Therapy can support you in exploring and understanding your emotions, thoughts and behaviours, which contributes to finding greater happiness if that’s a specific goal you have. But what is happiness anyway? Does it matter? What’s more important?
Happiness is a subjective and multifaceted emotional state often associated with contentment, joy and satisfaction. We can have all of those and not feel happiness. Its significance varies from one person to the next; some prioritise happiness, while others put more emphasis and value on meaning, purpose, learning, safety, healing. or personal growth.
Therapy is a collaborative process involving tools and insights to improve your wellbeing. Feeling happier is just one potential outcome, but not the only one or necessarily the first indicator to a client that attending their sessions is proving tangibly beneficial. The act of talking to someone who isn’t going to judge you is often a relief from burdens and helps you look at problems, thoughts and feelings from new angles without them just going round and round inside your head. As one client said to me, “It’s like I couldn’t see what was going on, but now I can.”
Ultimately, the worth and importance of happiness is like things to which we apply monetary and sentimental value: we pay what we think a thing is worth or value something based on its context. The memories and love we have relating to a dead person can mean we hold onto a tatty old jumper in a drawer that no one can ever actually wear; we will pay hundreds of pounds for a collectible toy because we have the goal of collecting all in a series and it is the one item hard to find and much desired by others. Do either of those examples bring happiness? No. They provide satisfaction (the collectible – “I have them all now and they look great on the shelf!”) or comfort (“Mum knitted this jumper, I think it still smells of her and reminds me of this one day we went to York and we…”).
There are some who argue happiness does not exist. Are they right? The concept of happiness is subjective and can be interpreted differently, of course. It isn’t a real, tangible thing. It’s like gender, without the opposing forces slugging it out that we see evidenced around that particular topic every day in recent years. Happiness is generally accepted to be a thing not found in nature as such, insofar as we can’t point to the anatomy of a creature and say, “Here we have the organ of happiness, which puts out a hormone…” (although hormones play a role in feeling happy, or sad, or anything at all).
Happiness is no less real to us for being of the mind. Mental health and unwellness are both as equally impactful and consequential as physical health and sickness. Some argue happiness is elusive or a fleeting emotion, while others see it as a deeper and more sustainable state of wellbeing. It’s a philosophical and psychological debate, and perspectives on the existence of happiness can vary.
In what ways can therapy help us become happier? It can do this by presenting a safe, nonjudgemental space in which clients can explore and understand their emotions, identifying patterns of thinking or behaviours that are hindering their cultivation of happiness. Therapeutic interactions can offer coping strategies and tools to manage the challenges we face and overcome past traumas more effectively. Therapy, be it psychiatric or counselling, can, as a result, facilitate personal growth and self-discovery, both of which lead to an improved overall sense of wellbeing.
The short answer to the question of whether happiness can be found through therapy is – yes, it can. It isn’t the therapy or therapist that make us happy, though. Other people and processes external to ourselves can never impose or donate happiness to us. It is instead the accomplishment of our goals, the sense we have progressed, overcome, strengthened ourselves; accepted our vulnerabilities, forgiven ourselves and others, or in a multitude of other ways made and experienced changes within ourselves that we see as positive and resulting from the therapeutic processes we chose to engage with. Those can bring happiness. It is therefore something we achieve through our own efforts.
Happiness is fleeting, that much is true. It comes and goes and returns to us again. Contentment is perhaps a more sustainable goal, with peaks of happiness along the way. Alongside contentment, there is also peace and understanding to consider as the fertilising substrate materials in which happiness can grow. Extending that metaphorical allusion to plant life, therapy helps us build a better environment in our minds, like a greenhouse, where what we might see as our weeds and pests are less likely to flourish and bring us down, while the roses and fruit trees get the chance to grow and blossom.
xph therapy offers integrative counselling, which means working with multiple therapy types, including CBT, psychotherapeutic and person-centred to develop a therapeutic pathway just for you, whatever outcome you’re hoping to achieve. Get in touch in a variety of ways. See the contact page for more info.