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Decide to pursue happiness as a way of life.

by Benjamin B. Conley, M.Div., LMFT

Here is a second way to convert struggle into success. The challenge with this idea is to create specific, down-to-earth applications of the decision to be happy. By keeping in mind your decision to pursue happiness as a way of life, you will be looking for opportunities to think and do things that will result in happiness.

For example, by focusing on the positives about yourself you can enjoy being the way you are, even though you have not arrived at your ideal picture of yourself. In the same way, you can focus on the positives about others and be supportive of what is good for them as well as yourself.

You can subject everything you do to the criterion of whether it is loving and positive, refusing to engage in negative thinking and behavior such as criticism, sarcasm, and ridicule, or whatever you dislike others to say or do to you.

Here are some ways to practice implementing your decision to pursue happiness as a way of life. [Read more →]

by Benjamin B. Conley, M.Div., LMFT

We have all found ourselves, at one time or another, engaged in what seems to be an endless, frustrating struggle to achieve success with something at which we have failed. Often, that struggle may have been to get someone else to be “reasonable,” “fair,” or “logical.” We may have been engaged in an attempt to accomplish the impossible, to control what we have no control over: the other person. The struggle sometimes turns into a fight with the other person or a criticism of ourselves.

We are all equipped with genetic knowledge about how to survive: fight or flight, freeze or submit. We know “in our bones” how to defend ourselves when we find ourselves in danger. We want our environment to be safe, rather than threatening, and endeavor to make it as safe as possible, by various means.

The “fight/flight” response is a genetically programmed reaction to control our environment and any enemies that may threaten us. The goal is to dominate and control adversaries so as to neutralize them, or failing that, to escape from their domination.

It is easy to understand why we might be inclined to use the same methods to get others to do something we want them to do. We act that out in positive ways, for example, with sports such as football, competing to see who can dominate who as the primary goal. The winner is the team that has the dominant physical control, on balance, over the other, as measured by the points scored.

But in relationships other than sports, when there is no agreement to compete, attempting to control others turns into frustrating and hapless struggle, because we cannot control others, short of putting them into physical bondage.

The struggle to make things and others be what we want is familiar and understandable, but when it comes to achieving cooperative relationships, it is doomed to failure. The reason is that one person cannot control what another thinks or does.

The exception to this principle is parents’ responsibility to care for children, to assure that their behavior and environment is as positive and nurturing as possible and to protect them from hurt. But children also gradually let the parents know as they become emotionally and financially independent that the parents have less and less responsibility and eventually no responsibility to manage their lives. By growing up, the children work the parents out of the job of being caretakers.

More sophisticated methods of relating than fight/flight are required for satisfactory adult relationships, methods affirming the autonomy and freedom of each person, still allowing for initiative to pursue what each person wants. One way to think of ways of relating that succeed in relationships is to focus on cooperation. [Read more →]