Achieving Happiness Column for 7-11-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. Pain Is A Path To Happiness Kathy is a paradox. On the one hand, she is a successful business woman who was able to deal with people very satisfactorily. On the other hand, she is a woman who is miserable in her marriage and feeling powerless to change the relationship. She’d become aware that her husband was much like her father. Both were nice guys who tended to have periodic melt downs during which they’d become angry and say very hurtful things. It doesn’t much matter to her that history is repeating itself. She really wants her marriage to work out with Ward. There are the practical considerations - she has a couple of kids, a bunch of bills and a nice house. But the biggest reason for staying is that deep down she still loves her husband. The problem is that after one of Ward’s attacks Kathy is so hurt and angry that she goes into an emotional tailspin. After initially defending herself, she withdraws from her husband to lick her wounds. Kathy feels like an emotional train wreck for weeks following one of their blowouts. When she runs out of tears, she’s left with a sense of righteous indignation - how dare Ward treat her so badly after all of the good things she’s done for him and the kids. During this time of being distraught Kathy lets Ward know how horribly he had made her feel. While this seems to make him feel bad for a while, it doesn’t change his behavior in the long run. The distance between them grows after each painful round. Kathy can see that Ward had a problem and needs help, but she isn’t aware that she also is contributing to the vicious cycle. From Kathy’s perspective, Ward is in the wrong and until he changes his ways she feels helpless to ever achieve happiness in their relationship. While her husband’s angry outbursts are reprehensible, Kathy is putting herself in a powerless position by trying to change Ward’s behavior. If she’s ever going to have any power to improve her relationship, it will be by controlling her own side of the equation. If she makes a concerted effort to learn how to manage her internal reactions when Ward gets angry, she can begin to influence the situation by changing her input into the relationship. Kathy already has the skills to accomplish a positive outcome that she acquired while building her successful small business. She’s just not deploying them in the context of her marriage. Kathy has learned how to handle occasional criticism from customers as well as how to cope with episodes in which her employees become disgruntled. So what’s keeping her from utilizing her relationship skills to improve how she interacts with Ward? She has a fatal flaw in her thinking. She doesn’t believe she should have to change how she’s handling the problem. Ward, she thinks, should always treat her well. If she applied that same philosophy to her business life, she’d assume that customers and employees would always be happy as well. If they weren’t, she’d become unhappy too, and allow the situation to deteriorate into an angry exchange in which everyone loses. But that’s not what she has done in building a thriving business, of course. She’s actually learned a lot from these difficult encounters about how to provide better service or be a better boss. Although such troubling episodes at work have been painful, they’ve motivated Kathy to learn something about how to improve her undertaking. Consequently, she’s grown stronger as a result of her trials and tribulations. People who have achieved authentic happiness are not always happy. They experience problems and pain just like everyone else does. The difference is that they’ve learned to control their thinking so that they rarely resort to fight, flight or freeze when a crisis strikes. Instead of fighting, they disengage from a confrontation and refuse to surrender their thoughts to the negative power of the person who is perturbed. Instead of trying to avoid the problem by fleeing or freezing, they go into mental and emotional action to move forward toward solutions. They become students who look into their problems to understand their meaning and to learn new ways of explaining and responding to the challenges they’re encountering. Happiness is more than savoring the satisfying experiences of life. It also encompasses the capacity to grow through the tough times.   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.