Choose to enjoy your life

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 30, 2015

There are many things we do to shape our lives that we don’t realize are choices. How can we make better ones?

I’m going to talk about choosing to enjoy your life by talking about techniques some people use for being miserable.

The first way to be miserable is to try to make other people do right. Your uncle is always going to drink too much at family gatherings and start talking about how terrible the president is. Your parents are always going to bail your big brother out of the financial “adventures” he gets embroiled in. Your sister is going to keep giving that guy another chance, even though he is clearly bad for her, and anyone could see it, and you could say something but it wouldn’t do any good. Even though you know that later she’s going to say “why didn’t you say something?” and you’re going to have to just stare her down.

So you can’t make people do the right thing. You can influence. Sometimes. Occasionally the window of influence is open, and you can say one or two things, then it closes again and your voice bounces off of shiny glass. If you say too much, or lean into the situation too often, you become a voice in the other person’s head that they set up resistances to. I call it “waking up the inner mule.” Then you’re sunk. They can’t even hear their own inner voice of health because now it’s got your voice and they don’t recognize it as belonging to themselves.

Sometimes it comes down to this: when a person in your life is behaving incorrectly you have to withdraw from them until they begin behaving correctly again. That’s advice from the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the I Ching. Sometimes this can be accomplished and sometimes it can’t.

When I’ve said these things to clients when I was a therapist, they responded “So you just want me to give up? You want me not to care?” No. Care. Don’t give up. Just be quiet. My Aunt Ruth, psychiatrist and mother of seven, used to say “When you can’t do anything about it, just say your prayers and watch it like TV.” Care. Just don’t control. Or give up. The I Ching calls this “bringing a lawsuit,” when you decide someone is hopeless and will never change. It warns against this. So you have to keep some hope but don’t let your hope make you stupid. Don’t let your hope put you in danger. Yoga teaching calls this “idiot compassion,” when, out of compassion for someone, you put yourself or others at reckless risk.

You can’t make other people be happy. Number one, some people don’t want to be happy. It’s not comfortable for them. It’s not familiar. Happiness feels stupid to some people. Others are wired as systems analysts, and they don’t like to be in a situation without cataloging all the things that could be done better, put together better, and giving a report of their findings. I find those folks very useful, because they see real flaws, but they can come off as negative.

You can’t control what people think of you or how they respond to you. The 12 step program has a saying “What you think of me is none of my business.” You can practice some conversations just to see how you think they will go, and those inner conversations can be fruitful, but so many of us try to practice strategies that will make someone respond the way we want them to. We either get lost in our heads, having conversations with them that turn into fights (that they don’t know about) or we polish and polish our confrontation with the thought that this, surely, will make the person who did wrong stop short, have a realization like the dawning of the first day, turn to us with liquid eyes and say “I’m so sorry. You were so right, and I was so wrong. How can I ever make it up to you?”

You have to be aware, when having these inner conversations (one of my clients called it “watching skull cinema”) that you remember the other person has not been part of the conversation. You may think you know what they are going to say. You may actually know what they are going to say, but it’s always good to give them a chance to surprise you.

Another technique for misery is to try to help when your help wasn’t asked for. Just as people won’t be interested in your answer to their question before they’ve asked or even formulated their question, people don’t want your help (usually) until they’ve asked for it. Even sometimes when they ask for help they don’t really want it. I had a great mother-in-law when I was married to her son for 17 years. When she came to help with the babies, I would ask her how to burp them the best or how to lay them down the best, and she would just shrug and tell me I was doing fine. If I asked her three times, she would finally tell me a little something. If you find yourself being snapped at by people around you, and you say “I was just trying to help!” Maybe you are helping without being asked. It’s helpful to people to allow others to figure things out, to allow them the struggle, to encourage their sense of agency. When they come to you in a state, instead of putting down what you are doing, heaving a sigh, getting up and fixing it, you can first try saying “That sure is a problem. What are you going to do?” Some people like the “Bet You Can’t Help Me” game, where you suggest one thing after another and they tell you why that won’t work. It’s fun for them but not for you. Other people have become convinced that they can’t do it, and if you keep doing it for them you underscore their conviction that they are incompetent. I knew a woman whose husband left her for another woman, moved into that other woman’s house a few blocks away, and the wife kept fixing him a plate for dinner and taking it down there. I’m not sure what all she was underscoring with that behavior, but you know that wasn’t right.

When you offer help, think about being a good steward of your time and energy. Are you using it well? Some folks in our lives, you could give them all your money and all your time and they would still need more. It wouldn’t help them. Other people are trying hard, doing what they can, they have a plan, they just need something. They will benefit most from your help. Think about where your help will do the most good. So many times we pour our help into the most pitiful person in our lives, and then we don’t have anything left when someone who is mostly doing ok needs a little something that will make a big difference. This is an insight from family systems theory, which says you help the family most by helping the healthiest members of the family most. Then that ripples out through the family.

This brings us to a corollary of the first bit of wisdom (you can’t make people do right), which is the common cold of techniques to have a miserable life. Trying to control things that can’t be controlled.

I am a big believer in control. First born, Virgo, raised Presbyterian, grammar aficionado, minister (did I say that out loud?) You should control what you can. Trying, however, to control things like other people or the weather or Ð well, here my imagination fails because I can’t think of anything else which can’t be controlled, or at least influenced Ð that is a sure way to be miserable. I’m sure this week I will be faced with hundreds more examples of things I can’t control, and I’ll say “Oh, yeah, that should have been on the list.”

When you are breaking your brain or your heart or your spirit on something, just gently enquire of your inner wisdom whether this is something which can be controlled, and if it’s not, point your feet downstream and wait for slower water.

Another technique for being miserable is not to know what you want and what you need. It’s amazing that many of us don’t know. It’s worth a little inner inquiry. I’m not saying that you always should do what you want and damn the torpedoes, but you should at least know what you want and what you need, whether you go after those things or not. Ask for what you want is a corollary of this. If the people around you don’t know what you want and what you need, you will be less happy than you might be. Some clients have said “If they love me they should just know what I need.” Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Often they are using 99 percent of their attention just to make it through their days, inward and outward, and they don’t have the capacity to notice your signals. It’s not that they don’t love you. They’re just tired. Or overwhelmed. Or reading a really good book.

If you can do the things you want to do and not do things you don’t want to do, that’s a way to be happier. If you have a choice of whether to do something or not, simply ask yourself whether you want to do it. If there’s not a big YES, then the answer is no. If it’s something for work, and you don’t really want to do it, ask yourself if you really want to have a job. Maybe that will inform your choice. If you don’t really want a job, ask whether you like to be able to buy food and go to the doctor. That might get you the guidance you need. I hope you understand by this overcomplicated backpedaling that I’m not recommending an irresponsible and hedonistic life. I’m just saying it can be insight producing to ask yourself whether or not you want to do this thing you are thinking of doing it. Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just because someone else wants you to doesn’t mean you have to. Just because it will make you the most money doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just because your mom and dad think you should do it doesn’t mean you have to do it. Martha Beck, a brilliant, funny and wise life coach with two Harvard PhDs, says to ask yourself, when facing a choice “Does this choice feel shackles on or shackles off?”

To enjoy your life, it’s important to put more focus on the things that are going well. This is sometimes called a practice of gratitude, or counting your blessings. Whatever you pay attention to is what fills your mind.

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