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Nobody Can Make Us Happy or Unhappy

<Perspective>

One of the main reasons why we unconsciously give our happiness away so easily to others is because we think that other people make us happy or unhappy.

When we go into a relationship or marry someone, it is because the person brings so much joy into our lives. When we fall in love, every other kind of happiness that we’ve ever felt can pale in comparison; so much so that it’s natural for us to settle on this one thought: this person makes me happy.

But that isn’t true.

It is you who made yourself happy—you made the choice to allow yourself to open up to someone incredible. You made the decision to commit to someone to whom you feel extremely connected. You made the choice to stick around and to hang in there through all the challenges and difficulties.

Nobody can make us happy, we have always been the ones who have brought happiness into our own lives.

If you’re feeling happy because you have great friends, it’s because you have chosen to surround yourself with genuine, generous, and loving people. If you’re feeling happy because you have a great family, it’s because you have chosen to be consciously grateful for them.

Similarly, nobody can make us unhappy. No wife, no husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend, lovers or exes, family or friends can make us unhappy—we have always been the only ones who can cause our own suffering and our own unhappiness, because it is always our response to the circumstances that determines whether we are happy or unhappy.

It’s never what happens or who happened, but how we handle it. It is also not whom we have or don’t have in our lives, because we cannot have a healthy relationship until we know that our happiness cannot be given to us by someone else.

We don’t expect people to lose weight for us, so why would we expect people to make us happy? We have to do that ourselves.

This is a perspective that my dad has never been able to truly understand. So much of his unhappiness lies in him being constantly at the mercy of people and circumstances—the smallest thing can make him angry, put him in a bad mood, and affect his entire day, if not his entire week.

Most of us don’t consciously think, “I blame the weather, the traffic, the waiter, that stupid person, my partner, and/or my boss,” but that is essentially what we’re doing when we have a tendency to be easily upset by people and circumstances.

When our thoughts carry us in a direction of blame, it is very easy to feel sorry for ourselves because we feel like people and things are always creating unhappiness in our lives. But our happiness is not in the hands of people and circumstances, it is inside of us.

As long as we are seeking happiness externally instead of cultivating it internally, it is likely it will be very hard for us to live with gratitude, because every time we feel grateful about something, we will find fault with a dozen other things.

Nobody can make us happy or unhappy, but we can always make ourselves happy.