Occasional suffering and unhappiness are essential components of life.
Negative situations, struggles and feelings of unhappiness help us to appreciate the goodness of life and to truly know what real happiness is.
Without varying degrees of feelings and emotions life would become flat and bland. Soon the happiness we once knew would become boring and would not be enough for us. The people, situations and events that once brought us happiness and joy would soon not be enough to make us feel the same happiness and enjoyment we once felt.
Happiness and pleasure are what most people strive to achieve and they are very essential, healthy and necessary emotions to feel and have in our lives. However, varying degrees of emotions from sadness to anger are also necessary emotions to have during our lives.
If we didn’t feel any sadness, remorse or anger occasionally, nothing would ever change. There wouldn’t be any reason to change anything or learn from mistakes made if you felt good and happy about every experience, behavior and type of situation you encountered.
Having the ability to feel a wide array of emotions should be celebrated and is what separates us from other life forms and sociopaths. Sociopaths are people with a negative personality disorder which manifests itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behaviors and they lack a conscience which is necessary to function successfully with others and in life and society.
Some unhappiness is necessary for learning positive behavior. Punishment is a tool often used to teach positive behaviors in young children or for those who break the laws in society. The punishment produces negative feelings and unhappiness in the individuals that are punished thus causing them to discontinue the negative behavior and to learn good moral behavior.
Occasional suffering and pain can be good and useful for us, for example feeling the burn and pain one feels when accidentally placing a hand on a hot stove teaches us not to touch a hot stove again. Without feeling physical pain in life it would be difficult to stay safe from physical harm or injury
We all usually take our good health for granted until we become sick. If you become ill with a little flu bug one day, after the symptoms are over, you feel so much better and appreciate life a little bit more.
Feeling down with sadness or extreme depression makes the ups we have feel so much higher and the happy so much happier.
Also many times people talk about hitting rock bottom and being in the the pits of despair before they decide to change their behavior and improve their lives. It is then they go on to do many beneficial and positive things in their lives, such as finding a new career and helping others get off drugs or quit drinking. This shows us how suffering and unhappiness are beneficial and can help create positive life changing experiences.
These people are the kind of people who replace the word problem with challenge and the word suffering with opportunity. Such people agree that there really isn’t a way to make suffering enjoyable, but they try always to find a way to make suffering produce beneficial results.
Living with Bipolar Disorder 1 and many other mental illness disorders has made my life very difficult and caused me to struggle throughout my life surviving many very serious, difficult and near death experiences. I chose to live and survive with my illness and the severe symptoms of my illness.
The diagnosis of my illness changed my life and identity forever. However, I know that it has changed me and my life in many ways for the better. One way it helped me was by leading me to Jesus my Lord and Savior who saved my life and healed me so that I could live a good and productive and happy life now. I became saved and born again.
I know that surviving my struggles and experiences that I encountered has helped me to become a better, stronger, kinder and more compassionate individual and has allowed me to help many other people that have mental illness and other people as well.
I know there is a reason for everything and you wrote the novel of my life before I was even conceived. Thank you God for giving me the opportunities to serve you and be able to help other people in the manner that I can now. Because of my diagnosis and being a mental illness survivor, I can be an advocate and a voice for others living with mental illness. I love to be a voice for others and help them to know that they are not alone.
I also know that my illness has helped my children become better individuals and they are now living their lives for Jesus and are helping other people find, know and love Jesus too. I know this would not have happened if I did not become as ill as I did.
Thank you God for creating me and the life I have and most importantly for blessing me with my three beautiful children who are children of God and are leading others to God. They are great young people who positively impact other people’s lives through you and because of you leading people to Jesus one person at a time.
All the great things my children are doing now and will do in their future is related to the struggles and suffering I experienced and that they also had to experience, survive and live through due to my bipolar disorder illness.
I am a Bipolar Disorder survivor and a bipolar mom.
My three beautiful, wonderful and amazing children are survivors of a bipolar mom.
Romans 5:3-5
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
My Loud Whispers of Hope 