Happy. We all want to be happy, but how many of us truly are?

Maybe we’re setting the wrong goals. Maybe we should appreciate happiness when we have it and acknowledge that it’s impossible to be happy 100% of the time.

Expecting to be happy all of the time is setting ourselves up for failure. Despite our best efforts and wishes, bad things happen. We’ve all experienced bad things in the past and will experience bad things in the future. Maybe we’re dealing with bad things right now.

If there’s such a big gulf between such expectations of happiness and our real (unhappy) emotional states, we could run into problems. Some people turn to using substances such as drugs and alcohol as ways to calm their troubled emotional states.

As you probably know, if people use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate their problems, they can do even more damage to their emotional states. Abusing drugs and alcohol can lead to depression or make depression worse, which could lead them to abuse even more alcohol and drugs.

Substance use disorder, then, can make emotional turmoil even more traumatic. Therapy that addresses substance use disorder and conditions such as depression is a good way to treat both conditions.

This therapy can help people explore why they aren’t happy and why they’re abusing substances. It can help them develop ways to create happiness. Therapy can help teach people to appreciate the happiness they already have in their lives. It can teach people to look at things with new perspectives.

While I’m not sure that there’s good in everything, I believe that we can find good in a lot of things, even bad experiences—especially bad experiences. Even though it’s a cliché, what doesn’t kill us does make us stronger. If we know we can handle bad stuff, we can find happiness in our strength. We know we’ll be strong enough to be happy again.