Chronic Dissatisfaction Syndrome

 

Do You Suffer Chronic Dissatisfaction?

I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. 

Oscar Wilde

Chronic Dissatisfaction (let’s just call it CD) stalked me for years.

Do you know CD?

The symptoms include restlessness, needing more of something indefinable and always shifting, feeling like you’re not there yet (but wondering where the hell there is.) CD pushed and nagged me that I was made for more, to be more and express more until I bled.

I seethed at myself when I felt it coming, gnawing chronic dissatisfaction. I judged myself for letting it invade me as a host again. I was furious that I felt so powerless to mollify or sate that slavering devourer of happiness.

Sometimes it turned me in knots of anxiety, sometimes it got me feeling so flat I didn’t want to move. Dissatisfaction with something, or everything, is a player in depression. It’s also there in anxiety, in the indeterminate dread that something’s not right and may at some point shockingly emerge and ambush you.

Recognise any of this yourself?

I felt it worst in my twenties. It’s a common time for CD to first show itself, during what’s sometimes called The Quarter-Life Crisis – an early 20’s existential angst period where we crave deeper meaning and purpose, in ourselves and in the world. Once CD has its hooks in you, it’s often a travelling companion on and off throughout life. Our celebrity-adoring, curated-life culture feeds CD, teasing us about whether we measure up, creating conditions that can keep us constantly doubting ourselves. Chronic Dissatisfaction is a close relative of that other perennial mind-stalker Fear of Failure to Fulfil Potential which also tends to rise up around the same time.

Years later, despite being more satisfied in my life than I’ve ever been, I’m still able to time warp right back into the feelings of dissatisfaction I had as a teenager and twenty-something, if I let myself.

I have everything I need, no reason for life or death struggles in my day to day, no reason for sadness, no reason for yearning or such blatant aching need. My life is full and rich. Yet there it is, writhing on home again through my veins like a parasite that sucks my lifeforce. CD is a feeling I recognise from long ago.

Sure, we have wins, but most of us never feel that CD’s completely solved – that’s the chronic in it – because as we grow and achieve a goal, always another deeper level or a higher standard to reach emerges. There’s always something greater, always something more just out ahead.

It’s healthy and adaptive to seek more, reach further, wonder what more we have in us, right? It’s a normal, self-actualising part of human growth, albeit not always a relaxing or very comfortable part. Dissatisfaction can be a great motivating force in life. The trouble is that it can also be disheartening, panic-inducing and exhausting.

Physical yoga practice, some exercise, used to see me through while I was doing it, but then…hello old friend…Now I’m much stronger with it. The years have taught me how to swim with it rather than sink.

Writing offers me huge solace in the catharsis of self-expression when I feel dissatisfaction trying to worm its way to the surface of my skin, infiltrating my words with self-doubt, whispering edits to try to suck the goodness out of easy pleasure. I tell it

“No, all is well”.

The difference between then and now is that I used to fear CD so much more. I was too afraid to speak to it directly, to look it in the face. Now I know it’s just a part of me that the rest of me isn’t entirely comfortable with, but I need to live with anyway. I take it in my stride when it shows up and check to see if it has anything useful to contribute today. 

Sometimes it’s there to tell you that you need to make a change, other times it’s rattling the pressure tin. The secret is having the patience and courage to see which of those emerges this time.

You can learn to work with your chronic dissatisfaction too. In fact, I recommend it for your mental health. Because, ugly as it is on first meeting, CD isn’t essentially a bad guy. These days I even feel safe enough with it to perversely enjoy its pressure sometimes when it lunges at me, because it helps me stay focused on living a life that has meaning for me. It stops me from wasting precious time on stuff that doesn’t matter, warns me off mediocrity and whispers

“What more, what more is possible?”

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough. 

Alain de Botton

Am I Normal to Often Feel Dissatisfied?

You’ll probably recognise it: Restlessness, needing more of something indefinable, feeling like you’re not there yet (but wondering where the hell there is), episodes of yearning for something you can’t quite name, wondering if there’s more to this life than what you’re currently living …

CD used to commandeer my ship all the time, but experience has now taught me to channel CD’s intensity, and smile at my nagging, fickle and distracted mind, rather than being bullied by obsessive striving. It wasn’t always that way. 

Dissatisfaction can and will work against you if you let it push you around. It can turn you against yourself with self-criticism and anxiety, or paralyse you into fear of failure if you believe the ‘nothing’s ever good enough’ hype and take it as a personal attack on you.

• If you believe its pitch, CD can keep you stuck and seething in frustration that everything sucks, no matter how hard you run against the wind to make life great. 
• It can make self-doubt the norm rather than a temporary lapse of confidence or a prompt for pause and reflection. 
• At its most acute, CD can spiral into self-loathing or self-pity, or gradually morph into a general state of anxiety or depression. 

Unexamined or misinterpreted as something entirely abnormal, dissatisfaction can become dangerous to emotional wellbeing. I’ve come to realise that CD is not in fact, abnormal. It’s commonplace.

Dissatisfaction manifests differently for everyone but the core feeling is a common experience. I got to know my CD intimately from very early because I wasn’t like other members of my small family. I felt dissatisfied with much of what they saw as unquestionably normal, which caused a lot of self-doubt. Since I was the odd one out, everyone, including me, assumed that I must have something wrong with me to think life as I found it should be queried. I saw so much in the world that made little sense emotionally or didn’t seem just, but nobody around me seemed to feel strongly about it so I assumed I must have faulty ideas.

Apparently, according to multiple family sources, I thought too much. I was called overly-sensitive. I was irritatingly, inconveniently hard to please. I was sulky. I just didn’t fit in. That was the feedback I got for wanting more than what I saw as the mindless, suburban drudge that seemingly lay inevitably ahead.

Once I grew out of my family box and joined the wider world it was abundantly clear that I wasn’t alone after all. Time revealed to me that I did fit in and many people thought as much or more than I did about life, the universe and questioning the status quo. My younger cousins as they grew up, were very much like me. I see now we were part of a generational shift in values, awareness, and expectations about life. We were becoming more connected to a wider world and we felt empowered to think critically and make a difference to the state of things than many of our parents or grandparents had.

Unfortunately, by the time it dawned on me that I was not an outsider in the world, I’d already grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who did life wrong. My brain ran a background program of CD with myself most of the time. ‘Not good enough’ was like a Velcro backdrop, on which hung a bunch of negative assumptions about myself. 

That sort of deep, old programming can take a bit of unpacking and dismantling as it seeps into all sorts of areas. It can often manifest as perfectionism.

In fact, CD and perfectionism have many of the same family traits – the good ones, like striving to excel and the bad ones, like being painfully hard on yourself. It’s a scary opponent to deal with when it bluffs you into fear or anxiety like an internal stand-over guy. However, you can make CD an ally in your life and benefit enormously from its energy, when you know how. In fact, it can be rocket fuel for achievement when you know how to handle it, without blowing yourself up.

The first thing to do, if you suffer with CD, is to put it into perspective by understanding that you are so normal to feel it. There is a rich and varied history of CD throughout the ages, and across cultures. In fact, CD is part of the human condition that’s gone by many names over the centuries.

Let’s break it down a little.

K.D. Lang called it ‘constant craving that’s always been.’ In its variously nuanced manifestations CD has been called ‘Ennui’ – a restless, uncomfortable kind of boredom; or it might be called ‘Existential Angst’ when CD is experienced as flat musing over life, death and a fear that the whole shebang might be meaningless.

Then, I’ve read about Weltschmerz – a German term, said to describe times when CD is focused on the state of the world and characterised by a sense of powerlessness and world-weariness – perhaps the way many of us feel about world politics and some leaders.

When it hangs around for a long time, flat and bereft of much energy, CD can sit dangerously close to the edge of depression and like depression; it may carry a good measure of anger at its core.

Call it by any name, here’s the thing I’ve learned:

Fighting CD is a waste of energy.

You must run with it. Turn it into a personal battery for insight into yourself and for fueling your growth – a battery that’s probably never going to run completely dry!

Add to your CD the power of your frustration, even anger, about it in ways that don’t hurt you or anybody else, and your growth can be turbo charged.

It’s possible and in fact, it’s vital, that we turn CD around from imprisoning misery into a force for motivation, direction and insight. Dissatisfaction can become a voice that unearths and empowers your passions and desires – instead of keeping you lost, empty, howling for the moon, but it takes a little understanding and self-awareness.

Before we look more deeply in coming posts at resolving dissatisfaction into a tool for your evolution, it’s important to define what success would look like to you. It’s difficult to get to a better place if we haven’t defined where that is.

Would it be called satisfaction?

Satisfaction can come across as a kind of lukewarm word, unlike passion, excitement, or excellence.

Do we tend to see satisfaction as an insipid state we don’t care for much, as a culture?

Could an unappealing cultural definition of satisfaction, on top of all our personal stuff, helps to keep us stuck in bouts of CD?

I suspect that increasingly unrealistic cultural values around wealth, looks, sexiness, fame and the other common extrinsic goals that apparently constitute success, have paved a multi-lane, highway straight to Dissatisfaction City. Wherever you’re travelling from, it’s hard to miss the turnoff to that all-pervasive town. No wonder its population is ever increasing as more global citizens are awestruck from afar by the riches their brothers and sisters in other towns take for granted.

In cultures largely motivated by striving and craving to be rich, famous, be seen, be beautiful, have the most, win and be a ‘success’, is it just too uncool to say that you’re satisfied with your life?

Is that one of the reasons so many of us suffer from bouts of CD – because satisfaction is culturally regarded as a lazy, complacent, cop-out?

Do You Need To Be Dissatisfied to be Motivated?

1. Do you need to be dissatisfied in life to be driven to succeed? 
2. Is satisfaction a lame, insipid word to you that means giving up, and just settling for mediocre when we should be going for bigger, faster, better, stronger, harder? 
3. In fact, does satisfaction even exist, or do we always want for more? 
4. And, are these key reasons so many of us suffer from bouts of Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) – because satisfaction is equated with stopping half way up the mountain, lazy, complacent, a cop-out?

Let’s get truthful – if you achieved all your dreams today would you even want to declare to the world

“I am satisfied!”

Or would that seem like a declaration of giving up on getting something better, something more.

Choreographer Martha Graham suggested that for artists at least, satisfaction isn’t even ‘a thing’. She asserted that artists need to feel dissatisfied to be driven to create:

"There is no satisfaction. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction. A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

Also, putting it rather strongly, playwright George Bernard Shaw famously wrote:

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

Wow, right? You can’t get a better reason for staying steadfastly dissatisfied than to see satisfaction as emotional death! Of course, Shaw’s talking about the emotional and creative side of life. He’s suggesting it’s not a rewarding artistic life if you tell the Muse “Piss off, I’ve done enough!” Art would cease, although life would go on, but it would be a pale life without any art.

I question however, how much we must suffer to be artistically blissful and in flow. I’m proof that I am a happier person, and a better artist, when I relinquish artistic ‘suffering’. Dissatisfaction lurks in the background during every artistic endeavour and in every editing process. However, it’s no longer the underpinning emotional state of my world. Now it’s more often a cause for consideration and a tool of reflection. I use it as a guide to where I am. I don’t let dissatisfaction hold too much power over my mood. When I do, I find that my productivity and flow suffer.

To enjoy expanding our experiences, to try new things and overcome anxieties, we must put perfectionism and dissatisfaction aside. It’s natural to feel dissatisfied with your efforts at times. It’s particularly tough at first, but we don’t improve unless we push on through, at least for a while. We must see how we progress and whether we find some flow or not. It takes time to see if you’re developing any ability and enjoyment in a field.

Ira Glass wrote that when we begin a creative pursuit we have a dream vision and high taste for it. We follow our creative bent, but because we’re a beginner our efforts generally aren’t amazing. That means it’s very easy to decide you’re no good and stop out of dissatisfaction, before you get going. This is the dark potential of dissatisfaction – it can paralyse you and steal your joy, creative vision, energy, and excitement.

Glass noted that a beginner’s skills usually cannot match their good taste for the thing they love. It is through developing a body of work that our abilities catch up to our vision and taste. From this perspective, periods of dissatisfaction are normal stages of personal and professional development. We must tolerate dissatisfaction rather than be smashed by it. Otherwise, we will give up too soon.

It seems that one problem with satisfaction lays in the fact that satisfaction has two distinct flavours of meaning. Like most things, what matters is what it means to you.

Definitions of satisfaction include 

‘A state of being pleased, well-pleased, proud, happy and content’. Great. However , there’s the shadow-side – satisfaction can also mean – ‘a state of being smug, pleased with oneself, complacent, settling for’.

Hmm…sounds undesirable…

Clearly in some contexts satisfaction is perceived as downright dull, too pleased with itself and even lazy. It’s associated with settling for mediocrity. It’s sometimes seen as being too lazy or scared to strive on.

Is the word ‘satisfaction’ just too insipid, lukewarm, and anti-passionate to be desirable to you?

I’m not so sure it’s shameful or mediocre to say ‘I’m satisfied and I’m proud to be satisfied’ but I know many success-driven individuals disagree vehemently with that. Dissatisfaction is frequently couched as bleakly romantic, full of desire, reaching and…suffering nobly for more, more, more. The idea of ‘no gain without pain’ essentially means that insatiable desire for more must be accompanied or even driven by unrelenting suffering.

Do not doubt it – CD can be a motivating force. Notably, dissatisfaction can mean we always have something to do. We are not meaningless because dissatisfaction delivers us from the fear of being purposeless – gives us an all-consuming, never-ending battle to fight – a reason to strive, fight on, a reason to be. CD can give you something to live for. So long as the misery and frustration of CD motivates you, rather than paralysing you in misery, it can be useful.

But would it not be more powerful, more motivating, and ultimately peaceful, to start from a base of freedom and acceptance of ourselves? To start from full ownership of our strengths and gifts then reach for more, motivated to work, to do better, to grow for the joy of our own experience and from the expression of our souls, rather than to fill an aching unfillable hole?

Can you note CD and harness it to other more powerful, pleasurable forces, to propel you forward in ways that aren’t all about romancing stress and suffering? 

Ultimately, the question is – Can dissatisfaction, passionate motivation and peace in your soul authentically coexist?

I know they can because I live with them every day. We can face CD head-on, listen to its messages, gain insight into ourselves and our choices and enrol its help and energy for growth, instead of becoming bitter in cycles of perfectionism, low self-esteem, and exhaustion. I’ve never seen anyone truly thrive in the long-term by only focussing on how unsatisfactory their world is, how faulty or no-good they think they are, or how little they have. Always, the growth, the joy, the passion come out of finding what you love, what matters most, and focussing on the pull of the vision, of your desires.

What if rather than satisfaction, our goal was passionate acceptance of ourselves and of life – a paradoxical state where passionate action, inspiration and peak experiences culminate in deep contentment and internal quiet?

Ultimately, contentment and peace won’t come from focussing on the pain of dissatisfaction, self-judgment, or anger at what you don’t have. Those emotions may be an impetus for forward movement – that’s a great and powerful use of feelings – but they are not life-sustaining emotions. Anger and dissatisfaction will never be at the culmination of our self-awareness because they generate resentment, and resentment is a sticking place. Finding deep pleasure, self-acceptance, connection, and flow are more powerful motivators than obsessive dissatisfaction can ever be.

So, motivating force, warning mechanism and/or vicious inner critical voice – dissatisfaction can rise up in many guises and for many reasons. How do you know when your satisfaction is serving you and when it’s nothing but paralysing self-doubt and fear?

Getting to know your own personal brand of dissatisfaction, being able to interpret its messages is a self-awareness skill. Sometimes CD has an important message for you, telling you you’re off track and out of alignment with your desires. At other times, when you’re being so hard on yourself you’re getting paralysed by fear, CD is talking out of place, telling you the same old tired, self-defeating stories that serve nothing. It takes self-awareness, mindfulness, and practice to know the difference.

It’s a life skill to get to know and accept CD as an uncomfortable companion, because even for the most Zen amongst us, it’s a part of ourselves we’ll face and need to deal with sometime. You don’t have to like your CD, but you may as well accept it exists and get on with being a human.

Knowing the reasons behind your CD is not always straight forward, it can be quite elusive and can shape-shift with different circumstances. If you can feel into what your CD might be trying to tell you, you have great information to help you turn it around to work for you, instead of against you.

Why Am I Chronically Dissatisfied?

Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) is that feeling of yearning, wishing for something more but not even knowing what it is…CD can be an ever-present hum in the background of your life or it can show up sporadically. It can even evolve with you and show up in different guises throughout life. Through reflecting on CD when it visits you, you can let go of it more easily as a problem and accept it as part of the human condition. CD also often carries lessons within it and understood,  it can be more friend than foe.

There are some self-supportive reasons, and some self-defeating reasons why we find ourselves in the grip of chronic dissatisfaction. Let’s explore some of the common ‘whys’ of chronic dissatisfaction so you can hold them in mind, and try them on for fit, next time you find yourself in restless, undefined yearning. Maybe one of these reasons will help cast a light on how to turn your CD around into a force for creativity and acceptance rather than paralysis and frustration.

Living life by someone else’s values, beliefs or goals

This is a classic recipe for recurring dissatisfaction. Despite your achievements you feel dissatisfied. Other’s ideas of success are not necessarily the achievements you most value and desire in your heart. We may grow up unwittingly living according to our parents’ goals for us. That can lead to ongoing dissatisfaction over time, if our values and desires differ from theirs.

Angela, an old school friend, went into marketing for a decade rather than studying her passion, science, because her father was in sales and offered her a great opportunity to earn money within his company. Angela didn’t love the work but she was good at it and she liked the lifestyle the money could buy her. In her thirties when her Dad’s company went through a merger and he retired, Angela found herself deeply dissatisfied in her job. It was a job to her, not a vocation or a meaningful purpose. It had served her well financially, but emotionally, it had largely been in the service of pleasing her dad and feeling more loved by him by doing what he valued.

You can’t be fully happy living according to someone else’s values and desires if it means not applying your strengths and gifts to the things that light you up and enrich your life. When you live to fulfil an image of what a parent, partner, or someone else wants you to be, usually unconsciously, you ultimately serve nobody. You help no one by not expressing your authentic talents and loves freely. You’re not at your best if you’re not accessing and exercising your inherent strengths and passions. In this case, your dissatisfaction may be showing itself as a guide who is trying to tell you that you’re not in the right place, or you’re in a cage, not hearing your soul’s desires.

Happiness Feels Uncool

I know, dumb in retrospect. When I was an actor, a lost but know-it-all twenty-something, I got it into my head that it was chic, serious, cool, and romantic to struggle. Like I was a real artist if I had to half-starve and go without coffee for a week. I didn’t make that idea up. There is an enduring iconic starving artist motif that’s been around for centuries. It was appealing to me as a young actor, to embrace the motif of struggle. The artist, tortured by meaninglessness, against all odds, fiercely talented, not seeking reward, only expression of the art, rises victorious to thunderous applause. There’s a whole underdog, heroic rags-to-riches narrative to tap into as an actor. So, I hung around in an extended teenager-hood for a few years too long, where sadness, poverty and questioning the status quo were just the way to be. A brooding approach to everything was my choice then, a state of constant nagging dissatisfaction, rather than the unguarded joy that I thought was just too uncool?!

Do You Often Feel Like a Victim?

Blaming everyone for all that you think isn’t right with your world will keep you trapped in CD. When you blame somebody else for your life, you’ve created a belief system that disempowers you to change it. There is nothing you can do to improve your own world if you have no responsibility for it. It’s out of your hands. You’re an innocent victim, a bystander to your own life. Paralysing blame and anger are convenient ways to justify delaying doing what it takes to improve your situation.

Of course outside factors exert an influence on our experiences. Things happen to us that are not our choice and not our fault. That’s a given. However, more powerful than any outside influence is our perspective of our own life and self. More important than anything that happens to us is what we choose to do with our experiences. There is always some choice you can make that will improve things for yourself. It’s rarely the best choice to keep floundering in paralysis and blaming powers outside your control.

At times, there may be truth in the idea that others are impeding your progress, goals or desires. Even so, does focusing on what they’ve done and the trouble they’ve caused serve you? I blamed not having a father for my looking for love in all the wrong places as a teenager. I blamed my father for my struggles with creating a loving relationship with a man later in life. My father’s choices did have a huge detrimental impact on my life and development. However, they also provided me with hard-won insights and gifts. When I was able to release my image of myself as a flawed victim, I flourished. Ifound what I’d long been seeking – self-compassion and great, loving relationships. As Brene Brown wrote, I understand now that

We mature through damage, not just through the years. 

 

At some point in all of our lives, completely unfair or plain challenging stuff happens. Your strength of character, wisdom, courage, and indeed your ultimate successes are measured not by the unfair things that happen to you. Your character shows through in how you coped with your experiences. Being the hero of your own life involves welcoming periods of dissatisfaction as a part of our growth. Sometimes CD is our friend, drawing us forward to strive harder for what we desire, and other times it’s a menace that needs understanding and managing into abeyance.

Understanding Your Chronic Dissatisfaction

Chronic Dissatisfaction (CD) is that restless feeling of yearning, wishing for something more but not even knowing what it is…CD can be an ever-present hum in the background of your life or it can show up sporadically. Through reflecting on CD when it visits you, you can let go of it more easily as a problem and accept it as part of the human condition. CD also often carries lessons within it and, I’ve realised, it can be more friend than foe.

You can’t always identify the ‘why’ of CD, which is what makes it so challenging and so common, but you can harness the power of it, rather than live in fear of it. And like it or hate it, you might as well learn to live with episodes of amorphous dissatisfaction because for most of us, it’s unavoidable at some points in life.

Let’s define some common reasons why we find ourselves in the grip of chronic dissatisfaction to increase our understanding of how to deal with it:

You think you should be constantly happy

 If you set a belief that you should be happy all the time, you are regularly going to suffer dissatisfaction. Constant, unrelenting happiness is not realistic and not even appropriate.

Instead, set a goal for greater emotional freedom — meaning the freedom to let yourself feel according to the circumstances of the present moment. Aim for the freedom and mindfulness to be able to respond well, rather than being stuck in an ongoing background state of dissatisfaction, anxiety, depression or anger. Feelings — including happiness, sadness and dissatisfaction are meant to come and go according to what’s happening to us.

You apply unrealistic standards to yourself

 If you’ve set up ‘never-good-enough’ criteria for judging your performance, or set goals that aren’t based on personally realistic standards, you’ve set up a recipe for recurring CD.

We may have learned the belief somewhere that unrealistic standards, constant dissatisfaction and harshness are the only paths to achieving success. Fortunately, we can reprogram such beliefs of the past to be more encouraging, although it can take some time and understanding to change our mindset and corresponding behaviour.

Dissatisfaction is your only form of motivation

 The cost of being endlessly driven by dissatisfaction is being relentlessly smashed by its negative cascades of feeling and thoughts. which to me, outweighs the motivational benefits.

Would you not gain more overall from being pulled forward by love, desire and joy rather than pushing and grinding and forcing a ‘not enough’ attitude uphill everyday?

Focus on what you love and what you’re great at, and let that draw you forward.

You’ve Got Comparisonitis

 We typically compare ourselves to others in all sorts of ways, but it’s not something to allow to run unchecked. Comparison as a way of life is a path to ensuring you will always be dissatisfied with some aspect of yourself, your world or your abilities. It’s a mark of maturity to stop comparing ourselves and to realise that comparing people is a bit like comparing oranges and apples…or peaches…

Performer Dita von Teese is quoted as saying

"You might be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches."

You’re angry

Sometimes dissatisfaction is just a manifestation of being really angry, like you’re carrying raw and glowing embers of rage under your surface. Something might need forgiving somewhere, something feels unfair or outrageous and you’re mentally pacing your insides, looking for change.

It can be quite reasonable to feel that way sometimes. In fact, there’s plenty going on the world to be angry and dissatisfied about.

The best thing to do with anger is to recognise it and look for the positive ways to express it as useful action, a fire that burns to make a difference in things you care about, not to harm them. Anger is powerful life-force, bubbling up and saying fight for something better!

Reflect on the useful places to direct your anger. Never let your anger destroy. Let it drive, let it create, let it direct better outcomes and better ways in the world through finding better ways in you.

Dissatisfaction gets you feeling loved

This is a HUGE reason for CD and it’s usually completely unconscious. For some of us, the way to get the attention of carers as a child was to be DISSATISFIED.

The rest of the time, when we were happy, we were largely left to our own devices. Thus, we learned that the way to get attention was to be sad, cry out in dissatisfaction.

Is this striking a chord in you? Do you regularly find yourself wanting to grizzle, complain, fault find, especially around your intimate others? Could it be that finding something to be dissatisfied with is a way to get their full and complete attention?

If you’re answering “Yes, Yes, YES!” you’ve probably just uncovered a bit of self-knowledge. That gives you the power to change, from needy and dissatisfied to more content. Ask for what you need rather than living in dissatisfaction.

Owning your reality, naming your feelings and getting some insight into why they recur are powerful first steps to getting free of the painful or debilitating manifestations of CD. So, the goal is not to rid yourself of difficult feelings. The goal to be more self-aware, note the feelings, but choose your behaviour.

 

Love is The Cure for Dissatisfaction

I don’t mean love of another person, but love of your own life. 

But how do we get there from feeling lost and unhappy with the way things are?

Through studying yoga, I learned how normal I was to regularly feel dissatisfied in life, in that amorphous, recurring way that I’d come to call CD. In yoga I discovered sophisticated philosophies and rich texts going back centuries, which specifically addressed CD and its corollaries, if by other names. Yoga offered paths to deal with suffering in physical terms, emotional ways, and transcendent terms.

I learned of the concept of Dukkha, which in broadest terms means suffering of all kinds, from emotional dissatisfaction to physical pain, death and all life’s hardships. There is great benefit in recognising the ever-present nature of all kinds of suffering as normal and from that basis, cultivating wisdom and practices to cope with suffering.

Dukkha is neither a thing to be loved nor hated, but a reality to be acknowledged and mindfully accepted as a part of life. That’s a very liberating attitude to suffering, rather than seeing it as paralysing and terrifying. It’s taught that all living creatures must in some way experience and deal with suffering and dissatisfaction – it’s inescapable because we are mortal. We must face challenges, age, and eventually die, as matters of fact. 

Therefore, there is little point wasting our energy trying to run from the great ‘inevitables’ of life and death. Better that we get our heads around our reality with all its good and lousy parts. Better to live fully in the precious time we have, with our eyes wide open, than half-asleep.

When you accept suffering and dissatisfaction as realities of life you are better prepared to face inevitable challenges. That acknowledgement and acceptance of CD is the first part of transforming it into your ally. That perspective takes a great deal of the power out of CD when it starts to rise in you. The second part is enlisting your energies fully in a greater purpose and force within yourself. The force is love.

There is no greater neutraliser for the dissatisfactions of being alive than love. There’s no greater place to find meaning in the randomness of everything, than love. I’m not talking about love in a teddies and hearts, cheesy kind of way. I’m talking about love as a magnetic motivator pulling you forward.  It has such massive power you can throw the weight of your body and soul onto it. You trust it because you know it’s what really matters. Love so strong in all areas of your life that your soul knows it’s invincible. Love that ensures we are utterly kind and compassionate in the values behind all our striving. I’m talking about identifying 360 degrees of love that will pull you forward with powerful energy.

There are three areas of love to focus on in creating a feeling of wholeness and integration in your world. Once identified – these three great loves of your life form a powerful and ever-evolving compass. They will keep you on track and CD in its place. There is no more powerful way to manage CD than to find a sense of deep integration within yourself. Integration comes when your values and desires – your loves – are guiding you. Love transforms dissatisfaction from paralysis to the ultimate motivational rocket fuel. We fall in love with many people and things, but ultimately, there are three great loves of our lives:

• Self-compassion, meaning being self-aware, kind and non-violent to yourself in your words and action, including becoming mindful of self-defeating patterns of thoughts, so you can choose a different focus when they visit you;

• Mindful relationships – nurturing meaningful connections with other beings (animal, mineral, vegetable or spiritual); 

• And Flow, also called Peak Experiences, which means discovering and giving yourself to pursuits or work that you love, in which time dissolves and you merge with the object of your attention.

 

Recognising your three loves, knowing exactly what they are for you, and where you find them, is a key to greater happiness. It’s also the greatest antidote to CD. 

Why wouldn’t it be? 

1. We want to spend more time doing what we love; 
2. being with the beings we love; 
3. feeling good about ourselves. 

So why not prioritise those desires and let the three core loves guide our direction in life? 

Guide us in everything?

In short, these three are the compass to guide you in your internal world. Using them as your guide will organically be reflected in more soul-centred, self-supportive choices. 

The three great loves of our lives – self-compassion, mindful relationships, and flow – are universal – meaning they exist across all the variations of us as unique individuals. Although they are consistent, they take different forms and measures in each of us. Living from them is a map to joy, fulfillment, sense of purpose and grounding in the world.

 

Being motivated by the three loves means knowing yourself better, activating your deepest strengths and eliminating a lot of confusion and stress about your life’s path.  

Living from the three loves means knowing that you’re on track because you’re generally living a life of passionate engagement, and dissatisfaction becomes a sometime assistant, rather than a constant foe.

Debra Campbell