Unhapiness and Its Cause
People or events do not cause unhappiness. This idea may seem counterintuitive at first because all our lives we have heard the opposite. However, upon further reflection it is clear that it is impossible for these things to cause unhappiness. It is rather our thoughts about persons and events that cause unhappiness, and we have ultimate control over our own thoughts. The events themselves are neutral.
When we were young children, we saw people react negatively to certain types of situations. We began to mirror and emulate people’s behavior. Innocently we learned to associate certain situations with certain emotions. For instance, when a person died we made ourselves feel sad, when people ignored us we felt slighted, when people lied to us we got upset, and when people stole from us we got angry. Think for a moment, is there a law that compels us to feel this way in these situations? We feel these feelings because we have been enculturated. In Mexican culture a person’s death while sad is also greeted with thought’s of love and respect for one’s ancestors. People celebrate the continuance of life, family relationships, community and solidarity. This treatment allows people to talk about death and even find humor in death. These are all positive concepts. A partial demonstration of these values is the Mexican Day of the Dead or El Dia de los Muertos.
For an event to literally cause us unhappiness a bizarre thing would have to occur; the inherently negative event would have to reach out and enter our brain. Then the event would have to stimulate our brain’s negative emotion areas thereby making us feel negative emotions – even against our will. The event would also feel negative forever; there would not be a chance to re-frame the event as a positive one in the future.
The fact is that every event has positive and negative aspects. We can recognize the reality of the negative aspects and then emphasize the positive aspects. Our happiness is under our control at all times, no matter what people we meet or events that affect us.
