social esteem

Good for Me; Bad for Me VII: Good for Me; Bad for You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, family, Feelings, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

My wife likes masks. I don’t. So what does this have to do with “good for me; bad for me”? Lots. Let me explain, but first let me review what I’ve been writing about in recent blogs.

I have proposed that there is a spectrum of things that are, quite simply, “good for me” or “bad for me.” Furthermore, the spectrum ranges from mildly good for to very good for me on one side and then mildly bad for me to significantly bad for me. The spectrum in its simplest form is:

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

I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be subcategorized as follows:

  • The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive                /                      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                                      to                                                     (profound)

  • The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting            /           Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                        to                                                                    (profound)

We most recently discussed “complexities” of such things, like when you don’t like something that is good for you, like green vegetables that my grandson hates, or working out that I hate. The present discussion is also complex but the complexities are different because they include times when something is:

  • Good for you but not good for someone else
  • Good for someone else but not good for you
  • Good for you and someone else
  • Bad for you and someone else

I want to help you find ways to deal with all these possibilities because this is the heart of the what makes a good relationship, where a brief encounter at the grocery store or  a long-term marital relationship. Furthermore, there are challenges that occur in relationships when there is agreement as well as when there is disparity in what is “good for you” and “bad for you.” In the following categories I am collapsing “liking” and “good for you” for purposes of brevity.

Good for me; Bad for you

This is the most common challenge in relationships, again noting that “relationships” can be intimate or brief. In this category we have at least the following:

  • I like Trump; you don’t; and vise versa
  • I enjoy green vegetables; you don’t
  • Alcohol is good for me; not for you
  • I need to talk; you need silence
  • I watch TV; you don’t
  • I like to read; you don’t
  • It’s good for me to wear a mask; it’s not good for you
  • I trust doctors; you don’t
  • I am a theist; you are an atheist
  • I like debates; you don’t
  • I favor the Black Lives Matter movement; you think it’s awful

Let’s consider one or two of these. The current health, political, and cultural matters so dominate America, whether it is Black Lives, wearing masks, or Trump. How difficult is it for you to go into a store where you “have to wear a mask”, or is it difficult for you to go into a store and see other people without masks? This is an example of the highly emotional element that is always involved in something that is “good for you” or “bad for you.” When emotion runs high, there is a danger of a certain kind of emotionally-caused blindness, superiority, or anger. Consider how you react to the mandate for masks or the lack of people following the mandate for masks, and you will find emotion. Now consider that this emotion erupts from your inner self or soul. Deb and I have just finished our final review of I Want to Tell You How I Feel in which we discuss how “feelings” erupt from a central core self and go sequentially through physical, emotional, cognitive, and active expressions. While we all have all four of these expressions, some people tend to recognize and express themselves in one of these expressions predominantly. Furthermore, emotion is the least developed feeling expression in America and hence the most dominant. So instead of simply noting that you feel sad because you are mandated to wear a mask, you get afraid and angry. Likewise, you do the same jump from sadness to anger and fear if you see other people failing to wear masks. I would propose that it would be helpful for all to recognize that masks are “good for you” and “bad for others” as a start. But this asks a lot of people: it asks them to be sad rather than angry. In my mind this is emotional maturity, i.e. staying with the disappointment, hurt, or sadness rather than letting allowing anger and fear to take over. This is the heart of what Deb and I wrote about in Good Grief.

Back to my original statement: Deb likes masks; I don’t. Well, it’s not true that I “don’t like masks.” What is true is that I choose to wear a mask in my office, which I deem as private, only when requested to do so by a patient. Deb, on the other hand, wears a mask with every patient and requires her patients to wear masks unless it is particularly inconvenient for them to do so. We have found some commonality in the mask-wearing matter but only as we have identified the “core self” matter, which I will discuss forthwith.

We could take any of the other examples noted above and examine them from the perspective of how some things make me sad, a sadness that I might tend to race right by preferring to be self-righteously angry or unduly afraid. There is more to the story but allow me to delay this discussion for a moment and examine the case when something is…

Good for you; Bad for me

We could consider all the political and cultural themes noted above. Let’s look at the Black Lives Matter discussion. This is a very good example of how many people feel deeply passionate about this movement, whereas as other people feel terribly offended. Supporters of Black Lives suggest that Blacks have been disenfranchised in America and feel deeply that there should be some political and cultural change to rectify this inequality. People who are not in favor of this movement speak of “what lives matter also” speaking of Caucasians, or “blue lives matter” speaking of police. On both sides of this discussion, however, lies a tremendous amount of passion with an even stronger element of anger. We have good people who are passionately demonstrating for equality sometimes becoming so engrossed in their emotions that they throw rocks into windows out of anger. We have equally good people who value “land order” and see window-breaking as “wrong”, so they fight back at people who are seeing that America’s cultural state is “not good for them” while their opponents see the movement as “not good for them.”

Let’s consider a somewhat more benign situation that is not so hotly emotional, like it being “good for you” to believe in God compared to people who find such belief “bad for them.” How can this happen? How can people feel that believing in God is bad for them? Being a theist myself, I have to stretch on this one, but I conjecture that atheists find so much wrong with religion that to even speak of a god is to speak a kind of evil. And it is important to note that both theists and atheists talk about “facts” and “science” and “logic” in defending their positions, which are more accurately feeling-based. So what is “feeling-based” mean? How do things become good for me or bad for me out of my “feelings”?

Feeling-based convictions

Since I have just finished the final review of the feeling book that Deb and I have written, this matter is very much on my mind, and it gives me a perspective of this “good for me” and “bad for me” matter. Feelings, as I see them, are an eruption out of our core selves, but I must quickly note that “feelings” and “core selves” are terms that are not defined, nor more so, by the way than time, distance, and mass are defined in physics, life is not defined in biology, or love is not defined in the human condition. To say something is “feeling-based” is tantamount to say that this something erupts from my core self, which in my mind is perfect, or perhaps the better word is pure. Hence, I would contend that the core self of someone who loves Trump is speaking of this purity/perfection just as the Trump hater is speaking of this purity-perfection. Then these two people express their core selves in a way we call “feeling.” So far, so good, as we then have two people speaking from the purity of core self expressing their core selves in feelings. But this is where things go array because people tend to race right through the physical manifestation of feelings and the emotional element of feelings right into the cognitive expression not knowing that they have missed the point. The point is that they have a core self value that is pure but this core value is not easily communicated in words and action without first recognizing the emotional element along the way. If we could agree that the core self always is love-based, we would know that any expression of feeling is love-based. Then we might be able to talk about what we love rather than what we hate; we could talk about what is important to us rather what is anathema; we could talk about what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. This is a tough task and not many people do it.

Good for you; Good for me

This is rather simple category what simply suggests that something, whether Trump or masks, we can find some commonality with something being good for both you and me. Hence, we have political parties, athletic teams, musical themes, and academic pursuits that are good for you as they are good for me. There are actually a lot of them, and it behooves us to remember how many of these things there are.

By the way, something that seem good for me and good for you might not, actually be so good. It might not be ultimately good for Black Lives protesters to feel good about throwing rocks, and it might not be good for the folks on the other side to throw rocks at the demonstrators.

Obviously, the same goes for something that seems bad for you and bad for me. It takes an emotionally mature person to realize that when something seems bad for me, it might also be ultimately good for me. All of this suggests that it important to note the “good for me” and “bad for me” first, then the same for other people before trying to find the common ground, the common ground always being the purity of core self. Oh, that we could communicate our core selves to one another.

The challenge

The challenge is to actually see that our surface “good for me” or “bad for me” erupts from our core selves, which are as close to God (or godliness for you atheists) that we can get. Starting with this we can see that love is at the basis of all good and all that seem bad. Would that our cultural, religious, and political leaders could have this kind of conversation.

In the meantime it will be necessary to simply note, “this is good for me” or “this is bad for me” before we enter into any kind of discussion.

Self, Selfish, and Selfless

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

There is much talk in the psychological community about “self,” and rightly so because the idea of self is central to understanding the very basis of psychology. Unfortunately, “self” is not defined, nor should it be, because it is one of those concepts that is so important that it can’t be defined. You might recall that I have written (as have many others) that the most important concepts in psychology are undefined, like feelings, love, wisdom, and perhaps other ones as well. Additionally, the three basic ingredients of the known universe are all undefined: distance, mass, and time. All other physics concepts are based on these three undefined concepts. We can measure time, distance, and mass, and we can combine them, like distance/time = velocity, but we don’t define them. Neither do we define “self.”

Not all psychologists use the term “self,” preferring “core self,” “soul,” “spirit,” “inner self,” and other such concepts that all refer to this essence of being human that is not only undefinable, but also fraught with implications according to how people use such terms. I will not debate the values and dangers of these terms but simply state that my preference is “core self” for the most part, but for this blog I will be using “self.”

What is self?

When you have an important concept like self, or time, distance, and love for that matter, you can understand the concept not by a definition but by three ways: (1) observing the absence of the concept, (2) observing more complex concepts that are comprised of self in combination with self, and (3) observing the effects of the concept. Note that the operative word is observing. Let’s look at these three ways of observing self.

The absence of self

We can understand self to some degree when we see what we call an “absence of self.” This terminology is not the best, I grant you, but it does communicate something of what apparently happens with some people: they have failed to develop a clear concept of who they are, that they are important in some way, or even that they exist. A related phenomenon exists with some severely impaired autistic people, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t have a concept of their actual existence.

But this is not what we are talking about with people who have an absence of self, or more accurately don’t have a good sense of self. The primary symptom of such people is an undue attachment to something other than oneself. There is some truth to the theory that people who become addicted to something, whether person, property, substance, or behavior, might not have a good sense of self. So they find a kind of attachment to one of these things (or behavior), which then gives them a sense of existence. This is tantamount to a person feeling such an attachment to, for instance, gambling, that s/he feels a real sense of self when s/he gambles. More often, however, the attachment is less to a behavior, person, property or whatever, as it is to the endorphins that are churned up when the individual is attached to this thing. It is like the person feels, “I feel real when I…(gamble, drink, or fuse with someone else, etc.).”

Most people have at least some sense of self, and hence “absence of self” is not quite right, but when someone has failed to develop a sense of his basic existence apart from anything, we do have this lack of a good sense of self.

Self combined with other elements

People who fuse with something so much that this thing, whether person, property or whatever, becomes what the person is rather than attached to the thing. There is a much healthier and profitable experience than fusion and consequent lack of identity: attachment. There is a literature on several kinds of attachment, but for our purposes here, we are talking about secure attachment. This is typified by the person who can separate him/herself from the behavior or product but finds that the use of something makes him/her a better person. Thus, a person who has a good senses of self can develop a passion for swimming and see swimming as a reflection of one’s self rather than swimming being the essence of oneself. In fact, the best competitors, whether in swimming or playing chess, are people who can attach to the sport and then detach from it without discomfort. To some degree, you can observe a person with a good sense of self engaged in some activity, do well with it at one time, do poorly with it at another time, and have other activities that assist the person to display his/her “self” in the activity. People who have to win at everything do not have a good sense of self, neither do people who simply do not try or give up too easily.

Aside from attaching and detaching from a sport, people with a secure sense of self can truly enjoy something like reading, writing poetry, painting, working, playing, singing, and many other elements of life. Common among people with a good sense of self is their being able to attach and detach from several things, which also suggests that the individual is able to love more broadly, say love swimming, love being alone, love being with people, love playing checkers, and love reading.

The effects of having a good sense of self

In all of these ways of attaching and dethatching to things, the person with a good sense of self is appreciative of the many aspects of life. The primary effect of having a good sense of self is that the individual appreciates life and has a sense of gratitude for living. People with less of a good sense of self do not feel such gratitude. Rather, sadly, they feel that they have not had enough and need more. This effect of having a good sense of self yields a deeper and deeper appreciation for what the world provides them, sometimes as simple as air to breathe and water to drink, but also property, people, and position in life.

In addition to feeling a sense of gratitude the second effect of someone with a good sense of self is that s/he has a passion to do something for humanity. You don’t have to be a philanthropist or a tree hugger to do something for humanity. You can be that cheery cashier or the honest attorney who both feel a passion to do something good for other people. When these things happen, namely feeling grateful and feeling a passion to give to the world, an interesting thing happens: you forget about yourself.

Forgetting about yourself

Now this must seem quite contradictory to what I originally wrote, namely that ideally a person has a good sense of self. So what do I mean suggesting that one “forget about him/herself?” I mean that when one’s sense of self is truly solid, s/he doesn’t worry, doesn’t fear, rarely gets angry, and spends a great deal of time thinking of how to serve the world. Such people are not defensive because they know their limits and their flaws. They are not critical because they know that everyone is doing their best to survive in life. They do not worry what other people think of them because they know that most people don’t care about them whatsoever, while there are probably an equal number of people who do like them and don’t like them. In their doing, they make mistakes and quickly come out with a “my bad” expression. They listen to criticism, whether right or wrong; they know they are hurt, but they don’t let their hurt lead them into anger or fear. Most importantly, they are more interested in other people than they are in themselves. They don’t live through other people, but rather have a life orientation of service. You can’t serve, give, and sacrifice if you are constantly thinking of what you want, which is so common among people with an inadequate sense of self.

Be yourself. It is the best thing you have. When you really know that, you will be able to “forget about yourself” without losing yourself. It is like having such a good foundation that the upper stories can collapse but never damage the foundation.

Deep Holes

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, social esteem

Ya’ gotta look out for deep holes when you’re walking in unfamiliar territory. Deb and I do a fair bit of hiking, and in fact, she does twice as much as I do, often in our preferred Wisconsin state park, Devil’s Lake, but anywhere we are, whether in the U.S. or Europe. Since we are often in unfamiliar territory, we have learned to be careful where we walk. If we are on some kind of unfamiliar precipice, we need to use great care because one false step could be life-threatening. On the other hand, hikes to both familiar territory are always enjoyable and hikes to unfamiliar territory are always exciting. Sometimes, these deep holes are of one’s own making. Literally, we have often made the mistake of doing some kind of yard project and stumbled over the block, the wood, or the tool as well as having tripped into the hole we dug for the post we were putting in on the fence line. Sometimes Deb has dug a hole that I didn’t know about and then I stumbled on it. So deep holes can come by someone’s own making or someone else’s making. Additionally, sometimes you have to watch out for massive holes that seem to come out of nowhere.

Holes of your own making

These are things that you have created on your own that now suck energy out of you or otherwise impede your progress in life. They may be major holes, like a marriage that you shouldn’t have entered, a profession that you shouldn’t have entered, or a house that you shouldn’t have bought. Almost always, you know at the time that you shouldn’t have done these things but for some surface reason you went against your better judgment, intuition, or deep feeling. You married the woman because you loved her despite the fact that you knew she had a lot of psychological baggage; you went into the profession because you were good at math and could make a lot of money in accounting even though you hated the tediousness of such work; you bought the house because it was a good deal even though it was way too big for you. These are holes that you have created for yourself. You have tried to justify your errors by citing the love, the money, or the beauty, but because these big holes continue to bother you, you continue to be in this hole. Furthermore, you are inclined to complain about your wife, your job, or your house to anyone who will listen, always to no avail. You created the hole; you have to get out of it. By the way, this doesn’t mean that you should get a divorce, quit your job, and sell your house. It does mean that you need to admit that you are in a hole, and you created it. Then you can…see later.

There are other holes of less significance, or shorter duration, and of only moderate distress, but they are self-made holes nevertheless. You make too much food for dinner just before you go on a two-week vacation, and you can’t use the leftovers like you usually do; you bought the wrong size shoes and you can’t easily get back to Chicago where you bought them, or you agreed to take on that Sunday school class for preteens that has become a burden. These short-term errors are holes, but not deep ones.

There are self-made holes that lie somewhat between holes of marriage, job, and house on the one hand and buying the wrong pair of shoes on the other. These holes are often related to the avoidances-come-addictions that most people have. A hole for many people is the undue use of alcohol, which then causes other holes like money spent, or days in jail. There are, in fact, more behavioral addictions than those of chemicals, namely gambling, hoarding, and working. In addition to addictive substance and behavior, the most common self-created hole are physical illnesses. Overweight people use 50% of the medical dollar spent in America (and probably elsewhere), but continue to overeat and under-exercise with the result of their talking about their various body ailments as if someone else created them.

You can actually deal with these self-made holes if you admit that you made them. Sadly, most people don’t admit to their part in the hole-making. The holes that are more difficult to deal with than the self-made holes are the ones that other people or situations have created for you. Almost all self-created holes have been created to compensate for the larger hole that was created by your family of origin. But before we get to that part of the discussion, let’s discuss holes that are “just there” coming out of nowhere.

Holes that are created from nonhuman external circumstances

The most obvious hole is the current lockdown due to the coronavirus. This is a large hole. It is frustrating, scary sometimes, uncertain always, of unknown duration, and certainly not something that you created. It is clear to all of us that, for the most part, there isn’t much we can do but wait and try our best to be careful. But in this circumstance there is no absolute rule. Some people don’t care a whit about social distancing while others are wearing hazmat suits. You are probably somewhere in the middle. Note that however difficult the lockdown is, it is actually easier to deal with than the holes that you created in your life because you can talk about “it” that has control over you or “they” who have control over you. It’s much harder to face the holes that you created in your own life.

There are many less profound holes that nonpersonal external factors have caused for you. You get fired (or these days, “laid off”) from your work; your wife dies; you lose much of your life savings due to a market turn-down. Externally created holes can be less profound, like losing your cell phone on a trip west, find yourself facing an unexpected real estate tax bill, or some unknown person failed to clean up the dog poop in your yard. These are holes that you can step around, fall into (hopefully not the poop), and recover pretty quickly. Not necessarily so easy when people have put holes in your way.

Holes that are created from other people

These are holes that other people have put in your way, almost always without intention to do so, but rather just due to the way they acted in life. Some of these holes are profound, and some much less so. It is a delicate time for you because it is way too easy to “blame” other people for the hole you stepped in and then continue to blame them for the fact that you’re still in the hole. We’ll deal with these other-created holes, and all holes, in a moment. First, look at the profound holes.

Profound holes (big ones) come primarily from your parents. All parents do their best when they raise children, but their best is often not good enough. Very simply stated, parent-caused holes come from parents who neglected their children, indulged their children, judged their children as lacking in some way, or demanded too much of their children. As you look back at your childhood, you will see some element of at least one of these tendencies, possibly two. It is easiest to see the neglect (or abuse) of children, but the larger issue that I see these recent decades is indulgence, namely where children are not given responsibility to take care of themselves, property, and other people. Indulgence creates a huge hole in children, who then grow up to be big people with big holes in them. Such people think that the world will give them everything they want like their parent(s) did. Neglected children have a very different hole in them, which turns out to be a deep hunger for the safety, comfort and nurturance that they didn’t get as children. A subtler hole is created in children who have been criticized and judged for the way they went about life, or forced to abide by a set of rules and structures that was not consistent with how they truly were. A freedom-oriented child needs great freedom together with the consequences of using freedom to a fault. A deeply loving child needs the freedom to love all people and animals and slowly learn that loving such is not always good. They don’t need to be judged for loving freedom o4 people, nor do they need to be forced into other ways of life. While most of the big holes in people’s lives come from parents, it is occasionally true that some other person has created such a hole, like an abusive husband, a promiscuous wife, an intolerable boss, or a friend who abandons you. Usually, however, we meet, marry, befriend, or work for people who simply replicate the damage that was done to us as children. (Look up Freud’s “repetition compulsion” concept.)

Most people do not do well with any kind of hole, even the small ones, but when people have had holes created in their lives due to early life losses, they rarely recover. Instead, they find ways to avoid the holes with some kind of filler. Most often this filler is addictive in some way, but not just substance and behavior. Some people use their natural gifts to fill the hole but always without genuine success. They talk more or they talk less (if at all); they cry all the time or they fail to ever cry; they work 90 hours a week or they don’t work at all; they dream all the time with various theories of life or they just keep doing things to keep from feeling the hole inside. Unfortunately, this filler works for minutes, maybe hours, but not for long because the filler is not real: it is imaginary. They think that if they continue to work, play, dream, do something, eat something, drink, cry, or talk, they will fill the hole. A deep hole cannot be filled. It needs to evaporate. Sadly, they very often drag other people into the hole that is in them. They actually become psychologically dangerous, and occasionally physically dangerous. It is a task to truly befriend such a person and keep a safe distance at the same time.

Dealing effectively with people who have big holes in them

I want to be very delicate here so as to avoid offending people with holes that they have to deal with. We all have holes, some small, some large, and we usually find ways to deal with them, stepping around them, fixing them, or simply falling into them and getting out by hook or crook. On the other hand, many people have such large holes in them that they are often unable to muster up the courage or find the recipe for climbing out of the hole, that they become stuck in these holes or become psychologically dangerous to people around them. Most specifically, I want to avoid talking about what is “wrong” with such people, much less render some kind of diagnosis. Diagnoses could include depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, or borderline personality disorder, but none of these diagnoses actually helps people suffering from having a deep hole inside. Sadly, it behooves people who are in their lives to protect themselves from being drawn into the hole. I can be drawn in by the person’s genuine complaints about some part of life, or all of life for that matter. I can feel sorry for the person, render some shoot-from-the-hip advice, or avoid the person altogether. In most cases, the last option is where people end up because they have become exhausted in trying to help their friend with words and actions. This leads to a kind of abandonment that only exacerbates the person with the hole because s/he feels bad about him/herself, and then looks for someone else to fill the hole. The important truth is that no one, and nothing, can fill the hole. So what can be done? We’ll get to it is a moment.

It is important to realize that that all people have holes and these very same people want someone else to fix the hole or fill it. You can do neither. In fact, if you have such a person in your life, you must do what your friend most does not want: limit. You have to say no to her/his requests for more information, more money, or more time. The more you limit, the less you will be frustrated by failing to help your friend with his/her hole. This, of course, will make your friend mad at you for hot “helping” him/her, but limiting your friend is the only thing you can do. Simply put, you give what you can, and no more. But people with holes always have “one more question” or one more request or need one more minute. From the people I have known with big holes in them I have heard the following: “I don’t want to go to the hospital where my wife is having brain surgery because it’s going to be all about him” (yes really); “If you gave me all the time you have, I would want more;” “All I want is all you have.” These are actual statements made by people, all good people, and all intelligent people, who have big holes in them. So you cannot fill their holes. Give, yes. Give in, no. Giving in is not giving. You know the difference because when you give in, you resent and you complain about your friend. Do neither. Just give, and then stop giving when you don’t want to give.

Dealing with the hole(s) in your life

Finally, I get practical. It is much easier to wax psychological. Effective dealing with the hole is getting the hole to evaporate. By this I mean that as you take responsibility for seeing yourself and seeing the world realistically, the hole that you have been living in begins to disappear. It is most certainly not filling the hole, whether with words, not with comfort, not with anger, and not with advice. You can deal with the small holes with some time, effort, and intelligence. It the larger, deeper inside of you, holes that require a good deal of work. This is the procedure:

  • Recognize that you have a big hole in your life. This is painful, but it is absolutely the necessary beginning, and it is the only beginning.
  • This will make you sad because you will see that you are missing something very central to life. You need to be sad for a period of time to allow you to move on.
  • Moving on is not forgetting the hole or neglecting it. Moving on is finding ways to improve your life. This usually means admitting that you have wanted someone else to fill the hole or fix the hole. Giving up this dream is painful, and you will see that no one, absolutely no one can, or should, fill or fix the hole.
  • Note the intrinsic fear that you have when you see that, whoever created this hole in you, it is now your hole and you have to deal with it. You need to reflect on what you missed in childhood, which will always be some combination of undue limitation, not enough limitation, neglect, indulgence, lack of understanding of your nature, some kind of true abuse, or a combination of these elements.
  • Finding, facing, and feeling the cause for your hole will begin to give you confidence that you can climb out of the hole. Again, there is no fixing or filling the hole. You have to climb out on your own.
  • You will not want to climb out. You would much rather have someone climb in or at least give you a latter. Won’t happen. Can’t happen. Just admit that you don’t want to climb out and you will soon find yourself climbing…hating it all the while.
  • As you climb, you will notice your confidence increases. This kind of confidence is not based on what you’re good at like playing, working, talking, dreaming, or crying. It will be something different. You are, as you climb out, developing other skills that have long eluded you. I can’t tell you what skill you will learn, but it most certainly won’t be what you’ve been doing for years, which is, figuratively, using a fork instead of a shovel or a ladder to get out of the hole. Forks are great for eating, not for climbing.
  • As you climb out, tell someone about your journey. Avoid the tendency that still resides in you, that someone else can rescue you. just tell your friend your struggle and ask your friend to keep quiet while you talk about your feelings and thoughts.
  • Note that you are feeling better and the hole is smaller. Eventually, it will evaporate