A Good Life

A good life vs. anxiety, depression and low self-esteem

 
The principle for a good (and fulfilled / happy) life is to be able to accept whatever comes and thereby, sometimes, to suffer. This includes accepting our limitations, our ageing process, our failures and struggles, and the bad things that happen to us.

The alternative is to want things to be a certain way and to complain and blame others or ourselves when they are not. This does not mean, of course, that we cannot do things to try to make life as good as possible.

Anxiety, depression and low self-esteem
However, when we don’t accept who we are and what is going on, then we feel bad and inadequate that we haven’t been able to make things as we’d like. We can then come to feel perennially anxious, dissatisfied and inadequate - a life of misery, depression and low self-esteem can lie this way. 

This applies particularly to wanting other people to be a certain way (other than who and how they are being) or to want them to make us feel a certain way. This is to (try to) control them, and puts pressure on them and on the relationship with them which is very likely to be unhelpful. Again this is not to say that raising genuine issues for discussion is not helpful, as long as we are not looking for a life without stress and that we don't persistently blame others when that doesn't materialise.

For the person who accepts, being free from the emphasis on what is in other people’s minds - their opinions, wishes and judgements - allows us to be free to be ourselves, rather than tied to others’ approval.

Early trauma
This also applies to old / early traumatic experiences. It can take a good deal of work to accept and come to terms with what happened to us earlier in our lives, and to come to learn to manage and regulate the distress associated with those experiences. However, if we can’t accept ourselves and what happened on some deep level, this is a worse loss as we are turning away from ourselves and reality (see my pages on Early relational trauma on this website or my book Into the Darkest Places for more discussion of this).

The Tao Te Ching
Whilst I have found this again and again clinically, particularly when working with people’s anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and misery, I have also come to recognise that this is ancient wisdom that lies at the heart of Taoist principles as described in the Tao Te Ching, which was written over two thousand years ago. I particularly recommend John Minford's translation and commentary of this work.