that's a very good question. after i had been abused the first time, i felt confused and dizzy...like the world would never stop spinning. i became depressed...not knowing why i continued to live...

as the abuse continued, everything was drained from me. nothing made me happy. nothing made me smile. then, i found someone. more like he found me.

he made me feel like he brought everything i had lost back...he had found it all and was returning these things to me: a reason to live, a smile, hope, feeling of peace...but he took it all from me. he ended up forcing himself...

now i'm back where i was before. lost...there is happiness out there. we just need to be strong enough to go out there and search for it...to find what was taken from us...

i'm here if you ever need to talk about anything...

That's pretty sad. Hopefully one day you'll see there IS happiness, but you have to find it yourself. I see life as pretty shitty quite a lot, but I also manage to see the good and find the joy when I can. Otherwise I'd walk around with a fork in my eye all the damn time. I wish you well.

I think esoteric is right, push your head up. And I don't care how many bad experiences you have, you have to pull yourself back up. Some day there will be someone to totally respect you. Possible trigger?(No one can hurt you worse than what you allow yourself to feel.) You can change your outlook, and it will change your heart and mind. It will heal you. I've seen the worst in the worst in people. But that is there problem now. I just don't talk to anyone I don't like, now.

excellent question. you are so right. but for me I have to seek out ways to make myself happy. we definately have to work a lot harder at than the non abused. it unfair and sucks but i think we owe it to ourselves.

I was really down when I wrote this but I wonder, what is happiness anyway? How will you know you've found it when you have? How do you define it? Maybe just having a definition would make it seem more tangible.

I remember, before I began my journey in recovery, I used to ask my husband, "Are we happy?" He used to say, "I'm happy, I don't know about you." I figured because he was happy I must be happy. I really didn't have a clue what it meant.

To this day, I can still remember with complete clarity the first time I felt happiness. It was an extraordinary moment, I wasn't on drugs, I wasn't drunk, no extraordinary thing had happened. I was just happy for no reason at all, i'm sorry except for being alive. When I asked someone what the feeling was, they told me it was happy. Happiness is that little natural high that makes you feel like everything is okay. I was two years into recovery from sexual abuse.

Today I feel that way a lot. I love the world I live in and believe that there is a lot of goodness in this world.

There really is no pat answer because we all have our own happiness. A tangible one for me....a box of junior mints....holy hell it gets no better than that. When one of my daughters acts like a total idiot just to make me laugh....bliss. Watching a movie that has me laugh the ENTIRE time. A stranger smiling at me in the mall. Sometimes when you DON'T look for it but keep yourself OPEN...it comes to you...and it could be any silly stupid little thing. So don't look, don't wait, don't stress about it. Buy your favorite food and eat it really really slow...that's a start.

IMHO, everyone's idea of happiness is different. To me, it's standing in a forest and listening to the sound of the wind blowing through the trees. It's kayaking on the ocean and seeing dolphins off the bow. It's watching my nieces and newphews play and laugh with the innocents that childhood should be. It's seeing soldiers at the airport, arriving safely home to their families, after serving in a war. It's watching birds fly. It's smiling at a stranger instead of looking at the ground. It's a million little things that I have to look for every day or else I'll miss them.

Happiness is an idea, a state of mind. It's up to you to define it and seek it out.