Happy

There is only one person who could ever make you happy, and that person is you.
David Burns

We are born into a culture with a victim mentality. We are taught from birth that someone else has control over us and we must do as they say. As babys we are so dependant on our parents that the worst thing we could possibly imagine is for them to reject us, to not be willing and able to fulfill our needs. We will do almost anything to please our parents. And from then on we learn that we must satisfy the wants of our family, our babysitters, our teachers, and the police. We feel that if they disapproved of us, the consequencees would be too much to bear.

It stands to reason that if we depend on the approval of other people for the fulfillment of our needs, it is only a small step to depending on them to make us feel happy, or even good about ourselves. Everything rests on their approval. We have learned that we can't fulfill our own needs, including our own need to be happy. We can't be happy unless we get lucky and outside circumstances are such that everything is going well in our lives. But of course that kind of happiness is not sustainable because circumstances are inevitably going to change.

There is only one person who could ever make you happy, and that person is you. Only you can give yourself the kind of long-lasting happiness you really want. The kind of happiness that is not dependant on good outside circumstances or the approval of other people. It is after all impossible to have the approval of all people at all times.

If you depend on some other person to make you happy, it is first of all an enormous burden to place on them and secondly they are just naturally going to have days when they have other people to pay more attention to, or when they don't approve of you as much as you would like. Only you can approve of yourself and give yourself what you really need all the time. And this is the key to any long-lasting happiness.