Author: Ron Johnson

Crazy is Contagious

Ron Johnson communication, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, political, relationships, Self-Awareness

I heard the statement, “crazy is contagious” from a colleague of mine when I told him about an experience I had recently had with a patient. It got me thinking. “Crazy” is not by any means a part of my vocabulary, nor are other typical terms when we think of the challenges that people have like, “issues,” “problems,” and even “diagnoses.” If you have followed me in my blogging, you have noticed that I do the very best I can to avoid diagnosing someone and finding the diagnosis of much benefit. People use the terms depressed, nervous, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and PTSD way too easily and very often without much knowledge of these conditions. There are, for instance very few people, who suffer from a true bipolar disorder, perhaps one in 1000, maybe less. Bipolar disorder, by the way, is a delusional disorder when someone truly experiences such a severe depression as to truly not want to live for one more day, and that followed by times when the person feels like s/he could fly off a building successfully with arms as wings. I was bemused by a person reported that her husband was “very bipolar.” She actually meant that he swung from happy to sad. But this is not bipolar disorder. Nor is being sad depression, being worried anxiety, being distracted ADHD, or having bad memories PTSD. PTSD and the like are all real disorders, but they are not as common as people think. Enough of my grandstanding on the theme that psychiatric terms are used excessively. Let me get to the point.

The point is this: some kind of “crazy” is contagious. This means that if you around a person who feels delusional, speaks her delusions with firm conviction, and is fully convinced of these delusions, you will absorb some of the “crazy” thinking. This happened to me the other day with a patient who, indeed, espoused a series of delusional-like statements. This was a young man, a man of good integrity as well as high intelligence, but someone who has been suffering from some time with a significant amount of anxiety. I have written about anxiety before noting that it is clearly the most difficult phenomenon to overcome because it is caused by the brain (not the mind, mind you) believes that there is lethal danger just around the corner and keeps you in a state of perpetual hypervigilance in preparation for the danger that the brain believes to exist. I will not restate what I have previously written about this mind-brain interaction except to say that you mind knows everything but your brain knows only safety and pleasure, or lack thereof. You brain doesn’t know that when you are “worried” about passing an exam tomorrow that this is, actually tomorrow, because the brain (not the mind) does not have a sense of time. For the brain everything is in the present. So when your mind thinks about the danger of failing an exam, you brain goes into action to protect you. Unfortunately, you brain does not distinguish some future danger from a present danger. Furthermore, you brain does not distinguish serious danger from minor danger. Hence, anxiety is very difficult to conquer. It is only conquered by sadness. But that is another discussion unless you want to read our books. So, let me tell you about how I “caught” the delusion I heard the other day.

Delusions

I must alter the words and circumstances to protect my patient’s identify but the phenomenon is the same: delusion spoken. Jack (I’ll call him Jack) suggested there was a conspiracy operating in Washington having to do with a certain political figure. He expressed how he had concluded that there was some immediate danger to him, to his family, and to America at large due to this individual and his colleagues. At first, he told me that an important senator had been “kidnapped” and another one “arrested” for unknown offenses and by unknown individuals. He told me more and more about what he was quite certain was about to happen in America and advised me that I should prepare myself for some kind of political, cultural, or military storm that was about to happen. When I first heard about the “arrest” of a senator, I was quite distressed because I had not heard about it, but then as Jack continued his story and beliefs in what I should call a conspiracy theory, I became increasingly concerned that I was listening to a person who was either truly delusional or “feeling” delusional for some reason. Jack finalized his statements of concern with a suggestion that there was a true danger of the water in Madison being contaminated with some kind of mind-altering drug. I was advised to keep from drinking tap water.

Now, I know that the water is not contaminated in Madison and I most certainly know that there is no conspiracy to take over the world, but after listening to this long story of conspiracy, I was affected emotionally, and then I was affected cognitively. I actually thought that maybe…just maybe…the water had somehow been contaminated. I knew better, but I found myself actually thinking this “crazy” notion. Why would I do that? I know better. Part of the reason I actually considered that there might be some truth in these stories was because I value Jack, namely his intelligence and his integrity. This is an important factor when you consider what you hear, from whom you hear it, and the content of what you hear. But this is not enough. You have to attend to how you feel because “crazy is contagious.”

Crazy is contagious

There are a lot of things that are contagious. These days, of course, we are all thinking of how Covid is contagious. We hear this all the time with suggestions of social distancing, masking, and all the rest. Then we also hear that social distancing and masking is not enough from some people and that it is harmful from other people. It is hard to know what to believe, but what most people do is trust their feelings: wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, social distance or don’t social distance, have parties or don’t have parties. Watching out for a viral contagion is difficult but you can find your way and do your best. Not so with emotional contagion and intellectual contagion.

Conspiratorial ideas, whether truly delusional or not, create a strong emotion. Witness the recent events in the Capital where people truly believed that it was possible to storm the Capital building and somehow change the course of democracy as it has operated for 250 years. These were not crazy people. They were, in my estimation, “true believers,” namely people who believe so heartily in President Trump, that they could take his words, his suggestion, and then broaden it into action. It is debatable whether Trump really wanted the crows to invade the Capital as it happened, something like the French revolution when outraged Frenchmen stormed to gates of the aristocracy. I doubt that these people were delusional although it is possible that some of them might have been. What happened, at least in my mind, was that there was a crowd effect, largely driven by powerful emotion and belief. The same crowd effect occurred during some Black Lives Matter marches when a few people, obviously overcome with emotion, did physical damage to property, and in some circumstances damage to people. Crazy, if we call it that, is contagious because it is profoundly emotional, which then filters into one’s cognition to justify the emotionally-based delusion. There is actually a formal diagnosis, rarely used, but quite real, called “shared psychotic experience.” I have encountered it only a couple times in my career.

It is not only “crazy” that is contagious. All things are contagious. Specifically, both depression and anxiety are contagious. This means that if you are around someone who suffers from depression or anxiety, you will most certainly feel the symptoms of these disorders. We therapists need to be quite aware of the contagion effect as we deal with people who might, indeed, be profoundly depressed or anxious. But this awareness is not limited to therapists. I suggest you be aware of the people around you who are, for instance, depressed, anxious, moody, or even delusional because too much exposure to such things will rub off on you.

Interestingly, you can also “catch” good feeling, like hope, faith, trust, love, and joy. Note how you feel when you are around someone who has one or more of these feelings in their nature or their presentation. Sadly, there are not many people who feel these things with our current deluge of politically motivated statements from all quarters. It behooves us to find people who feel good about life if we are to feel good about life. This can be a challenge especially if you are in some difficult situation, or your family or friend is in some difficult situation, because you would normally want to talk about the situation. Indeed, you need to talk but not with joining in with delusional, depressing, or anxiety-driven conversation, nor with conversation with false hope and simple answers. It is no small task.

Avoid the crazy

You can deal with delusional thoughts by noting how you feel emotionally. You will feel afraid. If you are around depression, you will feel depressed, and when you’re around anxiety, you will feel anxious. Not so bad to feel these things for a few moments, maybe minutes, but not more. Note when you start to absorb the “crazy” and quickly find a way out of the conversation. This may not always be easy. I needed to stay with my patient for a half hour as he talked to me about his delusions. I am not even sure that he really believes these conspiracy theories. Perhaps, he just absorbed them from a good friend. It doesn’t matter where he came to believe such things, nor does it matter how deeply he believes them. It doesn’t even matter whether some of what he says is actually true. What matters is that crazy incites crazy. Likewise, depression incites depression, anxiety incites anxiety, anger incites anger, and so on. You don’t need someone else’s crazy. You have enough of your own. You need to keep your distance.

Keeping you distance means trusting your feelings, namely when you begin to feel things that are not good for you, like anger or fear. If you are with someone and hearing their stories but begin to feel such things, you need to first be aware of your feelings, realize that you have “caught” someone else’s feeling, and then get away as soon as you can. This might take some socially delicate maneuver, but you need not feel what someone else feels if it is bad for you.

Feeling what someone else feels, whether joyful or sad, is not always a bad thing. It can be very good to feel sad with someone who has had a loss or feel truly joyful with someone when they tell you about their success in life. My concern is not to keep your social distance from any and all emotion but to be aware of the emotion that people bring to you because all emotion is contagious. Emotion is wonderful, and there are rare times when it is valuable to be afraid and to be angry. Rare times. There are more times when it is valuable to be joyful or sad because these emotions have to do with love, not defense

Life’s Issues and Challenges: It’s All about Trauma

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, Opportunity, Spiritual

A colleague, Jackie, recently told me about an experience she had had with an attorney. This colleague does quite a bit of family therapy and has a long history of having been involved in families that are usually quite dysfunctional. “Dysfunctional” is not one of my favorite words, but it means that the adults in the family were not mature: not mature emotionally and hence not mature socially. Jackie said that she indicated that there had been a good deal of trauma in the family, particularly with the father in the family. The lawyer who was litigating the case, which had to do with custody and care of the children, asked Jackie “how much training she had had in trauma.” I don’t know exactly how Jackie answered the question, but she said a most profound statement to me at that moment: “It’s all about trauma, isn’t it, Ron?” I agreed. It’s all about trauma.  To talk about trauma one is usually led to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder.

What is trauma? And what is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

There is some debate about what “trauma” means, and rightly so because the word trauma has been increasingly used in the culture, not only by therapists but by many other professionals and by many people who just live ordinary lives. There is general agreement among mental health practitioners that trauma is the following:

  • An unexpected negative event in a person’s life
  • An event that had some kind of negative impact on the person
  • An event that had a substantial amount of emotion connected with it, primarily the emotion of fear, and then secondarily of anger and sadness

Note that this definition of trauma is not the definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that we hear about so frequently. PTSD is a condition that includes the elements noted above plus two other elements:

  • A failure to express the emotions associated with the negative event.
  • We refer to these emotions as being “repressed” although importantly, there is not a conscious decision by the person to repress these emotions.
  • A reaction that is one or more of the normal reactions to a negative event:
    • Fight
    • Flight
    • Freeze
  • There is a significant neurological (brain) change due to the trauma and the repression of emotions associated with the original negative event
  • These emotions, not expressed at the time of the negative event, return to the person’s life at a later time, hours or years later.
  • There are often “re-traumatizing” events that occur later in the person’s life.

Trauma and PTSD are very real and very important. Unfortunately, there are at least three errors made in regard to PTSD:

  • The person fail to recognize that s/he has been traumatized and suffers PTSD
  • The person actually does not suffer from PTSD but finds the “diagnosis” a kind of justification for some kind of self-damaging behavior
  • The genuine PTSD or false PTSD causes social damage.
    • Damage from genuine PTSD comes because the real PTSD continues to affect the individual’s social life.
    • Damage from the artificial PTSD comes as the person artificially blames his/her past alleged trauma for harmful social behavior.

So the situation of trauma and PTSD is murky because of these complexities. Here, I will focus on genuine trauma and the PTSD that results from it. Anything can be traumatic. Any trauma can lead to PTSD. Furthermore, different people deal differently with the traumas in their lives. Something that is traumatic to one person is not necessarily traumatic to another person.

Examples of traumas

We normally think of traumas and PTSD in the realm of war trauma and sexual trauma. Specifically, people who have suffered trauma while in a theater of war very often suffer PTSD (while most soldiers do not suffer PTSD). People who have suffered genuine sexual abuse very often suffer PTSD (almost all sexual abuse victims do suffer PTSD). I will discuss these issues momentarily, but I have seen traumas and resulting PTSD from at least the following traumas:

  • A child was traumatized in utero for some reason including
    • A chemical damage, such as the mother taking damaging drugs
    • A hormonal imbalance due to mother’s biology
    • A fetus in utero damaged by the emotional imbalance of mother or the emotional disturbance of the parents
    • A long-term painful pregnancy
    • A difficult birth, e.g. an extended time of labor
    • The child was not planned
    • The child was not wanted
  • Early infancy difficulties:’
    • Birth is traumatic. Freud talked about “birth trauma.” Think about it: the fetus doesn’t need to eat, breathe, or eliminate, much less talk or walk. Then, rather suddenly, s/he has to breathe, taking in air into the lungs that have never had air before.
    • Feeding difficulties
    • Sleeping difficulties
    • Emotional disturbance in the family
    • Change of geography of the family
    • The addition of another child to the family within the first year or two, which requires the parents to limit the time they can spend with the older child
  • Toddler years difficulties:
    • Neglect
    • Abuse
    • Indulgence
    • Shame
    • All of above
  • Childhood
    • All of the foregoing toddler difficulties
    • Bullying at school
    • Academic challenges at school due to some form of learning disability
    • Physical/medical difficulties that restrict the child’s activity
    • Some kind of social rejection
    • Difficult teacher
    • Difficult adult (relative, significant person in the family)
  • Adolescence
    • All of above
    • Alcohol or drug use
    • Failure to identify a vocational direction
    • Social relationships that lead to some form of antisocial activity
  • Adulthood
    • All of above
    • Any adult trauma, such as a loss of person, place, or thing as well as separations and changes in jobs, geography, loved ones, and friendships.
    • There may also be traumas associated with parenting and other responsibilities that come along with adulthood.
    • There are also what Freud called “repetitive compulsions,” namely traumas that are created by individuals in a vain attempt to resolve early childhood traumas; e.g. marrying an abusive or neglectful individual hoping to have the early trauma magically resolved.
  • Intergenerational trauma
    • This is a bit hard to understand, but there is clearly trauma that occurred to our relatives that trickled down to us in the form of emotional or cognitive images of danger.
    • More interesting yet is the more recent finding that traumas that occurred to our great grandparents or earlier actually changed their DNA structure, and hence affected generations to come. The Black community seemingly still suffers from slavery, possibly both culturally and biologically.

Now, let’s look at what can be done about old traumas and PTSD:

Resolving traumas and PTSD

Importantly, all traumas are resolved, however difficult that may be to believe. There is strong evidence that it is not necessary to continue to suffer PTSD if a traumatized individual is able to find resolution to the original trauma(s). What does “resolution” mean? It means “completing the emotional process that was stunted when the original trauma occurred. Simply put, it means finding, feeling, and “finishing” the emotions that occurred…but were repressed…when the individual was traumatized. I have written about “finishing unfinished emotions” in previous blogs, but in a nutshell, it means feeling the original fear, anger, and sadness that are always associated with any trauma, particularly fear, which is our most basic emotion, one that keeps us alive. Finishing fear is most difficult because the brain gets in the way of finishing fear. You might check out my previous blog on finishing fear, noting that anxiety in any form (worry, panic, nervousness, or fear itself) is very resilient to change because of our most primitive brain function: stay alive at any cost, including the cost of staying anxious.

Anxiety, fear, worry, and the like are all forms of PTSD and can be felt and finished, e.g.:

  • Generational trauma, like slavery
  • War or sexual traumas
  • Social traumas
  • Physical/medical traumas
  • Loss of any kind

If you find a competent therapist to help you “finish” the traumas in your life and be free…yes completely free…of anxiety, you will need to face each and every trauma and loss you have had in your life where you did not allow yourself (or were not allowed) to feel the feelings of fear, sadness, anger, and sadness. If you do this, you will discover that sadness replaces both fear and anger (as Deb and I wrote in our earlier book and unpacked further in our recent book). So you must be prepared to feel more sadness, possibly a great deal of sadness when you start facing, feeling, and finishing the fear that caused your anxiety. Sadness always ends…if you allow it to run its course. Fear and anxiety do not naturally end; they just cause physical and social difficulties.

Many other things occur when you are no longer anxious, like increased confidence, increased humility, and decreased concern about yourself, and increased commitment to do something for the world with all the energy you now have at your disposal. Furthermore, when you are not thinking about and worrying about yourself, what might happen to you, and what people might think of you.

Yes, it is all about trauma, but more importantly, it is all about love: love of things, love of people, and love of ideas. More importantly, love of yourself, which always leads to self-confidence, humility and graciousness

Intention and Production

Ron Johnson communication, Personality, political, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

It is important to produce. It is equally important to intend to produce. But these two ways of engaging the world are profoundly different, a difference we might call spiritual. I conceive of these elements of psychological life on a spectrum with purpose in the center of the spectrum, something like this:

Intention…………..……….……Purpose…………………………..Production

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This might seem unduly abstract and theoretical, but all ow me to suggest how this paradigm might be helpful in understanding how you engage the world, and perhaps better understand how other people engage the world. In fact, unless you are one of the rare people who reside somewhere in the middle, you are probably largely on one side of this spectrum. Furthermore, you probably have some trouble with people who are on the other side of the spectrum. Roughly, people who favor intention need to have a direction to where they go compared to people who favor production who just go. Both “intenders” and “producers” have a purpose in what they are doing and where they are going, but their perspectives of how to get to this purpose are quite different.

Deb and I are on different sides of this spectrum, Deb being distinctly on the intention side whereas I am distinctly on the productive side of the spectrum. We share many elements of psychology and agree on most things that have to do with thinking and feeling, but where we differ is in the third element of life: how we go about engaging life with a purpose. I am sure this is yet too abstract for many of you, perhaps especially people who tend to be “producers.” Furthermore, even the terminology that I am using is less than distinct and less easily useful. Deb has brought this matter of “intention” to me recently as we look into this year and the days or years that we might have yet to live. We have found ourselves frequently musing, often talking, sometimes reading, and sometimes writing about what the future might bring. Talk about intension has intensified with Deb recently as she has made some changes in her work schedule and work place. Let me first discuss the nature of the American world in specific and the world at large in general in regards to the intention-production phenomenon. Then I will suggest ways in which you might understand how you go about life, and hopefully do a bit better engaging the other people in your life who might share your perspective or have a different perspective.

America is primarily productive

This is an important place to start because the very basic flavor of America is and has always been production, much more than intention, this despite the fact that the founders of the United States were actually people of intention. A careful look at the Constitution, but much more so, the Declaration of Independence, will show you that it was the intention of the founders to establish a democratic republic much more than their having an idea of how that intention would work out in producing a democratic republic. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (both of them), Hamilton, and Franklin were certainly intenders more than producers. Many later Presidents, particularly Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant were more producers. In between we find Lincoln, who most certainly was an intender but eventually became perhaps the most important producer President we have ever had. I will leave this thought for your reading and musing and turn to the functional nature of America as it unfolded.

Despite the fact that the founders were largely intenders, almost to the person, the country was young, incredibly capable of expansion with resources beyond comprehension, became a country dominated by production and all that goes with it. I will not belabor the point, but the very fabric of America is doing, producing, and having things.  It is not why we do, produce and have. It is not much about how we might effectively use such things. Look at what is said from most of our political leaders, and you will hear of doing, producing and having. You will not hear of intention except by inference. It seems to me that our current President is thoroughly a producer, not an intender. We will discuss the challenges that Trump has and other people like him have later.

Compare America to any other developed country in the world, particularly China and Japan in the East and most of Europe in the West. We could also look at native cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but we must delay that discussion. It is likely that the relative youth of America and the relative longer life of China, Japan, and Europe might be part of the reason America is so production oriented compared to the philosophies of China, Japan, and Europe to say nothing of the philosophies of the Middle East (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

So, if you’re more of a producer, like I am, life has probably been easier for you in America than your spouse, friend, daughter, or father who might be intenders. In my own family my brother was very significantly an intender, as was my mother while my father was almost completely a producer with my sister somewhere in between. My brother struggled heartily in this family dominated by my father’s production-orientation, and truly never recovered from the debates he had with our father, nor did he succeed in the world of work that is heavily production-based. It was much easier for me. I just did things. Bill considered doing things. This made life more challenging for Bill than it was for me, but we producers also have our challenges

The challenges of intention and production

Part of the challenge of understanding this intention-production paradigm is in the very words that we use. Words, at least normally used words, tend to fall into the producing side of the spectrum of paradigm of purpose. In fact, a case could be made for suggesting that words themselves are more inclined to value production over intention. This is one of the challenges that intenders have when they engage the (American) world: there isn’t a (normal English) vocabulary for intenders Consider what you might hear from someone you talk to someone:

  • What’s happening?
  • What’s going on in your life?
  • What are you doing?
  • What’s new in your life?
  • How has the problem being solved?

The operative words here are how and what. These are not particularly words of intention. They are words of doing or producing. You would rarely hear from your friend questions that are more of intention, like:

  • What have you been thinking lately?
  • What have you been feeling lately?
  • What have you been musing about lately?
  • What is your intention for the day?
  • Much less:
    • What is your intention for life?
    • What is your purpose in life?
    • What is important to you?
    • Why did you do this or that?

People just don’t talk this way for the most part. Note the difference between the “what” questions for intenders compared to the “what” questions for the producers. What questions for intenders are those of thought or feeling, not so much of actual doing.

Challenges are not so basic for producers living in America, but there are challenges nevertheless. Their challenges have to do with the result of being tired of all the things they do, doing something in a hurry to just get it done, doing something so perfectly that it never seems to get done, and other difficulties that come with a person who is always doing. The value system here is ultimately the same for intenders and producers, namely purpose, but the ways of getting there are substantially different. When I go about a purpose, like writing this blog, I “just start” with no particular intention other than to write something that might be of value to one or two people who might read this blog. I don’t sit back and see how I might go about writing, consider it more, write a bit, muse about it, correct it, and then perhaps set it aside until my passion builds to go back to writing. I just write. You might see the occasional unfortunate results of my “just writing,” namely in the spelling errors that I so often make. People who write from an intentional persuasion often think ten times more than they write, and many fine writers never finish anything because they get lost in the intention but fail to produce. I have a cousin who has been writing a screenplay for 10 or 15 years, and he seems quite satisfied with this way of going about writing, but his sister, much the producers of the family, can’t see the value of his intending to write the screenplay of the century. I think that it doesn’t matter to him whether he will every finish the screenplay because his intention is to write it, not to produce it.

I will leave you to consider that President Trump is very much the doer/producer. You simply don’t hear anything about intention. It bemuses me to read commentators trying to understand what his intention is in what he says or does. I would suggest that he has no intention. He just does things. Much different is President Obama who was clearly much more the intender than the doer. Admitting to the extreme nature of the following, I might say that Obama had great intention but didn’t really do much. Trump has done all kinds of things, most of them wrong. Choose your poison. I think, but I’m not sure, that Biden might be somewhere in between.

So, roughly, the challenge of the intenders of the world is to actually do something, produce something, create something, whereas the challenge for producers is to stand back and see what might be the intention of what they want to do and then move slowly towards accomplishing it. Doing is good, but not good enough; you need to do something of value, perhaps lasting value. Dreaming is good but also not good enough; you need to do something that might also have lasting value. Good luck intending and producing.