Category: Josh Feingold Blog

It’s funny but one of the most time consuming things that we ever do in life, we don’t put all that much thought into before we do it.

Our career?  We go to a four or more year collage to prepare. How about relationships.  How much time did you spend learning about relationships before you started having a serious one?  Exactly.

While this is NOT a blog about relationships, I will throw out some basics that I have learned about over the years, and hope that you will take advantage of learning more about them before you enter into them – and make sure that your significant other understands these things as well.

1) How we fall in love – We project an external image of what need to fix in ourselves on our partner, typically from something from our childhood, and our partner does the same.  Once the lust stage is over we end up fighting about these things.  Better to fix these issues BEFORE we get married!

Suggested Reading:  Falling in Love: Why We Choose the Lovers We Choose by Ayala Malakh-Pines

2) Attachment Theory – Now that you have met someone that meets your needs in a healthy way, understand you and your partners capacity to be intimate and have an intimate partner.   Ultimately, intimacy (which is really honesty on a relationship level) provides the foundation for a secure relationship.

Suggested Reading: Attached – by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller.

3) The five love languages – We continue to feel secure in a relationship, when our partner expresses their love in one of our love languages – of which there are five – and we probably received love in one or two main ways, which hopefully map to how our partner provides it!

Suggested Reading: The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman

So with a fifty dollar investment, you can greatly impact the quality of your relationships, and better insure that your partners are a good fit for you – and that you are a good fit for them!

[Note: This post continues from Monday and Tuesday.]

So now that we understand that the only way to be happy is to be true, and that truthfulness starts with oneself, the next step is to apply this as much as possible in your life.

And it all starts with an attitude.  An attitude that everything you do will be truthful.

Now this doesn’t mean telling someone the truth that their new outfit is ugly.  That’s just mean.  However, it does mean, being truthful with yourself, and to tell them what YOU want to tell them – regardless of what someone else might say is the right thing to do.

So it’s about digging deep and figuring out what you are really all about.  What makes you tick?  What provokes you?  What do you think about things?  What do you believe in your heart of heart?  What scares you?  All the stuff we have been discussing so far along the journey of my blog.

At the bottom of it all is the true you.  And it is your job to keep digging until you get there.  Because if you don’t you’ll just keep suffocating yourself and never find your true self and in doing so find true happiness.

Good luck on the journey.  I hope you enjoy it!

[Narrators note: This post continues from yesterday.]

Step number two in finding happiness is to commit to living truthfully in all of your relationships.  The hardest of which is yourself.

We all learn that we need to be honest with other people.  Well, not all of us, but it seems to be a basic moral principle of most people, and when we are done today, we’ll solve that anyways, so I won’t go into too much detail on that.  However, what we don’t really learn is to be honest with ourselves – and it is here where we really trip ourselves up in the path to happiness.

The problem is that as a child, no one is honest with us.  Our parents, teachers, friends, society, they all lie to us.  If you want, I’ll give you specific examples, but I am sure you can find places in your own life that you can remember where they lied to protect specific interests. So what all this lying did was teach you that it is okay to lie to yourselves to protect yourself.  So you did.

Let me show you how this works to your disadvantage with an example from myself to show you how this works.

I am a very anxious person.  Just am.   Let’s examine why.

An event happens, and I start asking myself a bunch of “what if” questions.  For example, a friend doesn’t answer the phone and I say “what if they were kidnapped.”  Now both you and I both know that the likelihood of anyone we know being kidnapped is very rare, but none the less, I start getting anxious – and stay anxious until I hear from my friend.

So let me ask you something, what do I gain with my anxiety?  I’ll answer for you.  It forces me to remember that there is something important out there that needs to be resolved – kind of a mental red string around my finger.  Trust me it works.  I don’t forget things that I need to do.

One more step and you’ll get the point of all this, I promise.

Why do I need this kidnapping issue to be resolved and create anxiety to remind myself?  Because I need my life to be in order, which means no outstanding issues (such as unreachable friends) and for me to be in control of my environment.  That is the base reason.

So look what I did here.  In order to ATTEMPT to control my environment (which we can’t do, right), I lied to myself, and said there is something I can do – I can worry about it.  But worrying doesn’t accomplish anything does it?  It just makes me unhappy.

Whew.  We did it.  A full example of where we lie to ourselves and in doing so create our own unhappiness.

Now you will find sometimes that they you tell yourself outright lies, other times they are denials, and still other times they are you fooling yourself.  However, in all cases they are you not telling the truth to yourself.  And in all cases, they are making you unhappy since you are suffocating your true self as you live untruthfully.

P.S. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to live a truthful life.

I can think of no better way to celebrate my just over 100th post than to share my model of how we can find happiness in life.

It is interesting, because most people I know (myself included) walk around looking for happiness, thinking that it can be found elsewhere, because it sure ain’t inside them.

However, what they fail to realize is that it really is, but they have so convoluted themselves, that they can no longer see it.

Think about babies.  How many unhappy babies do you know of?  Exactly, they are all happy – except for when they are in direct physical pain.

How many adults do you know that are happy?  Eh, who cares.  Are you happy?

I think I know the secret of happiness, and want to share it with you. It is glaringly obvious and simple, and eluded me until recently: get back to your baby state.

I’ll explain. Why do we all love babies so much?  Because they are innocent – and I think what underlies that – utter truth (at least when they are really young).

It is this truth that enables them to be free and happy.

You see, there is no happiness without freedom.  And there is no freedom without truth.

The problem is that we spend our lives building subtle lies upon lies which suffocate us – and make us unhappy.  I think you intuitively know I am correct.  So the way to fix the problem is to dig out of the pile of lies and be truthful with ourselves so we can find freedom and happiness.

Of course, this is easier said than done.  Lies protect us from our fears.  More to the point, lies protect us from ourselves.  Or so we think.  The truth is that while we think we are helping ourselves, we are really strangling ourselves – slowly, slowly.  (We do this a lot actually, if you think about it you’ll find other examples.)

We want truth, in fact, we can’t get enough of it in our lives – and we can’t seem to find it anywhere.

It’s for this reason that we are so enamored with “real.”  Why the Coke ad for “The Real Thing” was so effective, and why “Reality TV” is so much more amusing than scripted TV.  Real is real and we know it.

So step number one to being happy is to understand that only through truth – and living a true life – can you find happiness.

Want to avoid clutter?  Toss things after a year.

My cousin taught me this trick years ago, and it has treated me well.

Basically, if you haven’t put something on, used it, enjoyed it, or moved it for a year, isn’t it time to get rid of it?  Granted that you MIGHT have a need for it in the future, but you can always buy it again!

So as we end 2001, look around your house, your closet, your storage areas, and if there is no sentimental value, and you haven’t used it this year, go ahead and throw it away.