Striving for Wholeness, Not Mere Happiness
How trauma can reduce us to wanting and relying on surface emotions
You don’t deserve to be just happy. You deserve to feel joy that is full and rooted in your being. You deserve peace that emanates as warmth. You deserve self-love that is organic and able to be returned to again and again.
Oftentimes in childhood, when we’ve been emotionally neglected, abused, or traumatized in general, we will pick up the belief that we don’t deserve to be happy. Yet at the same time, we can feel an entitlement to being happy or having things that we think will make us happy.
What we don’t know is the things we feel entitled to or undeserving of are trivial things, or at least what is projected onto them is not what they seem. When we are still in a self-protective type of consciousness, aka ego, what we want will often be superficial because what we are seeking, whether we know it or not, is only relief.
What we want will always be something along the lines of longing to be saved by someone, longing for a metaphorical key to click into place to access permanent ease, longing to be rewarded for a hidden fantasy of self.
But as long as our early mistreatments goes unnoticed or are unexamined, we stay disconnected from our real inner landscape. This inner landscape, if tended to, holds potent seeds of deep, fulfilling emotions that stems from real self-growth. But not knowing how to tend or access this baseline in us will have us reaching evermore outside of us for a source that will relieve us from our disconnection to self.
As long we are unhealed, we will carry the misconception of what happiness is and of what happiness holds.
Victim Identities
In our victim identities, and I say that with compassion, we are unaware or unwilling to be aware of the work it takes to return to the type of ease we fantasize about. In this unhealed space, things like ease and happiness are wispy and wavering notions.
What our souls know that we don’t know is our deeper desire to return to wholeness and this is not clearly translated when we are out of tune. Transient happiness will never be a grounding for all to be easy like we would like. It takes dealing with our hardships, looking at our traumas head-on, and deconstructing certain narratives to be able to receive something as stable and big as the joy we are able to feel from merely existing.
As long as we are unhealed and operating from a victim identity, we will fall into the trap of believing that we have already gone through enough, that maybe we should be compensated for having had it so hard, that maybe more work to heal can be replaced with intellectually grasping our history.
As long as we avoid the work of emotionally and somatically healing, happiness will always be a type of illusion we use to stay above the waters of our psyches. Happiness will always come hand in hand with the things we choose to stay unaware of.
Honesty Starts With Ourselves
Like drug addicts, we must be honest with ourselves about what it is we’re really craving in the moment to not feel what we feel. We must be honest with ourselves about our escapism and how we’ve confused a temporary fix with what is essential or necessary.
The ‘reward’, if you will, that comes from healing your trauma is not learning how to no longer be encumbered by pain, but how to be deeply moved by pain. Being moved by pain removes the blockages preventing us from moving around inside ourselves. It moves us to start receiving and Knowing what we actually do deserve and have always deserved in an innate ego-less way. And what we deserve is to reconnect to our authentic self-love.
Feeling like we don’t deserve to be happy stems from untended to pain. Feeling like we are owed happiness or subconsciously attaching happiness to some external means is the same side of the coin.
When we intimately know and hold space for our pain, we also know and hold space for Joy, our Peace, and our Love. These are not mere pitstops but the access points to the unfurling spiritual and emotional landscapes that have lied dormant within us.
And it is not to say that we are not deserving of some lightness amidst working on ourselves. It is only that they shouldn’t be idealized and thought of as the end goal.
Be brave in wanting more than superficial, easy emotions that will never be fulfilling. Be brave in believing more is possible. Be brave in facing yourself to get there.
Listen to the intuitive voice that tells us to go deep. Because true rejoicing is deep. Because what is poignant and real is deep. Because the nature of our souls is what is deep.
Because what is deep is the only thing that can get to the root of the heaviness we’ve been lugging around. It is what will uproot it.
Ginger Tran is a writer and poet focusing on healing, mental health, spirituality, and psychology.
