Our concern to be good has to outweigh our concern to be well.

Seek emotional help

The main reason people seek emotional help is: the search for relief from a negative feeling. The person suffers and seeks to feel good. The motivation is the pursuit of happiness and pain is perceived as the obstacle to achieve it.

In this context, if the person consults a therapist, the therapist will investigate the situation or the root cause of this feeling and, by different methods, will try to alleviate the negative feeling.

However, the attempt to alleviate emotional discomfort can paradoxically cause happiness to recede even further.

Scale of values

Each person decides what his scale of values is. The highest on the scale is perceived as the most important, so it will bring more pleasure to have it and more pain to lose it.

The more a person devotes himself to feeling good, the more importance he is giving to his own well-being, and the more he is sensitized to discomfort, the more he suffers from memories and negative feelings. When the pursuit of happiness becomes the primary occupation, it becomes more difficult to achieve.

Is happiness the end or the means?

According to Jewish thought, happiness is not the end, but the means. We have to feel good, not because it is pleasant, but because it makes it easier to fulfill our role in the world.

On our scale of values, the concern to be good has to outweigh the concern to be well.

And the amazing thing is that this approach does not take away from happiness, but quite the opposite!

By seeking emotional relief as a means to become better people (and not happiness as an end goal in itself), discomforts become less relevant and difficulties less central to life.

This is one of the great added values of a therapy with a Jewish vision, such as the ones offered at koshertherapy.com. The mission of this initiative is to provide the Jewish community with access to the best Jewish professionals, specialists in health and emotional well-being, in order to contribute to fuller Jewish families, happier people and healthier interpersonal relationships.

If you need to schedule a session, don't hesitate, because remember, feeling good is not a right, is a duty.

Originally published at Aish Latino