Addicted to Unhappiness: Free yourself from the moods and behaviors that undermine relationships, work, and the life you want

by Martha Heineman Pieper, William J Pieper

Drawing upon their years of counseling experience, the bestselling author team of Martha and William Pieper explain how parenting styles based on discipline and excessive expectations condition children to equate unhappiness with love. This often persists into adulthood, leading to behaviors including eating disorders, compulsive gambling, disastrous romantic choices, substance abuse, and more. This book supplies readers with powerful tools, including self-assessments, checklists, diaries, and exercises, to overcome their need for unhappiness.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Psychology, Personal Development, Mental Health

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 23, 2002

About the author

Smart Love Press has just published the second edition of Addicted to Unhappiness: How Hidden Motives for Unhappiness Keep You from Creating the Life You Truly Want, And What You Can Do. Carol Gilligan said, "To me, the thesis was riveting and instantly applicable. I see it all around me."
Smart Love Press published my second children's book, Jilly"s Terrible Temper Tantrums: And How She Outgrew Them in 2017. The first was the award-winning Mommy, Daddy, I Had a Bad Dream! which won thirteen awards including the IBPA Ben Franklin Award for best children's picture book of 2012. Jilly"s Terrible Temper Tantrums has won the Mom's Choice Gold Award, first place Storymonsters award, NAPPA Award, a Book Excellence Award and a Feathered Quill Award!
"“Five stars! I absolutely love this book from both a teaching perspective as well as helping parents use more effective discipline strategies." (M. Bartmess, Preschool Teacher)
"Very highly recommended" Midwest Book Review.
"This is a delightful book to guide our children through their
frustrations. We especially like the
message that Jilly’s parents will always love her, even in the midst of a temper
tantrum.” (NAPPA Director Elena Epstein).
"This book can work as an aid to talking to children about temper tantrums and helping build dialogue and communication to help work through the emotions that cause the melt downs in the first place." (Mrs. Mommy Booknerd).
Feathered Quill Judge: "I love the lesson taught here, and wish all parents would take this to heart. I wish you much luck on spreading the Loving Regulation and Smart Love Concept to everyone around the globe."
I am the co-author with William J. Pieper, M.D. of the bestselling parenting book: Smart Love: The Comprehensive Guide to Understanding, Regulating, and Enjoying Your Child (reprinted by Smart Love Press, 2011: www.smartlovepress.com). We also co-authored the popular adult self-help book, Addicted to Unhappiness (McGraw-Hill, 2004) and for ten years wrote a parenting column, “Smart Love,” in Chicago Parent. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and my BA from Radcliffe College. Smart Love is the basis for Smart Love Family Services (http://www.smartlovefamily.org) which provides a broad spectrum of services to children and families, including counseling services, parent education, toddler programs, and a preschool. In addition to my own psychotherapy practice, I am the consultant to both the Smart Love Clinic and the Natalie G. Heineman Smart Love Preschool/Toddler Explorations.

Reviews

[Jonathan Karmel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Someone recommended this book to me, so I was a little surprised that I got so little out of it. Perhaps I didn't find much value in it because I am not "addicted to unhappiness," so I could not relate to what the author was talking about.

This book seems to say that people whose life circumstances are good are only unhappy because they have some unconscious desire to make themselves unhappy. This unconscious desire is something that comes from a confusion between happiness and unhappiness that dates back to childhood. According to this book, a lot of people had unhappy feelings as a child that were the result of bad parenting. But since we believe that our parents love us and are perfect, we also strive to continue to have those unhappy feelings that we had as a child. As a result, as adults we sabotage our opportunities to be happy.

I think this is probably true, but this seems like such a simplistic and watered-down explanation of human psychology that it is not all that worthwhile. The book does provide a ton of examples, so there may be some value in the examples, if you think the authors correctly analyzed what was going on with their patients. But I think a better word for what the authors are talking about is a "neurotic complex" or the concept of "toxic shame" that is explained in books by Pia Mellody and John Bradshaw.

This book makes it sound like it's obvious what people need to do to be happy, and the only reason people are unhappy is that they are not choosing to do these things. But different people find happiness in different ways, and for many people, I don't think it's obvious at all what they should be doing.

I will say this though. There do seem to be a lot of people who appear to spend all of their waking hours complaining, without any obvious justification. It does seem like there are quite a few people who would be absolutely miserable if they had nothing to complain about. So I guess those are the type of people that this book is about.

[adllto · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors are claiming that we can be addicted to unhappiness in the sense that we need it in our lives. The idea is really not that crazy because in built into us is the pursuit of happiness. As a child unfortunately through inappropriate discipline for appropriately aged behaviour and values we associate our feelings of unhappiness with what makes our parents and authority figures happy. Children being mirrors or imitators simply take it in. Thus our happiness can be not only linked to appropriate things but also things that make us unhappy. In fact we hang on to painful things, memories and feelings, simply because they are familiar and give us supposed comfort.

This book is not any old self-help book but rooted in research and years of practical experiences. I found the book really quite helpful.

[Jane Lew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Builds on attachment theory. The harder work on figuring out your emotional makeup is better done wrangling other, more intense books (for me, Anthony Storr's Solitude and Jonathan Heidt's Happiness Hypothesis) to reach the kind of objectivity needed to do what this book suggests. Still, several sensible insights. It works after you don't need it so badly.

[Dan Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much appreciated what I learned from this book, and that I need to examine my life for areas where I am satisfied with being unhappy. I've come to live with things that are very wrong but I don't do anything to address them because I accept them as "normal."

Unfortunately, the solutions to solving these issues always involve intentional, focused hard work. There are no shortcuts. But realizing there is a problem is the first step, and always leads to some improvement. So that's the good news.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure I unreservedly buy into the central thesis, which is that when children aren't treated optimally they mistake the resulting negative feelings for happiness (because, to their minds, it's what their perfect parents intend for them to feel and must thus be an ideal state). According to this theory, adults then end up "addicted" to the unhappiness they felt as children and consistently act in ways that sabotage their true happiness to bring themselves back to a state of unhappiness (which, to their unconscious minds, equals happiness because it's the state they experienced as small children with their parents).

Anyway. It's an intriguing theory even if I felt like there was a certain degree of oversimplification (it is a layperson-directed self-help book, after all). It certainly does make sense in a way, and whether or not it's literally true (I don't see how such a subjective theory could be declared definitely "true" or "untrue" anyway), it seems like it could be a very helpful and productive way for people to look at stubborn behavior patterns and vague, chronic dissatisfaction with life. At the very least, I think it's a useful thought experiment.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never thought of any of this before. I do not believe this is completely true for all people. But, I do think it has relevance in most people's lives. If nothing else, it is very informative on what others think. I voluntarily read and reviewed this book in exchange for a free copy.

[Magali Pool · Rating 5 out of 5]

Al principio un poco amargo (como me gustan), me hizo reflexionar sobre mi conducta y la de los demás; es un gran apoyo para mi profesión

[An · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whilst there is merit to the idea that how are brains are programmed early in life in terms of what it means to experience happiness and how to receive the love of our care takers, the authors overly generalise this to be the response to and cause of all problems in life. I find this to be overly simplistic. The approaches to healing this issue limit themselves to gaining awareness and applying willpower based behavioural strategies a lot of the time, and while there is a time and a place for this, it does not account for the vast influence of what's going on in our subconscious or how past trauma and stuck emotions may still be held in our system, accounting for self sabotaging behaviour. It's disappointing to see that in this day and age mental health and wellbeing support still so often stays at the surface and misses the opportunity to create real change.

[Candidespeaks · Rating 5 out of 5]

So I am addicted to unhappiness

This book is for those who are thesis driven readers, who enjoy learning why we do the things we do i.e. respond aggressively, take criticism, self sabotage all acts of a person who probably unknowingly addicted to unhappiness constantly recreating negative events and experiences. This book encourages you to think with a beginners mind forcing you to investigate and question everything you thought was true about love life relationship etc because through reading addiction to unhappiness and a lot of what you perceived as a child was in many cases only part truths and a confused concept for genuine pleasure.

[Mona Haddad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very repetitive. The number of pages could have been cut in half. It's just a constant repetition of the same original problem over and over again and not enough steps and guided solutions. I am glad I opened the book because it lead me to question somethings in my life but overall wouldn't recommend it, you can just read a summary of it and it would be sufficient honestly.

[Mere · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the read. Life is about balance and understanding that things are rooted from how you developed, both internally and externally. However, the book became very repetitive. It was a good reminder to remain diligent in progression and that there is not always a right or wrong way of going about several aspects in life.

[Hannah Johns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this theme and overall explanation of how we are drawn to false happiness. It did get really repetitive, so I did not finish it completely.

[Jamie Bee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Interesting Premise Explored with Depth and Breadth

I enjoy nonfiction, and therefore, I read a lot of it. In these days where self-publishing is such a boon, allowing authors who would never have been published by a traditional house to sell their own books, too often nonfiction books are seemingly slapped together from a variety of web sources rather than coming from the author’s personal experience or expertise. So I was delighted to find this book to be one of greater depth and breadth than I typically see.

The premise of the book is that our unhappiness, which manifests in a variety of ways from depression to excess weight, stems from the way we were parented, and that we have accepted a certain reality based on this unconsciously. It is this invisible aspect that makes the cycle hard to break. The book is split into two parts, first exploring how this paradigm is set up and then looking at how you can break the pattern. I don't necessarily buy that this affects everyone, though it may to greater and lesser degrees. I really liked that this got me thinking about my own background. If you're tired of self-help books that don't seem to have much substance and you want to attempt to get to the core of any unhappiness that you may have, you may find this book to be of help.

I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

My book blog: https://www.readingfanaticreviews.com

[Blanche_in_Lakeview · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book so far. Has some really good advice not only for raising children, but also pertains to problems that adults have that may have manifested as a result of things that happened in their childhood. We all know parents are not perfect, but it is important to analyze our behaviors, examining the past closely so that we can better understand ourselves and our loved ones around us. With a better understanding of the role that discipline, love and parenting that our parents gave us, we can see our behaviors in a more objective way and try to better ourselves for future generations. The book is based on years of research. However, it is a relatively easy and fast read because of all of the examples that the authors use to illustrate their points. So far, it's a good and very informative read!

[Loops · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this was alright but I don’t think i will read this book more than once 🤷🏻‍♀️i just don’t agree with the whole book...there were parts I liked and excerpts i enjoyed and that I will put in my journal but that’s about it. The premise was not anywhere close to what I was thinking this book was headed towards. It just didn’t float my boat. 🚤

[Hernán López · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bastante interesante análisis y propuestas acerca del comportamiento humano. Una de tantas expliciaciones, uno de tantos porqués. Guía práctica que se puede llevar a la práctica en cualquier etapa de la vida.

[Becca P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blames my habitual problems on my childhood experiences. I like not accepting the blame.