Working as a psychotherapist, I know quite a lot about pain, loss, and the aftermath of trauma - how it distorts our perception of reality especially happiness, and how it makes the simplest joy start to feel unfamiliar, suspicious, or unsafe. And to defend this anxiety, people act out (unconsciously) and engineer their own abandonment or failure. (self-fulfilling prophecy)
In clinical psychology, there is a term to describe this phenomenon: Cherophobia - It is the fear of happiness, or more precisely, an avoidance of happiness because a person believes that feeling happy will lead to something bad.
I’ve been working with people who’ve survived the unimaginable, only to find themselves unable to live what others might call a “normal” life. And I don’t mean someone struggling after a breakup. I mean the kind of trauma that borders on criminal, the kind that rearranges a nervous system and steals entire decades. And their whole identity.
The woman who can’t tolerate the simplicity of college life after ten years in prison because “small talks irritate” her.
The person who’s longed for love but, the moment she finds it, says, “Something feels weirdly off,” and unconsciously does everything in her power to push him away.
The once-trusting soul who, after several betrayals in a row, can’t tell the difference between intuition and fear. And starts to sabotage all the good things in his life and return to this “calmly alone.”
And the man who escapes a cult, or a violent home, or a dangerous country, only to find himself stranded in a quieter kind of no-man’s-land. Life isn’t getting better.
Or the man who “has it all,” yet drinks himself to sleep every night, and trapped in a life that looks enviable from the outside and unbearable from the inside.
When things end and pain takes over, people can act out of their character, creatively cause more messiness on top of the pain. You’d be surprised to listen to their inner dialogue. We all have the demons under our skin that we don’t want to admit.
Sometimes I think therapy is actually the study of happiness—or at least how people resist it due to the disowned insecurities and the unsolved pain.
Recently, a friend came to visit. We wandered through a farmer’s market, tried food from different stalls, and ended up with six hot, pan-fried buns. We sat under the California sun, sunbathing, and enjoying them. When the broth burst through the dough, there was this perfect, ridiculous moment of happiness. Quiet, sunny, and delicious.
He looked at me and said, almost like a child, “I never knew something so simple could make me this happy. I’m learning from you.” This friend used to serve in the army, once went to Iraq, and has successfully transitioned into business world and has climbed the social ladder. He’s humbled by life and is well trained to handle all the toughness, yet unfamiliar with the simplest joys in daily life.
I still had juice on my lips and didn’t know what to say. Isn’t this normal? I wondered.
But I came back to his comment later. How much of this—of noticing joy without bracing for it to disappear—came from the work I do every day? And how much did I have to teach myself? I wasn’t born with this skill. Finding joy in the mundane is a muscle I’ve had to build, a practice I return to again and again. Life hasn’t become gentler; I’ve just learned to look more closely at what’s already here.
Because what breaks us isn’t hardship itself—it’s the shock that sometimes life can be this painful, this overwhelming, this unfair. We carry a quiet expectation that things should be easier than they are, and when they aren’t, we interpret it as a personal failure. (It really is not.)
People who move through life with steadiness don’t suffer less; they just don’t assume suffering means something has gone wrong. They expect life to be messy, complicated, occasionally brutal. And because of that, they’re less rattled when it is. Endurance isn’t about becoming tougher—it’s what emerges when we stop negotiating with reality, stop wishing for a smoother version of life, and start engaging with the one we actually have - and perhaps, with as much grace as you can.
Maybe the work of being human is releasing the fantasy that life will ever be anything other than very difficult, and people anything other than profoundly flawed. The life we get is radically imperfect in a deeply serious way. What’s more beautiful than reality? - brutal, breathing-taking, and occasionally a total bitch!
And happiness—when it arrives—will almost always be just “good enough,” or only “sometimes,” and found in the tiniest, most undramatic moments. And our job is to hold it as much as we can.