Com101 – Needs & Hiding from Happiness

Now let’s talk about why I slipped the word “happiness” into the title of this tool.  I discovered Rosenberg included play, fun, and laughter in Nonviolent Communication’s list of human needs while Maslow did not.  Then I had to ask myself who I agreed with.  We already explored all that reasoning and, yes, I agree that play is a basic human need.  We reasoned our way through it all, which is great, but logic is not emotion.  I want to share my gut reaction as to why play is a core human need.  This is because, for many years, I fell into a societal trap where I chose to deny myself play and many other needs.  I was unhappy and I didn’t know why.

When I asked myself, “are play, fun, and laughter core human needs that Maslow somehow missed?”  My gut screamed, “are you kidding me!  Of course, they are!  We learned that lesson the hard way!”  Here’s my confession to you: for about two decades, I falsely assumed that being an adult meant many forms of play were no longer allowed.  It was a “conclusion” that was programmed into me through my guilt-soaked religious upbringing, living with parents who were stuck in survival mode in regards to money, a school system that insisted we behave, a society full of jobs that insisted we behave, and literal laws that attempt to limit the types of fun people are allowed to have in public and in private. 

On top of that, pile on gender roles of what is expected of men and woman.  I receive the message of how I’m supposed to pursue a mate through providing a luxurious life to her while my sister is bombarded with the message of “sit still, look pretty.”

I concluded that the whole point of adulthood, and life, was to work hard, get a good job, make good money, get a house, get a partner, and one day retire and “then be happy.”  I had no idea what “happy” meant aside from knowing it was a far off thing to pursue.  I ultimately decided that we were all supposed to “grow up,” “get to work,” and “stop fooling around already”.  Many years of therapy and healing have clearly identified those words as the words of the adults in my childhood. 

How about you?  Whose words took residence in your mind in childhood?  What were your childhood conclusions about life, how it works, and how you are supposed to be?  I’m sure the voices from your childhood are different than mine, but odds are, those childhood assumptions are unconsciously running your life?  We’ve got a mountain of healthy or toxic assumptions and habits in our heads that a five, ten, or fifteen year old version of ourselves decided was fact or simply never questioned.  That is a blind spot.  We all have many of them.

I’m going to walk you through my blind spot around not being able to play.  I do this in the hopes that you can see how we can unconsciously choose to cope with unmet needs and sometimes don’t even seek happiness or self-healing.

I concluded we were all supposed to “grow up,” “get to work,” and “stop fooling around already”.  From the ages of fifteen to thirty-five, I never questioned this.  Unconsciously, I embraced these phrases.  I tell you what, I got shit done.  I got a career.  I got a bunch of money.  I was basically a workaholic.  My life was “work hard, go home, tune out”.  I was quite unhappy during that time and I had no idea I was unhappy.  My life was awesome!  Work was awesome!  My girlfriend was awesome!  Our vacations were awesome!  Yet, I seemed to be searching for something.

On vacations I would read books like Tao Te Ching [1]and Stumbling On Happiness[2] trying to find some answer to “what’s the point of it all?”  I spent many years reading books on happiness as a core topic.  That’s not a joke.  I was in this weird place in life where I wasn’t happy, but I also wasn’t depressed.  At the same time, something was just, kind of, “missing.”  I couldn’t put my finger on it.  I had everything that was supposed to make me happy, but I wasn’t truly happy.  I often questioned myself, too.  “Maybe I am happy and it’s just not quite the feeling I thought it was.  I mean, look around.  My life is awesome.  What’s not to be happy about?”

So, I’d listen to audio books on my hour-long commute to work, read Wikipedia.org in the evening, and watch TED talk videos in bed.  All of it, focused on happiness.  For years I did this.  At first I thought a job making video games would make me happy.  It was amazing, but no.  In the end it was a job like any other.  Then I thought money and retiring early would make me happy, so I did that.  No, it left me less stressed, but lacking direction and meaning.  If anything, it made it worse as I hit that classic retirement person’s dilemma, “who am I if I’m not my job title?”  About that time, I was focusing on the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs thinking I was missing some kind of “fulfillment,” or some “higher purpose” in my life.  I focused on fulfillment for a couple years.  Nope.  I was starting to conclude that happiness must be more of an almost content-like feeling of “life’s good enough, I’ll just coast from here, I guess.”

In my early twenties, I game across this amazing little phrase, “happiness is a choice.”  It was a neat idea; one must simply choose to be happy every day.  It was a perspective thing and we just needed to choose a different perspective.  The idea had two parts.  (1) First, stop putting happiness after the finish line.  (2) Second, focus on grateful things every day.

The first part made sense to me.  A lot of us have this, “I’ll be happy when,” mind virus implanted in us at some point.  I know I did.  It’s the “I’ll be happy after I get something or do something,” approach.  “I’ll be happy when I’m out of high school.  I’ll be happy when I get to college.  I’ll be happy when I pass this class.  I’ll be happy when I get a job.  I’ll be happy when I get a raise.  I’ll be happy when I get married.”  There’s no end to that.  We spend our whole life chasing something that is just out of reach.  Every time we almost get there, our brain uses the phrase to move the finish line to happiness out to the horizon again.  “I’ll be happy after,” and “I’ll be happy when,” are both an invisible trap.  A trap that we will unconsciously defend, argue, and fight to stay in.  A properly brainwashed person will fight to keep their brainwashing intact.

The trick is to choose to be happy now, long before that future event.  Get up in the morning and say, “wow, look at me!  I’ve come so far!  Five years ago, I would be ecstatic to be where I’m at today!  I deserve to celebrate and be happy today!”  Then dance your way into the kitchen and make breakfast.  Sing loudly during your commute.  Whistle your way through work, and laugh at all the silly little inconveniences that life throws at you all day long.  It’s a perspective shift, and it works.

The second part of the perspective shift was naming between three and ten grateful things once a day.  This practice has been life changed for me.  If you haven’t tried it before.  Pause and name a few things you’re grateful for right now.

Here I’ll do it, too.  I’m grateful for having a creative outlet.  I’m grateful for my amazing circle of friends.  I’m grateful for all the laughs we had together last night.  I’m grateful for memes and cat videos.  I’m grateful I had food in the house today and I didn’t have to go grocery shopping.  Oh man, I’m grateful for coffee.  I’m grateful to have quiet time to write and get introspective.  I’m grateful that all of human knowledge is a click away on the web.  I’m grateful to have access to tools my parents’ generation didn’t even realize they were missing.  I’m grateful for all the little trip-ups and mistakes that got me to where I am today.  I’m grateful to have a moment to reflect and ground myself.

Now you try.

Focusing on grateful things is amazing because it’s just how our brains work.  What we focus on multiples.  It’s one of our brain’s superpowers.  Another way to say that is, we find what we are looking for.  This is the very definition of confirmation bias and we are using it to our advantage.  I’ll hit you with another example of conformation bias later in this chapter.

Grateful things shift my perspective in less than a minute.  When I’m sad or frustrated, I can simply take a moment to choose to see the things I’m grateful for and that perspective of the world tends to follow me around for most of the day.  I can also do it before I go to sleep and pretty-much guarantee I have sweet dreams.  I invite you to try that, it’s fantastic. 

These two things combine are not quite “rose-colored glasses,” but more like “sunny-day colored glasses.”  Now that feeling of “life’s good enough, I’ll just coast from here, I guess,” was much better.  I didn’t feel happy, but I felt bright and sunny.  Now I danced and whistled my way thought my “good enough, I guess” life.

I’m not going to hint at this, I’m just going to flat out say it.  I had just found two amazing tools for reframing and shifting my mind’s perspective.  Unfortunately, I choose to use these tools as coping mechanism for my unhappiness.  I was very successful at hiding my unhappiness from myself using these amazing tools.   That said, these tools are still wonderful and worth knowing and using every day.  Also, they are no substitute for facing your shit and doing the work to heal.  Otherwise, these can turn into a blind spot type of coping mechanism, as I’m about to illustrate.

So now I would always see the sunning side of life while completely missing the obvious: I still wasn’t happy.  I was unhappy and instead of doing something about it, I mastered the art of seeing the silver lining in every moment of my day.  I had accepted being not-quite-happy as a fact of life and I made the most of it every day.  I flat-out settled for less than a happy life and I managed to find coping mechanisms to put a sunny disposition on the whole thing.  I had no frigging clue that I was doing this to myself.  Again, I had a huge house, phenomenal partner, and plenty of time and money.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stumbled into the Burning Man scene in San Francisco, and it was life-changing for me.  These weird hippies were throwing some big festival every summer where they ran around naked and played with fire or something.  They would drive out to the middle of a desert for a whole week and these adults were basically acting like children.  I had to see this for myself! 

I got a ticket, joined a friend’s camp, and I went to see it for myself.  It was true.  70,000 responsible, self-reliant, radically expressive, community driven, highly intelligent, highly capable adults were out in the desert acting like children for a week.  For 7 days, Burning Man is the third largest city in Nevada, behind Las Vegas, and Reno.  Oh, and there was no money!  I bought a ticket, I brought my camping gear and supplies to the middle of a dried up lakebed.  Then I couldn’t buy anything but ice for a week.  We also can’t sell anything.  Everything someone offers is a gift.  No bartering allowed.  They purposely try to be as inclusive of others as possible and they use the phrase, “be here now,” to remind each other to be in the present moment. 

When the week is over, they burn it all to the ground!  Then, get this, 70,000 people take responsibility for themselves to “leave no trace,” and then a huge team of volunteers makes a second sweep after the event is over to ensure “leave no trace” was achieved.

Burning Man broke my brain in the best ways I never could have imagined.  I didn’t just go and see Burning Man, I got to be part of the Burning Man experiment.  I started going almost every year.  I didn’t want to just see it or experience it, I wanted to learn how to embody it.  For seven days each year I was really, truly, happy.  The only other time I could say I had experienced that same undeniable happiness in my adult life was when I was cutting through three feet of fresh powder on my snowboard one time at Keystone, in Colorado.

After discovering Burning Man, I chased the idea of “being in the moment for many years.”  I stopped collecting stuff and things and focused on collecting what I call, “perfected moments.”  Most of them were moments at Burning Man each year, but I started figuring out how to be “in the moment” outside of the Burn as well.

I learned to spin fire and how to get lost in the flow (like fire dancing), I stopped doing all the things I was “supposed to” do and literally started doing the opposite.  I started the KinkyPoly.com website.  I started a kinky YouTube channel that focused on play for play’s sake and experiences for the sake of experiencing them.  I started creating moments and experiences.  Experiences like sinking both hands into a giant bowl of the type of tapioca pearl that are normally found in boba tea or filling an enclosed shower with balloons just so we could get in there with them and see what it actually felt like.  I became an experience seeker and a sensory seeker.  I found my first true “safe space,” at something called a “play party” and the ball of string that is my childhood trauma, assumptions, and limiting beliefs, really began to unravel.

I was happy at Burning Man because it was a safe space.  I often called snowboarding “my happy place,” because it was another safe space.  When spaces became truly safe, I discovered I could play and just be in the moment.  Not just me, I notice other people would open up when the space was safe enough for them, too.  People can be vulnerable, authentic, and raw when they are truly safe to do so.

Then, in the middle of a conversation about the amazing power of safe spaces, just like the one we are having right now, I met a woman who said, “the world is my safe space.”  I nearly cried.  The thought of feeling this happy and free everywhere I went seemed awe inspiring and impossible.

That is when it finally hit me.  If I needed a “safe space” like Burning Man or a play party then that meant, I didn’t feel safe the rest of the time.  By default, I didn’t feel safe to be authentic or vulnerable.  I didn’t feel safe showing or sharing my emotions.  I didn’t feel safe being silly or playful.  The thought had never actually occurred to me.

All of this may be boring and obvious to you.  Looking back, all of this is now so obvious to me.  I had many needs that were not being met because my childhood survival mechanisms assumed various things were “normal.”  It’s like my young brain concluded, “oh, I guess most of the stuff I want or crave must not be real needs and I should just learn to live without those things.”  It’s like my childhood brain just shrugged and accepted this discovery as a fact.  Then young me found coping mechanisms to survive and move me forward even though most of my needs weren’t getting met.  This basically ensured they would never be met.  Twenty-year-old me found more coping tools like interpreting “happiness is a choice,” completely wrong and using it to create tunnel vision that looked right passed my assumptions that a bunch of my needs will simply never be met and I should be fine with that.  I diligently build myself a beautiful prison where my needs would not be met.  If anyone had tried to point it out to me, I would actually fight to stay in that delusion.

My childhood traumas were neglect and abandonment.  As a kid, my survival needs were mostly met, but every category after that wasn’t a survival need and I learned to work around those unmet needs.  I learned to give up on most of my cognitive needs with self-sabotaging thoughts like, “grow up,” “get to work” and “stop fooling around already”.  I learned to not even expect interdependence needs.  Family, friendship, community, belonging, support, empathy, understanding, love, touch, reassurance, trust, appreciation, acceptance, –none of those things were a guarantee when I was younger, so I learned to live without them.  I didn’t even know they were missing until I stumbled into Burning Man that first time.  Most of my esteem needs were never met.  Self-esteem I had in excess.  I was very capable, and our society rewarded me handsomely for that.  Soon, I was very “successful” too.  Esteem, on the other hand, totally different story.  The idea of “respect from others” and feeling safe in most social circles would have my younger self drawing a blank.  The thought of things like recognition, celebration, prestige, and attention would induce a mild panic inside my chest.

Without anger or sadness, the kid in me simply adapted and survived.  Many people would note my career, house, and mid-life retirement and assert that I did more than survive, I thrived.  No, I sacrificed a bunch of my core needs and happiness in trade for a beautiful façade of stuff, status, and coping mechanisms that enabled me to pursue a state of unhappiness.  We all deserve to be happy; we all deserve to have our core human needs met.

Everything in Burbol’s Hierarchy of Happiness is a need you are allowed to have.  Yes, you could drop yourself into survival mode and claim the top four categories are not true needs, but you don’t have to live life in survival mode.  You owe it to yourself to thrive.  You get to live life to it’s fullest.  You get to have everything in every category of needs.  All you have to do is seek it in healthy ways and ask for it in healthy ways.  For the people who have trauma around asking, know this, “you’re allowed to ask for what you want in healthy ways.  Asking for what you want is a gift to the people who love you.”  This book is going to teach you how to ask for what you need and how to not tolerate anyone who would attack your for making your needs known.

So, what’s your trauma?  What’s your limiting beliefs from childhood that are standing in the way of your happiness or allowing you to cope with less then having all your needs met?  What are the assumptions that are floating around in your head masquerading as facts but were literally made-up by a ten-year-old?

I invite you to entertain the idea that you are allowed to get all your needs met and by the end of this book you’ll have the tools to have those conversations in healthy ways.  I invite you to imagine a life where you actually are getting all of your needs met, and your friends and family are also getting all their needs met because all of you know how to check-in & timeout, remove blame, and then have easy conversations about everyone’s needs.

I want to clarify that from this moment forward, when I say, “happiness is a choice,” what I mean is: (1) We get to choose to put happiness today and not after the finish line.  (2) We get to choose to focus on grateful things every day.  (3) We get to choose to do check-in & timeout to discover our unmet needs.  (4) We get to choose to go get our needs met in healthy ways instead of finding ways to cope.  (5) We get to choose to heal, not ignore, whatever baggage, limiting beliefs, traumas, triggers, that we pick up along the way on our journey through childhood and since childhood.

Repeat after me, I get to choose to be happy.  I get to choose to heal my childhood wounds.  I get to choose to get my needs met in healthy ways.  I get to choose to manage myself and my emotions while I figure out my unmet needs.  I get to choose to surround myself with people who will support and root for me getting my needs met.  I get to choose to be grateful for all these opportunities to learn and grow.  I get to choose to be happy today without any hurdles or obstacles in front of that.

From now on, don’t hesitate to look at Burbol’s heirary of happiness and ask yourself if all your needs are currently being met.  This list is another tool to add to our checkin & timeout habit.

[1] “Tao Te Ching,” by Laozi.  Written in China around 400 BC.  A series of philosophical ideas that come across almost as poems that trying to describe the indescribable, “The Way.”  (Then humans added deities to it, made it a religion, and called it Taoism.  Ug.)

[2] “Stumbling on Happiness,” by Daniel Gilbert.  He shares scientific research into happiness in an upbeat, anecdotal tone.