“I am the happy one” is what I like to call a dominant story. I have found that part of the cause of people’s feeling stuck, depressed, high anxiety, and all the symptoms can be associated are the expectations foisted upon us by the roles we end up playing in lives. Starting even as early as childhood, people embrace the labels that their families often give them: “the happy one,” “the thoughtful one,” “the stubborn one.” These are just a few that end up becoming part of people’s fundamental way of thinking about themselves, and often end up living into their adult relationships.
Living up to family expectations, dominant stories and roles is a delicate balance. After all, being happy (or thoughtful, or even stubborn) are not only or always negative. At any given moment, the trick is to check in with yourself and tell the story that is true for you–are you, in this moment, “the happy one?” Are you even happy? If this is not the case, then it is vitally important to allow space for that reality to exist, even in the presence of family labels like “I am the happy one.”
This may sound counterintuitive because the message here is to allow yourself to feel your feelings and experience your experiences even when they are negative and don’t fit the dominant stories you tell yourself or you witness others telling of you. Finding your way through to your actual feelings and the full range of positive, negative, comfortable and uncomfortable experiences that reflect them is hard work, and it is the path to sustained wellness. Indeed, it is once this authoring of your full story begins to happen consistently, in real time, that I have seen people begin to emerge from depressive episodes and patterns of anxious affect.
