The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (5 page)

You can use any kind of reminder that works, such as a movie line, a passage from a poem, or a quote from a favorite novel. It could even be a photograph. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it works for you.

Using these thinking processes and the shorter pearls will help you in each room of your house. Let’s start—enter a room, any room. Since we have to start somewhere in this house, we will bring you to the basement first, that dark and scary place, where all your memories are stored and have the power to make you unhappy today.

But only if you let them.

Where the Memories Are Stored

T
he basement is sometimes a dreary, musty space, but it can be
instructive to go down those creaky stairs, pry open the boxes, and rummage around in your memories. You may be surprised to learn where your aversions and preferences really come from. Perhaps you are scared of the dark and remember that night when you were a kid walking along a country road in the dark, far from home, and your sister, brother, and cousins scared you by jumping out from behind the bushes, making you scream in terror.

Okay, that happened to
me
. And to this day, I have had to grapple with a fear of country lanes on quiet starless nights, and the idea that someone or something is going to jump out from behind a bush and try to hurt me. All because of a stupid hoax when I was nine.

The basement is where all your memories get stored. (Don’t confuse the scrapbooks of your childhood with the family heirlooms in the attic; those belonged to your grandma, and for our purposes, the attic is where your ancestral expectations are kept.) The basement is where all your childhood hurts and torments are stowed away in cabinets and under the stairs. You would rather not revisit them, but you have to in order to understand how you think and feel today.

The basement is the biggest room in the house because it’s the footprint of your emotional architecture; those memories are the precursors to all else. Of course, some memories are more important than others.

I like to say that everyone is always getting over something, their “Rosebud.” In
Citizen Kane
, a great and powerful newspaperman utters “Rosebud,”
as his last word, sending an intrepid reporter on a search for the meaning of the wealthy magnate’s life. Rosebud, we learn in the last scene of the movie, was the name of the sled Kane had when he was young and happy. (The sled is a symbol of his innocence, his last moments of being carefree.) In a flashback you see him sledding when he finds out his mother is sending him away to be raised by an uncaring banker, who arrives out of the blue.

In each of our lives Rosebud may not be so dramatic or so easy to pinpoint, but there is something—an insult or an emotional bruising—that each of us will never forget and that rests close to our consciousness. Like a scar, it never goes away. We may not realize it, but we are reacting to it in some way for the rest of our lives.

Think about it: What is your emotional hot button, the event that is “the key” to your past, which explains some part of your motivations and your pursuit of adult happiness?

These defining moments can be big (a divorce) or small (a teacher who tells you, “You’ll never be good at math”), and then you spend the rest of your life reacting to that by either becoming an engineer or by not being able to balance a checkbook. Either way the memories are significant because they influence how you think and act today, affecting every relationship you have and creating conflict in every room.

Imagine that you are in your daughter’s room, arguing with your eleven-year-old because she refuses to write a thank-you note to her grandmother, your mother. She wants to shoot off an e-mail, but you insist that a handwritten card is the only proper response. You are in a stalemate until you realize that this “battle” is an echo from your past, that you fought with your mother when she made
you
write thank-you notes to your grandmother. Now you’re not sure if it’s your voice or your mother’s in your head as you push your daughter to pick up the pen.

This isn’t about you and your daughter, even though you might think you’re in your (emotional) kid’s room. You suddenly have a clear image of yourself sitting weeping at the kitchen table, being told you had to write
a note before you could go out and play. You remember now that your own grandmother always appreciated—as in “quietly demanded”—such notes.

That’s called a “screen memory” because not only is it still as clear as a movie for you, but you are still “screening” your behavior and perceptions through it. You need to understand that your actions today—including this argument with your daughter—are distorted by that memory. Writing notes was a painful ritual for you because your grandmother corrected your spelling and grammar in red ink and sent the notes back to you, like homework. One year, you rebelled and thanked her for her present on the phone. You later learned that she was so upset about not getting a thank-you note that she punished you by not sending you a birthday check!

Tell your daughter the story of your painful memories—red-inked notes and the embargoed birthday check—and see if that moves her or at least helps you both understand where you’re coming from. Your goal is not to win this argument; your goal is to connect with your daughter and see if you can find common ground.

Why Are Some Memories as Vivid as a Movie Scene?

Freud coined the term
screen memory
, but we are co-opting it here to express the idea that your childhood memories are like home movies. What didn’t make the final cut is not as significant as what did, since that is the one you replay now, decades later.

So much of our adult life is filtered through what we remember from childhood. The screen memory may not even have been real, that is, what actually happened, but it is real to
you
…and may be bringing you down, in ways you don’t even realize.

These memories are a critical part of who you are and how you act and think, since they play an important role in every room. A typical screen memory can be a childhood hurt, a harsh criticism you’ll never forget. You continue to see things through that screen, so if someone makes fun of you for being a bad speller or horrible cook, you overreact, by becoming
an editor or a top chef. Or you shut down to avoid further hurt. Either way you’re doing what we call “screening.”

Fear Lives in the Basement

The basement can be the seat of powerful fears, but for me, it is also a source of powerful motivation. Here’s just one example: As a young girl, I was always scared of monsters—monsters in the closet, monsters under the bed—but thanks to Steven Spielberg and
Jaws
, that fear morphed into a lifelong phobia of sharks. I grew up going to Martha’s Vineyard and watched them making that movie, then went to see it the first chance I got. I was young enough to be traumatized (but old enough to know better) by that scene in the beginning in which the young woman is torn apart by a shark and pulled under. That scene was filmed on my beach and is forever etched in my memory, as if it had happened to me! The fear may be irrational, but it’s still real, imprinted on my brain as readily as a real event.

One of the most liberating achievements of my adult life was forcing myself to get beyond my fear of sharks and my fear of swimming in open water. I told myself I just had to get over it, but as Catherine would say, first I had to get through it. Before I could do that, I had to recognize that I was stuck, that my fear of sharks was preventing me from realizing my long-held dream of completing a triathlon.

Catherine says that what I was doing is called “counterphobia,” where you do exactly what you fear the most. Some people learn to fly, even get their pilot’s license, because they are afraid of getting on a plane. Counterphobia could be considered your body’s way of trying to overcome what it rationally knows it shouldn’t be scared of. Ultimately, though, it’s a form of reacting, as opposed to acting. By integrating your new experience you can change how you feel about an event and even how you feel about fear in general. Which is to say that it is something you can master.

I had no idea how this fear was holding me back in other areas as well—it was as if the fear of one thing was spilling into other “rooms” and causing me to be fearful in ways big and small. The litany of fears was
long: scared of the dark, scared of failure, scared of looking stupid or vulnerable or asking for help. But once I started to conquer this shark fear, I found it was easier to be brave in every part of my life. As in, “If I can do this…then why not all those other things?”

Getting over it, and through it, was a long process. I got a little help from the natural world when another fin-related event helped me do what Catherine calls “remetabolize” my fear of sharks. (She means I had a chance to churn through it and get a new perspective on it.) Years ago, I saw dolphins playing near the beach in South Carolina and thought:
Not every fin is scary
.
They are welcoming me to come swim, come play, get in the water!
Once I finally did go in the water, I slowly but surely began to enjoy swimming in the open sea. I was then able to complete a triathlon, a sport I had been eager to try for years before I’d gathered my courage.

Catherine explains that fear is paralyzing, but every emotion related to the basement can also be paralyzing, since it’s where we get “stuck” in the patterns of our past. You can be trapped in a guilty pattern, an angry pattern, and any of the emotions that stem from childhood hurts.

Living with the Past Means Storing It in Boxes, Where It Belongs

We all have memories that make us cringe, that we wish we could put in a box somewhere and never take out. Some are painful, others merely embarrassing, even humorous (now). For most women, the worst memories include men we wish we had not slept with or moments of humiliation in high school, when the “mean girls” attacked us for being un-cool or nonconformist. For some women, these memories are painful enough to be traumatic, and everyday decisions are still affected by them years, even decades, later.

But you don’t have to be trapped by your memories. They are yours, and yours to change. Catherine tells us that everyone has to make peace with her past, but this involves delving into it, since you have to bring it up, think about it, and understand it differently, in a new way. You may still feel embarrassed or fearful from time to time, but you’ll know where
the feeling is coming from, and that diffuses its power. Then you can change the impact of those memories, and in doing so, you can also change your life.

That is the beauty of the basement—it may be the largest room in the house, but it’s also not
in
the house; it’s under it. That means you can always climb the stairs, turn out the light, and go to any room you choose without taking the baggage with you.

Judith is a successful lawyer with a private practice that gives her reasonable control of her time. She’s married with two daughters and a son, ages nine to fourteen. When Judith thinks about the happiest time in her life, she always goes back to summer days on a beach in Nantucket. The memory is so powerful that she gets happy every time she smells salty sea air.

Those summer days—which, she is quick to point out, were spent in a shabby cabin that didn’t have a working telephone—reside in her memory as a golden, uncomplicated time when Judith and her brother were always in or near the water. Her father was reading books and newspapers, propped up on an elbow on a striped beach towel until the flood of words exhausted him and he would snooze. Her mom was either chatting with a friend or walking along the beach, looking for sea glass. Judith recalls her mother being happy all the time, whether she was watching the kids play or fixing up the house or handing out tuna sandwiches and potato chips. For Judith, this was a time when her family was relaxed and secure.

At least that’s how Judith remembers it. But dig a bit, and she’ll admit that it was a mirage. When Judith was thirteen, her parents’ marriage fell apart, and they stopped going to the little shack by the water. Two decades later, she took her husband and very young children back to that cabin to show them around. It was a bittersweet visit—Judith was still enthralled by the place, but she realized that the beach there was the source of both her happiest memories and her unhappiest because it was where her idealized world imploded. This trip as an adult helped her see that her memory was deceptive. None of her beach recollections were really about togetherness. The beach, she now realized, was a place where no one in her family communicated. All the parallel activity was a way of avoiding intimacy and honesty. As Judith puts it, “We were constantly on top of each other but didn’t connect. The beach itself was a natural sanitarium—so beautiful, peaceful, and remote that any unhappiness or anguish could be put on pause, if only for the month of August.”

Yet despite her recently acquired perspective about what really was going on in her parents’ marriage and how it cast a shadow on everything that happened at the beach, Judith is
still
trying to get back there.

For the past fifteen years, Judith saved all her discretionary income and used it to buy her own beach house. She was determined to re-create her treasured years for her children. But they don’t want to go to the beach every weekend—they have friends to hang out with, sports to play, parties to attend.

But Judith insists on dragging them to her precious weekend retreat anyway. As a result, an activity designed to bring everyone together has become the source of temper tantrums, recriminations, and tears. The kids are angry and miserable, since they don’t want to go. And Judith is unhappy and confused—why isn’t it fun?

The problem, according to Catherine, is that Judith isn’t in the family room, as she wants to be, but in her own little memory-filled basement, where she is trying to re-create the past and this time get it right. It’s as if, in her mind, the beach was perfect but the family was broken and she wants to repair it now, all these years later.

The unconscious process, explains Catherine, is that Judith isn’t over her injury and she is trying to master the trauma. She’s stuck there, because it was a traumatizing experience, and now she wants to move forward, but first she has to start back at the beginning. She is going to repeat it until she gets it right, like a scene in
Groundhog Day
, where the Bill Murray character has to replay the same day over and over until he gets every detail the way he wants it.