How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself

Copyright © 2017 Dr. Robert Dawson.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-0978-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0979-0 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/29/2017

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my partner Stella. Without her love, support and tolerance of my instinctive moods and her experience and intellect to provide me with a sounding board, this book would not have been written.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The writing of this book has been going on in my head over at least four decades. During that time I have been influenced by more academics and students than I could possibly mention.

Dr Albert Ellis and Dr Ian Campbell were most influential on my training as a cognitive behaviour therapist. My undergraduate marks were good but not quite good enough to get into the first graduate training program in Cognitive Behavior Therapy at the prestigious University of Melbourne. On reflection it probably would not have occurred if Dr. Campbell had not seen ‘something’ in me at my admission interview.

Some twenty years later, the work of neurophysiologists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese at the University of Parma in the 1980s and 1990s on mirror neurons got me thinking about what Dr. Campbell might have seen. Mirror neurons are a neurophysiological explanation for the existence of empathy.

Deep empathy has been described as the ability not just to imagine but to actually feel what other people are experiencing. It’s the ability to actually enter the mind space of another person so that you can sense their feelings and emotions. In a sense, your identity merges with theirs. The separateness between you and them fades away. Your self-boundary melts away, so that in a sense – or to an extent – you become them.

Empathy is touted as an important requirement for a therapist, an important strength to understand and help others. But it is also a significant burden if empathy prevents a separation from the distress of others, from establishing clear boundaries between oneself and others. Burn-out is an ever present issue for therapists.

To the extent that density of mirror neurons are inherited I have to acknowledge my genetic inheritance and the influence that my father had on me in championing the rights of trade workers in Australia to get a basic wage. I see my choice to study psychology and work as a therapist as an evolution of this desire to help others and myself.

In my first years of practice, my effectiveness as a therapist was shaped by Brad Levingston. He was my boss and supervised my work in my first professional appointment. Over the next forty years I recharged my enthusiasm for my work by going off on related tangents including taking on teaching roles in Graduate University programs. Being challenged to not only do the talk but also demonstrate the walk by hundreds of graduate therapy students kept me on my toes and I thank them all.

I still remember the occasion twenty years ago when I was lecturing about paranoia and gave a scenario of a driver noticing that a car had been following closely for the past twenty or so minutes. I asked the group what they thought the driver might have been thinking. One student instantly said that the driver thought The towing is going well!.

The most recent and profound influence on this book is the work in Evolutionary Psychology and I would like to acknowledge the host of researches in this area.

In my personal, and social life I would like to acknowledge Ken Marshall, Peter Craft, Gary Troedson and John Holmes for the experience of building trust, sharing the pain of competition and keeping me alive in my tumultuous teenage years. To Richard Nelson-Jones, an author and psychology lecturer who told me that the only difference between people that write books and people that don’t write books is that … the people who write books, write books. To Phil Jenkins for inadvertently spurring me to get started. To past relationships for giving me an opportunity to learn more about myself and for shaping the structure of this book. To my children for tolerating my obsessiveness. To my cycling group for giving me an effective tap to drain away the frustration of day to day life.

From my professional life I want to acknowledge the hundreds of clients who have provided most of the examples given in the book and who have inspired me to get this written.

INTRODUCTION

Most of us have been happy, so we know how good it feels. But our experience of this great feeling is that it does not last. We have been led to think that when it doesn’t, there must be something wrong—something wrong with our upbringing, our schooling, our relationships, our work, our friends, with our security, our health, our faith, ourselves, with the world. We become unhappy when we are frustrated that our happiness doesn’t last.

Feeling and thinking that there is something wrong, we look for solutions. This search for solutions often leads us to decisions and actions that initially seem to make us happy. These choices are aimed at changing, getting rid of, or avoiding old things and acquiring new things (new house, new baby, new relationships, new friends, new job, new clothes, new car, new bike, new diet, new phone—anything new). But any happiness that comes from these decisions inevitably wears off. When it does, we return to being unhappy and often enough regret our actions. It seems that the consequences of many of our deliberate attempts to be happy have a significant later role in the ongoing focus of our unhappiness (e.g., disappointment, stress, and debt).

This book rests on the idea that there is an important reason happiness is only temporary.

Evolutionary psychology views unhappiness and the many negative feelings associated with sadness—discontentment, frustration, anxiety, anger, depression, guilt, resentment, envy—as essential for survival. These negative feelings of dissatisfaction keep us motivated to do better, to look for improvements. They also keep us on edge and ready for action. They keep our guard up. From an instinctive survival perspective, not happy is the default human condition. Although we have been, can be, and will be happy, happiness is not a natural, ordinary state.

This perspective might seem a bit pessimistic and might lead to thoughts like, Well, what’s the point of surviving if you can’t be happy? Yet this perspective is not saying you can’t be happy. You can and will be happy. Random life events, including the positive reactions of others toward you, will ensure that you are happy every now and again. What this perspective is saying is that every episode of happiness you experience has to fade to keep you safe. Instinct makes this so. The pendulum swing of our moods between happiness and unhappiness, contentment and discontentment, satisfaction and dissatisfaction is natural, ordinary, and necessary for our species to thrive.

Swinging moods do not automatically mean that something is wrong.

There are two parts to this book. The first six chapters explain why instinct needs us to be unhappy. They also explain how our unconscious survival instinct ensures that any happiness that does come our way never lasts for very long.

The second part of the book demonstrates how a conscious effort on feelings, thoughts, and actions can initiate and extend periods of happiness when they occur and cushion the dampening impact on our mood when they inevitably fade. The chapters in the second part of the book illustrate this process in a range of life scenarios that we will all face eventually. These situations include:

• Relationships, socializing, breaking up.

• Parenting.

• Work and competition.

• Dealing with bureaucracy.

• Retirement, aging, and chronic pain.

Chapter 7 links the understanding of Part One to the practice of Part Two. Lifting the Fog of Instinct details the three-step habit we need to develop to moderate the negative effect of the human survival instinct on the quality of our life. When you realize that your instinct is undermining your happiness and see it for what it is—a normal and necessary automatic reaction to life’s challenges—you are on the way to being happy in spite of it.

My work as a clinical psychologist has spanned four decades, and I have been thinking about writing this book for at least the last two of these. What held me up was a missing piece of the puzzle of human psychology—the piece that explained why smart people repeatedly do dumb things. How come people don’t seem to learn from history? Until I found this piece, I could only observe this behavior in my clients (and myself) and present strategies to minimize the collateral damage. There seemed to be nothing I could do to prevent this behavior from re-occurring, and I was not ready to put pen to paper.

I initially took nine years to prepare myself to be a therapist—a four-year undergraduate honors degree in psychology, a two-year master’s degree in clinical psychology, and three years of researching therapeutic strategies for a doctor of philosophy degree to reassure myself that the therapeutic approach I intended to specialize in was the right one. I subsequently began, and forty years later retired from, a career in psychology as a cognitive behavioral therapist. Over this time, I saw many clients, worked as a lecturer in undergraduate and graduate psychology programs in three universities, and trained hundreds of mental health professionals in the skills and strategies of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Roughly ten years ago, I came across the field of evolutionary psychology. I may have touched on this in my undergraduate courses at university, but I don’t remember doing so. My two graduate degrees were very focused on therapeutic strategies. Evolutionary psychology did not come up in either of them. When I started reading about the impact of evolution on human psychology and behavior, the light went on for me. This impact was the missing piece. Here was the reason smart people repeatedly do dumb things.

The first impact of this light-bulb moment was on my therapy. I gradually changed the way I delivered CBT and saw improvements in outcomes for my clients. The second impact of this light-bulb moment was on me. I found it easier to live in my skin. I became more satisfied with myself and my circumstances, less dissatisfied with having to deal with day to day challenges and less obligated to be perfect.

Having found this missing piece, I am ready to share with you what I have learned during my career as a therapist. The title of this book says it all: How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself. If this title resonates with you in any way, you are ready for it.

This book is about how to become aware of your automatic, instinctive reactions; how to release the emotional tension they cause; how to consciously regulate them with deliberate intention; and how to put intentions into action and create opportunities to be happy in spite of yourself.

Dr. Robert Dawson

BA (Honors), MA (Clinical Psych), PhD

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1     Negativity By Necessity

Chapter 2     Comparisonitis

Chapter 3     Catastrophizing

Chapter 4     Frustration

Chapter 5     Satisfaction

Chapter 6     Emotion

Chapter 7     Lifting The Fog Of Instinct

Chapter 8     Relationships

Chapter 9     Parenting

Chapter 10   Work And Competition

Chapter 11   Bureaucracy

Chapter 12   Retirement, Aging, And Chronic Pain

Chapter 13   The Holy Grail

CHAPTER 1

NEGATIVITY BY NECESSITY

In the beginning, almost everything necessary for our survival was scarce. Obtaining food, water, and shelter required most of our time and effort, and we had to compete for it. Our species survived the beginning and is now the dominant life form on earth, even though we aren’t the biggest, fastest, most ferocious animal around.

We lack the size, physical strength, sharp teeth, tough skin, and speed of many other animal species. What we lack in these physical attributes, we make up for with a complex brain. Anthropologists call us Homo sapiens (Latin for wise man). According to the neuroscientists, there are billions of neurons (brain cells) between our ears. We were never the strongest species, but we proved to be the smartest. We use our big brains to observe and learn, adapt, plan, strategize, and improvise. Our intelligence allowed us to discover fire, make weapons, traps, and tools, and to develop hunting and other survival strategies.

The survival of our species has depended on three fundamentals:

• Fear.

• Speed.

• Safety.

More specifically, we need reaction speed for when things go wrong; the security to minimize the frequency of things going wrong; and fear that safety can’t last. Our big brain has allowed us to be the last surviving species of the human genus line. It has taken us out of the Stone Age and is propelling us toward the stars. To achieve this, our brain sacrifices quality of life for the greater goal of life itself, for survival.

While the size of our brain is moving us forward, its complexity has the potential to get us killed along the way. A weakness of our big brain is the potential it has for lots of thinking and for significant delays to occur between the beginning of deliberate thought and the actions that follow. In survival circumstances, conscious thinking slows down reaction time. When faced with situations where the speed of our response is of life-or-death importance, the time it takes to think can get us killed.

In survival situations, we must act, act immediately, and act quickly. No time to think. Just do it!

To handle these emergencies, to save split seconds and hence improve our chances for survival, we have a mechanism of automatic response. This automatic response occurs before conscious thought has even begun. When speed is everything, human actions occur as reflexes to a situation. Our brain has developed the ability to know when there is no time to consciously think about what to do and what might happen when we do, and how that might affect what happens tomorrow. This ability to react quickly without any input from conscious thought is part of our survival instinct.

You glimpse something coming at your face. You don’t know what the thing is, you don’t know what caused the thing to be heading your way, and you don’t know why. You might not even be aware that your hand is up blocking or catching. Analysis and deliberation occur after your reflex action, after you have caught or blocked the missile. There was no time for all that before your hand went up. You first had to survive the object.

Our brain automatically knows when to reflex. When it does, the action comes before conscious thought—reaction speed is all important. We have a big brain, but in some circumstances, we only use a tiny portion of it to survive.

At a fundamental level, safety for humans is related to the size of the group. We have learned that there is safety in numbers. At an unconscious level, our survival instinct makes us pursue connections with others (including with animals). The more connections we have, the bigger our group. The larger the group, the safer we are.

At a conscious level of