# Happiness and human connection

We can only find satisfaction in life when we connect with others.

Turn off social media:

- Everyone paints their social media as the "greatest hits" of their lives.
- In reality, those people are often as unhappy as you.
- Adding to the stream of self-indulgence doesn't add to anyone's life.
- Skip reading a social media feed and contact your friends directly.
- To share something [meaningful](meaning.md), write a blog or post a vlog.
- By stepping away from social media, you're focusing instead on real life.

Turn off the news and avoid politics:

- [The news media](stories-storytellers.md) makes money through advertisements, and they're paid more when you pay constant attention to them.
- Generally, we are most attached to news when we're miserable.
- Therefore, you're being manipulated by continuing to watch the news.
- Often, the news is simply an attempt to bend your [political opinion](politics-conservativeliberal.md).

## Get involved with others

Find new ways to socialize:

- You'll find more happiness in helping others than in being helped.
- Make frequent small talk with strangers.
- Create meaningful conversations whenever you can.
- Do a random act of kindness about once a week.
- Join a volunteer organization or get more involved at your church.
- Make a goal to get someone to smile.
- Avoid alienating topics with strangers, such as religion or politics.
  - Convert people to your way of thinking by showing them your happiness first, then telling them why.

Learn to BIRG:

- BIRGing is "basking in reflected glory", which is feeling the success of someone else.
- Most [clubs and groups](groups-member.md) are BIRGing together at some level.
- By connecting our feelings of accomplishment to someone else, we can become satisfied with their success, as well as [fuel our drive to succeed](success-1_why.md).

Open yourself to new social challenges:

- Get more connected with your community
- Get a [pet](fun-pets.md).
- Make a deeper commitment with your [life partner](relationships-marriage.md).
- [Have children](parenting-children.md) or adopt.
- Reach out to one person each month who inspires you.

## Find a healing environment

A healing environment is a community that lets us recover from life's trauma.

Everyone can feel a healing environment:

1. Group members guide each other to good things:
   - Things that make everyone well.
   - Healthy values that open everyone to change and growth.
   - Freedom to show and receive physical affection.
   - Everyone commits to each other to survive current crises for better causes.
2. Everyone is encouraged to support each other, but nobody blames anyone else for difficulties:
   - Nobody is condemning, cruel, or abusive.
   - There's no risk of banishment from the group.
   - Members spend more time provoking feelings toward possible solutions than condemning unpleasant feelings.
3. Everyone clearly and directly resolves disagreements and [conflicts](people-5_conflicts.md):
   - Members disapprove of power struggles to maintain emotional control of the environment.
   - Nobody plays the role of victim or martyr.
   - Nobody reacts or gets defensive about constructive criticism and feedback.
   - Nobody considers past mistakes, shortcomings, backsliding, and failures in a conflict.
4. There's zero tolerance for bitterness, belittling, rejection, resentment, not forgiving, and revenge.

Healing environments only form when everyone agrees on a few things:

1. People with problems are sick or ill and not evil, wrong, or defective.
2. Everyone is flawed, which means anyone at any time could be causing an issue.
3. No solution is unsolvable if everyone is willing and brave enough to attain it.
4. Openness and honesty are crucial to resolving any conflicts.
5. Everyone should seek direct feedback on any issues, concerns, faults, and feelings.
6. Everyone is allowed to make mistakes.
7. For the sake of connection, transparency is worth the risk.
8. Forgiveness is always worth it, even if it isn't always easy and the offense might happen again.
9. Everyone deserves a chance to heal and grow.
10. Feelings are always legitimate and should be listened to, even when they're not based on reality.
11. Everyone deserves a chance to love and be loved.
12. Everyone should be emotionally supportive, understanding, patient, sympathetic, and caring.

A healing environment is challenging to create because one person's bad attitude can halt it:

1. Failing to forgive, understand the need for forgiveness, or release issues.
2. Unable to accept personal responsibility for faults, errors, wrongdoing, and consequences of actions.
3. Fear of backsliding, getting hurt or taken advantage of, or long-term loss.
4. Fear of taking risks, accepting change, or failing.
5. Assuming others are evil, disbelieving others' good intentions, or non-commitment toward the group.
6. Disbelief in personal ability to meet the challenge to change and grow.
7. Confused about reality and unable to observe events:
   - Interprets problems literally instead of rationally or without connecting them to other significant problems.
   - Fails to accept parts of the situation that don't fit preconceived notions, expectations, or fantasies of how things "should" be.
   - Committed strongly and permanently to a relationship with little nurture or growth.
8. Meets all discussions of alternate viewpoints and differing methods with name-calling, belittling, ignoring or condemning.
9. Mental disorders like depression or schizophrenia that forbid a healthy give-and-take engagement.
   - Parents' and leaders' roles will shift from nurturers and enablers to caretakers and maintainers.
10. Communication barriers make problems impossible to solve:
    - Failure to receive or engage others' feelings.
    - Not reading nonverbal communication.
    - Unable to verbally talk through issues.

Disruptive behaviors against healing environments come from multiple sources:

1. High-stress or dysfunctional family backgrounds that provide feelings of condemnation for "bad" behavior.
   - Dysfunctional backgrounds often immobilize people through blaming, bickering, fighting, arguing, yelling, and complaining.
2. Withdrawn, silent, or unable to communicate issues:
   - Refusing to admit problems or unwilling to get help.
   - Refusing to express fantasies and expectations of others.
   - Ignores personal rights or violates others' rights without permission.
3. [Addiction](addiction.md) or abuse of [any substance](addiction-substances.md) or person.
4. Impulse to fix or recreate a childhood home.
   - Even with complete enlightenment, an adult child will rarely fix their childhood home.
5. Rigid and constrictive [religious](religion-answers.md), [political](politics-conservativeliberal.md), or social beliefs.
   - Inability or feeling unable to think or act with a sense of personal autonomy or independence.
   - Can't say "no", hear "yes" or "thank you", laugh at themselves, or be straightforward with themselves.
6. Sexual or emotional unfaithfulness.

### An unhealthy environment *can* become a healing one

Everyone must be willing to work to foster a healing environment.

A. Carefully understand what you need:

- Look at issues in your life, what groups they exist within, and with whom.
- Consider how willing everyone is to work on those problems.
- If they aren't, examine whether you can comfortably stay in the environment and why.
  - If someone is in a dysfunctional environment where members don't want to discuss or fix the matter, they're almost *always* better off emotionally separating and creating new connections somewhere else.

B. Consider whether you have everything necessary to start building a healing environment:

- Ask why everyone in the group needs a healing environment.
- Figure out who should develop what healing behaviors.
- Consider all obstacles that stop a healing environment.
- Discern the beliefs everyone must follow to create those healing behaviors.
- Connect the issues you see in the environment itself that will directly benefit from those changed behaviors.

C. Clarify expectations with the other members and plan together:

- Everyone must agree on the issue.
- Everyone must agree on possible solutions that could resolve the issue.
- Specify the actions and habits each person must improve on.
- Agree what outside help everyone will use to address their issues.
- Clarify how everyone will confront all setbacks, relapses, or backsliding.
- Set a date and frequency to check how everyone is doing, revise the plan, continue unchanged, or create a new one.
- Set target goals to show the beginning of a healing environment.
- Make everyone verbally commit, sign, and date it.

If all this fails, go back to Step A or find a new group.

One of the clearest indicators of successfully framing a healing environment will come through [how children respond](parenting-children.md) in that social dynamic.