Ask David-- The Fear of Happiness!
Although we had five questions for today’s Ask David episode, we spend the entire podcast on the first question from a man with an intense fear of happiness.
He wrote: How can I use exposure to overcome my fear of happiness?
Hi David,
How would you do exposure for the fear of happiness? Whenever I feel happy I immediately feel afraid because I had a very strict religious upbringing where many harmless forms of fun and enjoyment were completely forbidden. Even though I'm no longer a religious believer, the fear remains. Feeling good then makes me afraid, anxious and insomniac.
This often goes on for days after something good happens and it almost seems as if I AM being punished after all! How can I recover when feeling good makes me feel so bad?
Love your work and all that you do.
Best regards,
Tomas
David’s reply
As I have said on numerous occasions, I do NOT recommend “methods” (like exposure) for “problems” (like your “fear of happiness.”) I think your problem is very treatable, but I work with patients systematically, and that doesn’t mean starting out with a “method,” like exposure or any other method.
I use a step by step approach, using T = Testing, E – Empathy, A = Assessment of Resistance, and M = Methods in a sequence. In addition, when I work with anxiety, I always incorporate these four approaches with every patient I work with:
The Motivational Model: I bring Outcome and Process Resistance to conscious awareness and melt them away, if possible, using a variety of TEAM CBT approaches.
The Cognitive Model: This involves a well-done Daily Mood Log to identify and challenge the distorted negative thoughts at one moment in time.
The Exposure Model: Facing your fears, or testing them with an experiment. This is frightening, but required of every anxious patient.
The Hidden Emotion Model: This is based on the idea that only “nice” people struggle with anxiety, with only a few exceptions, and that an unacknowledged problem is often hiding right behind the anxiety. The cure requires the Detective Step: identifying what the hidden emotion or feeling is. The Action Step: Expressing the suppressed feeling and or dealing with the problem you are avoiding.
Your fear of happiness is an interesting problem for sure. One of my favorite movies, “Babette’s Feast,” involves this theme.
If you want some help, you could send me a partially completed Daily Mood Log. You will discover that you are the only one who is doing the punishing! It is that belittling, intimidating voice in your own head that is causing 100% of your suffering. I look forward to helping you challenge those voices!
In the meantime, I’ll add this to the latest Ask David podcast questions, in the hopes you might send the DML, and then Rhonda and I can comment in greater depth on the live program.
Best, david
Tomas kindly sent a Daily Mood Log, which you can see if you
CLICK HERE
As you can see, the Upsetting Event is simply “studying mathematics,” something he loves. However, he has the belief that if he allows himself to enjoy this or any activity, something terrible will happen to him. He traces this to a strict religious upbringing, and perhaps also to bullying he endured as a kid.
You can see that this is intensely upsetting to him. If you look you will see that in 8 of the 9 categories of emotions on his Daily Mood Log (DML), he scores in the range of 80 to 100, which is intense and severe to extreme. The only emotion category that is not extremely elevated is the anger cluster, which he rated at only 40.
You can see as well that his negative thoughts all involve the theme of punishment and destruction if he allows himself to feel happiness and enjoyment of life, or if he advances himself in life. In some of the emails he sent me, he traces this back to being bullied when young. . . possibly by kids who were jealous of his high IQ.
As mentioned above, I don’t throw methods (like exposure) at people based on a problem or diagnosis (in his case a phobia, the fear of happiness.) I also mentioned that I go through the T E A M model in a sequence, starting with Testing and Empathy, followed by the Assessment of Resistance and culminating in Methods. In addition, I always treat anxious patients with four powerful models, including the Motivational Model, the Cognitive Model, the Exposure Model, and the Hidden Emotion Model. I described these models above.
The Motivational Model
The Outcome Resistance has to do with the fact that Tomas may resist treatment because of his fear of the consequences of successfully achieving happiness. We will deal with that with Positive Reframing, including the Miracle Cure Question, the Magic Button, Positive Reframing, and the Magic Dial.
In addition, we’ll have to deal with Process Resistance. At some point, we will have to use exposure techniques, and we will want to find out if he’s WILLING to do exposure even though it may be extremely anxiety provoking at first.
We can dangle the carrot, letting him know that we anticipate a positive outcome, but also understand that facing his worst fears may be terrifying at first, and very uncomfortable. I will not try to persuade him to use any of the many versions of Exposure. He will have to persuade me that he’s willing to do it.
I suspect he will be, because he is asking for exposure, but if he says he wants to be treated without exposure, I will have to let him know I am not a good choice as a therapist for him! That’s because I don’t know how to defeat any form of anxiety without exposure.
Of course, I cannot treat Tomas, or anyone, through an Ask David, but can only make teaching points. But I am teaching self-help techniques that have been helpful to many people.
In an email, I asked him the Magic Button question, and he said he didn’t think he’d push it. This indicates some understandable resistance that has to be dealt with.
Positive Reframing is one way to deal with Outcome Resistance. The goal is not only deeper empathy but also helping patients “see” that the negative thoughts and feelings they are struggling so desperately to overcome are actually positive in many ways.
Once they “see” this, it is kind of a pleasant shock to the system, and their resistance to change typically disappears. Then we ask them to set goals for each negative feelings—a lower level of each feeling that would allow them to feel better and not lose all the wonderful positives we have discovered. That’s why it’s better NOT to push the Magic Button.
To help Tomas or anyone see and list the positives in their negative thoughts and feelings, we ask two key questions about each one:
- What are some possible advantages, or benefits, of this negative thought or feeling? How might it help me?
- What does this negative thought or feeling show about me and my core values as a human being that’s positive and awesome?
Typically, this leads to list of 10 to 20 positives that have three characteristics. To give you an example, his intense loneliness is an expression of his love for people and the great value he sees in meaningful relationships. And his anxiety serves to protect him from danger, and is therefore an expression of self-love.
And his feelings of inferiority—in spite of his tremendous intelligence—show humility, which is not only a spiritual quality, but also can make a person of great intelligence more accessible, more vulnerable, and more attractive. Inferiority may also be an expression of his honesty and willingness to acknowledge his shortcomings, as well as his accountability.
We could easily go on and on, and it might be a great exercise for you to try find the positives in several other of his negative thoughts and feelings by asking those two questions.
Once my patient and I have listed 10 or more positives, I ask if these positives are
- True and valid?
- Powerful?
- Important?
Nearly always, I get a resounding YES to each question. Then I use the Magic Dial to see what they might want to dial each negative feeling down to in the % Goal column of the Daily Mood Log.
Is this Positive Reframing process straightforward? Easy?
Not really. I make it look easy, because when I teach I want people to understand, but “seeing” these positives is, in reality, incredibly challenging for most people.
In fact, You can see the Positive Reframing that Tomas completed on his own if you
CLICK HERE
As you can see Tomas almost completely missed the boat when he tried to identify the positives in his negative thoughts and feelings. I mention this because it is a CRUCIAL step in TEAM CBT, and people often have a tremendously hard time “seeing” the positives in their negative thoughts and feelings. A big part of the reason is that society teaches us the opposite. In fact, negative feelings are Labeled as a bewildering array of more than 200 so-called “mental disorders” by the American Psychiatric Association in their “bible,” the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.)
But here’s something even MORE surprising. Rhonda—a highly respected and admired TEAM CBT therapist and teacher—also struggles to find the positives during today’s podcast. Once someone has pointed them out, you can suddenly “see” them. But on your own, you may have a lot of trouble at first with Positive Reframing, which is anything but simple, but extraordinarily powerful once you “get it.”
I recently told my weekly Tuesday psychotherapy training group at Stanford that TEAM CBT is extraordinarily difficult to learn and master—nearly always requiring years of study and practice—and perhaps the most challenging form of psychotherapy ever developed. She was angry and told me I’d have to do large controlled outcome studies to validate that claim!
Yikes!
I may be wrong, and there could be other more difficult forms of therapy, but I still believe what I’m saying because I see it every single day. Many of the most powerful and helpful concepts, such as the four “Great Deaths” of the “self” for the therapist and for the patient in TEAM, and the Acceptance Paradox, and more are hard to learn!
But worth it, IF you take the time to learn this method.
And if you wish to use TEAM CBT, on yourself (for self-help) or with your patients (if you’re a therapist) you will have much greater success after you master this powerful but elusive skill.
The Cognitive Model
After Rhonda and I worked with Positive Reframing, we went on to the technique that usually starts the M = Methods section, called “Explain the Distortions.” This powerful method includes answering three questions about one or several of the distortions you can find in one of the thoughts you want to work on first.
First, select the thought and identify all the distortions in it, listing them by abbreviations in the Distortion column on your Daily Mood Log. For example, if it is an example of All-or-Nothing you can put AON in that column. And you can put OG for Overgeneralization, and so forth. Often, you will find five or even ten distortions in a single negative thought.
Let’s say you work on, “If I’m happy, I’ll be destroyed.” This alarming thought includes AON; LAB, FT, DP, and ER. And it’s also a Hidden SS.
Choose the distortion you want to work on first. Let’s say it’s Fortune Telling (FT).
- Why is this distortion, FT, considered a thinking error in general?
- Why does the FT distortion your specific thought pretty much make the thought unreasonable? In other words, Why does the FT in your thought NOT map onto reality?
- And finally, why is the FT is this thought unfair?
As an exercise, turn off the podcast for a moment and write down your answers to those three questions. Once you’re done, you can check the answers at the end of the show notes.
It’s a great skill to practice and learn, because it will usually make it really easy for you to generate positive thoughts that satisfy the necessary and sufficient conditions for emotional change.
Do you know what they are? Write them down before you look at the answers at the end of the show notes. Just take a guess, but WRITE SOMETHING DOWN before you look!
But DON’T look until you’ve written down your own answers!
Hey, did you peek, or did you write down the answers first?
I get it! And I forgive you! However, you missed out on a great opportunity for learning if you skipped the written exercise. Or, to put it positively, I try to make the exercises fun and interesting. And if you do them, you’ll learn some cool and helpful things rapidly.
It’s like riding a bicycle. You’ve got to get on and ride to learn how to do it!
But here’s what’s really interesting. You’ll notice that Rhonda, once again, really struggles with this exercise during the podcast. Although I think of Explain the Distortions as a really easy TEAM CBT method, experience with real people has over and over again provided abundant evidence that it’s NOT easy for many, or possibly most, people at first.
So, what’s the point? Here’s the point. If you’re a therapist, this method is powerful, and will richly reward you for the time and effort you spend in learning how to do it! But you cannot take it for granted if you want to use it in an actual therapy session.
And if you are simply looking for self-help, the exact same thing is true: the method is incredibly helpful and well worth some time and effort to “get it!”
In addition, to challenging the obviously distorted thoughts on his Daily Mood Log, what other methods might be helpful to Tomas?
The Exposure Model
Well, there are a great many, including the Exposure techniques he was asking for. For example, he could intentionally make himself happy, and then fantasize some horrible punishment using Cognitive Flooding. The idea would be to make himself as anxious as possible for as long as possible, until he finally gets bored with the fantasy, which will definitely happen eventually, and the anxiety disappears.
Exposure is terrifying at first, and it is supposed to be. That’s whey and how it works!
The Hidden Emotion Model
There are many helpful variations on the Exposure front, and the Hidden Emotion Model might also be key. Is there some problem or issue in his life that Tomas is not dealing with? The Class on this technique in the (now entirely free for the summer of 2025 app) Feeling Great app has many details and exercises and examples to show how this mind-blowing technique works.
That’s it for today’s podcast. I want to thank you, Tomas, for providing us with a fascinating problem, and all of you who send in your questions.
We are SO GRATEFUL that you are bouncing back, Rhonda, after your ordeal with radiation therapy for your lymphoma, and send you all our love and best wishes for joyful and complete healing and liberation from your nightmare!
Warmly,
Rhonda and David
Answers
Here is my answer to first exercise on the necessary and sufficient conditions for emotional change from a positive thought. .
- The necessary condition for emotional change: The Positive Thought must be 100% correct.
- The sufficient condition for emotional change: The Positive Thought must reduce your belief in the disturbing negative thought. Sometimes you’ll want to reduce it all the way to zero. Sometimes, that’s not necessary, especially with Should Statements.
Here are my answers to the three questions about Explain the Distortions above.
- In general, FT is a thinking error when you are making arbitrary alarming predictions without strong evidence that supports those predictions. In particular, there is no evidence that supports the claim that people who feel happy rapidly become the victims of some horrific disaster or punishment.
- This thought is very unrealistic because the ONLY punishment that Tomas has experienced is the result of his own negative thoughts!
- This thought is unfair because it puts Tomas in handcuffs so he will be unable to enjoy his life.
