Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. What I've learned over the last 30 years of working with people as a clinical psychologist is that we're really hard on ourselves.

When we mess up, when we make mistakes, when we fail, we are almost always our harshest critic. We critique ourselves, we criticize ourselves, we blame ourselves,

we look on the failure as something that's truly who we are, we are a failure, and we can go this route for days, weeks, months, years.

It's amazing how hard we can be in ourselves.

I have often found this to be the need-jerk response to people when something goes wrong, that they cause.

They failed, they didn't get into college they wanted to.

Their marriage collapsed, their careers collapsed, they got sick, whatever it may be.

When we fail, we have a tendency to really blame ourselves.

And after a while, this self-blink can be so intense that what we do instead is we numb

ourselves to that blame. We turn towards addictions, things that turn off that pain, even though that pain doesn't go away when we do that.

But we turn towards those pain addictions, like alcohol, drugs, sex, work,

whatever it may be, not to look at that failure, not to look at that failure not to look at that shame because it can be so

overwhelming but the day in this podcast I want to suggest an alternate choice that we can do when we face with failure

because we are going to fail at things. Things aren't going to go the way we want,

things aren't going to go the way we wish they would. But do we need to

see that as failure, perhaps, just perhaps, we can in this podcast look at it in a much more different way a much more healthier way because

the path of shame blame is a path of suffering and we're listening to this podcast to avoid to not take the path of suffering.

And the way we're going to do that is when we fail, what we're going to do is not see that as a failure anymore.

Instead, we're going to see that as a lesson, a life lesson that we can learn from.

A classic one that up to now 50% of the population is going to suffer and even

if it doesn't happen in a marriage it probably will happen in some relationship that

we're in. Is that a relationship or marriage that we are in is going to

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