Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Sometimes it can happen very early in our lives and other times it happens later. But sooner or later,

we're going to suffer. We're going to have things that happen to us that cause us pain.

But I think these moments are incredibly critical because they're a turning point.

They're a turning point between pain and ongoing suffering, and the other would be healing

and getting better and finding joy in our lives again.

It is a turning point because at these points we get to make a choice.

It's a choice between, do I want to heal this or do I want to numb it.

And because in our world it's so easy to numb things,

it's an easy choice, but often with devastating consequences.

Because nowadays in our world,

it is so easy to numb ourselves from the pains of life. There are so many different things that we can turn to in order to take away our pain.

Life sometimes can be so painful. We reach a point that we want to give up. We just want the pain to go away.

And so we may turn to things to say pain, stop. I just can't take this anymore.

Stop hurting me. And we find things to numb that pain.

And often initially that numbing is very relieving and really has not too many

consequences to it yet. But then with time we keep going back to it. And with

time that numbing becomes an addiction because that moment in life that began as pain, now because of the numbing, it causes our whole life to be painful.

And we don't stop the numbing because if we do, then the pain seems overwhelming.

That which we initially turn to, to numb our pain, we need more of because the pain when we numbed it didn't go away and

now there is so much more pain and so we need more to numb it.

And the people who numb, they are bad people,

people that we need to look down on with disdain.

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