Please Consider Me "Your Personal Happiness Doctor"

When children came to see me, I would explain to them that: "I'm not the kind of doctor who gives you medicine or shots. The letters after that doctor's name are M.D. and stand for medical doctor. The letters after my name are Ph.D. They stand for people's happiness doctor, and for adolescents and adults I'd say the letters meant that I was their personal happiness doctor. I am the doctor who helps you figure out what is making you unhappy and I help you become happier."

I left clinical practice to reach more people, but there is no reason that my message has to lose the personal touch of one-on-one therapy. I know that I have felt the work of certain authors, Alice Miller, for example, as speaking directly to my heart. It is my hope that you will feel the same with my books, tapes, CDs, videos, DVDs, and seminars.

We all want to be happy but we continue to do and say things that interfere with being happy in life. The habits we develop for handling stress are a big factor in preventing or fostering happiness. Below is an excerpt about happiness taken from Slay the Dragon—Not Each Other.

Excerpt on Happiness from Slay the Dragon—Not Each Other

Since the renowned psychologist Martin Seligman wrote Authentic Happiness (see http://www.positive-psychology.org/), happiness has become the subject of serious scientific study. How we can cultivate happiness and other positive emotions became the goal of a new positive psychology. . . . [To me] in addition to cultivating happiness, we need to remove what I discovered was a fundamental fear of being happy.

Why We Develop a Fear of Feeling Good & Being Happy

“Whenever I feel really good, as I do after I meditate, my son and daughter start acting up and bring me down.” Mary was talking about how frustrating it is to stay in a place of peace around her teenagers. What’s going on? Somehow her children are fearing a loss. It’s as if they are thinking, “Where is Mommy? What have you [the happy, peaceful person before them] done with our Mommy?” “How were you when your kids were small?” I asked Mary. “Anxious,” she replied. Clearly, the relaxed person was not the mother they were used to, and they felt a loss. They were scared. 

Our first source of security is found in our mother’s arms. As infants, we can feel her tension and her concern in the cells of our little-baby body. Early in our mother’s arms, our brain is developing chemical connections. And we start wiring in our associations of what feels safe. Insofar as our primary caretaker often felt bad—mad, scared, anxious, sad and depressed—we learn to link feeling bad with feeling safe and secure.

The hypothalamus is the seat of emotions. It is the bartender of the brain; early on it starts serving up brain brews associated with safety and security. We can become addicted to the negative emotions exhibited by our primary caretaker, mother, father, grandmother, etcetera. Just as an alcoholic is hooked on his or her beverage of choice, we are hooked on feeling bad in some form.
If your primary caretaker was anxious and angry, you come to associate feeling safe with being anxious and/or angry. You may seek out a partner that is anxious and angry. If your primary caretaker was depressed as well, you can add a dash of depression. Voilá! You have the brain brew that makes up your specific cockeyed cocktail  of mother-security. Things can be going well, and you get scared. Your fear may fuel a fight with a loved one so you can get that intoxicating feeling of the negative emotions associated with safety. 

There is a protective pattern people develop so as to avoid the pain of loss. It’s as if we think, “If I keep my body contracted and tense, then I am prepared for and protected from disappointments. Makes sense. Right? Sure does. But it does interfere with happiness. It is in the nature of the dragon, the reptile brain, to focus on danger so that we can insure our survival. Still, there is another source: our experience with our primary caretaker(s).

Often our parents set an example of indulging the bad habit of playing the blame-game. But even if they didn’t, the blame-game comes out of our feeling dependent on others and our environment to feel good and be at peace. The blame-game is just another aspect of the dragon of our dependency and desire. We sling mud at others and at our circumstances for causing our misery. Slinging mud keeps us mired in mud. When we have no power to change our circumstances, blaming is muddy thinking about who we are and what we are capable of accomplishing. The POWS taught us that we have the power to feel good by choosing a love focus instead of a fear or blame focus.

Consider how your mother tended to be. Anxious? Angry? Depressed? All of the above? What did you see on her face most  of the time you were growing up? A frown? A smile? Approval? Disapproval? How often did you see her happy? How often did your father seem happy?

Remember that the observer effect in physics can help us break our addictions, especially the one to feeling bad. Once we look under a microscope at the mass of moving electrons, they freeze like deer staring into the headlights of a car. Simply noting and then linking our negative emotions to love, we can break the pattern of being negative. If you practice the 8 steps and the following meditations, you can redirect the archaic chemical aqueducts and  rewire the neural pathways in your brain. Feeling good can become the norm, and feeling bad becomes the deviation from the norm.