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Why Do We Choose to Be Unhappy and How Can Adlerian Psychology Help You Change?
Explore lessons from The Courage to Be Disliked. Learn how Adlerian psychology helps you overcome insecurity, stop seeking approval, and find genuine happiness.
Ready to stop living for other people’s expectations? Read the full article to learn how to separate your responsibilities from others and build healthier, more fulfilling relationships today.
If you’re unhappy, it’s not because you were born into an unhappy circumstance or ended up in an unhappy situation. It’s because your unhappiness serves a purpose. Anger, anxiety, or stress is a tool to achieve a hidden goal. Adlerian psychology, a century‐old framework for human behavior, explains that we choose to remain in a negative state because it makes us feel special, avoid rejection, or meet social expectations.
For example, if someone says something hurtful, we might hold onto that hurt because it would make the person who hurt us feel guilty and have them go out of their way to make it up to us. The hurt becomes a tool to get the attention, kindness, and sympathy we desire. Anger works the same way. We get angry to be noticed. Shouting is our way of saying, “Look at me!” Keeping ourselves in an emotional rut allows us to avoid creative work that might get rejected, and then say to others, “If only I didn’t feel so stuck, I would be wildly successful.” Likewise, feeling too drained to go out spares us from having awkward conversations and dealing with potential rejection. Even stress about our finances, health, or career is perpetuated by the goal of meeting social expectations.
Now, imagine you’re the only person on the planet. Since there’s no one to impress, no one to reject you, and no social pressure, you simply go about your day gathering food and building shelter—free of the emotional turmoil that plagues modern society.
But thankfully, we don’t need an apocalypse to be free of all the hidden interpersonal goals that are a source of our problems and unhappiness. We can resolve most of our interpersonal problems and eliminate chronic unhappiness by altering how we relate to people in two fundamentally different ways:
Eliminate Vertical Relationships
We have a chart in the back of our minds that compares our self‐worth to everyone we meet. The people above us have achievements or abilities we envy. And the people below us have few qualities and accolades we value. This constant assessment of others fuels inferiority and superiority complexes that wreak havoc on our emotional lives.
When you feel inferior, you tend to obsess about how those above you—either more successful, happier, fitter, wealthier, or better‐looking—judge you because you crave their approval. Feeling that your self‐worth is less than the people you admire erodes your confidence. If you see yourself above someone else, the qualities that give you a sense of superiority—looks, income, status—start to own you. You grow terrified of losing your position, so you live in constant anxiety.
But the gaps above and below you are an illusion! Everyone has the same worth simply by existing, and the people you envy have subjective advantages.
- A baby brings joy and meaning to its parents simply by existing. An elderly man in a nursing home who is holding on to his life reminds his children of the love and values he passed on to them. As long as someone is alive, they have worth to someone in some way. Their worth is neither greater nor less than ours.
- Life advantages are entirely subjective. The most apparent advantages, like wealth and fame, can be golden chains tying people to obligations they didn’t choose and robbing them of the freedom to walk away. If you sat down at a table with people you perceive to be above you and everyone laid out their problems on the table, you’d probably take back yours.
Once you realize that the worth gaps above and below you are an illusion and everyone is walking on the same plane in the same direction, you stop letting inferiority and superiority‐based goals rule your life and just focus on becoming the best version of yourself.
Master Your Task & Respect Theirs
Your task is to give while giving others the freedom to choose what to think and what to do with your gift.
- As a parent, your task is to provide opportunities for your child to learn and grow. Whether they take advantage of those opportunities is their task, not yours.
- At work, your task is to show up and do your best. Whether others approve of your efforts is entirely up to them.
Interpersonal problems arise when you try to interfere with someone else’s task. It’s like telling someone how to do their job. You may hope for praise and appreciation, but it’s not your task to ensure you get those things. Your task is to contribute by using whatever position, knowledge, and skill you have to be uniquely useful to others. This contribution must be so obvious that you don’t need acknowledgment to feel a sense of contribution.
When you know you’re doing what you can to give to other people, and you feel joy doing it, you can go to sleep at night without worrying what other people are thinking about you. And that’s what authors Kashimi and Koga call The Courage to Be Disliked ‐ the ultimate freedom and the remedy to unhappiness.