Positive Psychology Column for 5-25-03 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. How to Find Happiness Through Suffering I haven’t always been able to find happiness.  I had to learn how to be a positive person the hard way - through tragedy and loss.  I was a teenager when my father died after a long battle with cancer.  My mother turned to alcohol to numb her pain, but that choice only fueled her fury at having lost the love of her life. We battled with each other as a way of venting the seemingly unbearable pain of losing someone that we had each loved so deeply.  And we blamed each other for the lack of support when we had to face our fears about building a new life for ourselves. Surprisingly, pain seems to be the pathway on which many people discover how to be happy.  In retrospect I’ve come to realize that you can’t learn the skills necessary to create joy in your life when things are going well.  That pathway only teaches complacency. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s that problems and pain are inevitable.  Happiness, I’ve come to discover, isn’t having a trouble-free life.  It’s the ability to respond well when you’re afraid that your pain will overwhelm you. The most painful part of life may very well be the loss of love.  Nothing else strikes fear in your heart in quite the same way.  Fear that you’ll never be loved again.  Fear that you will never recover from the loss.  Fear, seemingly unending fear, can render you helpless, awash in a flood of miserable feelings. For a long time I closed off my heart in a futile effort to protect it from any further pain.  But all I had really done was imprison my heart, condemning myself to solitary confinement. When someone eventually did get close, I was hypersensitive to the slightest hurt, reacting with bitterness and blame to their transgression.  But my defensiveness only drove people who tried to love me further and further away. Protecting myself from pain was impossible, I finally decided.  If I was to have love in my life, I needed to learn how to dispel the negative emotions when they arose.  Only then could I enjoy the positive feelings that are also associated with being in a loving relationship. That decision created curiosity.  I wanted to learn what other’s had found out about how to have a good loving relationship.  As I began to read and study what psychologists such as John Gottman (The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work) had found in their research, I began to change my thoughts. One day as I was going through this process I realized that I’d become an optimist when it came to love.  Happy couples have a 5:1 ratio of good to bad events in their relationship, I’d learned.  The trick was to focus on creating the five good exchanges, rather than dwelling on the one negative. How do those happy couples make choices that accomplish that outcome, I wondered?  The new science of happiness has found that the best way is to develop your character strengths, especially those that allowed you to connect well with others.  What are those traits that produce an abundance of positives in a relationship?  The first is kindness and generosity - the capacity to be as concerned about another person’s needs as you are about your own.  The skills involved in demonstrating this strength are empathy and sympathy.  Tuning in to the other person’s feelings allows you to develop an understanding of their world - their interests and their struggles.  Deploying this strength gets you out of your own head for a while, and gives you vital information to use when making choices when constructing positive interactions.  To create a win-win relationship you need to know what the other person needs in order to feel good. The second character strength involves showing love to others and allowing them to demonstrate their love for you.  Happy couples frequently find ways to say, “I love you.” They engage in five minutes of touching, holding and kissing every day, and another five minutes expressing genuine admiration and appreciation toward one another.      Now when I look back at my life I realize what a blessing it was to have had those problems so early in my life.  Without them I never would have been driven to understand how happiness is achieved, for myself and others. I wouldn’t have had a purpose to my life.  That would have robbed me of the satisfaction of developing my own strengths as well as the pleasure of helping other people proceed through the pathway of pain to find a place of joy.   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.