Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

We all believe that we want to feel good, but sometimes feeling good leads to feeling bad. Why does this happen? Here are 5 reasons.

1. Something bad happened when you were feeling good in the past. Sometimes you know what that was (e.g. we were feeling on top of the world when a tragic accident occurred), and sometimes you don’t. You just know that you start to get nervous and avoid things that would lead to feeling good. This is simple learning by association.
 
These connections can be hard to break. If you continue to avoid things that might lead to feeling good (usually this tendency is unconscious), you never extinguish this learned association. It may take many times of pushing past the nervous feeling before the nervous feeling finally lets go.
 
2. Other people didn’t like it when you felt good. It may be that when you were “full of yourself” or quite lively it made Mother angry or you were ignored. Maybe there was someone ill at home and you had to stay quiet and invisible.
 
3.  You avoid happy to preserve a relationship. If someone around you is quite unhappy, you may not want to “rub salt in the wound” by being happy. Or perhaps you started a relationship in a low state and are afraid to risk upsetting it by changing. Look for ways you may be trying to protect a relationship by muting yourself.
 
4. You live in a numb state. If you’ve protected yourself from overwhelming or negative feelings by numbing, you will want to preserve that. Good feelings will shake up a habitual pattern, and there is inherent resistance against changing a safety mechanism like this.
 
5. You don’t think you deserve to be happy. So where did that idea come from? This is rotten programming worth deconstructing! The more firmly you believe it, the more you’ll need skilled help getting out from under it.

These are not easy patterns to change yet essential to change if you’re to have a chance at a happier life. The happiness strategies of the previous blog may be of help.