Misery Loves Company

On the theme of containment, I’ve been thinking how misery can be a habit – a life long habit. If you were born into, and lived with, depression, that’s what you will be used to. Misery became familiar to you. Joy, being unfamiliar, will be more threatening. It is unknown and you are less likely to trust it. That's why fear comes along with excitement. You don't know how to contain your excitement.

“Change is always for the worse,” someone said to me recently. What a negative attitude! This was a person who shunned change, never grew and reached her eighties with a whole lot of unfulfilled potential and regrets. Have a look at your negativity. What do you feel more comfortable with? What have you got used to?

If your family was miserable they would not have been able to cope with a healthy, joyful, vivacious, spontaneous and powerful child. They could have been miserable for any number of reasons, depression, bereavement, general unhappiness with their situation. Their negativity could be understandable, but the effect on you, the child, was devastating. You grew up believing your happiness would inconvenience other people. You probably learned to keep quiet, dumb yourself down, minimise your power. You became limited by the limitations of your environment. You will have grown up being less than who you really are and can be – not fulfilling your potential. Children are ingenious at adapting to their environment. Think how you have adapted to your early environment and how you still use those same coping mechanisms habitually, even though you no longer need to. Think about how you coped with the limitations of your early environment. What have you adapted to and what do you put up with now that is less than you could really have.