“Sometimes cherophobia can stem from the belief that if something very good happens to a person, or if their life is going well, that a bad event is destined to happen. As a result, they may fear activities related to happiness because they believe they can ward off something bad from happening.” - Healthline.com
Have you ever felt like you have been gifted, have earned a reward, suddenly and unexpectedly, like a windfall when something wonderful happens and it feels like you do really deserve it? I do not know about all of you, but I often fear having something really good happen because, deep in the recesses of my memory are places of hurt and once in a when my Evil Inner Witch/Ego/limbic system/Lizard Brain has a break-through – and not a good one, and I feel fear creep in before I can squash it. ‘cherophobia”, who’d have thought there was a label for even that? Just another type of anxiety and that there is even a Goddess to call on for such things!
Do I need a label for this? Do any of us? Actually, yes, because it will drive us to know ourselves better and there is a word for what that gut-wrench feeling that comes when good things come to us. Why does it make any sense to have such a thing happen? Actually, it truly does.
In life, we have had the sky fall, the shoe drop, many times and some of those times have changed us. There, absolutely, can be a fear of happiness. When we know we have it, understand the WHY of it, it is easier to stomp down when it shows up.
I have always been a Type A person; work, work, do, do, go, go… and I think I have a handle on my perfectionism and then…boom! There it is, again, and sometimes in the form of “cherophobia”. I think that that fear is so engrained that we overlook the times when something yucky did NOT happen after a jolt of happiness. Traumatic events seem to embed differently and deeply in our memory. What might be traumatic to me, can be totally different than what you define as traumatic. It seems to be a little black box (ever the little black box that Pandora had) that we tuck those events in, stuff them down hard, and think we have control over them, but, no, one little jolt of Joy and it seeps out through the cracks. That FEAR of good things keeps us blocked from good things, sure enough. We forge to be spontaneous. We might even forget to say “thank you” because there is a gripping fist in our belly. The connection between fear and happiness is faulty, if we fear happiness. We are keeping us from the Joy of every present moment. We are always looking forward and that ‘forward’ is really THE PAST that ha no place in our Present.
I procrastinate, as soon as I know I should start listing the times good things happened to me, that was NOT followed by something not happy. Again, fear of abandonment and rejection/ ah, the ever “Primal Wound” in me. For goodness sakes, I am 74 years old, I ought to have gotten over it…and yet... I have not. You would think that , with all the wonderful things that have happened to me, that I would be rational and not have fear connected to happiness. It certainly has not always been a fact that not good things followed something happy. I have had to sit myself down and have a good talk to myself, yet again.
I have never been a miserable, sad, person, for longer than the time it took me to get some sense to incidents. I am getting better at getting ‘hold’ of myself. And, I praise myself, in my quietude, when I realize I have done so. I need to be more compassionate with myself. The Child in me is still that rejected child, the 'pleaser' child, the smile-through-your-tears young adult. Just when you think you have gotten to the root of something, acknowledged it and let it be a gift and just let it go, again, the niggling fear finds a way through the clutter. Being compassionate with self, as you would any other person, is paramount to Self-esteem.
Somehow, we have bought into the idea that we should be happy all the time, that we should feel joyous, if we were a good person doing good things for others. And, that is not so. We bought into a fictitious ideology. Life is an ocean full of ebbs and flows. Life is a forest where the trees bend and sometimes fall. Life is the adult and we are the child. Sometimes we need to give ourselves a good talking too. I am enough for myself! I matter to myself! Happiness is an ever-changing state. Adversity is what teaches us to know happiness. Every emotion we have is a gift. We are either gliding along or we are fighting the weather, but it never lasts, any of it. It was never meant to. And, sometimes we need to lean on someone else, something else, for a time. We all have some kind of faith in something. I choose to borrow the aide of my belief in the personifications of the Goddesses.
Authentic does not mean absolute Joy all the time, ever happy, ever positive. Authentic Life is one with all the gift of emotions we were created to have.
Euphrosyne is the Greek Goddess of Joy, of Happiness and Good Cheer. She was created to fill the world with pleasant moments (– note, ‘moments’, in time.
©Carol Desjarlais 9.7.21
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