it’s because you have chosen to surround yourself with genuine, generous, and loving people. If you’re feeling happy because you have a great family, it’s because you have chosen to be consciously grateful for them.
Similarly, nobody can make us unhappy. No wife, no husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend, lovers or exes, family or friends can make us unhappy—we have always been the only ones who can cause our own suffering and our own unhappiness, because it is always our response to the circumstances that determines whether we are happy or unhappy.
It’s never what happens or who happened, but how we handle it. It is also not whom we have or don’t have in our lives, because we cannot have a healthy relationship until we know that our happiness cannot be given to us by someone else.
We don’t expect people to lose weight for us, so why would we expect people to make us happy? We have to do that ourselves.
This is a perspective that my dad has never been able to truly understand. So much of his unhappiness lies in him being constantly at the mercy of people and circumstances—the smallest thing can make him angry, put him in a bad mood, and affect his entire day, if not his entire week.
Most of us don’t consciously think, “I blame the weather, the traffic, the waiter, that stupid person, my partner, and/or my boss,” but that is essentially what we’re doing when we have a tendency to be easily upset by people and circumstances.
When our thoughts carry us in a direction of blame, it is very easy to feel sorry for ourselves because we feel like people and things are always creating unhappiness in our lives. But our happiness is not in the hands of people and circumstances, it is inside of us.
As long as we are seeking happiness externally instead of cultivating it internally, it is likely it will be very hard for us to live with gratitude, because every time we feel grateful about something, we will find fault with a dozen other things.
Nobody can make us happy or unhappy, but we can always make ourselves happy.
Fulfilment in Love and Relationships
Understand the Relationship You Have with Yourself
<Understanding>
One of our deepest needs for happiness, or even for survival, revolves strongly around our connections and relationships with people. However, it is often our connections and relationships with people that cause us the most problems and bring us the most unhappiness. The one thing we need the most is also the one thing that challenges us the most. It would be very ironic if it didn’t make so much sense—where there is comfort, there is also challenge. The yin and yang of life is what creates balance, and to deny one by craving more of the other only serves to make us miserable.
Our quality of life is greatly impacted by the quality of our relationships with people, so if we don’t cultivate the skills of how to navigate through the difficult aspects of interacting with others, we will often feel very unhappy.
This is why we can have so much going for us yet feel so angry or frustrated most of the time. We can have an amazing career we know we’re lucky to have, yet go to work in a bad mood because we can’t get along with a colleague or with our boss. We can have a steady relationship we value, yet still feel resentful of our partner and what he or she isn’t contributing to the relationship. We can have a beautiful family we love, yet spend most of our time at home, impatient and short-tempered.
Life is strange in the way that we can see how much we have yet still not feel content. If this isn’t addressed, we will go through life chalking up many regrets along the way. Many of us are aware of this already, but we don’t know how to resolve the feelings of discontentment within us.
This is why I find it so important to learn how to build positive relationships with others, because it is the people around us who impact our happiness the most. Much of our dissatisfaction with life comes from dissatisfying interactions and relationships.
When it comes to relationships with people, it isn’t about making people happy or blaming and accusing those who make you unhappy—it’s about understanding your relationship with yourself.
It isn’t until we examine what our needs and fears are that we understand why we have an aversion to certain behaviors, or why we gravitate toward certain relationships, or why we put up a wall to protect ourselves.
It isn’t until we know what our ideals and expectations are that we understand why some people affect us more deeply than others, or why we might have a really strong negative reaction when people disagree with us.
We can be incredibly good with the day-to-day things of living, from feeding ourselves and our families to managing teams of people and putting out fires at work. This is partly because we spend years in school preparing ourselves for our careers, so as adults, a huge part of our brain space is dedicated to thinking about how to do or fix something. However, to be truly happy, we also need to learn to be aware of why we think the thoughts we do, why we want the things we want, and why we get upset over certain things. It is when we understand ourselves that we can stop outsourcing our happiness away so easily to other people.
Problems and challenges are inevitable in our relationships—pain and hurt are part of human interaction—but it is how we respond to them that determines how happy we are. To resolve problems in our relationships with people, we have to learn how to communicate. The hardest part about communicating with people is learning not to react negatively when we disagree—it’s hard to not feel defensive, judged, resentful, or attacked in a difficult conversation. This makes it hard for us to take the next step forward or to make decisions that can help us and not hurt us further. This is why before we can even begin to understand someone else, we have to first understand ourselves.
What are your expectations and judgements of other people? What are your triggers and sensitivities? What are your insecurities, fears, and needs?
To understand ourselves is to understand people better. This is the most crucial step of communication, whether in our romantic relationships, with our family members, or even with difficult clients, colleagues, and customers.
When we face challenges in our relationships with people, the work is not up to them—it is up to us to build our self-awareness and emotional maturity so that we can respond to these relationship challenges in a way that brings us more happiness and less suffering. As the next two chapters of this book address how we relate with people, it is best to read them sequentially. The next chapter examines our expectations, needs, and fears so that we will be able to communicate openly and build amazing relationships with the people we love.
Your Normal Is Not the Universal Normal
Part 1
Perspective
Is life difficult? Or is it that the people in our lives make life difficult? The answer is almost always the latter, until we realize that this is not true either—it is our expectations of how people should be that make our lives difficult.
We all have our values, beliefs, principles, and ethics that we hold true, and they form the standards that guide our lives. We all think that our standards are good; that’s why we subscribe to them. This is why it’s easy to fall into thinking that our own standards are the universal standard—“Kind people will behave this way,” or “Generous people will
