cherophobia

Aversion to happiness, also called fear of happiness, is an attitude towards happiness in which individuals may deliberately avoid experiences that invoke positive emotions or happiness. Aversion to happiness is not a recognized mental health disorder on its own, but it can contribute to and/or exacerbate existing mental health issues.
Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers identify four reasons for an aversion to happiness:

a belief that happiness will cause bad things to happen
that happiness will cause you to become a bad person
that expressing happiness is somehow bad for you and others
that pursuing happiness is bad for you and others.For example, "some people—in Western and Eastern cultures—are wary of happiness because they believe that bad things, such as unhappiness, suffering, and death, tend to happen to happy people." Emperical studies show that fear of happiness is associated with fragility of happiness beliefs, suggesting that one of the causes of aversion to happiness may be the belief that happiness is unstable and fragile. Research shows that fear of happiness is associated with avoidant and anxious attachment styles. A study found that perfectionistic tendencies, loneliness, a childhood perceived as unhappy, belief in paranormal phenomena, and holding a collectivistic understanding of happiness are positively associated with aversion to happiness.

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    Trivia Cherophobia

    Cherophobia is the word for the irrational fear of being happy No, it's not the fear of Cher, as the name might lead you to believe. It comes from the Greek word "chero," which means "to rejoice." People who suffer from cherophobia are often afraid, cripplingly so, of doing anything that might...
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