Positive psychology

Wordiness, Wordlessness, and Wordness

Ron Johnson communication, Feelings, Personality, relationships

Many people have trouble with words. In fact, it is my belief that every human being has trouble with words despite the fact that words are so central in human functioning and seemingly essential in interpersonal relations of any kind. We might say that the (scientific) difference between animals and humans is that humans have speech, whereas animals don’t (while we might suggest that the existence of self, soul, or spirit might also differentiate us from animals.)

I had a conversation this morning with a man who speaks easily and freely, so much so that he sometimes stumbles and tumbles over his own words as he is desperately trying to communicate what he feels and thinks. Several times during this morning’s conversation, “Jim” (as I will call him) said, “I just don’t know how to say what I feel” or “I just don’t know how to say what I think” and then follow up with some kind of self-criticism because of his difficulty of finding the right words. Jim is by far not the only person who I see that has trouble with finding words for his thoughts or feelings. Many were the times when someone said, “I just don’t know what to say” when they heard of our daughter’s death a year ago. What could they say at such an event? No words would do justice to the feelings that people often had although the best words were always, “I am so sorry.” But there were people who said all kinds of things, people who said nothing, and people who just looked at us with faces full of feelings but no spoken words.

The matter of words is more than the phenomenon of not knowing what to say. There are many instances where words are insufficient to express one’s feelings or thoughts. The title of this blog, “wordiness, wordless, and word-ness” is a reflection of some of the problems with words, and they all have to do with inadequate communication:

  • Wordiness: People have too many words and fail adequately communicate
  • Wordlessness: people have too few words and fail to adequately communicate
  • Wordness: people make up words but fail to adequately communicate

Wordiness

The “Jim” noted above had too many words for what he was feeling. He spoke over and over again about how he was feeling but he was having but was never satisfied with his words. So, he did what wordy people tend to do: he spoke more, he spoke louder, and he repeated himself. Jim’s situation was quite simple: his wife said that she wanted a divorce, and “it came as a complete surprise” although he admitted that he knew that “something was wrong” in the marriage for some time. I tried my best to help him say what he really felt but with only a modicum of success because he was so inclined to repeat himself over and over again, usually with intermittent statements of “I just don’t know how to communicate.” I tried, largely in vain, to help him feel the real emotion that he felt, which was simple sadness, but he was so inclined to rattle on, mostly about his wife and her alleged “problems” that I didn’t succeed in this endeavor. Of course, complaining and diagnosing his wife wouldn’t help him, but he didn’t know any other way to express his feelings. This is so often the case with wordy people: they don’t know when to stop talking, when to start thinking, and when to speak again when they have found words that adequately communicate their feelings. Wordy people rarely feel, then think, and then speak. Rather, they speak furiously because they depend on a flurry of words to communicate their feelings. Sadly, they often fail in this endeavor, which makes life even harder for them because they have done all that they know to do. Jim was largely covering the feeling of sadness with his wordiness. The more he said, the worse he felt and found himself in this downward cycle.

Wordy people tend to be extraverted but wordiness is not entirely in the realm of extraversion as we might expect. In fact, Jim is quite introverted by nature. You may know some introverted people who, when they have a kept audience, tend to rattle on about something. I recall a good introverted friend who, when we entered her house, would immediately meet us with a flurry of words, so much so that we were quite overwhelmed by the words, if not entirely by the content. Yes, extraverts can also dominate a conversation, but they tend to need a larger audience. Introverts dominate the conversation when they have you alone. I recall an incident with my younger daughter, who is by nature quite introverted, a time that Deb and I were taking her to some church event. Deb and I both remember how Jenny seemed to rattle on about one thing or another, then at one time said, “Listen to me; I’m just rattling on, aren’t I?” and then just as quickly went back to rattling. We enjoyed the moment.

Wordy people also tend to be feeling-based, which is a reference to the Jungian concept of how people make judgments. “Feeling-based” people “feel through” things, including their thoughts, emotions, and actions. Feeling-based people tend to have good intuition, especially if their intuition is not dominated by emotion. Often, however, feeling-based people have many more feelings than they have words for, so they can be found to say words over and over again with the hope of communicating the feeling they have. But wordiness is not only in the realm of feeling-based people. The individual I just noted who would typically greet me at her door was also thinking-based. Thinking-based people are always looking for someone to talk to about what they have read, experienced, or thought.

Whether introverted, extraverted, feeling-based, or thinking-based, wordy people tend to push into the conversation as many words as possible. I suspect they know that they have but little time before the audience will lose interest so they cram as many words as possible into the space where there should actually be fewer words.

Wordlessness

Wordless people have fewer words. Sometimes they have no words at all. There is a great place to say nothing. We would all do well to consider that there are important times to say nothing because there are times when nothing needs to be said. These are times when simple presence with a friend is important and simple quietude alone is important. There is certainly nothing wrong with being silent as Desiderata begins with “go placidly among the noise and haste of the world and remember what peace there may be in silence.” But let’s look a bit deeper into the wordlessness that troubles so many people.

Many people have suffered in school because of their lack of words. Most of the men I see in my office have suffered because they were not “word people.” Their lack of words may have been a genuine dyslexia but more often than not they were not “auditory learners,” which is learning based on words shown in reading, writing, and speaking. There are even people who were good at reading and speaking but couldn’t seem to put two words together on paper or people who could read and write but were terrified of speaking in class. School does no service to people who are not word-based. I didn’t like reading until well into college but I was good at writing and speaking, so I got along pretty well. Furthermore, my “learning style” is predominantly “auditory” (word-based). Equally good, but substantially different, are people whose learning styles are kinesthetic or visual. These would be the musicians, artists, and athletes in school who “go to school for their friends and activities” but abhor the reading and writing that dominates school. School was good for me because I am primarily word-based but I see kids in my office all the time who are good with art, music, sports, dance, and social life but hate reading. Oops, school is reading (and writing and speaking).

Wordless people might also be introverted or thinking-based. These folks work diligently to find the right words so often that they have large gaps in what they say in a conversation. This gap-ness is not the sole domain of introverts and thinkers, but it is most common among them. My brother used to look at his wife, who was both introverted and thinking, and say, “I’m sorry, my dear, I didn’t hear what you said” when she had not actually “said” anything. She would say, “Oh, that’s right. You can’t read my mind.” This looking at someone intently, perhaps with mouth agape, arms swinging in the air, or grimacing is a time of wordlessness that usually fails to communicate. I recall many instances when someone has looked at me when we are in a conversation, opened his mouth as if to say something but not with any words, then came closer to me and was right in my face, yet without any words. Such a person is attempting furiously to communicate without using words. Rarely do they succeed in that endeavor. “There is a time to keep silent, and there is a time to speak” as Solomon said in the Jewish Scriptures’ book of Ecclesiastes.

Wordness

What I call “wordness” is the creating of words for the purpose of communicating something that standard dictionary-based words are insufficient. We have many words that are added to Webster every year, like “texting” a few years ago. While every language adds words to the usable vocabulary every year, there are also times when people create words that will never be a part of Webster, much less common use. I recently read an article that was based on Buber’s I and Thou book and the concept under the concepts of I and Thou. This author talked about “I-ness” and “Thou-ness” in her discussion of Buber’s concept of I and Thou. (For what it’s worth, Buber’s simple, yet profound suggestion is that we need to understand how we relate to one another, and the way we need to do that is understand how we think and feel followed by understanding how other people think and feel. This theologian found it necessary to talk about “I-ness” and “Thou-ness” in her dissertation. Yet I found it difficult to understand what she was talking about and sometimes found myself wondering if what she was saying was even important. Perhaps other readers have been fascinated by her use of these created words. Readers of theology, and somewhat in psychology, will be more familiar with these hyphenated words, like God-ness, Satan-ness, sin-ness, and creation-ness words.

Created words are not the sole property of theologians. Note that I used the word “gap-ness” above. I created this word. Many people will create words that have even less meaning than the likes of “I-ness” and “Thou-ness.” These are times when people may actually use some vocalism, like a grunt in an attempt to communicate. Or they may find some combination of words that seems to make no sense at all, something like babies do when they are trying to communicate their feelings but don’t yet have a vocabulary. Similarly, adults can yell, scream, grunt, murmur, or cry when they want to say something but can’t find the words to adequately communicate their feelings. While wordiness can be irritating or boring, and wordlessness can be frustrating, wordness can be awkward at the best and dangerous at the worst. Many physical fights have come about due to the wordness that has miscommunicated.

The danger that can come about due to wordiness, wordlessness, or wordness sometimes leads to undue cursing. Cursing has always been a part of this culture, and seemingly of every culture, the increase in the frequency of cursing, now beginning as early as age 5 or 6, seems to be a symptom of people increasingly unable to communicate themselves adequately. We know, for instance, that while speech is largely a “left-brain” phenomenon, cursing is a right-brain phenomenon, the right side of the brain being the housing for emotion as well as much of what we perceive in our five senses. Cursing can be conceived as wordness and created words. It is interesting that the “f word” can be almost any part of speech.

What’s it all about: wordiness, wordlessness, and wordness?

It’s about insecurity, namely feeling inadequate in expressing what I want to communicate. Thus, people talk too much, talk too little, or make up words in attempts to communicate. But what are they trying to communicate? Feelings. Deb and I finally published our most recent work, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, which should be back from the publisher in a week as well as being available for download soon. In this book we first admit that we will “never successfully communicate our feelings” while proposing that we can improve in communication if we realize that it is impossible to communicate perfectly. Nevertheless, this task of feeling something, trying to communicate it, and finding some modicum of success is something that few people master. I encourage you to continue to work at it.

Good for Me; Bad for Me VI: Complexities

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, morality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the sixth in a series of “good for me; bad for me,” namely things that are, quite simply good for me or bad for me. The pronoun “me” could be “you”, but the point is the many things are those that enhance one’s life while other things depreciate one’s life. Importantly, I have also suggested that the “things” that are good or bad can be people, places, physical things, or events in one’s life. I have further proposed that there is a spectrum that might reflect the intensity of something being good or bad, namely:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

Furthermore, I have suggested that we can quantify just how good something is by the following words:

  • Mildly or moderately good for me: interesting, pleasant, exciting
  • Profoundly good for me: enlivening, life-enhancing, life-sustaining

Likewise, we could quantify things that are bad for me with the following:

  • Mildly or moderately bad for me: uninteresting, unpleasant, aversive
  • Profoundly bad for me: dangerous, toxic, lethal

I have suggested that it might be profitable for you to quantify the things in your life that may be good, very good, bad, or very bad. You may wish to examine the origin of this discussion in the previous blogs.

My purpose in the present blog is to deal with the complexities of something being good or bad for you because life is not so simple as just good or just bad. We will discuss some of these complexities, e.g.:

  • Good for me at one time; bad for me at another time
  • Good for me but I don’t like it
  • Bad for me be I do like it
  • Seemingly neither good nor bad; just not very important

Good for me at one time; bad for me at another

As I just stated, “life is not so simple” as to suggest that something is universally bad for me or universally good for me. Times change. I change. Circumstances change. People change. Consider something (someone, some place, some thing, some situation) that was good for you but not is not good for you.

There was a time that it was very good for me to speak my thoughts and feelings freely. Having been brought up in a very outspoken and expressive family, I was subtly taught that a person should simply say whatever s/he felt or thought regardless of the environment or the consequences. Thus, my family’s philosophy was based on the unspoken belief that we all have the right to our thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and furthermore have the right to express ourselves at any time with anyone. As you might imagine, and as I certainly know, it is not always wise or kind to speak oneself openly. I slowly earned that I needed to add wisdom and kindness to my expressiveness in what I said, something that we might call discretion. I should add that I learned this lesson painfully. Part of the pain was the fact that I unnecessarily hurt other people, always without intention, but I also learned that they hurt me in return, as the book title Hurt People Hurt People so succinctly suggests. (Don’t buy the book; just remember the title and its meaning.) When I was so quickly outspoken, I was just as quickly judged, often negatively. People made judgments of me, probably largely out of their having been hurt by me. I slowly learned that while my heart and head might have been in the right place, namely to be “honest and forthright,” I was not cognizant of my audience, particularly their feelings. Whereas speaking my mind at all times and with all people was originally good for me, it is no longer so. It is also not good for other people, but we will discuss this matter in a future blog.

At the present time in my life I rarely speak my mind and heart. Now, having given this example of something that was good for me but not good for me now, I often feel sad that I most certainly should not express myself in many circumstances. Most pointedly, I have learned that I can say precious little of my thinking and feeling while I am doing psychotherapy although I am almost constantly both thinking and feeling. I have a kind of nostalgia for my younger days when I just said what I wanted to say, and sometimes think, “Wouldn’t we all be much better if we just did that?” But then I come to my senses and admit that it might not be so good after all. As Desiderata so poignantly says, one must “gracefully yield the things of youth.” The cost of giving up such things is first sadness, then contentment, and then wisdom. I am still learning.

There are many other examples of things that have been good for me at one time, and then later bad for me. Almost all of these things are in the arena of wanting the freedom that we can only have in childhood. I rarely do waterskiing, something that was very central to my life as a teenager, although I do have good memories. I almost never eat any fast food, and interestingly have little desire for such stuff. I used to work 12 hours a day and thoroughly enjoy it, but have found that 12-hour days are no longer good for me, and sometimes in need a 4-hour day, God forbid. During the current political squabble that we are in here in America, I can no longer read the newspaper with earnest interest because the Trump factor stares me in the face, as does the current Covid factor, and even the Black Lives Matter movement. I remain avidly interested in political and cultural matters but find it “bad for me” to see our country so inflamed.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

It used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut. I have learned otherwise partly because I have learned that introverted people are naturally inclined to keep their feelings to themselves. It was bad for me to keep quiet but it is no longer bad for me. Certainly, this change is a matter of personal growth, but I now value keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, sometimes writing them as I am presently doing, and sometimes simply enjoying “going placidly among the noise and haste of the world knowing what peace there is in silence” (also Desiderata). In my psychotherapy work I probably say about 10% of what I think and 1% of what I feel although my thoughts and feelings can occasionally be quite helpful. More often in the past I have caused more harm by expression than by silence. If you had asked me some 40 years ago what I thought about being outspoken, I probably would have said something like, “everyone should just say what they think all the time.” By the way, my coming into psychology through the “back door” of existential therapy, there were many very good masters of existential therapy who did, indeed, suggest that you should just say anything to anyone at any time. While the hearts of these people were in the right place, their heads were not, and they were reacting against psychoanalysis, which suggested that the analyst said little or nothing, hence abstain from any expression of his/her own thoughts and feelings as well as Carl Rogers’ unconditional positive regard.

By the way, I could turn this story around and suggest that it was formerly bad for me to be so outspoken, but that begs the question. Yes, it was not exactly good for me to say everything I thought and felt, but it was something I needed to do because that is who I was, namely an outgoing, expressive person. I do not look at those years of being outspoken as being wrong, just lacking in wisdom and understanding. But there is the real opposite:

Formerly good for me, now bad for me

All “good for me; bad for me” categories can be of people, places, property, or experience. Allow me to briefly say that you can have a friend who is good for you and later bad for you even if s/he doesn’t change. Perhaps you just outgrow the person, or the person finds someone else who is better for him than you are. While painful, it is important to allow friendships…and family relationships…to be good at one time and then not be good at another time. The discovery that a person, even a very good person, someone who might have been a good friend or a valued family member, is no longer good for you…is hard to feel, hard to accept, and hard to know how to handle. I see many such situations in my office, two today where people moved family members into their homes and now resent these family members. At other times, a marriage has been very good but is not very bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

Aside from people being good…and then being “bad for you” there can also be places, property, or experiences. Maybe the house you live in is no longer good for you, maybe the car you have loved for many years is no longer good for you, or the books you treasure. Experiences that used to be good but no longer are might simply be those of youth that no longer profit you as an adult, or that some experience in life has superseded one that used to be top on the list.

If you  find something that was good but no longer is good, you need to admit to that fact, then accept that fact, feel through the possible change in your life, and then feel the sadness of loss that always occurs when you choose to give something up that has nostalgic value, whether people, places, property, or experiences. Allow yourself to feel, accept your feelings, feel your feelings, and then take action. Most people fail in one of these elements. Frequently, people fail to take action because they don’t want to lose somethings (person, place, thing, or experience) that used to be good for them. Just as frequently, people can take action too quickly not having truly thought through and felt through the change of “good for me” to “bad for me.”

Maybe getting drunk was good for you, or being promiscuous, or even lying. Yes, all seem bad, but that is not the case. I could make a good case that all of these experiences could actually be good for people at one time, but I will defer that discussion while noting that many people have found such things to no longer be good for them. You might note, however, that I am subtly suggesting that there is very little that is intrinsically bad, but again, this is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

Let’s talk onions: used to hate them; now I love them. Used to love the Gophers when I lived in MN as a kid; now I live in WI and love the Badgers. Used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut; now I find it a pleasant experience. There are lots of things, many of them childhood dislikes, that now are things that we like. But all of these are in the relatively mild/moderate “bad for me” that are now in the mild/moderate “good for me” category. It’s not terribly important for me to eat onions and enjoy the Badgers. The dial on the spectrum of good for me/bad for me has just shifted from one side to the other. You might think of things, often trivial, that used to be bad for you that are now good for you.

More important than onions and football teams could be people, places, and experiences. Consider someone in your past, perhaps a family member, maybe even an extended family member, a classmate or a workmate whom you really didn’t like. It might not matter why you didn’t like this person, but it is important that such a person was not good for you, or even was quite bad for you. You might think that your previous feelings about this person were “wrong” or that you were immature or something. I suggest that you simply admit that somebody in your past life was “just not good for you” and leave it at that while sequentially seeing that you now value this person and see that s/he is largely good for you.

In addition to things like onions and sports teams on the one hand, and people on the other, you might see that certain places or experiences might have moved from the “bad for me” side of the spectrum to the “good for me” side. I have replaced my three-times a week basketball playing, now eliminated due to the Covid phenomenon, with running. There was a time that running was mildly good for me, and then basketball replaced it to such a degree that I never ran. Even when I tried to run, I didn’t like it: it was mildly bad for me. Now, I run two or three times a week and find that running has barely crossed over to the “good for me” side of the spectrum. Our grandson lived with us recently for three months and pretty much hated the hiking and walking that Deb and I do pretty regularly. The needle moved quite a bit towards “good for me” evidenced by his walking on his own several times during his last few weeks with us.

Liking and not liking

I want to make a subtle distinction between “liking” and things that are good for me or bad for me. Such “things” could be person, place, experience, or something physical. There are roughly two categories in this discussion:

  • Things that I don’t like that are actually good for me
  • Things that I do like that are actually bad for me.

You probably immediately see the similarity to something that was once good for me but now bad for me, or something that was once bad for me but now good for me. I choose to distinguish the “liking” from “good for me” in order to make sense of many things in life that cannot wholly be described as good or bad.

There are, most importantly, some people that I don’t particularly like but see that they are actually good for me. Consider someone who you really don’t like, perhaps a political figure, a family member, or a friend who also is a good person in some way. Such a person might even be helpful to you in some way. But you just don’t like her. I think it is important to admit to you feelings of not liking this person while paradoxically seeing that this person is good for you in some way. Dentists come to mind. Who in their right mind “likes” a guy who digs into your mouth with nasty tools? The dentist chair could also be a “place” that you don’t like, and certainly don’t like the experience of a root canal while also seeing that the dentist, the chair, the tools, and the experience is good for you.

Consider the people in your life whom you respect, even love, but don’t like. They might be good for you, but you just don’t like them. Likewise, there may be experiences, places, or physical objects that you don’t like but see as essentially good for you. Who likes taxes? But they are eventually good for us, right? At least for the most part.

The other side of this discussion is something (person, place, experience, or thing) that you like but is bad for you. Certainly, all addictions fall into this category, whether addictions that are chemical or behavioral. It is hard for me to understand why people like sitting in front of a slot machine putting pennies or dollars into the machine for hours at a time while simultaneously knowing that they will most certainly lose more than they win. Gamblers just like gambling. I like sugar, God forgive me. I eat some kind of really-bad-for-you sugar just about every day despite knowing that sugar, at least refined sugar is bad for me. Additionally, I know that if I am ever to give up my sugar addiction, I have to start by admitting that I like sugar.

Not important

Certainly, you have wondered if there are things (people, places, experiences, or physical things) that don’t exactly fit on either side of the spectrum. I call these things “not important.” Consider things that are not important in your life. I hear from most people that the current political disaster in our country causes them much grief, and consequently, these people find that politics are very important. I also find people who simply don’t care about politics for some reason. I care deeply. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring. I care about psychology, theology, history, and culture, but many people don’t care about such things. A mother who is caring for a challenging child doesn’t even have the time to read, much less care about politics, nor does the nuclear scientist who works 12 hours a day looking for a way to control fusion.

In your regular life, there are many things that fall into the “don’t care” category. Certainly, this is true. I would simply caution you to know that if you are with a person, in a situation, in a place, or otherwise with something that is not important, you might stay too long there and find that the “don’t care” moved into the “not good for me” category.

Next week (?): Good for Me; Bad for You. And Bad for Me; Good for You.” These are real challenges and the heart of successful (and unsuccessful) relationships.

Good for Me; Bad for Me: Part 1 (corrected)

Ron Johnson Discovery, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the first of three blogs regarding the phenomenon of “good for me” and “bad for me” that I have used for many years as I have attempted to help people know when something is, quite simply good for them or bad for them. In this blog I will propose the basic concept of how to know when something is either good or bad for you as well as the variations of “good” and “bad.” Like many other significant psychological terms, these expressions do not lend themselves to exact definitions, which is to suggest that we cannot fully define “good” or “bad.”

Undefinable

The fact that we cannot exactly define “good” or “bad” does not take away from the value of using these terms. It is noteworthy that several other very significant psychological terms do not have exact definitions, like love, truth, feelings, and understanding. Nor do we have exact definitions for the three basic ingredients of the known universe: time, space, and mass. We understand these important aspects of the universe, as well as the elements of psychology by seeing the effects of such things. Furthermore, we can quantify such things as time, space, and mass even though we do not define them. Likewise, we can quantify love by noting how much we love something, and we can quantify truth as well from somewhat true to entirely true. Feelings do not lend themselves to quantification but we can see the effects of feelings as we have discussed at length in previous blogs and in our recently published book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel. In the present discussion we will study the quantification of “good for me” and “bad for me.” We will discuss the effects of good or bad in the forthcoming blogs.

Quantification of “good for me” and “bad for me”

Allow me to first discuss the quantification of “good for me/bad for me” by suggesting a continuum, or spectrum, with “good for me” on one side and “bad for me””

__________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

(very bad)                                (not so bad)          (pretty good)                                      (very good)

My suggestion with this proposal is that there is a spectrum that ranges from very bad for me to very good for me. Before I elaborate more about this spectrum, I should explain what can be good for me or bad for me. Pretty much anything can be good for me or bad for me. For instance, some foods may be good for me or bad for me. Likewise, some life situations can be good or bad for me, like work, relationships, geographical locations, or insertions into my life. Insertions include the finding of $10 bill on the street to a dog barking loudly while you walk by a house, but the more significant and lasting the “insertion,” the more significant the effect on you. If you find a $100 bill, it would be really good for you, or if the dog bit you on the leg, it would be really bad for you. Additionally, something that someone says too you might be good for you or bad for you, or in more extreme circumstances, a person him/herself at tone time might be good for you or bad for you. So, as we continue to discuss this “good for me” and “bad for me,” consider that anything, human or otherwise, living or nonliving, real or imaginary could be good for me or bad for me.

Having proposed that there is a spectrum of “good for me” and “bad for me,” allow me to elaborate about this continuum and suggest a number of terms that might serve as indicators of the strength of “good” or “bad” for me. We might have relatively mild experiences of “good for me” or “bad for me”, i.e.:

Aversive     Unpleasant    Uninteresting                   /                   Interesting    Pleasant    Exciting

_____________________________________________________________________________

We might also have things that are more extremely good or bad for me, and find the use of stronger terms valuable, i.e.:

Lethal    Toxic    Dangerous               /                   Enlivening    Life-enhancing    Life-sustaining

____________________________________________________________________________

Putting these terms together we have a continuum on the “bad for me” side ranging from something that is mildly “not good”, i.e. uninteresting, to something that is lethal, meaning something might kill me. Likewise, on the “good” side of the continuum the range is from interesting to life-sustaining, meaning that I can’t do without it.

I have found it helpful to assist people to know how to quantify things and people in their lives using this continuum starting with the simple “good for me” things be asking them what people, places, ideas, and situations are good for them, and then to help people note relatively good these things are. Then I follow by assisting people to similarly identify things that are bad for them along the negative side of the continuum. I have found that while it is hard for people to describe exactly how good or bad something is for them, they can approximate the good or bad somewhere on the continuum. The idea of a continuum, or spectrum, of good or bad rather than an absolute good or bad is helpful for people to see how things adversely affect them or enhance them in life.

Quantification: a sign of emotional maturity

While many people find it valuable to see a continuum from extremely good to extremely bad for them, some people are not willing or able to make these distinctions. Such people often use the extreme terms for everything, namely “dangerous” or “lethal” on the bad side or somehow necessary on the good side. People who regularly use such extreme terms often talk more than do, by which I mean they complain a lot about things but do nothing to get out of situations that are not good for them, or they dream about things that they think would be good for them but do nothing to fulfill those dreams. I find that such people have simply not matured in life sufficiently to see that very few things are truly life-sustaining or lethal, but many things are simply interesting or uninteresting. These people are stuck in their helplessness or stuck in their dreams. They have not matured beyond a childlike view of life that they should have everything they want without work or that they are helpless to do anything to enhance their lives. Extremes of any sort are the natural stuff of childhood but not of maturity. As people mature in their understanding of life, they tend to use less extreme terms leaving such terminology for very few cases. When people mature in this way, they are better able to make adjustments in life.

There are at least three elements of maturing in the business of enhancing life with what is good and reducing elements that are dangerous: (1) thinking and feeling to yourself about such things, (2) speaking to someone else, and (3) doing something. People tend to skip item (1), thinking and feeling, and go right to item (2), talking to someone or item (3), doing something. But it is important to first think and feel before talking or doing. If I talk to someone right away or take action right away without first truly knowing how I feel and think, I will not find it profitable and productive because my personal thoughts and feelings will not be the foundation of what I might ultimately do.

You might consider the many other situations that occur in life, like an intimate relationship that is good for you, and then think of how you might enhance the relationship rather than taking the good person in your life for granted. Likewise, you might consider how you might make an adjustment to a relationship that is less than good for you rather than taking leave of the person who might just be uninteresting to you in some way. You could also examine what you eat or drink, what you do for recreation, or what color you would like to see on your house. In fact, if you can examine the less important things in your life, like what you eat or what color you have on your house, you might be better able to honestly examine the more important things in your life, like your relationships, your work, your geographical location, or something that is truly sacred in your life.

You might consider talking to someone about your “good for you” feelings and “bad for you” feelings once you have studied your feelings for yourself. There are equal dangers of keeping your feelings entirely to yourself, which tends to be a tendency of introverted-thinking people, or constantly talking about your feelings that frequently occurs with extraverted-feeling people. If you can be honest with yourself about what is good for you and what is bad for you, you will be in a better position to profit from talking to someone else. After thoughtful self-examination of the goods and the bads of something in your life, and then talking to someone about those feelings, mature people do something.

Sometimes the “doing” doesn’t actually look like doing because the person decides that the best course of action is to stay the course. Equally possible, is the need to actually do something about your life, particularly when you find yourself on the “bad for me” side of the spectrum. People tend to jump to action too soon or avoid any kind of action for fear of loss. In the long run, when a mature person has come to a decision to take action or not, there is always sadness involved in the action. For instance, it might be sad to give up alcohol if you decide that it is largely bad for you, or you might be sad if you decide to keep drinking because the loss of alcohol in your life is worse than then ill effects of alcohol. You will be sad staying with someone who is not always good for you and you will be sad leaving such a person.

Sadness

The universal experience of feeling sad when you have actually done something is important to understand as we have written in The Positive Power of Sadness. People often avoid doing something because they simply don’t want to experience the sadness of losing something. They would rather live in the fantasy that they can have it both ways, like living happily with a person who you find “not good for you” occasionally and simultaneously leaving such a person without any regret of having lost an intimate partner. You can only do this in fantasy, not reality. To honestly stay or leave, and then profit from the staying or leaving, you have to look at the effects of staying or leaving.

In the next two blogs, where I will discuss the effects of something that is good for you or bad for you and how to take action with such things. Consider what might be in each category:

  • Good for you could be person, place, property, experience, or idea
  • Bad for you could be person, place, property, experience or idea