Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
Against Happiness
Geral T. Blanchard • Jul 22, 2023
My spirits were lifted when I came across the book, Against Happiness, by a professor of English at Wake Forest University, Eric Wilson.
This is an examination on how we, as individuals and as a culture, relentlessly chase happiness – what Buddhists would call a desire problem, an attachment, or an addiction. We have a lopsided view of positive moods when matched against sadness.
Wilson points out that happiness gives blues a bad name by suggesting it is an aberrant mental state. Having this presumed need for eternal bliss appears to entertain a craven disregard for the value of sadness. Hellbent only for happiness, as a country we have become afraid of sadness. Our American dream may be a nightmare, Wilson argues. What passes for bliss might well be a dystopia of lifeless and sagging grins. Has he lost you yet?
Upon closer examination, some of what repeatedly drives people to Disneyworld, then Vegas, and on to the shopping mall is a distraction from an uncertain and scary life – wanting control and pacification in an uncontrollable world. Wilson calls this avoidance “flights into shininess” and he concludes, “the road to hell is paved with happy plans.” To strive for happiness all the time is to repress the inevitable sadness that life brings, the natural rhythms – the ups and downs, polarities, and contrariness of the world that we have divorced ourselves from. Some of that angst and fear may also be the residue of unaddressed childhood adversity.
Wilson asserts that “The greatest tragedy is to live life without tragedy.” That isn’t living one’s life, is it? Sooner or later we all have traumas, sometimes more than one a year. The resultant melancholy holds the potential to connect us to our core being, if only we allow it. We must search for insights during the dark nights of the soul, as Carl Jung suggested, concluding that depression and profound insights are intimately connected. Significant gloom can generate rapid light. And when we experience a breakdown, a breakthrough may be close behind. Jung learned this after his breakup with Freud and his mother’s death. He fell into “a state of disorientation,” for years like being “totally suspended in mid-air.” He acknowledged his neurosis, nervousness, agitation, and unease were essential to the reshaping of a different identity – a more satisfying and authentic one.
Neurosis is energy. Neurosis is hidden knowledge, the catalyst for a special kind of genius as Marsilio Ficino, an Italian priest contended in the 15th century. And much like trauma, psychological pain is often the catalyst to try on something dramatically different that lands us in a happier state of mind. Jung knew that his emotional illness, even the transient psychosis he supposedly was diagnosed with, were far from being singular illnesses.
There are those of us who get stuck in
suffering consciousness and live a life of isolation, dejection, depression, and despair. “These sad types – those black-clad poseurs who identify only with darkness – choose sullenness as one picks a religion or a haircut,” Wilson wrote. They stick with it despite getting the same discouraging results month after month, year after year. Or, until a lightbulb turns on during a momentary respite, like during an MDMA treatment when they get some new lenses to gaze through. It is then realized that by condemning and chasing away their demons (secret instructors), the angels have been swept along with them.
Some people, while justifiably hating the dark nights of the soul, bravely grapple during those times trying to find some new meaning in all the crap. When folks do so, they become “meaning makers” as I wrote about in Transcending Trauma.
Wilson would call them “melancholy innovators.” A few examples: Martin Luther, Martin Luther king, Jr., Florence Nightingale, Marcel Proust, John Lennon, Michelangelo, Abraham Lincoln, Jim Carrey, and Beethoven. All of them eventually, after a lot of mud wrestling, came to an understanding of the secret marriage of sorrow and joy. They heeded the call to interior depths out of which new insights bubbled to the surface. And a beautiful lotus arose from the mud. They experienced moments of fertility once the sun shined again, in part because of their wrestling (doing), not just by perseverative thinking. They merged with life’s natural cycles, the rhythms of the cosmos.
If right at this moment you are feeling chronic depression and periods of panic, know you might be included in this fascinating litany of inspirational people. Like them you may finally understand that frowning clutches flourishing. Wilson again: “The true path to ecstatic joy is through acute melancholia.” Melancholy, if we are courageously open to its teachings, guides us to transformation. This is “necessary melancholia.” No more Prozac-ing of our brains. Embrace it, as best you can. It often leads to a wellspring of creativity…even joy. If you don’t believe it, just ask around.
**********
“The richest moments in life are these junctures where we realize, [deep] in our sinews, what is true all the time: the cosmos is a dance of joggled opposites, a jolted waltz.”
- Eric Wilson in
Against Happiness
*********
Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
More Articles
In recent years psychotherapists have become increasingly aware of the risk of transmitting trauma intergenerationally. By examining the impact of the Holocaust, or the experiences of Native Americans who were systematically abused by colonizers including the Catholic Church, it becomes obvious that indirect passage of depression, despair, anxiety, and damaged self-regard are but a few of the ancestral legacies of uninterrupted abuse. If, however, trauma can be passed from generation to generation without direct experience, could it also be possible for the reverse to happen?
Just as we have started to witness the reality of individual post-traumatic growth (PTG) – not just bouncing back after trauma but bouncing forward – could we entertain the concept of intergenerational growth (IG) – in other words, thriving from generation to generation?
There can be two levels at which trauma is processed. The first tier may be a time of quiet denial or the dissociation of nearly all thoughts of how painful the past was. The body feels it, but the mind does not speak it. On the second level a person awakens to the entirety of it, often an unpredicted and sudden onslaught of previously suppressed details with extensive associated pain. When trauma is reconstituted at the second level it often happens unwillingly. A person may be swept away by an awakening that seems very ugly. It feels like too much to absorb in its entirety. The result is often to feel afraid, even shattered – at first. Now with everything out in the open, what must be done with it?
At the second level of awareness, it is almost impossible to go on pretending that everything is fine. No longer can the visuals and emotions be kept submerged. One wonders, “Damn it, will I ever get better?”
Traumatized persons, with their pervasive pain, typically seek mood altering experiences. This can include ascetic restrictions, hedonistic over-eating, chemical dependency, sexual dependency, sexual anorexia or celibacy, romance addiction, relationship dependency, compulsive gambling, TV or movie binging, rock climbing, auto racing, reliance on antidepressants and/or antianxiety medications, religious addiction, and so much more that can serve to pacify, distract, and avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings. By thrill-seeking, the higher the risks being engaged, the greater mood alteration one can experience. It’s a big dopamine splash and more.
These are the adult versions of childhood thumb sucking, according to Dr. Harvey Milkman, the author of Craving for Ecstasy (the feeling of ecstasy, not the drug). Harvey pointedly said, “Growing up consists of finding the right substitute for your thumb.”
There are many emotional reactions to a drug-free spiritual awakening experience and a ceremonial MDMA journey. While this article focuses on empathy – both the feeling and the cognitive component – it is obvious to those who have awakened from a spiritual emergency that a variety of related emotions arise.
It is one thing to imagine how another person feels. Psychopaths, despite what the general public believes, are very good at empathy on an intellectual level. Even criminal psychopaths can put themselves in another person’s position and understand their perspective. It is bigger, better, and far healthier when empathy, in its deepest sense, allows us to “feel with” other people by recognizing a sense of oneness with them, what’s called unity consciousness. To hurt others would be to hurt ourselves.
It’s impossible to talk about projection without incorporating a discussion about Sigmund Freud and Donald Trump. In this article I will skip Donald but throw in a little Carl Jung. Freud, of course, named several distinctive defense measures – reality distorting strategies to keep us safe. Two of the big ones are displacement and projection.
First, a definition of projection: This is evident when an individual attributes their own unacceptable impulses onto others. For example, a person might accuse others of engaging in thievery when, in fact, they are swindling money from their employer. Some of the behaviors and thoughts we are most ashamed of could be called shadows. We can see them first in other people before we can “call them out” in ourselves. We are defending against humiliation and mortification lest we be exposed.
Does this empathogen work in a similar manner as psychedelics, blasting us off to a sudden and dramatic awakening of the mind and soul? Not necessarily. Much like massive stress, psychedelics and MDMA can knock people off an unhealthy path and offer them an entirely different trajectory, but there is a lot of arduous individual work that must follow the use of these propellants.
So, could it be concluded that MDMA is a transcendent spiritual event -- a chemical event, or perhaps a neurological experience? By themselves, both seem unlikely. They can change activity in the brain, but enlightenment comes from hard work before and after their use. Entheogens and empathogens likely have a catalytic but not a primary casual effect in awakening.
Many events in life can change us, some in profound ways, others somewhat superficially. Some positively, some negatively. Some temporarily, some permanently. Let’s break it down.
With the “help” of psychology and the diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD, an entire trauma industry has developed. Much help has been delivered and, unfortunately, in many instances the assigned labels stick like glue and there can be difficulty relinquishing the newly imposed identity of “breakage.”
Many life events are transformative:
Many great minds have come out of India. Like countless spelling bee champions, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose who later took on the name of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo became a highly regarded spiritual teacher and author in the twentieth century. His main insight was that what many humans experience during altered or higher states of consciousness are glimpses of the future of evolution. And, he contended, one day these states of expansion will be normal for the whole human race.
Countless numbers of people are seeking the unity consciousness that MDMA can offer. It can make them feel bigger. And more deeply connected and powerful. Like many billions of tiny ants inching a fourteen-wheeler up a hill, every tiny bit of effort pulls the big rig along. Similarly, each one of the eight billion or so people residing on our planet today may, via a combined assemblage of singular efforts, raise their individual consciousness, while tugging the entire race forward.
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment. They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time.
Dark nights of the soul as Saint John of the Cross called those long, despairing periods of our life, are never easy, in fact they are usually dreadful. They are so necessarily awful and so damn long because some of us don’t do subtlety very well. If we are open to these moments, even a tiny bit, they can serve as an internally calculated and blaring wakeup call that will guide us to solace.
John Nelson, in Healing the Split, refers to a fleeting or ephemeral sense of a higher purpose, not fully conceptualized, but compellingly near the heart. It holds answers to life’s pain but isn’t quite within our grasp…at least until the dark clouds engulf us. Then, with great staying power and inexperience matched with trust, a spiritual emergence nears surface awareness. And it always happens, as psychiatrist Stan Groff defined it, around the time of a blurry spiritual emergency.