Happiness is a function of accepting what is. Werner Erhard
He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how. In the concentration camp, every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals in life are snatched away. What alone remains is “the last of human freedoms” the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” This ultimate freedom, recognized by the ancient Stoics as well as by modern existentialists, takes on vivid significance in Frankl’s story. The prisoners were only average men, but some, at least, by choosing to be “worthy of their suffering” proved man’s capacity to rise above his outward fate. Gordon W Alport
What is happiness? Happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.
When most people talk about happiness, they might be talking about how they feel in the present moment, or they might be referring to a more general sense of how they feel about life overall.
Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are:
The Balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.
Life Satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.
Well, what do you believe this has to do with grief work because I will never be happy again. How can I, the person that I have spent all my life with is no longer with me? You are telling me to try to be happy. No way. It’s just not going to happen.
Well, I guess my next question would be, do you want to be happy again or can I be HAPPY again? I would love to change this question if I could to How do I become HAPPY again? Can you hear the difference in these two questions? " Can I be HAPPY again is questioning whether happiness can even be an option for you again and the other question is asking to participate in happiness once again because there is a belief that you can still have happiness.
Working through the grief process and allowing it to run its natural course is what needs to happen for a person to truly realize that he/she can be happy again.
For some people, it takes a long time to get to the stage of grief that involves hope and a willingness to be happy again. The bereaved person has to understand on a very deep level that it is possible to “feel” again without dishonoring the deceased.
When a person has suffered a huge loss, it can be so difficult to even have the desire and motivation to look for ways to find happiness.
Steps to Survival and Joy
Those who have gone on to survive grief and find joy again, suggest the following approaches:
Small steps. Let the process of grieving run its course. Don’t rush it. Until the intensity of your grief subsides, you can’t expect to be truly happy again. Work through your guilt, extreme pain, extreme sadness, intense anger, and every other feeling and emotion. Often, reaching out to a grief counselor gives you a structure for doing this work.
Focusing on the important things. After the death of a spouse, for example, some people focus on themselves, what they can do to be happy again, and even spend their time and energy on living and loving their remaining family members.
Redefining happiness. Sometimes, when you can’t fill the void in the same way, it takes something new to help ease the pain. Try to find new things or experiences from which to derive pleasure. Whether it's the personal fulfillment of accomplishing goals, spending more time with family, or taking up a new activity, learning to live again may sometimes require an adjustment in outlook and thinking.
Finding Happiness. Remember that life after loss is not an easy experience to endure. While things will never be the same again, “different” can be happy as well.
The author, Missy Yost, suggests that sometimes a tragedy can give new energy to life and bring more awareness to our lives. As part of grieving the death of her father, she blamed herself for his death. Then one day, in a true aha! moment, she realized that it would make him sad to know this. He wanted her to be happy and live happily. At that moment, she drew her conclusion that:
The best thing we can do is honor the person we lost by living our lives to the fullest. After all, wouldn’t that be our wish for them?
Then, with that realization, she chose to honor him by living her own life to the fullest, appreciating every moment, and all the people that make her own life special. She started doing the things that she had always wanted to do. She also learned to stop and appreciate the small things around her. For her, although this was a time of great sadness, it was also an unexpected time of personal growth, which resulted in a more meaningful life.
Continuing to live and find joy is the ultimate way to honor your loved one.
I think so. Give it some thought. And consider, that there IS happiness after grief.
To endure your grief, it is necessary to keep in mind that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, in the form of some joyful living.
Lists for Happiness
JOY LIST - What is the joy list? It was an idea that helped me during a very sad, tragic time in my life. I lost my wife and became a widower at the age of 53 and was going through a grief-healing journey. My thought was that I was obviously in a tremendous amount of pain and I was grieving and dealing with the loss of a loved one. I had all these things I had to do that were sad. I called this the "sad list."
SAD LIST - What is a sad list? It was a list that I filled with all of the activities that I had to do, contacting friends that we could not locate to let them know about my wife's death was sad. Closing credit card accounts and changing bank accounts was sad. Sad activities were central in my life for several months which, let's face it, can be very depressing. So I decided to overcome all of the sadness by creating a joy list.
The joy list was very simple. It was just a list of all the things that make me happy, bring me up, put me in a good frame of mind, or things that just bring me joy. My thought was if I could plan each week to do some of the things that brought me joy, it would help balance out some of the dark things I had to do that were on the sad list. My joy list included some of the following items: Travel, Art and art museums, Water parks, Being with friends, Hiking, Drawing and painting, Working out, Playing the drums, Movies, Shopping, and Amusement parks.
So I noticed once I started to work items from my joy list into my weekly schedule (I'm sure this is no surprise) they brought me joy. It felt good to have some joy back in my life. More importantly, while I was doing them they brought me joy and I was not thinking about the grief. It was a tremendous boost to my heart and soul. So I would feel sad, I would go do something joyful and then later that day, I might have felt sad again. My point is I didn't feel sad when I was in joy.
Now the cynics of the world will say to me, "Well sir, how can you have joy when your wife just died? How can you go anywhere and have fun when you should be grieving?" Well, I say that is nonsense! Just because I worked some small moments of joy into my life did not mean that I was not grieving, and it did not mean that I was not missing my wife. I was miserable enough grieving -- why would I want to sit around and continue to be miserable? I never understood that mindset.
So as for me I choose joy, I choose happiness, I choose to celebrate life because life is short. I am sure some folks are reading this who will say "Well, that is a great idea to do the joy list -- but to be brutally honest, I don't feel like having joy." I understand, I do. The timing of the joy list is entirely up to you, or you can never try it at all. I'm going to strongly recommend that you do it anyway.
Six weeks after my wife died I went to an amusement park. I know it sounds crazy but -- I found that it did help me tremendously to get out and do things that brought me joy. I'm not saying it is the right approach for you. I'm only saying that worked for me. I also believe that when you are grieving sometimes you have to "fake it until you make it." It's almost as if you have to battle your mind -- your mind wants to grieve but your body and your spirit want to go out and play. What I noticed is when I put my body into action (like standing in a wave pool) my body convinced my mind to relax and have fun. So sometimes the mind follows the body and other times the body follows the mind. Just give it a try.
Here is a bigger question I would ask anyone -- what is so wrong with being happy? If you want joy, you can have it again, you just have to try harder and it will come -- I promise.
If this is you, take heart. You can be happy again. You can laugh again. You can feel joy again.
Six Truths to Finding Your Happiness
You have to choose happiness again. Here’s the thing. It doesn’t happen like this: months and years don’t just roll by and one fine morning you wake up and feel that sparkle of happiness in the middle of your chest. You have to want happiness again. You have to choose happiness again. This means healing the beliefs you’ve made your own. I don’t deserve to be happy anymore. How can I be happy when my husband is dead? Your being unhappy isn’t serving anyone. Your loved ones in spirit want you to be happy.
Your flavor of happiness is different. Happiness after loss may have a different taste to it. Maybe it’s a deep sense of contentment. Maybe it’s more muted and less bubbly. Maybe it feels more like appreciation and gratitude for all the blessings in your life and all that you know now.
What makes you happy is different. Most people that I work with admit that their values have changed after the storm they went through. What used to be important no longer is. What once did not get their time, energy, and focus now does. Things that don’t matter fall away. Priorities shift. What it means to have a happy and fulfilled life without your loved one is a new phase you learn to navigate.
Learning to be happy because of the loss. Your loss has taught you how fragile life is and now you’re even more conscious of every passing moment and devoted to making it count. Your loved one isn’t here, but you are. You breathe with a whole new level of appreciation for the gift of breath. You resolve to live a life and create a legacy that will leave your heart imprint on the world.
Living life on your terms. A new awareness that you have so much love to give and receive takes root. Life didn’t pan out the way you imagined but you’re determined to live life on your terms. Pleasing other people, doing what others think you should, and giving until it hurts to give — these lifelong habits of fulfilling others’ expectations and living by popular social norms fall away. You begin to ask yourself what matters to you and how you want to spend the rest of your life. Whether it’s eating cake for dinner, painting in the park, or moving to live closer to the beach. This becomes the new compass that guides your life.
Happiness is a changing target. Instead of spurts of joy and big highs, happiness is more about deep contentment and a settled feeling that all is well. Because of the massive grief you’ve experienced, you know that we’re all impermanent and all that we feel is impermanent too. So you’re better able to accept that a day of feeling tearful and hopeless is just a passing wave. You receive it and be with it, knowing that happiness will find you again.
I’ve been forced to learn that if we give ourselves permission and time to process grief in all its forms, and if others can manage to offer us the same, we somehow can open space in our hearts to experience moments of powerful joy.
It has been through holding space for joy in my heart and connecting with love when sitting with pain, in the throes of sorrow, that I managed to swim not drown. I was able to stand in awe of life and love and embrace it as all that is me—and all that is we. Over time, that initial space of love and joy grew, until it could no longer contain or entertain anything else but love and conviction.
Question About Happiness
Now, my last question is WERE YOU HAPPY BEFORE YOUR HUSBAND PASSED AWAY? IF NOT, WHY?
You may need to go back before the death of your spouse and question your personal experience with happiness. I know in my own story, I had learned to not be too happy because something else bad would happen. I remember how I was always preparing for the worst to happen. If I did not prepare, then I would feel anxious. I hated feeling anxious.
Did I know what happiness was before my husband passed away? NO, I DID NOT!
In the book Uncovering Happiness, Elisha Goldstein reveals 7 steps to uncovering happiness. He is someone who practiced this in his own life and discovered that he was filtering life from a place of deep sadness a not understanding a personal HAPPINESS. He says in the introduction, “Mindfulness changed my life; in fact, it may have even saved it.” He talks in the book about these 7 steps that brought him from a state of deep sadness to a deep peaceful happiness as he began to develop practices of healing himself from the inside out.
Our Brain is a Natural Antidepressant
In Part 1 of his book, he discusses that our brain is a natural antidepressant. Wow! We can heal ourselves. Isn’t this powerful? You may be saying. REALLY? That is not what I am hearing people tell me. People are telling me to go to the doctor, get meds, go get help. I am not saying don’t go get help, I am just introducing this concept that you have superpowers at your disposal. When you become aware of your superpowers changes will and can happen.
Next week, we are going to dive into Our Brain is a Natural Antidepressant and look at understanding steps to uncover happiness. We will look at our “fear dance” or our “depression loop” and step into reversing bad habits. Do you see yourself spiraling under the sadness of the grief? Has this been a spiral from before your spouse passed away? Much of how we grieve after the devastating loss of our spouses is how we have been taught to grieve. From that experience, we develop tools, and strategies, and move through life to manage our emotions that sometimes put us in stuck and sadder places where we feel we have no options in life.
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