Note: This amounts to an OpEd: I do not have clinical data; only anecdotal. This is an evolving idea.
As I’ve been enjoying my vacation, I’ve been thinking about this context in terms of relationships, especially between parent / child as well as romantic relationships. The focus of this writing is how I believe these concepts are left ambiguous among individuals, without a singular overarching definition to unify people and ideas, thus, creating churn and confusion.
The first component of this idea is the disconnection of Happiness and Anxiety from each other. I’m guessing for a good percentage of my audience, you’ve heard something along the lines of “Don’t do that! You’ll make me mad!”, “Study hard and get good grades and you’ll be good”, etc. from parents.
Straight to the point: I don’t think by following these sort of directions you are making them happy. You are (sorta) soothing their anxiety which isn’t quite the same thing.
The reason I made this point is because if you the child wants to choose to do something that makes you “happy”, such as pursuing a certain education or career, the idea is to grow your “happiness” metric, but it probably causes your parents “anxiety” metric to spike. How could you throw away stability for happiness?! This starts the communication breakdown because there is two perspectives talking about two different things.
For parents: personal happiness may be a foreign topic. Anything that threatens security sets off the alarms and primal fear drive, and the need to control the situation comes flying out.
For the child: personal happiness is this weird vague thing, but it seems like its worth chasing. After all, isn’t that what everybody is doing? Wasn’t this opportunity the point of parents risking so much in a foreign land? You’re afraid you’re ruining things, but at the same time, you don’t want to lose what little autonomy you have.
To be clear, having anxiety isn’t a bad thing. Nor is fear or wanting control. All are natural responses to situations too. Where the struggle is if there is poor self regulation of these feelings.
Like I said earlier, if these is an incorrect linking between happiness and soothing anxiety, fear and control are also probably poorly regulated. Fear typically goes to worst case scenarios (and feeding a vicious cycle. Control is heavy handedly thrown around in order to try to (externally) sooth these internal feelings.
The growth comes with the realization that you can control externally, what really are internal struggles. Fear responses are personal feelings. Control are actions that you can healthily exert over yourself, and unhealthily exert over other people. Happiness is certainly a valuable goal to attain, but only if its correctly identified and defined.