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Dealing with unhappiness through mindfulness

February 15, 2013 //  by Joyce Alexander//  68 Comments

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Editor’s note: The following article refers to spiritual concepts. Please read Lovefraud’s statement on Spiritual Recovery.

By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired)

While I am a Christian in belief, I also read about the beliefs of various other religions and philosophies because I think there are valuable lessons in the writings of each of them.

Lately as I have been increasing my study of “mindful” meditation. Since this was first practiced by Buddhists, there were some interesting points about Buddhist beliefs brought up by the author in a book I read called Mindfulness for Beginners by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This book is about mindful meditation for stress reduction, and is not a religious work.

In the Buddhist tradition, the causes of unhappiness are Greed, Aversion and Delusion. I am going to expound on these three a bit.

Greed

Greed is our desire to have something which we think will make us happy, be it a new car, a career as a singer, or to have someone love us. We have this big desire for something; anything. Actually, that feeling of unrequited desire can definitely cause unhappiness.

I think about how “greedy” I was that my children would grow up to be successful men, happy, caring and loving men. How much unhappiness did I bring on myself for having this “greed”? I think about how I spent so much time wanting to be loved by the psychopaths in my life.

Jon Kabat-Zinn says:

That doesn’t mean we cannot desire things or that we should not have goals or ambitions. It simply reminds us that we generate less suffering in ourselves and others when we are aware of how attached we may be to our desires and then let that awareness modulate our thoughts, emotions and actions.

Aversion

Aversion is the flip side of greed. Aversion comes from whatever you don’t want, don’t like, and/or would like to change. Many emotions are encompassed in aversion; anger, rage, fear, hate, and even smaller emotions like being irritable or resentful. In learning about aversion, in other words, being unhappy at how things are, I have spent too much of my life being unhappy because the world wasn’t what I wanted it to be. By acknowledging that the world or situation isn’t what I want, but not allowing those emotions to overwhelm me, I can spend less time being unhappy.

The author says:

Mindfulness of aversion is profoundly healing, because it offers us a way to at least momentarily dissolve the self-imposed but unconscious straight jacket of such automatic and unconscious reactions ”¦ it allows us to see that we have very real choices ”¦ and whether we are really better off with our emotional reaction.

Delusion

Delusion, or the trap of self-fulfilling prophecies, is the exact opposite of wisdom. This is believing what we want to believe rather than seeing the reality. This delusion, this illusion, is what keeps us welded to the psychopath and believing that they will change.

The author says about Delusion:

We can always marshal any evidence we want in support of a particular view and then believe it even if it is patently not true.

Boy, if that doesn’t sum up the delusional life I led trying to believe what I wanted to believe about the psychopaths in my life!

Overcoming the unhappiness

However, we do not have to fall prey to any of these problems, we can control how we react to whatever is happening in our lives, good, bad or indifferent. I’ve realized in the last few months I have engaged in all three of these toxic things in my personal life and I have suffered for it in stress reactions, poor health, poor sleep, and depression. But I am determined to dig myself out of the abyss in which I have sunk by doing what I know is good for me, what I already know to do, and to study other positive things I can apply to my life. I am not powerless. Knowledge is power….if you use it.

Dr. Viktor Frankl lost everything except his life in a Nazi prison camp. After he was released, he wrote in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, “everything can be taken from a human being but one thing— the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances; to choose one’s own way.”

Category: Recovery from a sociopath

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Ox Drover

Tea Light, if you have not read “Man’s search for meaning” I suggest you do, that book was the “turn around” for me. That book and LF saved my life and sanity.

March 20, 2013 12:48 pm
Tea Light

I will Oxy, my counselor and you have both mentioned Frankl, I plan on reading him and Jon Kabat-Zinn too, over the Easter break . Roll on April!

March 20, 2013 12:51 pm
Ox Drover

Tea light, I could g on forever about how Frankl changed my thinking, and thus my life “as a man thinketh in is heart so is he”

March 20, 2013 1:59 pm
Louise

Oxy:

Sounds like I NEED to read that book!

March 20, 2013 2:01 pm
Ox Drover

Louise, it explains pain and the way we Handle adversity better than any book I ever read, how to endure what we cannot change.

March 20, 2013 4:42 pm
Louise

Oxy:

I really need that seriously. Perhaps it will go along great with my counseling.

March 20, 2013 5:36 pm
Tea Light

Lou last week we both broke NC and so in late March 2014 we’ll be able to post woo hoo! We did it! One year no contact! And we can do the no contact dance. That’ll be good won’t it? x

March 20, 2013 6:02 pm
discovering

I’m interested in this idea of self- centered fear.
I do believe that is guiding my actions now.
Fear of what he might do,
fear of where I will work,
fear of where I will live,
fear of the legal process (and getting screwed)- greed and aversion I would guess.

And the ideas of greed; I never quite thought of it in the way you describe OxD. I think I always associated greed with tangible objects.

Aversion is big for me right now!!! I know more about what I don’t want than what I do want right now. Facing an unexpected separation/divorce is something that (although I didn’t want ) has to happen for me to move forward.

How do I begin to learn about what I want for me??? I think that I gave so much of myself- I thought that was a good thing but now I see that I deluding myself into believing that if I only kept giving of myself that I would be enough for him. I even recall saying that I felt him slipping away and that I felt I wasn’t good enough. Fortunately I did not suffer the verbal abuse that many women have, but the covert abuse (poisoning, gaslighting) was so much more incidious. It did cause me to question my own sanity on top of all the other nonsense.

My counselor told me that my husband is a narcissistic psychopath and that there were many masks (personalities), but that all of these “personalities” were him- counselor says the reasons for my husbands disorder is probably recriprocal (many causes).

I see now that my growth and movement forward is also recriprocal. It seems that the broad beliefs for recovery are similar- it really is all about us and our doing the work that we need to heal ourselves from what (for most of us) has been a lifetime of disordered thinking on our own part.

It is now 6:10 PM and I have resisted calling, texting, and emailing the “P” to tell him that I am thinking of him on our anniversary. Got married on the first day of spring to represent a “new beginning” 🙁

March 20, 2013 6:11 pm
discovering

did a little research on Frankl…

from Wikipedia

Frankl concludes that there are only two races of men, decent men and indecent. No society is free of either of them, and thus there were “decent” Nazi guards and “indecent” prisoners, most notably the kapo who would torture and abuse their fellow prisoners for personal gain.
(sounds familiar)

His concluding passage in Part One describes the psychological reaction of the inmates to their liberation, which he separates into three stages.

The first is depersonalization—a period of readjustment, in which a prisoner gradually returns to the world. Initially, the liberated prisoners are so numb that they are unable to understand what freedom means, or to emotionally respond to it. Part of them believes that it is an illusion or a dream that will be taken away from them. In their first foray outside their former prison, the prisoners realized that they could not comprehend pleasure. Flowers and the reality of the freedom they had dreamed about for years were all surreal, unable to be grasped in their depersonalization.

The body is the first element to break out of this stage, responding by big appetites of eating and wanting more sleeping. Only after the partial replenishing of the body is the mind finally able to respond, as “feeling suddenly broke through the strange fetters which had restrained it” (111).

This begins the second stage, in which there is a danger of deformation. As the intense pressure on the mind is released, mental health can be endangered. Frankl uses the analogy of a diver suddenly released from his pressure chamber. He recounts the story of a decent friend who became immediately obsessed with dispensing the same violence in judgment of his abusers that they had inflicted on him.

I believe many like me have problems overcoming- wanting the “P” that hurt us so badly to see him suffer as we have. By feeling this way, Frankl is telling us that our own mental health is in danger.
I guess that means if you are fixated at this point in your recovery- that it would be beneficial to work on releasing the pain. Finding the right type of counseling seems to be the biggest battle we face in this step.

I think we all know that we as empaths, could never stoop to the depths that our abusers have. Could I systematically poison my spouse’s food and drink in order to kill them slowly with arsenic? No, that never entered into my consciousness. I could never beat him at his evil game.

Upon returning home, the prisoners had to struggle with two fundamental experiences which could also damage their mental health: bitterness and disillusionment. The last stage is bitterness at the lack of responsiveness of the world outside—a “superficiality and lack of feeling…so disgusting that one finally felt like creeping into a hole and neither hearing nor seeing human beings any more” (113).

Worse was disillusionment, which was the discovery that suffering does not end, that the longed-for happiness will not come. This was the experience of those who ”“ like Frankl ”“ returned home to discover that no one awaited them. The hope that had sustained them throughout their time in the concentration camp was now gone. Frankl cites this experience as the most difficult to overcome.

Honesty this was the most disappointing part to read since the end of suffering is what we are striving for.

March 20, 2013 6:44 pm
Laura19

I’ve seen the title Man’s Search for Meaning come up so often recently here on Lovefraud, and I kept thinking that I had heard of it before, and I also thought that maybe I even owned it. I looked on my bookshelf just now, and there it was! It is one of those books that I’ve had for years but never read. I think the time has come to do that, finally. Thanks, Oxy, for suggesting it. I feel happy that I saw the potential in it so many years ago when I bought it, and apparently I was right!

March 20, 2013 7:10 pm
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