Happiness vs truth

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Here's my issue with this.

Happiness = the truth

I say happiness is the truth, because the prevailing attitude is to change your thoughts, to make you happy.

This feeling of being happy is therefore paramount and of higher value which your thoughts should be built around.

If you are unhappy, anxious, depressed, in other words negative kind of a feeling, something is wrong with your own thoughts.

But, what if negative feelings are telling you something about your environment.

A wife who is treated badly in a relationship may be having negative feelings. The professional may say that she doesn't have to put up with such treatment and may leave or fix it if possible. In this sort of situation it is seen as the environment/situation as a significant affect on her mood and it would help to change that environment. She may also have thoughts which are irrational or inaccurate which may cause problems as well though.

Now expand this to the societal level and how each person survives and lives their life in their social and economic environment and particular situations.

What if people have negative feelings because of their environment, even the structure of their society and it's values? What if these people are then told to change their thoughts about it to become happy (positive feelings)?

Couldn't this idea of seeing positive feelings as the truth to gear your thoughts and feelings around be a way for people to adapt to a situation that their own self finds ill fitting (for whatever reason)?

You can't escape this environment because it is everywhere almost like air, it is the atmosphere.

I see this as man being built for the institution, the structure, the economy, the environment, instead of having these things built for man.

I would prefer genuine happiness. I would be more genuinely happier if the environment was built around higher values.

I've thought a lot about these things for a long time. I've taken a long time to explain these things to a counselor and he's working with me on this.

This sort of crap makes me sick. Happiness isn't a choice. Pretending to be happy doesn't make you happy. Thinking happy things doesn't cause happy things to happen. To anyone who honestly believes that, do you have, or are you planning on getting a degree from a clown college?

If I'm pissed off, then you better believe I'm going to be pissed off. I see absolutely no point in pretending to be happy just because I should want to be happy.

I used to have terrible depression, and people told me that. It hurt so much more pretending to be happy. I was never very good at it, and it felt like I, too, was rejecting my own emotions. I find the only way to be truly happy now is to be okay with being sad. Emotions come and go... fretting over them, making some 'bad' and some 'good' is missing that emotions are just the clouds crossing the sun of who we are (i.e. they don't change us).