Self-Therapy

A person's happiness is among the basic needs for their own survival. If a person is unhappy, they are less likely to further their lives in other areas, such as their education or personal relationships, that would also cause happiness to occur in the person's life. I believe that people create their own therapy, specially formulated to heal their wounds so that they may strive for happiness and self satisfaction. There are many forms of therapy people choose to make for themselves, but they fall under two main categories: the short-term and the long-term therapy.
Short-term therapies are more of a quick-fix for much larger problems. They include dealing with issues by way of alcohol, drug use, self-mutilation, or even prescribed medication. I thoroughly disagree with these practices as means of therapy because they are painfully unoriginal. They provide temporary relief for a person's problems by masking the problem instead of helping the person work through it. Far be it from me to judge people for what they do in their spare time, but it says a lot about a person when they prefer to reject their problems in temporary euphoria only to face it tenfold when the blissful state wears off. These therapies also cause a certain dependency on whatever therapy they may choose to practice in this group. The key to happiness is self sufficiency, so although they may feel temporary relief, they have to work much harder to rely on themselves alone to solve their problems.
Long-term therapy proves much more creative and can actually eliminate the problems people must face to achieve happiness without numbing them to the world. These therapies range from traditional psychoanalysis to doing laundry, and they are acted on by the person actually wanting to fix their troubles. I am partial to these long-term therapies because they force someone to self examine and pinpoint what they have to overcome. The people who choose to use long-term therapies cannot cloud their problems with an unnatural state. They cannot push aside their issues only to frightfully face them later because they are always facing them and constantly reasoning with why their situation upsets them. Slowly but surely, they know exactly why they feel the way they do, reducing the power their everyday stresses hold over them. These long-term therapies eliminate the need for short-term therapies, allowing the individual to move past their problems so they can focus on attaining their own happiness. Whether a person uses short-term or long-term therapy, the goal to acquire happiness remains the same. I truly believe a person's own self-produced therapy is the most important aspect to achieving their happiness because to be happy, they must want to be happy. Therapy provides the platform to which this need for personal happiness will aspire to.