Stop believing in unhappiness!
A startling conversation about the Option Method with Wendy Dolber
I love doing dialogues with people.
It’s really my happy place, you know.
I mean, I guess everything is my happy place.
I feel like it’s a wonderful gift to be able to express what I know
and to help people disentangle and really see them change.
- Wendy Dolber
Late last year, I learned about the Option Method when I read the book Searchless Responsiveness by
. He described it as “existential therapy at its finest.”Intrigued, I looked it up online and discovered recordings of Bruce Di Marsico, the founder of Option, speaking to his trainees in the 1970s. One of the people in the room when those recordings were made was Wendy Dolber, who carries forward this unique perspective on the human condition into the present day as an author and practitioner of the Option Method.
I was immediately intrigued by the premise, captured in the title of di Marsico’s collected works, The Myth of Unhappiness, that the only reason anyone is unhappy is because they choose to be unhappy.
What?!
Who would choose to be unhappy and why would anyone propose that one could choose otherwise when calamity strikes?!
Earlier this year, in a series of dialogues with Wendy, I discovered many places in my own life where I thought,
“Sure, this situation makes me unhappy. But ANYONE would be unhappy in this circumstance, right?!”
Wendy might reply with a simple question like,
“What makes you say that?”
Then as I would look for reasons and Wendy kept making inquiries, we’d eventually arrive at a belief I had which, upon examination was just that: a belief, an idea that I was holding as some kind of universal “truth”, but which, upon simple interrogation, was shown to be anything but guaranteed to be true.
Most of the questions Wendy asks are very straightforward. Yet, as Bruce Di Marsico said in one of those recordings, the questions that the Option Method presents you with can be mind-blowing because you have never previously considered them.
When Wendy joined me on my podcast, we took up a hypothetical situation that would probably make most people unhappy.
Is it possible to be happy about a car accident?!
(Full conversation below)
Wendy is the author of The Guru Next Door, a fictional work that imagines the life of a girl who lives next to Bruce Di Marsico and grows up into adulthood, benefiting from Bruce’s unique perspective as she goes through different challenges that seem to be forced up on her by circumstances.
In our conversation, we talked about how a person’s beliefs about happiness and unhappiness are directly tied to their capacity to deal with difficult emotions, generate motivation, and realize their goals.
“We are perfectly free to love any feeling that we have.
Option is for people who want to change how they feel and how they think.
It’s never saying you should feel happy or you should feel differently.”
Option is creating a new way of thinking about emotions which is that things don’t just happen to us. We’re not just pawns in the game of life. We have a choice about how we feel and the way that we exercise that choice is about what we believe.
It’s a way of thinking about happiness and unhappiness. It’s not prescriptive - like we were saying, “you should feel this way, you should not feel this way…” But what it does is, it elevates your mind out of the trap of “I’ll be happy if this, I’ll be unhappy if that”
That’s a whole reality that we construct that keeps us coloring within the lines of life, you know. And if we want to color outside, and really have more joy, more happiness, more freedom, we have to start to shake up that way of thinking about things.
Are you unhappy about something? Or bored with it? Frustrated? Anxious?
Why?
You surely have a reason. But then - why is THAT a reason to be unhappy?
(…and why is THAT a reason to be unhappy. Keep going until you hit “the bottom”!)
If you think of a situation where you can’t imagine being happy - what if you COULD be happy in that situation . . . is there any reason why you wouldn’t want that?
These are some of the questions an Option Method practitioner might ask you. If you are willing to face the implications of these questions directly, it’s possible to shift your beliefs - which are at the core of how you process emotions - quite quickly.
Then again, as Wendy notes, many people resist a way of thinking that points to the possibility of much greater happiness in life through letting go of the habit of blaming circumstances and other people for unhappiness.
The Option Method points us towards taking responsibility for what we feel in a way most of us have never even considered doing before.
For this reason, Wendy underlines that the questioning of unhappiness must be conducted from a compassionate posture of loving kindness. “I believe in the essential goodness of people, aka the happiness of people,” she says.
And yet, from her point of view, if you are unhappy,
“There’s a way out if you want to look at things differently.”
Full conversation:
Connect with Wendy at https://www.wendydolber.com/
Learn more about the Option Method:
https://choosehappiness.net/
https://dialoguesinselfdiscovery.com
 | A guest post by
|