Author: Ron Johnson

Temperament I

Ron Johnson Personality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the first of what I suspect will be several blogs on “temperament,” something I have been interested in for about 45 years. Let me indulge myself with a bit of history here, namely how I came into this idea of “temperament.” I started this rather odd profession of being a psychologist in 1966 right after I graduated from college and entered seminary. That would be 52 years ago. My first work was with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) as a campus minister doing what I suppose was a bit of “counseling” of undergraduates, who were then maybe two or three years younger than I was. Then through a chain of events I had the opportunity to be in a group of people who gathered weekly for an “encounter group,” which was, in a way, a part of an important movement adjacent to “The 60’s revolution” where everything was up for grabs, everything questioned, and many things challenged. It was an exciting time for me because it was a time where I could explore the many things that have continued to fascinate me for these past 52 years, and continue to fascinate me. While there were many excesses in the 60’s, it was an important time in America that had just finished the 50’s where everything was stable, the 40’s where we had war, and the 30’s where we had desperation. It was a time that many people challenged anything and everything. It was also a time where there was a great resistance to these challenges.

I challenged a lot. For instance, I challenged my quite Republican/conservative theology while simultaneously holding tightly to what I thought was a deeply Christian theology and value system. I challenged my seminary professors to such an extent that I was asked to “reapply” for my senior year because of my perceived recalcitrance. I thought I was just interested in finding the truth, but I was perceived as simply resistant and arrogant. Certainly there was some truth in their perception, but give me a break, I was a “Young Turk” of 23 and asking questions that I thought everyone should ask. I read an article in Look Magazine of all things, about Gene McCarthy and immediately became a follower of his politics. While in Portland, OR at the time I had the opportunity to hear Robert Kennedy speak the day he lost the OR primary but then won the CA Democratic primary the next day, minutes before he was assassinated. Challenge was good for me, but during these early 20’s I had no idea of the journey I was taking, a journey I am still on. I thought it was a good time to challenge everything, albeit with a respect for people of different opinions.

In this time of personal challenging I continued in this encounter group, which was my first real experience in real life psychology. The mode of the group was to experience and let it all hang out. In other words to trust your feelings, speak your feelings, and trust the truth that came out of speaking your feelings. This orientation to saying anything that came to your mind fit my extraverted nature quite well, but it took me years, if not decades, to learn to temper my expression of my thoughts and feelings. I mistakenly thought that everyone should be as extraverted as I was, which was an example of the excesses of the 60’s and the excesses of my experience in the 60’s. It seemed right to me to be able to challenge openly not realizing that I often offended people in my expressions of feelings, sometimes for a lifetime. It saddens me to see the many mistakes I made during these formative years. Yet in allowing myself to experience the joys of expression, I slowly learned that there is equal value in keeping one’s feelings and thoughts private, no small task for the flaming extravert that I am by nature.

Fast forward a bit: leave seminary 1, go to seminary #2 for my senior year, continue to challenge and have a deuce of a time finishing seminary. My continued challenges included coming to believe that no one will ever go to “hell” and maybe the Holy Scriptures weren’t not entirely accurate in everything they said, not positions that are commensurate with graduating from a conservative seminary. But graduate I did, albeit with mixed emotions, both on my part and at the part of my seminary. Thank God for Dr. Vernon Grounds, the president of Denver Seminary at the time, who for some unknown reason took me under his wing and steered me through these challenging years. Dr. Grounds, who had a PhD in psychology in addition to his theological studies, was now my second experience in psychology after the psychologist who led the encounter group in Portland. Yet I was still in the mode of seeing psychology too simply, namely “just let it all hang it out” and “say it the way it is.” Still the young Turk.

From seminary to graduate school at the University of Iowa, first in a pastoral counseling program, which turned out to be a bad fit and then into psychology proper, where I learned of psychological testing and diagnosing. I was in love again, this time with the categories of people by what was wrong with them. This guy was schizophrenic, this other guy was depressed, this gal was addicted, and the other one was anxious. Something seemed right about this finding ways of understanding people by seeing their problems, but something also seemed wrong about it as well. I didn’t have any other way to understand people given that the entirety of my training in psychology was, indeed, on what is wrong with people. Fast forward 4 years of graduate school in Iowa City into my first real job as a psychologist working for a psychiatrist in Council Bluffs, IA. Again, I learned from Dr. Rassekh, the psychiatrist for whom I worked, that the only way of understanding and categorizing people was by what was wrong with them. He was, indeed, brilliant in his diagnostic capacities, like spotting a guy in the lobby who he was convinced had a paranoid personality disorder without ever actually listening to him.

Fast forward again into my own practice that developed just a year after working for Dr. Rassekh, and then a couple years in. I had a thriving practice at that time, so much so that I hired several part-time therapists and now called my practice Midlands Psychological Associates, the name we have retained for nearly 50 years. One of these therapists went to a conference where he was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and he talked about this test as possibly valuable. The MBTI changed my perspective drastically. I immediately learned not only that I was “extraverted,” having thought that everyone should be, but I learned that it was equally valuable to be introverted, however hard that was at the time for me to understand. And the MBTI also had other categories of understanding people. Importantly, the MBTI looked at personality, not pathology; what is right about people, not what was wrong with them. The journey of understanding myself and people continued with a new perspective: what is right with people.

About the time that I became familiar with the MBTI, I started studying other ways of understanding people. This brought me to several personality theorists, some 2500 years old, like the Greek philosopher/psychologist Galen, and the others who followed him. I also was simultaneously looking at the work of people who found ways to integrate personality and pathology, like the outstanding psychotherapist, Dick Olney, who “reframed” Alexander Lowen’s fine work of “body diagnosis” into friendlier terms. As I looked at the patients I was seeing as well as looking at myself and my friends and family, I saw what became the cornerstone of what came to be the temperament system I created and have used for 40 years. I saw my daughter and then a patient by the name of Kevin who seemed to share some characteristics of living. I also noticed that I also had many of these characteristics, which seemed to center around playing. My daughter, Krissie, loved to play; Kevin loved to play, and I certainly loved to play. So I came up with the first of what became four temperaments, the player personality, and wrote a bit about people who were players. Many people, including my daughter whom I had previously thought of as “suffering” from ADHD, now seemed more accurately understood as players. I began to think of how I could help players be true to themselves but also engage society successfully, something that appeared to be a real challenge.

From seeing players as a rather distinct group, I put together a system of understanding people of different temperaments, namely four temperaments. I constructed a test called the Johnson Temperament Indicator (JTI) and began to use it regularly in my testing package, along with the MBTI and a bunch of other tests. We still use these tests, which patients first complain about having to spend 4 hours finishing only to see the great value of understanding themselves, namely “what is right about them.” While players, and people of all personality types and temperaments, are inclined to some kind of problems, I didn’t see people with problems first, but problems that often resulted from not finding ways to be who they are in meaningful, helpful, and valuable ways. Enough history, abbreviated as it may be, boring as it may be.

In following blogs l will discuss my four temperaments that I now see in people. While no one falls perfectly into any one of these boxes, most people find themselves relatively secure in one of them or perhaps two of them. The temperaments are:

  • Player
  • Lover
  • Caretaker
  • Analyst

The typical characteristics of these people are:

  • Players: seek experience, often excitement. They bring fun to live.
  • Lovers: seek human connections. They bring sacrifice to live.
  • Caretakers: protect property. They bring safety to life.
  • Analysts: seek meaning. They bring understanding to life.

Consider how you might fit into one or more of these temperaments. Then follow us as we unpack these four looking at strengths, possibilities, trials, and challenges of each.

 

Further Reading

Bates, E. and Wachs, T. (eds.) (2002). Temperament: individual differences at the interface of biology and behavior. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Keisey, D. and Bates, M. (1978). Please understand me: character and temperament types. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis Books.

Johnson, R. (1985). The Johnson Temperament Indicator (test). Available in our office.

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2018). Watch your temperament. Prepublication manuscript available in our office.

Ward, R.M. (1988). Blending temperaments: improving relationships—yours and others. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

The Cure for Anxiety

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Sadness. That is the cure for anxiety. But let me explain. Or you can read our book that devotes a whole chapter to the “cure for anxiety.” In this brief blog I will attempt to do several things:

  • Explain what anxiety is along with its cousins: worry, fretting, fear, and outright terror
  • Explain why anxiety is without a doubt one of the most resistant of all psychological difficulties people have, like depression, relationship problems, vocational problems, and general living problems.
  • Explain some of the underlying neurological functions that cause, create, and maintain anxiety once it gets into one’s psychological system

The neuropsychology

I distinguish the mind and the brain as I have explained in Mind over Matter blogs before. I use the term “mind” to describe our thinking, feeling, and acting. The brain is the machine the mind uses to do such things. There is great debate about this matter, however, with some very good neuropsychologists suggesting that the mind is the brain, while others, like myself, believe that there is an as yet undefined element in the human condition that we consider to be the operator of the brain. I’m afraid you’ll have to be content with the fact that we are all theorizing about how things work in the brain. But let me defer this discussion to previous blogs and other psychologists’ writings.

Aside from whether there is a real mind/brain difference, some things are quite well known. The brain (in my understanding) engages in only two operations that keep things going in the body: safety and pleasure. We discussed the pleasure side of the brain when we discussed “liking and wanting” as different operations of the brain, both related to pleasure. So this function of the brain seeks pleasure, mostly through chemicals, such as dopamine, and sometimes through electrical operations. The more important of the two things that the brain does, however, is safety. In other words, your brain works most diligently and constantly on keeping you alive. Central to this keeping you alive is the brain’s fantastic operation of keeping blood flowing in the body, originating in the heart and then to the rest of the body. Blood oxygenizes the body’s cells with blood and simultaneously cleanses these cells from material that needs to be dispenses. While the brain looks to pleasure when possible, something like 99% of the brain looks for safety. Our wonderful brain is doing this protection all the time, every second of our lives.

The brain is wonderful in protecting you and finding pleasure for you, these 100 neurons (brain cells) operating sometimes with trillions of connections to one another. But the brain is sort of stupid in anything else than pleasure and safety. For instance, the brain (again, not the mind) does not know what the mind knows, like love, trust, honesty, work, play, and the many other elements of character, relationships, and daily living. Importantly, the brain does not have an understanding of time. The brain does not know any difference between past, present, and future. In the brain, these three elements of time are all conceived as present. So when the brain senses that something might happen in the future, that future is right now or at best, a second or two in the future. This fact, namely that the brain doesn’t distinguish future from present is very important in the cause, maintenance, and ultimate cure for anxiety.

The brain’s resistance to threat

If you keep in mind that the brain is spending most of its time taking care of the body and protecting the body from harm, you get the picture as to why the brain needs to do this and how it does this. The brain (not the mind) has a startle reflex, for instance, that overrides anything else on your mind when you are started in some way, usually with a loud noise, but also sometimes by something visually that startles you, or perhaps even something that startles you in one of the other three senses (smell, taste, and touch). You don’t have to think, much less feel, when you touch a hot pan by accident while you’re cooking. You don’t have to think or feel when you see fire in that same kitchen. Your startle reaction operates in your olfactory lobe (smell) if you smell something odd in the kitchen. Startle reaction is just one of the ways the brain takes care of you by taking immediate action when the brain perceives something that is dangerous or could be dangerous because it is not within the norm of daily living.

The brain’s protective mechanism operates wonderfully all the time and keeps us alive. Unfortunately, this same protective mechanism also operates when there may not be any immediate or actual threat because the brain doesn’t distinguish a current threat from a future threat. When your brain senses some kind of threat, it goes into hyper drive in order to protect you from danger. This hyper drive comes in the forms of increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, increased breathing, and increased sensual awareness. Increased sensual awareness is in all five senses: sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. In other words, when the brain senses some threat, it garners all the defenses: chemical, electrical, and sensual to protect you from this perceived threat. These increases are much like what it may have been like for primitive humankind to be faced with the sight of a lion coming over the hill: the brain sees the lion and immediately does the chemical and electrical changes in your body so that you can run. Hopefully, the brain churned up these defenses in time for you to protect yourself. If a lion were chasing you in the Serengeti, for instance, you would be experiencing a pretty high level of anxiety, like life-and-death anxiety. Thank you brain for keeping you aware of possible escape routes from the charging lion.

The cause of anxiety

Anxiety is devastating. It is a well-known fact that that many, if not most, visits to the ER have at least some anxiety driving these visits. Millions of people have thought they were having heart attacks, raced to the ER, and had all kinds of expensive tests, only to find out that there “was nothing wrong with them,” often to their great disappointment. Anxiety has many forms, including the rather popular current diagnoses of PTSD and OCD, but more often anxiety is what is called “free-floating.” In other words, people “just feel anxious for no apparent reason.” Well, there is a reason but it is not that they are having heart attacks or making this stuff up to get attention. Nor is it true that “nothing is wrong with them.” Something is “wrong,” but it has nothing to do with their bodies or minds. What is wrong is that their brains have somehow concluded that the lion is coming over the hill, or something equally dangerous. Why would the brain think such a thing? Most of us don’t roam the Serengeti and few of us have to contend with lions around. The brain should know that, so it seems. The brain does not know that. The brain thinks something very much like “the lion is coming over the hill, so you have to be hypervigilant.

How does this happen. How does the brain think something crazy like the lion is coming after you when there is no lion? It does so because the brain has heard a message from the mind that there is some immediate danger. So, the brain goes into its normal operation of increasing heartrate, blood flow, breathing, and hypervigilance to keep you hyperaware of your surroundings. Anxiety is essentially hyperawareness. Why?

The brain creates what we call anxiety for you to be hyperaware of your surroundings and “protect you from the lion coming over the hill.” The brain does not distinguish different kinds of dangers. The brain does not distinguish dangers: danger is danger, whether it is the spider or the lion. So anything that the brain determines is some kind of threat will start the chain reaction in the brain of upping the various elements of the body to protect you, primarily by making you hypervigilant.

Not only does not brain fail to distinguish kinds of threats, the brain does not distinguish the present from the future. And this the crux of the problem with anxiety. When you think of something aversive that might happen in the future, it is your mind that is doing this thinking, not your brain. Let’s say your boss has called a meeting with you on Monday morning but she didn’t tell you what she wanted to talk to you about. This kind of situation can cause “anxiety,” namely worrying about what your boss might say to you, or God forbid, that you might get demoted or fired. So it seems natural that you would worry about this future meeting. Unfortunately, your brain does not know any of this: it does not know that you work, it does not know you have a boss, it does not know about the meeting, and it does not know about the future. So, when you brain hears from your mind that you have a potential meeting that could be deleterious for you, your brain assumes “the lion is coming over hill,” and wants to send you into hyper drive.

Then, to make matters worse, your brain sort of “talks” back to your mind about this potential danger because the brain can’t think. It is the mind that thinks. The message from the mind to the brain started this cycle moving by telling the brain that there is some danger. You brain assumed this danger was immediate and started the hypervigilance, but it didn’t stop there. The brain then sent the mind the message that the mind needed to figure out what to do. Now we have this ongoing cycle with the mind telling the brain that there is danger and the brain talking back to the mind asking the mind to figure it out. So the mind tries to figure it out. How does the mind do that? By worrying about worst case scenarios like, “If he fires me, where will I get another job?” or “if he criticizes me for my performance, how can I defend myself” and the like. Of course this fretting does no good but, all the while the brain is sort of insisting that the mind come up with a solution to the problem it perceives as “the lion coming over the hill.”

Unless there is some way to stop this cycle of considering danger (the mind), reacting to danger (the brain), and then fretting (the mind again), anxiety will stay present and very possibly increase. If the brain determines that there is no immediate solution to what it perceives as the lion coming, it will do what it does: create more hypervigilance. How do we break this cycle?

The cure of anxiety

Read the first word again in this blog: sadness. The cure for anxiety is sadness, however odd that sounds. This is what I mean: you have to face the potential loss, feel this potential loss by feeling sad, and resolve this sadness. Easily said, not easily done. Anxiety in all its forms (fear, worry, fretting) keeps therapists busy trying to calm people down and physicians busy prescribing anxiolytics to treat the symptoms of anxiety. But neither really works to cure anxiety. There is no “settling down” someone who is in a state of anxiety because the brain perceives “the lion is coming over the hill.” You can’t talk to the brain about jobs, meetings, and the like, and you certainly can’t talk to the brain about the future because the brain, this wonderful machine, has no capacity to understand such things. You have to get the mind involved. You have to get the mind and the brain to work together the way these two elements work together 99% of the time. How do you do that?

You cure anxiety by considering the loss you might have, feeling sad about this potential loss, and allow this sadness to end. This is what you need to do: truly consider the worst case scenario. In our theoretical case, you need to consider that you would be fired. Then you have to feel sad about possibly being fired. This is what we call anticipatory sadness because you are anticipating some important loss in the future and allowing yourself to feel the sadness about this possible loss. It sounds crazy, I know, but this is the only way to cure anxiety, namely feeling sad in the present about something that might happen in the future. Note the tenses here: feeling sad in the present for something that might happen in the future. You can learn to do this with a little practice, but let me warn you, you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to feel sad about losing a job that is important to you; you don’t want to consider that your daughter with cancer might die; you don’t want to consider that your house will be robbed. And you don’t want to feel sad about these things because they haven’t happened. You know that they haven’t happened. But this “you” is your mind, not your brain. Your brain thinks that something really dangerous is happening and needs to be fixed. The only way out of the cycle of anxiety is to feel this anticipatory sadness. The sadness will end.

The interesting thing about sadness is that it always ends. Anxiety does not end. It can go on for years or a lifetime and get worse in the process. But if you lose something you love, you will feel sad for a period and eventually finish feeling sad. An even more devastating phenomenon that occurs with people is depression. Depression is the collections of many losses that have not been felt and finished, and have collected to such a degree that your brain shuts down interest in life in order to cope with the fact of these many losses.

So try it out. When you feel anxious about something, ask yourself the question, “What might I lose?” Then you will discover that you might lose something that is important to you, something that you love. Then allow yourself to feel the sadness you would feel if you would actually lose this something. Dare to feel this sadness now about what you might lose in the future. You will feel sad for a moment or two, maybe longer, but eventually, your anticipatory sadness will end.

Further Reading

Previous blogs on feelings

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2017). The Positive Power of Sadness. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. New York: Viking Press.

Guilt and Shame

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

Guilt is good for you. Shame is bad for you. Guilt makes you a better person. Shame makes you a scared person. Guilt is good. Shame is bad. Period. Allow me to explain. I intend to describe these two very important experiences, which are quite different but are often conflated together.

Guilt and shame “feelings”. Readers of this blog may have seen my previous blogs on Feelings in which I have noted that all feelings are a central ingredient of human existence and even more central in human relationships. That having been said we must also note that while feelings are central to life, feelings are undefinable. We can understand them, talk about them, and attempt to communicate them, but we can never define them. Feelings are just too important to be simply defined, just like the three elements of the universe, time, distance, and mass, which are undefined.  Allow me to review a couple things we have noted in previous Feelings blogs. We discussed emotions as a part of feelings:

Emotions

There are four basic emotions, all of which have to do with love in some way:

  • Two emotions that have to do with having or losing something that I love:
    • Joy when I have something I love (in the present)
    • Sadness when I lose something that I love (in the present)
  • Two emotions that have to do with losing something that I love:
    • Anger when I have lost something that I love (in the past)
    • Fear when I might lose something that I love (in the future)

Various psychologists have described as many as 50 basic emotions (or feelings as they are sometimes called), but we will not debate this subject here. Important for this discussion is the experience of these four emotions in shame and guilt, our main discussion in this blog.

Shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment are often used interchangeably. We hear people say that we “need to get rid of shame and guilt” as if they were the same thing, or they might say that they are embarrassed when they actually feel shame. So let me parse out these feelings and how they can be harmful…and interestingly…helpful. In all these feelings (guilt, shame, humiliation, and embarrassment) the emotions we feel are not completely expressed. Rather, they are hidden or partially hidden while we go through these feelings.

Guilt, shame, humiliation, and embarrassment

Consider the basic emotions and other matters associated with shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment:

  • Basic emotions associated with these four feelings:
    • Guilt: sadness
    • Shame: fear
    • Humiliation: anger
    • Embarrassment: joy
  • The person causing these feelings
    • Guilt: yourself
    • Shame: an imaginary other person
    • Humiliation: a real other person
    • Embarrassment: yourself
  • The element causing these feelings
    • Guilt: activity (something you have said or done)
    • Shame: yourself (you fear that something is wrong with you)
    • Humiliation: yourself (you believe that something is wrong with you)
    • Embarrassment: activity (something you have said or done)
  • The result of these feelings:
    • Guilt: personal improvement
    • Shame: hiding
    • Humiliation: hiding
    • Embarrassment: personal improvement
  • The effects of these feelings:
    • Guilt: ends
    • Shame: continues
    • Humiliation: continues
    • Embarrassment: ends

What is guilt?

Guilt is the feeling of sadness that I have when I have hurt or harmed someone by something I have said or done, or something that I have not said or not done. Note that the key in guilt is the feeling of sadness. I feel sad when I feel genuinely guilty because I have caused some hurt or harm to someone as I look back at my behavior. Simply put I think, “I should have said (or done)” or “I shouldn’t have said (or done)” something. When I feel sadness, I can then correct my mistake, offer an apology, and/or make amends for my misdeeds. The important factor here is that I judge myself. The even more important factor is that I then have the opportunity to improve myself in the future.

So, to the surprise of many people, guilt is good for me…if we understand guilt in the way I have described. Not so with shame.

What is shame?

Shame is essentially the fear of someone else’s disapproval. I feel shame when I think that someone will judge me harshly for something that I have said or done (or again, not said or not done). The key factor in shame is that I imagine that I will be judged, not what I have done. Simply put, I think, “Person A or B might think that I am somehow a bad person or a stupid person for what I have done.” In shame I imagine that I am judged as somehow inadequate, not that I have done something inadequate. As a result of shame, I hide: I hide what I have done from others, and I may hide it from myself.

So, while guilt makes me a better person, shame prevents me from becoming a better person. Shame is bad for me…always. It is always harmful to think there is something wrong with me instead of examining my behavior and seeing that I have actually done something that is wrong. Shame is much like humiliation as noted above.

What is humiliation?

As you can read in the abbreviated the paradigm I have laid out above, shame and humiliation are nearly the same except in shame there is often an imaginary person, whereas in humiliation there is a real person. When I am humiliated, a real person has humiliated me. Humiliating experiences occur when I am unable or unwilling to exercise the anger I feel when someone has assaulted my character. The result of humiliation is just the same as it is with shame: I hide. And when I hide, I do not improve as a person.

Most humiliation occurs in childhood. The most common perpetrators of humiliation are siblings, sometimes with intention to humiliate, sometimes with unintentional humor or teasing that has the same effect: something is wrong with me and I need to hide from everyone. Humiliation occurs with girls in school often in regards to some kind of body image or presentation, and occasionally with “drama” that asserts some girl is somehow inadequate or unacceptable. Humiliation occurs with boys usually from other boys, often with some failure in competition, perhaps academic or athletic.

So, like shame, humiliation is never helpful…never because it always leads to hiding from rather than self-examination and improvement. Furthermore, humiliation can bleed into shame experiences in adulthood because the essence is the same: there is something is wrong with me.

You will note that shame and humiliation are quite similar, the difference being that true shame is the feeling I have about possibly being criticized while humiliation is the feeling that results from by actually being criticized. When some “shames you,” this is actually humiliation because this is a real person who has assaulted you. So when you are shamed (by some real person), you feel humiliation. You hide, just like you do in shame.

What is embarrassment?

It must seem odd that I suggest that the basic emotion in embarrassment is joy. This is because most people equate embarrassment with shame or humiliation. But true embarrassment is a time when you laugh at yourself for some blunder, whether something you said, didn’t say, did wrong, or didn’t do right. So, true embarrassment can occur when you can’t remember the name of your favorite tool or the name of your grandchild. I remember Grandma Ostlund calling out to me with a stream of names like, “Billy, Margaret, Lloyd…I mean Ronny.” We would all laugh as Grandma would have cited my brother, my mother, and my uncle before she finally got around to me. This simple failure to remember a name occurred to me a couple days ago in therapy when I lost track of what I was saying, and then in the same hour when my patient forgot the name of something. In both cases we laughed. I also might laugh at myself) when I choose to have that second piece of pie, but so enjoy the indulgence.

Like guilt, embarrassment is good for me. In both cases I am dealing with something that I love. In guilt I am dealing with having lost something that I value: I did something or said something that brought harm to something or someone I value. In embarrassment I did something or said something that was simply wrong but not very important. But with true embarrassment I can recognize my action, chuckle at it and even be teased about it without feeling shame or humiliation. Whereas guilt is often felt privately, and ultimately leads to personal improvement, embarrassment is often felt publicly, and can also lead to personal improvement. In embarrassment I am humbled but not humiliated.

Aren’t these feelings mixed up?

Yes, they get mixed up. I mentioned that childhood humiliation can bleed into shame; in other words the fact that I have been attacked in character can lead to the feeling of fear that I might be attacked in character.

Furthermore, people use these terms in the ways that they have learned them, so they may say they are “guilty” when they actually feel shame as I have defined it. They may use embarrassment when they feel humiliation. The words for these four feelings are not particularly important, but the concepts are dreadfully important.

We can, indeed, feel two of these feelings at the same time, like humiliation and shame. Importantly, we can also feel guilt, which is good for me, and shame, which is bad for me, at the same time. Unfortunately, if I feel the sadness that is implicit guilt for what I have said or done, but I also am afraid that someone will challenge me, shame will unfortunately override guilt, and I will probably hide.

See if you can distinguish these feelings and the emotions that occur with each of them. You will begin to see the value of guilt and embarrassment and find ways to feel these things more and feel shame and humiliation less.

Further reading

Johnson, R. (2018). Feelings I and Feelings II blogs

Lewis, H. (1971). Shame and guilt in neurosis. New York: International Universities Press

Narramore, B. (1984). No condemnation: rethinking guilt motivation in counseling, preaching, and parenting. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan

Nathanson, D.L. (1992). Shame and pride: affect, sex, and the birth of the self. New York: Norton

Tangney, P. (2002). Shame and guilt. New York: Guilford

Tournier, P. (1958). Guilt and grace. New York: Harper and Row