460: Ask David: The Fear of Happiness!

Ask David--

The Fear of Happiness!

Although we had five questions for today’s Ask David episode, we spend the entire podcast on the first question from a man with an intense fear of happiness.

He wrote: How can I use exposure to overcome my fear of happiness?

Hi David,

How would you do exposure for the fear of happiness? Whenever I feel happy I immediately feel afraid because I had a very strict religious upbringing where many harmless forms of fun and enjoyment were completely forbidden. Even though I'm no longer a religious believer, the fear remains. Feeling good then makes me afraid, anxious and insomniac.

This often goes on for days after something good happens and it almost seems as if I AM being punished after all! How can I recover when feeling good makes me feel so bad?

Love your work and all that you do.

Best regards,

Tomas

David’s reply

As I have said on numerous occasions, I do NOT recommend “methods” (like exposure) for “problems” (like your “fear of happiness.”) I think your problem is very treatable, but I work with patients systematically, and that doesn’t mean starting out with a “method,” like exposure or any other method.

I use a step by step approach, using T = Testing, E – Empathy, A = Assessment of Resistance, and M = Methods in a sequence. In addition, when I work with anxiety, I always incorporate these four approaches with every patient I work with:

The Motivational Model: I bring Outcome and Process Resistance to conscious awareness and melt them away, if possible, using a variety of TEAM CBT approaches.

The Cognitive Model: This involves a well-done Daily Mood Log to identify and challenge the distorted negative thoughts at one moment in time.

The Exposure Model: Facing your fears, or testing them with an experiment. This is frightening, but required of every anxious patient.

The Hidden Emotion Model: This is based on the idea that only “nice” people struggle with anxiety, with only a few exceptions, and that an unacknowledged problem is often hiding right behind the anxiety. The cure requires the Detective Step: identifying what the hidden emotion or feeling is. The Action Step: Expressing the suppressed feeling and or dealing with the problem you are avoiding.

Your fear of happiness is an interesting problem for sure. One of my favorite movies, “Babette’s Feast,” involves this theme.

If you want some help, you could send me a partially completed Daily Mood Log. You will discover that you are the only one who is doing the punishing! It is that belittling, intimidating voice in your own head that is causing 100% of your suffering. I look forward to helping you challenge those voices!

In the meantime, I’ll add this to the latest Ask David podcast questions, in the hopes you might send the DML, and then Rhonda and I can comment in greater depth on the live program.

Best, david

Tomas kindly sent a Daily Mood Log, which you can see if you

CLICK HERE

As you can see, the Upsetting Event is simply “studying mathematics,” something he loves. However, he has the belief that if he allows himself to enjoy this or any activity, something terrible will happen to him. He traces this to a strict religious upbringing, and perhaps also to bullying he endured as a kid.

You can see that this is intensely upsetting to him. If you look you will see that in 8 of the 9 categories of emotions on his Daily Mood Log (DML), he scores in the range of 80 to 100, which is intense and severe to extreme. The only emotion category that is not extremely elevated is the anger cluster, which he rated at only 40.

You can see as well that his negative thoughts all involve the theme of punishment and destruction if he allows himself to feel happiness and enjoyment of life, or if he advances himself in life. In some of the emails he sent me, he traces this back to being bullied when young. . . possibly by kids who were jealous of his high IQ.

As mentioned above, I don’t throw methods (like exposure) at people based on a problem or diagnosis (in his case a phobia, the fear of happiness.) I also mentioned that I go through the T E A M model in a sequence, starting with Testing and Empathy, followed by the Assessment of Resistance and culminating in Methods. In addition, I always treat anxious patients with four powerful models, including the Motivational Model, the Cognitive Model, the Exposure Model, and the Hidden Emotion Model. I described these models above.

The Motivational Model

The Outcome Resistance has to do with the