Happiness in the Age of Sorrow

It’s a great time to discover our source of happiness, even while the world’s chaos, looting, violence, and depravity are producing so much unhappiness.

We’re talking here about genuine happiness, not superficial, smiley faces. Genuine happiness is the pleasant connection we feel to ourselves and to life when we clear out our inner conflicts, negativity, and fear.

There’s a simple formula for finding happiness, one that’s been overlooked by most experts. The key to happiness is found in understanding our determination to be unhappy.

In other words, the way to be happy is to understand how and why we create our own unhappiness. It’s all a learning process. We have to understand the inner mechanisms whereby we chose to suffer.

Now lots of people say they do understand their unhappiness. They say, “Give me more money, or more friends, or a better personality, or a bigger house, or a kinder society, and I’ll be happy.”

My New Book’s Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

My new book, a two-year project, is finally done. It’s titled, Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness. It’s available as an e-book at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble for only $4.99. Here’s the book description as it appears at those websites:

Psychotherapist’s Revolutionary New Book Says
We’re All Addicted to Pain and Suffering

How is it possible to be addicted to our suffering? The notion seems preposterous. How could we be so foolish as to suffer for nothing?

Fortunately, we’re not foolish at all. We just haven’t penetrated our psyche deeply enough. We haven’t understood the dynamics in our psyche that cause our suffering.

This book by experienced psychotherapist Peter Michaelson shows how we unwittingly produce our own suffering. The author tells us how to free ourselves from it. Most readers will immediately realize they have not previously encountered this knowledge.

Lara Logan’s Encounter with Human Perversity

The sexual assault this past winter on CBS correspondent Lara Logan reveals the pressing need to understand something very important about human nature. Ms. Logan shared her experience with us this week on “60 Minutes,” and we have a duty to learn from it.

She was attacked by a mob of frenzied men in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and she spent days recovering in a hospital. In The New York Times last week, she said: “What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence.”

The perverse pleasure that her frenzied attackers exhibited has many variations among people, involving levels of misconduct that extend from cruel to criminal to barbaric. This perversity is produced by unconscious processes that are part of human nature and common to us all.

We humans have a dark side in our psyche that makes us capable of vicious, evil behavior. One aspect of this dark side is the perverse, intoxicating pleasure that is available to us when we exult in feelings of power over a helpless victim or a passive group or population.