one another.

So how do we avoid this problem? Fortunately the path to happiness is simple.

If we want to create happiness in our relationships with others, we must first learn to become more self-aware…to more intentionally pay attention to the unconscious behaviors that come from our self-focused primitive ego.

As we learn to pay attention to the behaviors we are sending into the world,  we will become less and less comfortable with our many behaviors that create conflict and hurt.

Over time those behaviors will begin to diminish……almost effortlessly.

They simply will no longer make sense to us. We will begin to understand at a deeper and deeper level of consciousness that they are clearly not helpful if we want to be happy.

And secondly, we must never confuse the difference between feelings and behaviors.

It is important to acknowledge that our primitive ego will almost always act out whatever it is feeling. This knee-jerk reaction is the primary reason that we create conflict and hurt in our relationships with others.

Just because we feel unloving does not mean we have to behave in an unloving way with those around us.

Just because we have a feeling does not mean we have to act on that feeling.

We can learn to simply pay attention to the feeling and then we can simply make a conscious choice as to how we want to behave.

Loving behaviors create happy relationships, and loving behaviors in our relationships with others is always a choice that is separate from our feelings.
 
To state it simply, loving behaviors and the creation of happiness in our relationships with others is always our responsibility and is always a choice we can make.

See video relating to this subject.