Happiness is Regulation
It occurred to me this week that when I say I feel “happy” more often lately, or “peaceful,” what I really mean is that I have learned how to emotionally regulate. For most of my adult (and child) life, I thought that emotional regulation was emotional suppression. I was very good at this. I knew how to dissociate like a pro, even when I was in elementary school. Bullies didn’t bother me because I knew how to NOT REACT. This was a key survival skill, not just in school, but in an abusive household where not only my father but also my older brothers, who mimicked him to a lesser degree, were dangerous to anyone who showed them that they would react. I did not react. I had “control” over my emotions.
After my daughter died, I discovered some of the negative consequences of dissociation as a method of dealing with grief. A lot of them were physical: constant nausea, general physical discomfort, headaches. Many of the results were also emotional and social: shouting and sobbing uncontrollably, fleeing social situations that had once felt safe and comforting, being unable to focus or concentrate, or alternately zoning out when I should have been able to pay attention to multiple things, detaching from many relationships. I learned, finally, that I had emotions and that I needed to pay attention to them. But that didn’t mean I had emotional regulation.
For another decade, difficult situations sent me into a tailspin of emotional dysregulation. Other people’s comments or moods made me feel that I was unworthy to be alive and I had no idea how to deal with the growing reality that I was making choices that the people who had been closest to me for my adult life thought were wrong, immoral, or even evil. I couldn’t make myself continue to live the Mormon life but I also found it nearly impossible to live with the reactions of people around me who perceived me to be a hedonistic heretic when all I was doing was the real work of adulthood: figuring out who I was underneath the conditioning and brainwashing, and actually discovering what I liked and what mattered to me.
Sitting with the discomfort of knowing that people I love are judging me, that people I love hold an opinion of me that is not the same as the opinion I hold myself, is incredibly difficult work. It is not the same as ignoring other people’s opinions, though it may look like it from the outside. It doesn’t mean that I am obligated to spend time with people who treat me badly, either. This was another thing that I’ve tried carefully to disentangle from my religious past. Forgiving someone has nothing to do with allowing them back into your life. Giving care to others is not the same as letting them run over you and having no boundaries, though this has often been the model for women in patriarchy and in patriarchal religion.
To have skills at hand to breathe through the triggered state that hits my body when I am presented with situations that I do not like, or when people I love say things to me that might previously have made me feel like being dead, may seem to many other people as obvious steps to adulthood. But they were not steps that I saw adults around me taking and certainly no one explained them to me in church, school, or even in my conversations with adult friends. So, it was therapy and reading books that showed me these were actually skills that one could learn slowly, and through practice. They aren’t particularly fun skills and no one gives out medals because there aren’t any finish lines (at least as far as I have seen). But they do allow me to have some measure of control over difficult situations and this helps me believe that I will not easily fall back into suicidal ideation.
Why do I say that emotional regulation is happiness? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe this isn’t what other people mean when they talk about happiness. But it is what I’ve been talking about when I’ve complained that I don’t feel happy. It allows me to be more in control of my life and that is certainly a good portion of feeling peaceful and feeling free of my past traumas. If emotional regulation isn’t really happiness, then it feels so good that I guess I don’t care if I’m supposed to be looking for something else. It means that I enjoy spending time with myself and am not afraid that my brain is going to wind up and start shooting down anything good that happens. It means that I can do something very hard or nothing and still feel, deep down, a sense of satisfaction. It means that I get to pay attention to my physical reactions to decide if something is good or bad—for me. And no one else gets to tell me whether or not I should or should not have that experience, because my subjective experience of the world IS what happiness or unhappiness is.