Just how much happiness can you take?

Perhaps you too have ‘being happy’ as one of your goals in life, if so, it might come as a quite a shock to find you have a happiness ‘upper limit’.

You’ve had a wonderful time of feeling close and intimate with your partner, beyond your wildest dreams, and then something happens and you fall out or have to move apart.  It could just be a coincidence yet when you observe closely, this is part of a pattern and the thing that happens (arguing, sickness, a crisis) is something you’ve done for a long time, probably since childhood.

It could be a similar scenario with work; all’s going well, the team you work with are wonderful and the job rewarding and then it all starts to unravel.

Upper limits is one of the concepts in Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks.  Being happy can bring up fears and your subconscious starts saying something like ‘things can’t stay this good’, ‘get prepared for a low’, ‘remember that time when you were really happy and then (something bad) happened?’.  Your fears and worries take you away from the present and into the past/future, the next thing you know your ‘upper limits pattern’ kicks in and the result is that you are less intimate, distanced, and judgemental and your happiness has diminished.

After a while perhaps you will recover and re-engage with the situation or perhaps it’ll never quite feel the same again.  The book teaches that, through awareness, we can learn to spot our upper limits and face our fears and worries before our subconscious saboteur kicks in.  We might need to take a step back to process a new level of happiness or take other action to address our fears and then we’re ready to take our happiness to new levels.