How to break free from psychological suffering and become happy
Any human being goes through times of psychological suffering during their life time. How could we restore happiness after overcoming psychological pain and suffering? No one would deliberately attempt to cause psychological suffering for themselves. We all suffer from pain originated from psychological interactions with other people. That is, we feel that the cause of suffering is our counterparty. However, it is you yourself who suffer from pain. The counterparty may or may not be the cause, but he or she can never sense your pain. The point is that judging or analyzing the source of pain and suffering does not lead us to any proper solution. What is important is that painful emotions have occurred inside you whether your counterparty has caused them or not. Then, how could we break free from psychological suffering and become happy?
First of all, we must understand that it is inside yourself that painful emotions have occurred. Many people believe that they will break free from suffering when they eliminate the cause of pain. They think that the cause of suffering is the counterparty. However, your pain occurs and operates from within yourself regardless of the external cause, so it does not go away even when the external cause disappears. Avoiding suffering by removing the external cause is effective only when the strategy is used as a prevention method before psychological pain occurs. Also, in many cases, people demand the counterparty to restore their condition that has occurred inside themselves since they think that the counterparty has caused the pain. However, the counterparty does not have the ability to restore your condition since it has occurred and is operating only from within yourself. The first thing to do is to realize that you yourself are the only agent who can break free form suffering and restore healthy psychology regardless of the external cause of suffering.
Secondly, you yourself must make efforts to break free from suffering. So many people look to other people for restoring their condition rather than making efforts for themselves. When you have the ability to restore your own psychology and prevent psychological problems, your counterparty cannot affect your psychology causing suffering in you since you already have the ability not to be affected by others' behaviors. Then, you can become rational in judging and deciding on how to manage relationships with others in practical ways without involving your emotions, which are manifested in distorted ways in many cases.
Thirdly, you must accurately evaluate the state of relationships with others to determine whether you want to maintain the relationship or not. Your counterparties must be able to address their own pain and suffering for themselves. They also must develop the ability to restore their condition and prevent the recurrence of problems. You have no ability to recover their psychology. You will have to decide whether you want to wait until they deal with their own problems or not. You may sever the relationship when you have judged that the counterparties do not have the will to restore their psychology in order to maintain the relationship.
We all have to make efforts to achieve our own happiness and we ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and unhappiness. Our counterparties are simply people with whom we make the journey of life. When we try to find the source of our happiness and unhappiness in others as most people do, we demand others for change of situations and restoration of our happiness. Then, we cannot but live an unhappy life without even starting to make efforts for our happiness. When you are suffering from psychological pain due to problems in relationships, you must follow the three steps to restore your happiness as a human being. When you fulfill the first two steps of understanding the concept of happiness and making efforts for your own happiness, you can live happily. Then, you may or may not choose to stay with the present counterparty or sever the present relationship and find another counterparty to share your happiness.
This mechanism applies not only to close relationships but also to other diverse relationships. For example, when we are victimized due to a crime, we tend to focus on the punishment of the perpetrator rather than the recovery of the victim's psychology. The victim may feel better when the perpetrator is properly punished, but the victim's psychological pain stays inside him or her. The victims themselves must make efforts to restore healthy psychology by healing stress and treating wounds. When victims focus simply on the punishment, they will only aggravate their psychological conditions and and grow problems. Giving up on your own happiness due to ignorance about the true concept of happiness and promoting the counterparty's psychological suffering is the last thing we human beings may wish for in our life. We must first understand the concept of psychological suffering, solve our own problems, and then develop the ability to prevent psychological suffering from occurring again by developing happiness ability.
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