The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (15 page)

Anne is a bright, attractive brunette who is a fifth-year associate at a big corporate law firm in Los Angeles. Her husband, Keith, is also an attorney; he works in entertainment law. They have been together for ten years and still fight about money all the time, even over whether they should share a joint account. He says yes, she says no. She wants to do whatever she wants with her paycheck, and not have to answer to her husband.

Anne grew up in an affluent Northern California family. Her father
was a founding partner in a law firm, and her mother was a successful tax attorney. Money was never a big issue for them, but Anne’s dad felt his kids should know the value of the dollar and insisted they work every summer to earn their spending money for the academic year. “Dad would always pay for school, but anything beyond that was our responsibility. I realize that I had it good, I mean I don’t have any debt right now, and I did learn the value of a dollar. So I resent Keith getting upset when he sees I’ve bought a nice new suit or pair of shoes.”

Keith is from a small town in central California. His father owned a gas station and his mother was a homemaker. They both worked very hard and made many sacrifices to get their two kids into college. Keith took out loans to pay for his schooling and got some merit scholarship money for law school. His philosophy is: Spend nothing, save everything. Hers is: We’ve got it, why not enjoy it?

Anne’s mom always brought her home new clothes, so she sees that as a form of love; shopping is just part of being happy and affirming life and looking forward to events that require you to look pretty and get dressed up. Only after sharing these memories and worries can they see that for Anne spending is a positive thing, an expression of her personality and her desires and her accomplishments. For Keith, spending money is undisciplined, profligate, and even weak. It shows a lack of self-control, like drinking too much. It’s not the kind of behavior he wants to see from the future mother of his children. This is serious, and though they love each other, the money fight can drive a wedge between them; they need to sit down and learn to understand each other before it’s too late.

Anne and Keith talk a lot about what money means to each of them. While Keith thinks he gives Anne a lot of latitude, he knows she feels she’s being watched like a hawk. They have tried to talk about this and they recognize that they come from very different financial backgrounds, but it continues to be a source of tension for them, particularly when Keith recites the Visa bill charges at the end of the each month. “He tells me he’s just trying to be helpful, keep us aware of our spending, but he knows it upsets and humiliates me. And to make things worse, he’ll have just reviewed our bills and then want to have sex. Is he kidding? I am fuming,
while he can just shut off the bill talk and want to make love. Forget it—I’d rather go to bed furious and hope tomorrow is a better day.”

Not likely, says Catherine, since these two are stuck in the paradigm of the parent/child relationship, and they are having trouble acting as grown, married adults. It’s as if Anne is reacting against her own father (now played by Keith), and he is the dad in his family trying to rein in the purse strings (child now played by Anne). Once again, the unconscious process is transference. The emotions Anne has for one person (her dad) are played out and experienced with another (her husband), and the pattern goes right back to childhood.

She is also experiencing some “return of the repressed” feeling, since she is saying to Keith “don’t tell me what to do,” as if it’s a response to her father. But Keith is flummoxed, reacting with a shrug and “I’m not trying to tell you what to do. No one is. But don’t we want to try to build a family and a bank account together?” Catherine points out that Anne is fighting Keith as if he’s her father, but he’s not, and she can choose to break the pattern and grow up, move forward, and create an adult lifestyle. (As opposed to the kid who blows through her allowance every week.)

First Anne has to recognize she’s not in her office but her basement, full of memories of her father’s overbearing behavior, and how money seemed like power, at least within her family. Having money meant you got to make the decisions, and not having it meant other people told you what to do. So once she resets and remetabolizes those feelings, she can choose to assign a different value to her own paycheck: It’s a future plan, a partnership with her husband, and they both are “investing” in their family life.

The key process to understanding their relationship to each other is to think of the Venn diagram, though this time it could represent not just their relationship, but also their view about how to spend or save. They can draw a financial Venn diagram, where the shading in the middle is the money they each contribute to their mutual goals, and the outer areas are the money they choose to spend or save as they see fit. The middle, shaded area might need to be bigger, to signify that they share common
financial goals and a common vision, if not a philosophy about money. They need to find areas they can both agree on (saving for a house? a college fund?) and put these in the middle area of the diagram.

You can have different ideas and be close, so long as you work to understand your differences. For anyone pulled apart by money conflicts or different points of view, the key is to remember that sameness is not closeness. You don’t have to do things the same way, but you do have to find a workable compromise. Staying close is the goal, not agreeing on everything. Our pearl: It’s more important to be close than to win.

Karen is the hardworking co-owner of a small jewelry business. She and her best friend from art school started making jewelry and had some luck showing and selling it to friends and family. They eventually took out a small business loan and rented a storefront on the main street of their little Connecticut town.

“At first, all we wanted was to be able to sell enough inventory to pay our monthly rent. We would literally share a bottle of wine at the end of the month as we sat around the store, doing our bookkeeping, and realize that yes, we could pay the rent this month! Not that we didn’t have faith, but it’s scary starting your own business.”

About six months after they opened their doors, Karen and her partner had done well enough to be able to do a little public relations for
themselves. “Our goal was to eventually go national, and my idea was to send our jewelry to the accessories editor at a fashion magazine, so we could see it on a model and hope that the photograph would drive business. We sent it to all the major titles, and what happened next was like a fairy tale. One of our pieces was in a major magazine, being worn by a celebrity. It was a set of delicate gold bangles. One day I got a call from a fact checker at the magazine, who was making sure they had the correct Web site address for us. I panicked. Not only was it good news, but it was also almost too good. I had to quickly make sure our supplier could still provide the bracelets, and that I had time to make up enough pieces before the magazine came out three weeks later.”

Karen and her partner worked like maniacs for those three weeks, but when the magazine hit the newsstands, they were ready. Orders started rolling into the Web site, and not only did Karen have to go back to her supplier three times for more bangles, but the other jewelry on the Web site started selling out as well. Karen had to hire a third and then a fourth person, one to man the store and another to answer the phones and work the Web site while she went out to find new designs and create more jewelry. She was suddenly so busy being successful that she never stopped even to have a glass of champagne to celebrate. One day Karen ran into an old friend from school, who said something that struck home: “Wow, you really made it. You must be so happy!”

Once upon a time a statement like that—from this person especially—would have been a major victory. But Karen felt as if someone had just punched her.
Why
, she thought,
don’t I feel happy?
She had gotten everything she’d ever wanted, career-wise, and yet she felt that it could all evaporate in an instant if she didn’t keep pushing and moving forward, solving tomorrow’s problems today.

The joy she’d felt when that fact checker had called was fleeting, like the flash of a camera; but her next thought was panic and then she was racing full tilt to make the most of this opportunity. But she hadn’t really made the most of it, just the most profits. “I was so mad at myself because I wasn’t able to hold on to the feeling of success. All I could think about was,
What’s next?
And
How could we do this bigger and better?
I was so
quickly on to the next thing that I didn’t take the time to savor that moment, that victory.”

Catherine explains that this is an example of idealization/devaluation, which basically means if it happens to you, you think it’s not as impressive as if it happened to someone else. In layman’s terms, this is the famous Groucho Marx line: “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.” So in other words, just by achieving your goal, it feels less amazing. This is one of the cruelest ironies of a successful life. Karen idealized the hope that her business would get into the magazine, but when it actually happened, she dismissed it because now that it was real, it didn’t seem to be as important. In fact it seemed totally unimportant, as if she’d been working for the wrong goal all along.

Some people experience this letdown when they achieve partnership in a law firm and think, yeah, but I missed all my daughter’s ballet performances in order to reach this moment where my boss, who I now realize is a narcissistic a-hole, is clapping me on the back. Or it happens earlier, when you get into the Ivy League college of your dreams and realize you would have been much happier at the little liberal arts college that had your favorite subject at the core of its curriculum. Tal Ben-Shahar, the positive-psychology professor at Harvard, once told me that his students will walk up to him after a great class and say, “When do I get to just be happy? I feel like I need to constantly succeed, first to get into Harvard, now in all my courses, and I wonder, when am I allowed to just relax and be happy?” And Tal says to them, “Why not today?” And they look at him like he’s crazy. There are expectations of grad school and becoming a Rhodes Scholar and the like, and these driven people don’t know how to take their foot off the accelerator; it can become a chronic problem.

The typical type A person is successful in every measurable way but one: They don’t value their own success. They lack the ability to appreciate the things they do attain and constantly seek the ones that are just outside their reach.

Usually something or someone in their past is a spark or pilot light to their inner fire. Often it’s a critical parent or someone who is devaluing
her, and she either can react against the criticism (I’ll show you!) or agree with them (I am a fraud). Either way she’s reacting, not acting in an authentic way.

Karen’s basement is full of memories of working hard to overcompensate for the fact that in grade school she was identified as having mild dyslexia, and she always felt she had to work harder than everyone around her to excel at school. Finally, winning a prize for an essay at graduation was her first “accomplishment” that she had idealized and then devalued. Once she won it she felt it held no real value; it was an award for “most improved,” and she didn’t feel she deserved all the congratulations that came her way. Only her mother was critical of her, even during that period, saying that she liked Karen’s other essays better than the winning one. And Karen felt that her critical mother was the true pinger, not all the positive voices around her.

Karen has to understand why she is seeking further success; is it for herself or to show her mom? For creative purposes or monetary gain? (Or both?) If it’s just to stick it to her mom, then it’s not going to be enough to sustain her over the long term, and that’s why she may feel hollow. It’s a Pyrrhic victory, since her mother didn’t take any real notice of the magazine that featured her jewelry, dismissing it with nary an acknowledgment. “Oh, that’s nice, honey. I don’t get that magazine. But my neighbor reads it sometimes!” But no fanfare. Turns out the only person who can validate her is…her. She has to understand that her mother may never give her the approval she craves, and Karen can be responsible only for herself, for her own self-worth. If she can do that, she can be happy. She deserves to toast herself and her own success, and not to feel like a fraud.

When something that should bring satisfaction doesn’t, you need to figure out your true motivation. What is the passion that brought you here and how can you get it back, reconnect to that thing you love, that started you down this path in the first place? Or was this never the right path for you? We’d say: Act, don’t react. In other words, ask yourself, What do I really want? Take the time to figure it out, since the pearl here is to be true to you, and only
you
can decide what that really means. Once you have an inkling, follow it, see where it leads you. Find your authentic self.