The Fear of Happiness with Deva Davisson

Have you ever had something really great happen, and then instead of blissing out, you found yourself waiting for the other shoe to drop? 

Have you ever damped down your own feelings of joy for fear that there would be negative consequences?

It turns out, the fear of happiness is a real thing, and it has a name: Cherophobia, the aversion to happiness.

It has four strong predictors: an unhappy childhood, perfectionism, belief in black magic or karma, and loneliness.

Did you even realize you had a fear of happiness? I did not, and the more I unpacked it, the more I came to understand that this is not an irrational belief; instead, it’s a self-protective mechanism that we can slowly entrain to a different, more useful view, of how to experience joy and well-being.

In this episode, I discuss:

• why cherophobia is considered an anxiety disorder even though it is not in the DSM-5
• how cherophobia has been studied
• the predictors researchers have found across the world and across cultures
• the different forms of cherophobia
• childhood factors that can lead to an aversion to happiness
• attachment styles that are more likely to develop a fear of happiness
• the myriad ways that perfectionism keeps us from feeling joy and pride
• the sentence stem, “what right do I have to…” and how it keeps us from fulfillment and wellbeing
• the differing views on happiness in collective and individualistic societies
• the mixed messages women get around pursuing individual happiness and belief in collective wellbeing
• creating our own definition of happiness
• the loss of control of too much emotion or too much happiness
• the lack of rationality brought about by the giddy happiness of falling in love
• the co-morbidity with major depressive disorder
• the need to treat cherophobia prior to or in tandem with treating co-morbid depression
• the validity of our own responses
• how the fear of happiness is a self-protective mechanism
• the relentless positivity culture and how that disavows our own complexity and our own experience
• the psychological concept that anxiety contracts or expands depending on exposure
• the usefulness of mindfulness, self-care, and gratitude to nearly every issue of the podcast
• starting a small regimen of exposure therapy to happiness
• the self-work of learning our own negative bias and stories
• how combining mindfulness and gratitude can teach you to recognize small but powerful moments of happiness
• teaching yourself through practice and repetition that you can be happy without fear

 

Links discussed in this episode:

What Is Cherophobia? How to Overcome a Fear of Happiness 

Aversion to happiness and the experience of happiness: The moderating roles of personality - ScienceDirect 

Fear of Happiness Underlies Some Mental Illnesses - Scientific American 

What Predicts Fear of Happiness? | SPSP 

People with unhappy childhoods are more likely to exhibit a fear of happiness, multi-national study finds 

Fear of happiness among college students: The role of gender, childhood psychological trauma, and dissociation - PMC 

 

Shout-outs:

Neuroga