Positive Psychology Column for 2-15-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. Learning To Love Recently people have been asking me, “Are you really happy yourself?” It’s a fair question. I think what they want to know is whether the stuff I’m teaching really works. To answer the question I thought I’d share with you what I’ve found to be important lessons in making my life happier. For me, learning to have a loving relationship with my wife ranks as the best part of my life. I need to emphasize the “learning” aspect of that statement. I grew up in a family that had some trouble in that area, and so loving and being loved wasn’t something I learned to do very well until I was older. I’m going to tell you more about my background, but the history is not as important as how I’ve learned to think about the past. My father got colon cancer when I was a kid and, after a long illness, died when I was a teenager. My mother’s reaction was to become extremely angry, and I became her sparring partner. These events turned out to be incredibly valuable because they gave me a purpose in life: I was determined to figure out how relationships could be more loving. This sense of purpose gave me the drive to get a doctoral degree in psychology. Happy ending, right? Not yet. You don’t learn how to love by going to graduate school, I discovered. It’s on the job training in my own marriage that gave me the opportunity to apply what I was learning. And I messed up my marriage as I was trying to figure out how the love part of life could work. Not being able to sustain loving feelings made me mad at first, but ultimately it became very depressing. The breakthrough came when I began to learn some painful lessons from the mistakes I was making. One of the most important learnings was about blame. It doesn’t work. When I got unhappy with my wife, my first reaction was to blame her for all our problems. While she wasn’t perfect, she was a perfectly fine person who didn’t like having all the blame put on her. Criticizing her only fueled the negative emotions, which ultimately became depressing as the situation deteriorated. I wanted to have a loving relationship so much, and my inability to make it happen was disheartening. But blaming myself only deepened my despair. This is when I realized that blaming resulted in giving my power away. I couldn’t control someone else. Trying to do so only generated a great deal of negativity as the other person became increasingly defensive and I became more and more frustrated. Blaming myself didn’t work either. When I focused on my own faults I felt like I was fatally flawed. That way of thinking robbed me of my energy for being able to make any changes. I like the quote from Albert Einstein regarding mental health, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” So I decided to try something else to see if I could make love happen in my life. I set out to learn how to control myself rather than others. What I learned produced remarkable results. I began to realize that how I was thinking about situations was determining how I was feeling about my relationships. So I changed my thinking about relationships from “I’m not getting what I want, so I have the right to be unhappy” to “I’m not getting what I want, so I have to figure out what I need and how I can get it.” It eventually dawned on me that no one would give me what I wanted if I wasn’t willing to give them what they needed in return. This led to my learning how to envision not only what I need to be happy, but what the other person needs as well. In retrospect it seems so simple: just focus on doing what will make everybody happy. But I first had to learn how to deal with the negative feelings about what had led up to the present because they were blinding me from being able to see the how I could create win-win solutions in the future. Once I mastered the art of soothing myself when anger, anxiety or sadness struck, I was able to shift away from negative reactions into positive, proactive efforts. To have love last, I’ve learned, requires being a loving person even when facing the inevitable problems of life.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.