Author: Ron Johnson

You Value What You See

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Personality, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

I don’t see much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but there’s lots of truth in it. An important part of this “not seeing much” is related to the fact that I am colorblind. Not seriously so, like people who actually don’t see colors at all and live in a kind of black-and-white world, as I have a red/green colorblindness, which is the most common. So when Deb asks me to look at the (red) tulips in the yard, I can see them only if they are pretty close to me, but when far away, I can’t distinguish the red tulips from the green foliage. There are lots of other times when I mix colors or fail to distinguish colors. I have failed to distinguish red, green, brown, and gray depending on the depth of the color and what might be the background confusing the “cones” in my eyes. I recall the first time everyone realized that I was colorblind because my paternal grandfather asked me to plug the meter in his green Nash standing right in front of his office building where he could watch me from 6 stories up. Mom and he watched as I plugged the meter of the brown Nash right next to his green one. Colorblindness comes through the mother’s side of the family and rarely affects girls, so my maternal uncle was colorblind, my daughter not, but her son is. It is funny to play Sorry with Gavin when we struggle to distinguish the green movers from the red ones. Enough about the colorblindness, already. What does this have to do with anything important in life? It’s not terribly important if you or I are colorblind, but it is dreadfully important to know what we see and what we don’t see because we actually see different things.

First, let’s enlarge upon the word see for a moment. We can use this word “see” to include at least all five senses and possibly the “sixth sense” of intuition. Intuition is very close to the feelings that I have disused at length in previous blogs, but for our current purposes, we shall use the word intuition as a kind of sixth sense. Then we can use the word “see” to include all the ways people gather information: seeing (physically), hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and by intuition. I mention this 6-part way of “seeing” as a way of dealing with several important factors in one’s psychological makeup, not the least of which is that there are great differences among people in the way they see things. Some people are particularly good at seeing through one of their six senses, and some people are good at using all of their senses. Furthermore, there are people called synesthetic, who actually integrate their senses so much that they do such things as “taste the color blue,” smell the green grass, feel “touched” the thing that they hear, and many other combinations. There is at least one good book on the phenomenon of synesthesia and many articles, some of them in the popular genre. Blind people often have developed a particularly sense of hearing, and deaf people are often particularly good at seeing with their eyes. Beyond the fact that many people have a preference for one or two senses, there are people who aren’t particularly good at using any of their senses.

Beyond the use of the physical five senses plus intuition, there are some very interesting things about what we see that are very close to many other psychological factors, not the least of which is what we value. Think of it this way: if you don’t really care much about colors, as is largely true for me, you won’t really see colors, or if you do, you won’t care much about colors. Thankfully, Deb chooses my ties every day and often chooses my suits, jackets, pants, and shirts. I care about how I look but I don’t care about colors particularly as Deb has learned over our 40 some years together.

Having briefly presented some information about what we see with our eyes, what we see with the other physical senses, what we see with intuition, and also what we value, allow me to tell you a bit about a very important understanding that was made a century ago. Carl Jung, psychoanalyst and psychologist was a student of Sigmund Freud around the turn of the last century but came to believe that Freud’s understanding of the human condition was not sufficient to help people grapple with the difficulties in their lives. He proposed. Among many other things, that people had substantially different personality structures, one of which was the way that people see things. He referred to this structure as the perceptive function. Jung observed that people seemed to attend to very different things, perhaps see different things, and certainly value different things. Simply stated, Jung suggested that there is a spectrum of these differences representing how, what, and why people saw, attended to, and valued different things. He called these two different ways of seeing “intuitive” and “sensing,” terms that have continued to be used for the past century. I have found it more valuable to use the terms “objective” and “subjective” in explaining these differences of seeing. Thus the spectrum of perception is:

_______________________________________/______________________________________

Objective (Sensing)                                                                                     Subjective (intuition)

 

There have been scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of pages written on Jung’s understanding of personality, so permit me to simply indicate how people with these different perspectives see the world.

Objective (sensing) people tend to:

  • See what is real
  • See what is factual
  • Value the physical world
  • Engage the physical world
  • Produce something
  • Examine things (and people) individually

Subjective (intuitive) people tend to:

  • See what is unreal
  • See what is possible
  • Regard the nonphysical world
  • Engage the nonphysical world
  • Create something
  • Examine things (and people) relationally

There are many more things that can be said of these important ways of looking at the world, and nay interested reader will have no difficulty finding relevant material on this subject. My point in presenting this difference in seeing is to highlight the strengths of both of these ways of seeing, and to shed some light on some of the difficulties people have engaging these different worlds (physical and nonphysical), as well as the difficulties people have relating to one another.

For purposes of personal revelation I should note that I am particularly on the objective side of this spectrum, namely being a person who sees the real world and engages the real world. However, I am married to someone who sees the unreal world and engages quite well with this world. Furthermore, I have had the opportunity of living with my 14-year old grandson for the past three months who is distinctly on the subjective side of the spectrum of perception. The interesting thing about living with these two people who share this subjective way of seeing the world is in their seminaries in how and what they see and ultimately what they value. Additionally, as would be expected, they display differences in maturity that come with being either 14 or 65. Deb grew up in a very objective family and learned how to deal with the objective elements of the world, so from her earliest years she knew how to engage the physical world, reflected to some degree in the way she cared for property. My grandson did not grow up in such an environment largely because his mother took undue care for all the property in her household leaving my grandson to be able to continue undisturbed in engaging the “unreal” world, more accurately described as the “possible world”. It has been remarkable for me to see Gavin who is truly “subjective” in what he sees compared to my wife who also sees the subjective but also engages the objective world. This has given me an opportunity of seeing a bit clearer what subjective people “see” and hence what they do with what they see, and what they value because of what they see. This can be simply summarized in the matter of socks.

Socks? Yes. Some weeks ago, before I had truly grasped the differences in how my grandson and I “see” the world, I noticed that he had left his socks on the bathroom floor when we were visiting our cabin up north. I noticed the socks after he showered for the day. I noticed them at noon, again at 5 PM, and at 8. I noticed the socks because I notice such things. At 8 o’clock I asked Gavin to look in the bathroom and see what might be “wrong,” which was an interesting word I chose for what he saw. He immediately said that he saw the socks on the floor. I then asked him if he had seen the socks on the floor during the several times he had gone into the bathroom during the day. He said that he hadn’t seen the socks. While hard for me to believe, I came to the immediate realization that he hadn’t actually seen the socks. I thought, “How can someone walk into a (relatively small) bathroom and not see the socks that are on the floor?” But this wasn’t so much a question as it was a rhetorical question, something that I restrained myself from asking because such questions only stir shame rather than instruct.

Since the incident with the socks there have been perhaps several hundred such incidents over these past 12 weeks that Gavin has been with us, many of which I ignored, many of which I attended to by picking things up, and many of which I asked Gavin to attend to. This experience of “socks” and all that the socks represent has stirred a new understanding of people who have the subjective way of looking at the world.

I know this: it is the subjective people of the world who have made the most important discovering and improvements in the world, not the objective people like me. This very blog is a testament to this fact: nothing that I have written is “new” because Jung and his predecessors “discovered” this difference in perception long ago. Theologian Soren Kierkegaard predated Jung by nearly a hundred years and said the following about how people perceive. He called objective folks “people of possibility” and subjective folks “people of reality.” Then he went on to note the difficulties that both kinds of people have:

  • People of reality do everything but nothing (or very little) is of value
  • People of possibility do nothing (or very little), and everything they dream about is valuable

There are many more musings on this matter, not the least of which is what we value. Thus, Gavin values what he might do rather than what he does, whereas I value what I have done more than what I might do. I’m sure it’s been a challenge for Gavin to live with me for these past months and it certainly has been a challenge to live with him. More importantly, this is not about Gavin and me. It is about what we see and what we value, and ultimately how we can understand and value one another.

Further Reading

Jung, C. (1921/1974). Psychological types. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen

Myers. I.B. (1980). Gifts differing. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press

Johnson, R. (1993). Watch your temperament. Madison, WI: Midlands Psychological Press

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.

The Joy/Sadness Dyad of Love

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Spiritual

Do you ever feel “emotional”? Yes, just “emotional” without any real kind of definition to what this means. The symptoms of being emotional are often a tearing up in some way. You might feel something physically in another part of your body, probably depending on your personality type and temperament. You might have an immediate thought or take some course of action, but there is a predominance of emotion. I have come to think that this feeling “emotional” is a very important experience, one that needs to be noticed, allowed, understood, and possibly expressed because I’m quite sure that this experience has love written all over it.

Previously, I have written about how sadness is “a love problem,” which means exactly this: when I am sad, I am in a state of grief for having lost something that I love. This “thing” that I have lost usually will be a person, a piece of property, or an idea. There are other losses that lead to sadness, like loss of opportunity, loss of a game, loss of some physical ability, and perhaps other forms of losses, but the primary losses that stir our emotions are people, property, and ideas. Deb and I wrote extensively about losses and the centrality of sadness in any kind of loss in our The Positive Power of Sadness book published a couple years ago, yet we continue to find new and important things related to this whole sadness matter. In this blog would like to take apart this “love problem” thing that includes sadness but also includes joy because I think there are many times, often when we feel “emotional” that we feel both joy and sadness simultaneously.

As often happens in therapy, I often feel “emotional,” i.e. tearful when I am working with a patient. I have found that if I can carefully speak of my feeling emotional or tearful, the man in front of me says something like, “Yes, I feel the same thing.” People familiar with psychoanalysis will note that this kind of encounter has to do with transference and countertransference that are both frequent and probably essential ingredients of any good psychotherapy. Simply put, transference is the feeling the patient has for the therapist, while countertransference is the feeling the therapist has for the patient. These feelings can often turn into emotion (note the distinction, by the way between “feelings” and emotion, with emotion a subset of feelings). The emotion can be any of the four basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, or fear, and these emotions, often triggered by physical sensations, can lead to some kind of thought or action. (Forgive the complexity of this matter as this sentence is a summary of two chapters in our forthcoming book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel.) There are many times of everyday life that are like this, namely when a person has an emotional moment (erupting out of one’s feelings, of course). Before we look at some examples of these important times of emotional experience, allow me to set the stage with a bit of theory.

The experience of love always has both joy and sorrow in it

Well, probably not always…but I could make a case for “usually.” My point is this: when I feel this emotional moment, I feel some kind of true love, be it person, property, or idea. Very often, this love is for a person, and perhaps people bring these emotional moments more than property or things. My point is that when I feel this emotion that brings tears, this experience is so basically loving that it is simultaneously joy and sadness. When people try to explain what they feel at these moments, they usually use the term emotional, or perhaps sadness, but rarely do they see that joy is equally a part of the experience. I have come to see that these emotional moments are quite important in life and need to be recognized and treasured. They may also need to be expressed, but any expression of the emotion (and the feeling under the emotion) might actually take away from the feeling because we are inclined to explain why we feel something more than just feeling it.

Just feeling something can be done quite easily once one realizes that an emotional moment is really a love moment. If you can do that, you will be able to tear up, cry, or perhaps even sob as you allow yourself these moments to be a part of you. Extraverts will be inclined to want to share these moments, while introverts will want to keep them private. Nothing wrong with either pose, but it is important for extraverts to know that there not everyone wants or needs to hear their feelings all the time, and it is equally important for introverts to know that they can too easily hide their feelings for fear of being misunderstood. My main point is: feel it first; value the feeling second, and then decide whether it is valuable for you and your audience to express this feeling.

 

Examples of feeling emotional

I am not an animal person as compared to almost everyone else in my family. You will never see me cuddle up to some dog or cat that happens to be in the vicinity, nor do I take any kind of great joy in seeing deer cross the road or geese flying overhead. My grandson sees all of God’s creatures, large and small; my sister has always had at least one dog, and for a time had a room full of birds…jut normal birds that somehow ended up in the house; my daughter, Krissie, loved dogs. Animal people can easily have an “emotional moment” when they see some animal. I watch as these folks seem to necessarily touch their chests while simultaneously coming out with a verbal or nonverbal expression of joy. Good for them. They are experiencing love, usually the joy side of love, but I have also seen the sadness side of love when they see an animal is in distress.

I see many examples of this sadness/joy experience with clients. Recently, I was with a man who is quite a “caretaker” by temperament and also a thinking-based person (INTJ for those of you who know the Myers-Briggs). Jim has been working diligently to suffer through and get through a serious depression, which he is doing marvelously, almost entirely by recognizing what he feels, predominantly the feeling of emotion. When was with him the other day while hearing his thoughts and surmising his feelings, I felt somewhat “emotional,” and after a moment, I told him so. This led to more than 30 minutes of his simply feeling “emotional” replete with a few teardrops. Throughout this period of time the mainstay of his experience was, in his words, “God’s comfort.” This led him to conclude that he needed to trust God more, and along the way, trust people more. Thus, Jim noticed what he felt physically, stayed with what he felt emotionally, thought what he felt cognitively, and then felt led to do something about this feeling. Thus, it was the emotion that was so important for him that led him into thinking and doing.

I have had many such times, often daily, where I feel this amorphous joy/sadness experience, sometimes alone, more often with someone, rarely with nature. Nature people, often simultaneously animal people, feel this joy/sadness/love experience quite frequently, whether sunset, sunrise, full moon (last night by the way), or even rough weather. I had a friend years ago who was hunter and a real naturalist who just loved it when his hunting weather (usually fowl) was “nasty” as he said it. It just moved him to tears.

While not a naturalist by any means, I can read about nature, or history, or theology, or psychology, and become quite moved, not always, but sometimes to tears. I just love to learn something in one of these genres. Making sense of some piece of history, theology, or psychology is truly a love moment for me. I never could see how kids thought history was boring. Why would a person, like me for instance, come to tears with some new insight about psychology, history, or theology? I doubt that I am the only one.

By far the most predominant emotional moments occur with other people. Not long ago when writing about the loss of our dear daughter, Krissie, now nearly nine months ago, I noted how the sharing of her loss in some circumstance led to various people coming to tears. What were these tears about, especially with most of these people had never met us before, much less Krissie? They were tears of love replete with both the emotions of joy and sorrow. There was the woman at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the woman in the shoe repair shop who had lost her boss, the woman at the headwaters of the Mississippi, and more than a half dozen people at various Starbucks’ counters where Deb prefers to get espresso. Note, all women, but it doesn’t end there. I had an encounter with a man in my office during my very first Intake Assessment with him where we were talking about feelings in the larger sense, and emotion in the smaller sense. I mentioned the loss I had had with Krissie as a point of reference to emotion, and this guy was fraught with uncertainty as to how to handle his emotion. I had to help him allow himself to cry because, as ye said afterward, he “didn’t want to appear emotional.” In fact, his felt emotion was an act of love: both joy and sorrow. What was the joy? He loved Krissie, and at that moment he loved me although he is not emotionally mature enough to feel the “L” word, much less allow himself to express it

I encourage you to notice these “emotional moments”, allow for one or two tears, or more if necessary, and then note the love you have just experienced shown in this odd admixture of joy and sorrow.