Author: Ron Johnson

Overcoming Shame

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, love, marital, men's issues, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Almost everyone I see in my office suffers from shame. I wrote a blog a few years back differentiating shame and guilt, which remains an important element in understanding and conquering the phenomenon of shame in one’s life. In this blog, I will give some examples of shame that people feel in their lives, then define shame, consider the causes of shame, examine the consequences of shame, differentiate shame from guilt, and make recommendations for conquering shame in one’s life. Let’s start with real people understanding that the names and other identifying information of these people have been changed…”to protect the guilty,” but not the shame.

Real people who feel shame:

  • Bud, who is a physician, feels shame because he has been unable to overcome his tendency to get angry very quickly, something that has damaged his life in many ways, not the least of which is the relationship with his wife
  • Sam, who is a very bright person as well as a person of very good character, feels ashamed of the fact that he is gay, largely because of his evangelical Christian roots and harsh father
  • Jason, who is also bright and successful, but feels shame because he is overweight, something for which he was bullied and teased as a child 25 years ago
  • Jack, also very bright and a deeply intuitive person but also unable to sustain a job in his profession or sustain a lasting female relationship because he hasn’t found a way to successfully relate to people
  • Rick, another very bright person, who took several years to get the last class he needed to graduate from the university, finally found a lasting relationship, but has not been able to engage faithfully in a job
  • Peter, another very bright person as well as person of impeccable character, a pastor for many years but quite unsuccessful in his marriage because he tried too hard to please and give to his wife to such an extent that now he is woefully in debt with little option to get out of it. He also feels more shame for even considering bankruptcy.
  • Cannon, a very capable musician and a person of good character as well as being in a lasting female relationship, feels shame because he is suffering and has suffered from anxiety since he was at least four years old.
  • Freddie, a young man of nine, who feels shame for not being able to do compositions in school and otherwise write despite the facts that his parents are really good people. I tested him with a 120 IQ and a possible learning disability (dysgraphia)
  • Dwight, a very successful businessman as well as a person of deep spiritual development, feels shame every time he has made even the smallest mistake. He also feels shame because his wife, also a successful professional and kind person, has a tendency to tell him what is wrong with him
  • Jose’, an 18-yearold man who recently won a state championship in his chosen sport and generally does well with his friends. He is reading at the fourth grade level and about to enter college. I told him that he was a “genius” in his sport, but he feels ashamed of his difficulty reading and writing
  • Jim, another physician, bright, and deeply spiritual, feels ashamed that he spent an undue amount of money having been convinced that the world would be deteriorating soon. He also feels ashamed because he gave $100K to a “false prophet” who has evidently taken advantage of many other people.
  • Greg, a very capable person and a person of very good character, feels ashamed of his sexual proclivity even though he has never been unfaithful to his wife or engaged in this unique form of sex.
  • Gavin, another person of very good character and a very likable person, feels ashamed because he frequently lies to his female partner, often regarding trivial matters.
  • Justin, a very bright person working diligently on his PhD in history having successfully completed two master’s degrees, feels shame at every drop of the hat and ends up getting angry or avoiding life in some way or another.

There is much that differentiates these men: age, religious persuasion, gender orientation, characterological development, marital/spousal status and other factors, but they have many things in common, namely the feeling of shame, the results of shame, and the challenges that are necessary to get out of shame.

What is shame?

Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with me, a feeling that immediately leads to the tendency to hide in some way and thereby feel some assuaging of the feeling of shame. The feeling that “something is wrong with me” can take relate to many things that could be wrong: physical, emotional, legal, cognitive, financial, sexual, relational, professional, and others.

This feeling that something is wrong with me might seem to be normal. You might think, “We all have something wrong with us because no one’s perfect, right?” However, reasonable that seems, the matter of shame is much deeper and darker than simply admitting that you’re not perfect. Indeed, no one is perfect, and we might make a case for saying that nothing is perfect; perhaps just good, valuable, helpful on the one side of the spectrum and bad, not valuable, and harmful on the other side. Shame is not about being perfect and it is not about thinking that I should be perfect. It is a phenomenon that has deep roots in childhood as well as deep roots in daily life, and deep roots in causing an immense amount of difficulty in life.

In a way, shame is like so many other psychological, philosophical, and theological phenomena: it is not entirely definable. As I have previously written (and it is written many other places), the most important elements of life are undefinable: in physics time, distance, and mass are undefinable; life itself is undefinable; love is undefinable; God is undefinable. We know things like time, love, and life because of experience, not because of definition. We use these terms every day, or at least organize ourselves around these things, like time and love. So, we must grant that we can define shame to some degree but not with absolute definition, and certainly not without using other terms, like life and feelings that are undefinable. Shame is a feeling (there we go with another undefinable word) that occurs when I feel this “something is wrong with me” feeling and usually has deep roots in childhood experiences. Before we examine these causes of shame, let’s differentiate shame from other feelings that are second cousins: humiliation, guilt, and embarrassment.

Shame, humiliation, guilt, and embarrassment

These concepts are intrinsically related because they all have certain things in common. When I feel any of these feelings, I tend to hide in some way. I drop my head when I feel, guilt, for instance, cover my face with a piece of paper when I feel embarrassment, hide myself in my room if I feel shame, or run away if I feel humiliation.

Note that it seems that the source of these feelings is always external although that is not actually the case. In fact, however, these four experiences are profoundly different. Simply noted, the differences are in the emotions associated with the experience, the result of the experience, and the value or disvalue of the experience

  • Shame is fear-based. It is the feeling there is something wrong with me, not with what I have done. Secondly, shame is external in its origin, namely another person. This “other person” is usually an imagined other person. I imagine that someone will think ill of me for some reason. The first result of shame is that I hide from this person, or perhaps I might hide from everyone. The second more important result of shame is that in my hiding, I do not improve as a person and may actually deteriorate.
  • Guilt is quite different. It is sadness-based. I feel guilty when I have done something wrong. Note the difference between thinking there is something wrong with me and what I have done that might have been wrong. Note also, that guilt originates from me, perhaps my own ethical or moral stance, or what I expect of myself. It does not originate from an external source like another person. Most importantly, guilt makes me a better person because I can see what I did that was wrong and make personal improvements and perhaps make amends.
  • Humiliation is anger-based. It is similar to shame in that it is externally based, i.e. from another person, but distinct from shame, which is imaginary (“What will she think of me about this?”), it comes from a real person who intends to humiliate you. While shame occurs mostly in adulthood, humiliation occurs most often in childhood, very often by siblings, parents, or ex-friends. Most importantly, like shame, humiliation makes me hide and prevents me from maturing and becoming a different person.
  • Embarrassment is joy-based. I feel embarrassed when I eat that second piece of pie in front of a friend knowing that it is not good for me. I laugh at myself. Hence, embarrassment, like guilt, is self-based. It is not based on the anger I feel for what someone has done to me (humiliation) or the fear of what someone might think of me (shame). I simply laugh at myself, and as a result, I become a better person. Perhaps I determine to never have a second piece of pie.

In general, guilt and embarrassment are good for me because I admit what I have done wrong, while shame and humiliation are not good for me because I hide. So, how do these experiences, particularly shame, originate develop in life?

The origins of shame

Briefly stated, the origins of the other experiences are as follows:

  • Guilt: I am able to see mistakes and rectify them in some way
  • Embarrassment: I am able to laugh at myself
  • Humiliation: I cannot prevent being humiliated, but this occurs mostly in childhood, and is actually the origin of much shame.

The origin of shame is almost always rooted in a childhood experience of humiliation, e.g.:

  • A playmate on the soccer field pulls my pants down in front of everyone
  • A teacher berates me because I don’t understand what she has said
  • My brother teases me about being fat
  • My parent frequently ask rhetorically, “What’s wrong with you?”
  • And many others

These are real experiences that set the stage for thinking, feeling, or fearing that there is something wrong with me. How can I answer the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with you?’ but to come to believe that there is something wrong with me…not just wrong with what I said or did? Shame in adult life is based on these early experiences when I couldn’t get away from my attacker and the feeling was awful. All I could do was to be quiet, hide, or find some kind of escape.

For the most part shame occurs in my mind, not in reality. I fear that someone might think ill of me in some way, and this ill feeling is too close to the awful feeling I had as a child that I become afraid to be myself, admit what I said or did, or just see if my fear of rejection actually occurs.

Shame in adult life comes in forms not dissimilar from those in childhood when I was humiliated, but when I was a child, I was angry at being humiliated, but not in a position to be angry in fact. I had to hide my anger. So, when I feel shame, my basic emotion is fear, and I hide myself from being potentially humiliated. I feel shame when I fear that he or she might say, think, or feel that:

  • I am a bad person
  • I am stupid
  • I am not honest
  • I will be rejected

I feel shame that people might see these things in me even if none of them is true. I can also feel humiliated when he or she actually does these things. Most specifically, at least for men, they feel fear of judgment or some kind of criticism when their partners might criticize them. Unfortunately, women are too inclined to “help” the men in their lives by finding fault with them, but this is beyond the score of this blog (Wait for my forthcoming book, Balls, where I unpack this undue fear that men have of female rejection.) Whatever the origin, whoever the individual feared, whatever the situation, shame has dire consequences.

The consequences of shame

The consequences of shame are dire. They are dire because shame inhibits much of what is good about life: truth, intimacy, openness, love, caring, enjoyment, and contentment. Most importantly, shame creates a sense of danger, which then creates fear and anxiety, which itself creates a life that is worrying about the future, not a life where you are enjoying the present or working on enjoying the present. The essence of these dire results of shame are that we live in the future, namely what someone might say to me, where someone might criticize me, or where someone might humiliate me. Shame leads to a basic fear orientation to life rather than life itself, which is composed of joy and sorrow, not of fear that is at the heart of shame based on the feeling of anger that occurred early in life.

The practical result of shame is some kind of hiding, whether that is hiding in your room with a blanket over your head, keeping quiet about what you think or feel, hiding in some addiction, or hiding that occurs with some kind of dishonesty. I don’t know of a single man who is not afraid of his wife’s or partner’s potential rejection. I wrote a blog some time ago entitled, Why Do Good Men Lie, and proposed that it is the fear men have of female rejection, which always is built on a basis shame that so many men feel, particularly with the women in their lives. This fear and the result of some kind of dishonesty with women is devastating to men’s female relationships and often leads to women saying, “I can’t trust anything you say.”

While hiding of some kind and the dishonesty that goes along with it is bad for men in their relationships, even worse is the feeling of low self-esteem that is the result of feeling shame. If I think there is “something wrong with me,” I most certainly do not want anyone to know about it, so I naturally will not talk about it. The result of this fear, I never come to grips with the reality of something that I did wrong or the falsity of there being something wrong with me.

When these two things, hiding and low self-esteem, begin to operate in life with a man, everything else suffers: vocation, money, property, relationships, and even play. Nothing is ever good enough because I am not good enough, or so I feel when I feel shame. I can’t really enjoy my successes because I feel this “something is wrong with me,” I have great trouble accepting the small mistakes I make for the same reason, and I certainly can’t accept criticism, whether accurate or inaccurate if I feel shame. My life is dominated by fear.

So what can be done about shame and how can I get rid of it? Possible. Necessary. Hard.

Getting over shame

There are essentially two elements involved in overcoming shame: honesty and sadness.

Honesty: the key here is to first be honest with yourself and then be honest (carefully and selectively) with someone else. I put being honest with God in between those two but your understanding of the universe may not include such an entity. The key is honest. Honest to yourself is admitting all that you can admit to that scares you, particularly the inner feeling that you are not good enough for some reason, however irrational the “reason” may be. When you first admit to what you feel, the words you use may be quite irrational, or even downright wrong, like:

  • I wish I weren’t alive (By the way, this statement doesn’t mean you want to die, much less suicide.)
  • I am a complete loser
  • There is something terribly wrong with me
  • I can never admit to anyone what I feel (or what I did or what I said)
  • I can’t trust that anyone really likes me or loves me
  • I have to leave the country; maybe I should just to go Lover Slovovia
  • I can’t do this job
  • I want to have an affair

Once you admit to yourself, however wrong or irrational the words are, you might be able to admit to someone else what your feelings are. But be very careful doing this because most people have their own shame, their own craziness, and their own feelings. You don’t need someone telling you that you’re crazy, or wrong, or selfish, or wonderful, or perfect. You need someone who can listen silently and govern their own feelings.

This being honest, especially if you have been dishonest for a long time, is very very hard, and you most certainly don’t want to do it. Of course you don’t want to do it. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t want to work out either but I do it because it is good for me. I’d much rather watch a movie or read a book. Honesty is central, but it might take some time to become honest: first with yourself, (possibly with God), and then with just one or two other people selectively chosen. If you’re working on being honest, be prepared to be sad. Sadness cures shame.

Sadness: Sadness is without a doubt the most important emotion we have. Read what I’ve said about sadness in previous blogs or in our book on sadness. You will learn that sadness is always the result of loving something. If you love something, some person, some thing, some idea, or anything, you will most certainly lose this thing. Perhaps in an hour, perhaps in 50 years. But you will lose everything you love, so you need to have the God-given mechanism of feeling sad when you lose something. (Read more on sadness elsewhere in blogs or the book.)

When you really feel shame, you will feel awful at first, but the more you admit to the feeling, the sadder you will feel. You will feel sad about all the dishonesty you have engaged in, like with yourself and with others. You will feel sad about all the humiliation you suffered when you were a child. You will feel sad about all the shaming you get from the people in your current life. Most important of all, you will feel sad about all the hours and years you have wasted feeling ashamed of yourself. These are hours and years that can never be recovered because they are in the past forever, but you can feel sad about the losses. The beauty of sadness is that it ends. Shame and its origin, fear, and its result, anger, do not end. They go on forever. But when you become familiar with feeling sad, you will begin to be freed of your shame. Shame is never helpful. Guilt, which is feeling sad about what you said or did, is valuable. Shame leads to hiding. Guilt and sadness lead to love.

Feeling Safe in the World

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

The world has seemed a whole lot less safe recently. This increased amount of fear has led to a good deal of anxiety. Lack of safety has at least been caused by the Covid pandemic for more than two years but also by the cultural challenges that the Black Lives Matter movement have brought to America, and the political dissention that has been an increasing element for the last 25 years. Add to these external elements causing fear and ultimately anxiety there are some even more significant internal elements that have only been exacerbated by the externally-caused fears. “Internal” elements are those fears and anxieties that are within ourselves. In this blog I want to discuss how most people deal with these feelings and how we might be able to do a bit better. I will discuss the nature of external factors, the nature of internal factors, the nature of fear, and the nature of anxiety, these elements followed by the ways people tend to cope with fear and a few suggestions as to how to reduce anxiety and fear to zero.

The nature of external fears

This is the easier part of this essay. External fears are like those I just discussed: cultural, political, and biological, Now, of course, we have the fears associated with Putin’s assault on Ukraine and his saber-rattling suggesting that he might use nuclear weapons causing untold destruction. In all of these external elements there is a feeling of helplessness. This feeling of helplessness is central to any kind of fear, but with these external factors, the fear is that something will happen to me over which I have no control whatsoever. What can I do about Putin? What can I do about the destruction of the Black Lives Matter? What can I do about the pandemic that may hit me despite the fact that I have been thrice vaccinated? What can I do about Trump and company if I am a Democrat or the alleged Marxist agenda of the Democrats if I am a Republican? It seems that there is not much I can do with any of these external elements that cause fear, but we will discuss how we can actually reduce fear to zero in these circumstances however impossible and outrageous that seems.

The nature of internal fears

These fears, usually coming in the form of anxiety, are much more difficult to examine. Unfortunately (in my opinion), there has been an increasing use of the term anxiety and its cognates worry and fretting over the recent years. People find some kind of solace in saying that they “have” anxiety, or for that matter “have” depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, a learning disability, alcoholism, or autism. This orientation towards “having” something makes people fear that “something” inside of them is not working and they have no control over this something. Thus, again we see the feeling of no control over something, but this something is not external but internal, which makes the fear and anxiety worse because it is coming from inside. However challenging it is to feel helpless with political intrigue, biological invasion, or physical damage, it is much worse to feel that people have no control over what is happening inside of them. You can completely conquer these internal fears and reduce them to zero.

The nature of fear

This is the crux of the problem with fear and anxiety. Just what is the nature of fear and how can we understand it if we are ever able to “reduce it to zero”: in our lives? Fear is absolutely the most basic emotion that we have as humans. I look at fear from a developmental perspective, namely how fear originates in the human organism, what its normal purpose, and how it should ideally become less and less important as life progresses. Sadly, sometimes as people get older, the exact opposite happens: they experience more anxiety. Importantly, fear is the basic emotion we have because it is in our psychological/neurological structures to keep us alive. There are four basic emotions: fear, joy, anger, and sadness, all of which come to us developmentally, i.e. as we move from infancy onward. Ideally, a child of six should have at his/her disposal all of these emotions as they are necessary, but this same (ideal) child should have much less fear that he/she has had in earlier years. Again ideally, a child should move more into joy, anger, and ultimately into sadness and slowly move away from fear. More often than not, this fails to happen. Let’s look at the natural development of emotions in a young child:

  • The first year of life is where the predominant emotion, often the only emotion, is fear. This natural experience of infancy keeps the infant alive. Infants cry in infancy because they are afraid. Why are they afraid? An infant is truly helpless. She can’t feed herself or change her diapers. So when she feels “something” inside that feels dangerous, she cries. This “something”: is probably hunger, but it could also be some kind of difficulty breathing. The key in understanding fear is to understand that fear keeps us alive, especially in infancy. We cry, we get some kind of attention that we feels is central to living. The infant doesn’t know that she is “hungry” because all she knows is that something is “not right” in her body and she feels helpless. While an infant of one year old may experiment with rudiments of joy, anger, and sadness, these are not the most of what an infant feels. Rather, she feels fear or no emotion at all.
  • The second year of life is when we learn of the second basic human emotion: joy. The 1-2 year old feels joy because of several reasons including being fed properly and being changed from a wet diaper. More importantly, this second year of life is a time when things have exploded because now the infant can walk and talk, and with those elements now beginning to have their place in his life, he can attach to things. These “things” include people, physical objects, and possibilities. He now sees it possible to crawl or walk across the floor. He can see that it is fun to pull out all the tissues from the tissue box. He can talk, he can scream, he can sing, and he can dance. What is the essence of all these things: experiencing joy. What is joy? It is the emotion associated with loving something. The infant enjoys speaking or yelling, crawling or walking, jumping or sitting, all of these in the form of experiencing the wider world. When an infant grows beyond the first year of life, his world has exploded 100-fold from the confines of a crib or a diaper-changing table. The joy that is central, or should be central, in this part of infancy, is the result of the child beginning the rudiments of love, whether of people, things, or perhaps just possibilities and dreams.
  • You have heard of the “terrible twos,” meaning that a two-year old is easily and frequently angered. Actually, the real “terrible” years are not so much the one-year old or two-year old but a child who is three, four, or five. These are the real challenging years both for parents and for the developing child. Why is the toddler (ages 2-5) so often angry? Because she had her first year of life when she had pretty much everything she wanted, then into the second year where she got most of what she wanted, perhaps with a few restrictions. There is nothing an infant in a cradle can really do that is dangerous, and there is not too much a one-year old can do that is dangerous. However, there is a lot that a 4-year old can do that is either dangerous or obstructive in life someway. So what happens? The 4-year old is limited…and limited and limited. And that same child is angry about it. “Why is the world so bad now when it was so good before,” a 4-year old might think not knowing that he now gets little of what he wants compared to the years when he got almost all of what he wanted (first year) or most of what he wanted (second year of life). So these years are very crucial because the task for this child and his parents is to find a way into understanding that you can’t get most of what you want, and ultimately understand that it is not good for you to have most of what you want. But a 4-year doesn’t have this perspective, so he is angry “all the time” because you are limiting him “all the time.” This time of life, however, is central for what we call character development, but this is beyond the scope of this essay.
  • If a child gets through these first three stages of life, she could have some grasp of the necessity of fear for survival, joy for having, and anger for not having. This brings the child to the most important emotion in the human being: sadness. Deb and I wrote The Positive Power of Sadness a few years ago, which explains and underscores our belief that this is the most important emotion we can have, namely because whatever we love, be it person, place, thing, or idea, we most surely will lost it. So, we need to be good at grieving, being sad, being disappointed, and hurt because such things come every day. Unfortunately, most people get stuck in one of the previous stages so they fail to know the centrality of sadness and go to fear, anger, or (artificial) joy.

The nature of anxiety

Anxiety is not exactly fear but it is fear-based. Anxiety is actually a brain function. Here, I distinguish between the brain and the mind, the brain being biological and the mind being…well, something else. There is a raging debate, as there has been for centuries, as to whether there is even something called the mind as some scientists believe there is no such thing, only a brain. I won’t debate that subject at this point except to suggest that brain and mind are substantially different, the mind using the brain for cognition, emotion, and physical activity. Importantly, the brain doesn’t know anything but survival and pleasure, so it’s entire function is to maintain safety and enhance pleasure. Anxiety is actually an increase in heartbeat and breathing, which is called vigilance, or sometimes hypervigilance. The brain churns up breathing and heartrate when the brain determines that you need to be vigilant for some reason, namely in the face of danger. That’s all fine and good except the brain does not distinguish the past, present, and future. So when you are remember some dangerous situation that occurred in your past or imagine some dangerous situation in the future, your brain kicks into gear the hormone cortisol, which increases breathing and blood flow as well as hypervigilance.  If that were all there was to it, we would rarely feel anxious, but the fears we have, especially about the future are interpreted by the brain as you being in some immediate danger. Think about an exam that might be a challenge, a flight that might be a challenge, a meeting with someone that might be a challenge. In all of these circumstances the brain kicks up cortisol and increases breathing and heart rate to protect you because the brain determines that there is immediate danger. If you could think of something in the future (or in some cases the past) without any kind of fear, you brain would help you figure out what you should do (or could have done). But if you have the slightest fear of failure or loss, the brain goes into hyper drive. Simply stated, anxiety is a brain problem. The brain is doing its job: protecting you and preparing you for the lion coming over the hill. The brain doesn’t know the difference between the figurative lion and the possible exam when you are experiencing some kind of fear. It just sees you in danger and seemingly in need of hypervigilance.

Ways people cope with fear

Consider that fear erupts in someone when the environment is felt to be unsafe, whether this is in the present or in the future (and also rarely in the past). Fear is not bad. Fear is meant to be a natural emotion that erupts when some unexpected event occurs that appears to be dangerous. If that is the case, the brain does its job by protecting you from the danger by creating vigilance (or hyper vigilance if the danger seems imminent.  I am not denigrating fear. I said at the start that it is the most basic emotion we have because if we didn’t have fear, we wouldn’t survive as adults, and we most certainly wouldn’t have survived as infants. The problem isn’t with real danger or immediate danger. The problem is with perceived danger, which is where all anxiety comes from. Recall that the brain does not distinguish future danger from present danger because it doesn’t know that the future exists: all is in the present as far as the brain is concerned.

Let me bring you back to infancy where fear is the only, or at least the primary emotion that we have. The three ingredients that we need in infancy are, in order of importance: safety, nurturance, and comfort. By far the most important aspect of infancy is safety. If I’m not safe, I will likely die. Then we need nurturance (food) and comfort (physical touch). We can survive without nurturance for a few hours or even days. And we can actually survive without any physical touch whatever, although such a situation does some significant damage to the brain. What sometimes happens in infancy is that the infant gets too much nurturance or too much comfort and not enough times of fear, however odd that sounds. Overprotective parents often render too much of these last two ingredients, nurturance and comfort. A normally developing infant actually needs to be scared for a while before s/he is nurtured or comforted so the infant can feel that the environment is safe…ultimately. In other words the infant gets the message, usually after many hours and days of crying, that s/he does get comfort and nurturance and other care, like diaper-changing, but s/he doesn’t get it at the instant s/he wants it. Give an infant too much comfort and s/he will go through the rest of life seeking undue comfort. Give the infant too much nurturance, and s/he will think that s/he has to be nurtured all the time. There, of course, the opposite side of the coin, namely when the infant actually doesn’t get enough safety, nurturance, or comfort. When an infant is deprived of basic safety, s/he will then do the very same thing: seek undue comfort and nurturance in some way. In sum, the origin of anxiety and undue fear comes from infancy originally, and often from too much or too little of one of the basic ingredients: safety, nurturance, and comfort. This leads to all sorts of unfortunate coping that people do in the real world.

In this paradigm the basic element for which people “cope” is fear of some sort. Listen carefully to people who are stressed, frustrated, challenged, or worried, and you will hear the fear element. E.g. “I’m afraid that he will…,” “I don’t know what I’m going to do with…,” “I’m so frustrated with….because she…,” “What in the world will happen if….” While people saying these things indicate that they are “frustrated,” the real emotion they feel is fear, and this fear is one of helplessness in the face of some impending something. There is “good coping” that we will discuss in a moment, but presently let’s look at typical coping that people do. In a nutshell, they pass over the basic fear that an infant feels and go right into seeking the second and third ingredients of good parenting of an infant: nurturance and comfort. This doesn’t seem so bad on the surface. It doesn’t seem so bad to seek some kind of “support” in the form of some kind of “food” or some kind of human comfort. But when nurturance and comfort are sought in place of facing, feeling, and finishing basic fear, comfort and nurturance only assuage the fear; these things do not finish the fear. People “feel better” when they nurture themselves or find comfort in the arms, physically, emotionally, or cognitively. But they aren’t “better.” They just feel better…for the moment. And then things can easily turn to coping to a fault. I used this expression with a patient recently and he asked me what it meant. “To a fault” means doing something that is intrinsically good in itself but this something is used too much, so much often that this something encroaches on the rest of life.

Seeking comfort and nurturance to a fault actually leads to addiction. Addiction is also a brain-based phenomenon. Recall that the brain only knows safety first and pleasure second. So, if your brain has found that you “feel better” with some kind of nurturance or comfort, you will then continue to seek one or both of these things because your brain is trying to make you feel better. Your brain doesn’t know that if you do anything “to a fault,” you are on a dangerous path. A basic element of addiction is that the substance or behavior is increasingly sought after while at the same time giving less and less satisfaction and security. So, nurturance of some kind and comfort of some kind are first good, then not so good, and then actually bad for you. What is happening in all these circumstances is that you are actually led by craving of some sort but receiving comfort and nurturance less and less. An interesting study done by a neuropsychologist of my acquaintance found that the “craving” that addicts have is chemical, while the liking that addicts have is electrical. The stronger of these two elements is the craving. Most addicts will say that their looking forward to their addictive substance or behavior is much more attractive than their actually liking of it. I defer this discussion at this point but I did a blog on liking and wanting that you might read.

We will discuss what can be done profitably when one fears something, but for the moment allow me to discuss the typical coping/addictive things that people do. Note that in all of these behaviors and substances, people have some kind of short-lived pleasure at the cost of a lot of long-term distress. Addictions fall into two categories: behavior and chemical. They include the following:

  • Behavioral addictions:
    • Gambling
    • Screen time (computer, gaming, TV, Internet searching)
    • Sexual (promiscuity, excessive masturbation and pornography, fetishes)
    • Cognitive (excessive dreaming, imagination)
    • Emotional (excessive emotional expression; no emotional expression)
    • Playing (too much, not enough)
    • Working (too much, nor enough)
    • Sleeping (too much, not enough)
  • Chemical additions
    • Eating (too much, too little)
    • Stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, cocaine)
    • Depressants (alcohol, sedatives, marijuana)
    • Hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.)

Note that all of these things, whether chemical or behavioral, are good in themselves, and some of them are essential, like eating, working, emotional, and cognitive. Recall, an addiction is something to a fault, but more revealing, an addiction is something that I do that begins to be life itself rather than enhancing life. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with eating but people who eat excessively, or fail to eat sufficiently, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food, eating, or avoiding eating. Then eating is an addiction. Recall that the brain has just two operations, namely safety and pleasure, so when you engage in an activity to a fault, the brain doesn’t know that this excessive activity has adverse effects on the rest of your life and your future. Your brain doesn’t know the rest of your life, much less the future.

The key in all of these behaviors is fear, namely how fear has come to dominate the person. A person who is anorexic fear-based. He can actually become delusional thinking that certain foods, too much of a food, or food itself is dangerous. Then the brain kicks in and protects the anorexic person from food, actually causing physical damage…in the future but not in the present. Fear always starts an addiction but only after there has been a good bit of joy. On the other side of addictive eating we have excessive eating. In this case the second element of the brain is activated: pleasure. I might really enjoy eating a large pizza, but if I eat three large pizzas every day, my joy will lesson, and more importantly, the brain will begin to feel that you are depriving yourself of joy, or worse yet, began to think (loosely speaking) that you are in danger if you don’t eat pizzas every day. If your brain is fear-based and fear-activated, you may be caught in a cycle of quick joy and long lasting unhappiness that can only be assuaged by eating more pizzas.

I have discussed addictions as a way of coping, but are all people inclined towards addictions? In a word, yes. If we cope with our fear by falling into some kind of personally damaging behavior, we are then addicted to it, whether this behavior is eating, sleeping, thinking, emoting or any of the other things noted above. I don’t wish to suggest that everyone is addicted, like in the sense of being a chronic alcoholic, but rather I am suggesting that most coping that people do fails to assuage the fear and find a way through it. So, what can be done to correct this pattern that is fear-based?

Successful dealing with harmful coping

Be sad. This is the only cure for fear. Let me explain. Recall that fear is the most basic emotion we have and that the purpose of fear is to keep us alive. Also remember that an infant needs safety first, nurturance second, and comfort third. When that infant fails to get enough safety for whatever reason, he then will seek nurturance and/or comfort. The groundwork for overcoming fear and its cognates, anxiety and worry, is in understanding this concept of fear, first that it is basic to human existence, second that it is necessary to sustain life. It is never helpful to see fear as something wrong, nor is it helpful to think of such things as anxiety as “something wrong” inside of me. You need to move your life from being fear-based to love-based, but in order to do that you will need to feel sad. What does this mean? How does feeling sad assuage fear and replace it with love. Deb and I dealt with this concept primarily in our Good Grief book and secondarily in I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we discussed the fact that sadness is a “love problem,” meaning that if I am sad, I have lost something that I loved. Sadness is not depression or despair. It is the way your soul manages loss, and it is wholly a good thing. More importantly, it is not fear-based. In fact, you cannot be both afraid and sad, which is the key to understanding how to move your life forward from fear to love. Very importantly, fear does not end on its own. It stays the same, gets worse, or is repressed. Sadness ends. I may be sad for seconds or hours but sadness always ends if I allow myself to feel sad.

This is how sadness can replace fear: (1) Notice the fear that you have right now. Notice what you feel in your body that indicates that you are afraid (or anxious or worried). (2) Remind yourself that your brain is taking care of you because your brain believes that “there is a lion coming over the hill” or something just as dangerous. Your brain is doing its most basic job: keeping you alive. (3) Think of what you are afraid of losing. This might be girlfriend, job, tool, opportunity, or house. Consider how you might feel if you would lose this thing. Note that you will begin to feel sad. (4) Allow yourself to feel sad about what you might lose. Note that when you are thinking, just imagining that you might lose this something that you love in the future, you start to feel sad in the present. (5) Let this sadness run its course. (6) Notice that you feels less afraid or anxiety, perhaps not afraid at all. Instead, you feel sad. We call this anticipatory sorrow. Note further that you are now feeling the love you have for this something, whether girlfriend, job, property, or idea. You have replace fear with sadness. Fear is about danger. Sadness is about love. You’ll probably need a good therapist to guide you through this process. Later, you can do it on your own.

You can do the same procedure with something that you have lost in the past if you follow the same path: remember what you had, remember what you lost, and remember how difficult it was for you to having lost this something. Your fear of losing something in the future might well have to do with something in the past. A couple of days ago I dealt with a young man who came to see me because of chronic anxiety. He has been afraid all his life, namely that his father would die for some unknown reason. As we looked at his past life, which had been unduly attached to his father and afraid of losing his father, that he had not ever lived a day without this undue fear. The more we looked at this loss of 24 years of life in fear, the sadder he became. The more he felt sad about this profound loss, the less he felt fear and anxiety. I asked him how much fear he had. He said, “None”…while he was crying for having lost so much of life to fear. He found it helpful to stop using “anxiety” that he “has” but the feeling, “I do not feel safe in the world” added with the statement, “The world is safe”. Talking about his experience with anxiety this way moved him away from something that he has to something that he feels.

The Apostle Paul said, “Perfect love cast out fear” among other things having to do with loving more than fearing. Likewise, Buddha said similar things as have many philosophers over the years. But finding “perfect love” is a life challenge. It is better to seek perfect love, even though we know that we will never have it, than it is to worry about not having something that we love.

Fear less; love more. Along the way feel occasionally sad. Sadness always ends.

Are All Men Selfish?

Ron Johnson appreciation, Children, communication, Connection, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, men's issues, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

What an outrageous question, right? This is just as outrageous as my previous blog about “women never admit that they’re wrong.” This equally outrageous statement about men is not made in jest because men are frequently accused of being selfish, particularly by the women in their lives. I think there is something very important in this question because there is a certain truth to the statement that all men are selfish, or at least look selfish. We will examine several things in this blog, not the least of which are related to my last blog about women seemingly having a difficult time admitting that they’re wrong. Let’s examine what “selfish” means, especially as it compares to narcissism. We will look at the positive aspect of selfishness, the negative aspect of it, and the very opposite of selfishness, selflessness, which can be good and not so good. Then let’s look at how men operate, at least for the most part, that makes them look selfish and act selfish.

What is selfishness?

This is an unfortunate word that has creeped into the English vocabulary over the recent decades, perhaps centuries. On the surface selfish means one is oriented towards oneself. So, at least at this level, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with being selfish if it means that he (or she; but let’s stay with “he” for now) is aware of himself and looks at the world as a person who is independent from everyone else. John Donne said, “Every man is an island to himself” 400 years ago, but Donne’s intent was to deal with the isolation that so many people feel. So, we could say that there is at least some value in being selfish while there is a danger. This will be the main point I wish to convey in this essay. In other words, you need to know who you are in order to do anything in the world.

This “knowing who you are” ideally coms early in life, starting about age two but blossoming during the years 2-5 or 6. These toddler and early childhood years when ideally the person has received the security, nurturance, and comfort one needs during the first year or two of life, and is now ready to engage in the social world. The heart of “self” as we discuss it in psychology is having a sense of security that can only come from a secure environment. So, if the infant has received these basic three elements (security, nurturance, and comfort), s/he will be able to then bridge safely and confidently into the world. And this is very important because the rest of the world will not provide these three basic elements. The individual needs to find a way to find his or her (now let’s just go with “his”) way in life by his own wits. This is the positive aspect of “selfishness,” i.e. knowing who you are and going through the rigors of the toddler/early childhood years when you still think that you should have everything you want. You don’t know that at age, say, four, your wants have accelerated 100-fold while your needs have stayed the same: security, nurturance, and comfort. During infancy your wants were quite simple as they were essentially needs, i.e. food and safety. So the positive essence of selfishness is having sense of self, where I provide most of my security, nurturance, and comfort. I look out to not fall off a cliff or run in front of a car, I feed myself, and I take care of myself for the most part. I should not need the same amount of comfort as a 4-year old that I needed as a one-year old. But what happens when I don’t get my infantile needs met? I remain “self-less.”

The two aspects of selflessness

Unfortunately, many people do not adequately receive these three basic elements in infancy and are not prepared to engage the world that does not care for them as their parents did…or should have done. When this happens, the individual (we’re talking mostly about men, so let’s use the masculine pronoun from here on) does not have the groundwork to enter the years 2-6 where he needs to find himself, be himself, and exert himself in order to make it in the world. If the person does not get a foundation in infancy, particularly of safety, nurturance, and comfort, he will not be ready for the journey that begins in these early childhood years and never ends. Such a person will then be seeking these basic infantile needs from other people, or perhaps by some kind of addictive substance or behavior to give him a sense of self. Chemical addictions give the man an artificial sense of self as he finds a chemical way to feel safe and productive. Behavioral addictions do the same thing because they give the man a sense of purpose: gamble (and hopefully make a million dollars) or work all the time, and hence give the man a sense of safety, eat excessively (and serve the need for nurturance), or engage in some form of sexual addiction (and give the man a sense of comfort). All of these addictions are attempts to find a sense of self because the man didn’t have an adequate sense of self when he was four.

The other aspect of selflessness is what we normally think of with the term: a tendency to take care of others and serve the world. People who do, indeed, focus their lives on service can be people who have a good sense of self, so good, in fact that they forget about themselves in their charitable work. People who are truly generous are people who have a good sense of self, so good that they are able to spend hours or dollars without needing or seeking any kind of reward beyond the satisfaction and pleasure of taking care of people or the world in some way. My first therapist and life’s mentor, Dr. Vernon Grounds, was such a person. He had a very solid sense of self, so solid that he didn’t have to prove himself to anyone and could spend 18 hours a day caring for people like me and other students and faculty in the seminary where he was president and professor.

These are two distinct kinds of selflessness but they can seem to appear together, which actually never happens. Many people who are apparently quite generous and positively selfless are seeking approval and attention. They have not found the intrinsic value of giving and the satisfaction of improving the world in some way. Many good men work too much and give too much because they are unable to say “no” to the needs of the world, often the seeming needs of people in their lives. True positive selflessness is demonstrated by the man who “let his nay be nay and his aye be aye.” In other words, the man who can say no just as easily as he can say yes. Many men struggle with this.

Selfishness and narcissism

Deb and I wrote a chapter in a book a few years back where we unpacked the word narcissism. Unfortunately, in contemporary society, this term has been used to a fault and without a real understanding of what the word narcissism means and what narcissism comes from. In our paper we proposed that there is a natural narcissism and an extensive of natural narcissism into adult life. On the surface narcissism seems to suggest that the individual is selfish, i.e. cares only about himself and thinks only about his own needs and wants. There is some truth to this with people who we might dare to call narcissistic, but there is great danger in using this word without knowing what natural narcissism is.

Natural narcissism, or childhood narcissism is what we have been discussing in the 2-6 year old time of life where I have the opportunity to develop a sense of self so that I can effectively engage the world. So, the 4-year old is “narcissistic” because he is looking to get his needs and wants met (even though he doesn’t really distinguish wants and needs). Then he meets some kind of resistance or limitation, puts up a fuss, and finds a way to get around the limitation, or hopefully adjust to the limits of life. This finding and fighting limits during these early childhood years is where most people fail in personal development. They either continue to fight so much that the world around them (usually parents) give into him, go their own way and trust no one, or they give up trying and find ways to accommodate to what everyone wants of them. Ideally, the boy finds a way to accept some limits and challenge others in such a way that he learns that he can have want he needs but not necessarily what he wants. What generates out of this crucial time of life is that the individual develops a sense of self from which he can engage the world successfully. When the boy has been indulged with getting too much of what he wants, he will continue to retain the natural narcissism of childhood into adulthood. If he has not been given enough freedom and encouragement together with appropriate limitations, he will also retain a narcissistic view of life but hold onto the belief that he needs to find the right place, people, and parental substitutes to give him what he wants. These are two different forms of narcissism in adult life, one “selfish” (I get what I want by demand), and one “selfless” (I’ll never get what I want so I have to depend on others to give it to me).

The bottom line is that adult narcissism is not selfishness so much as it is a lack of self, namely a self that knows that he can get what he needs, mostly by his own hands, but he can’t get most of what he wants because we all, quite simply, want more than we can have. These are the two holes that so many people fall into: I have a right to get what I want all the time or I have to find people to give me what I want. Most men tend to fall into the former group. Most women tend to fall into the second group. Both forms of narcissism are dead ends in life. But before we end this diatribe on selfishness, let’s look at another aspect of men’s apparent selfishness that has more to do with their independent nature…to a fault.

Independence to a fault

There is an interesting passage in Genesis, chapter 3 where God speaks to the metaphorical characters Adam and Eve after they have discovered the difference between good and evil when they ate the forbidden fruit from one tree. God said that the man would “work by the sweat of his brow,” in other words working hard. God said to the woman that she “would look to the man.” We dealt a bit with the “looking to the man” with women in our last blog. Notably, in this same chapter God said that he kept them from eating from the Tree of Life. We might conjecture that had Adam and Eve been more obedient to the limits (of childhood?), that they would have matured into Life more successfully. Regardless as to whether you believe this story as fact or myth, or disbelieve its value altogether, it does provide an interesting view of what a male needs to do in life: work. Carol Gilligan in a marvelous piece of psychological literature suggested that women are more naturally “communal” while men are more naturally “agenic.” This means that men might be more inclined to do their own thing while women being more inclined to do something with someone else, often with the man. Some biblical theologians have suggested that in Genesis 1, where Adam and Eve are created together, both worked side by side and both were communal, but in Chapter 3 these dimensions of humankind were separated. Let’s leave the Bible and go into how men actually operate with this work thing.

I propose that it is more natural for men to be independent and women to be more communal. Note that I do not suggest that women are the opposite of independent, i.e. dependent, but rather that they are more communal. We discussed the value and angers of communality in the previous blog, namely women tending to tell men what to do in an attempt to find communality. But the men’s side of the phenomenon here is their tendency to be independent to a fault, i.e. do what they want without regard for the other people in their lives, especially the women in their lives. Let me give you some examples.

Jack is an independent guy. He, like most of the men who come to my office, came with the figurative “female handprint in his back,” namely because his wife thought that he had some kind of problem. I talked about Jack’s wife in my last blog, but here I want to talk about Jack. He has been a successful tradesman and businessman for many years and has been in various businesses over time largely because he works hard and he works smart. Unfortunately for Julia, his wife, she has not always been a part of his business decisions and directions. He has, simply stated, gone on his merry way doing what he has thought is the right thing to do. And he has done quite well as he has looked at the business landscape. The difficulty with Jack, as he relates to Junie, is not his work or his decisions, but he going on with it on his own. Nothing wrong with doing things that seem right to you, but if you’re in a marriage where your wife wants to be a part of your life, you might want to converse with her about what you’re planning to do. This just doesn’t occur to Jack. Hence, his wife sees him as “selfish,” or worse yet narcissistic. There is a lot of truth her allegation but I have to be very careful with dealing with Jack’s independence because he has taken care of himself all of his life and has never really trusted anyone.

Sam is quite like Jack, i.e. independent to a fault. A physician, he has also chosen many directions in life, some having to do with his profession, some having to do with his philosophical and theological orientation to the world. He has spent thousands of dollars, much of it unwisely, investing in one thing or another but hasn’t consulted with his wife about these decisions. She sees him as selfish and narcissistic. Like Jack, he does not have a good sense of self and has, indeed, been independent because he needed to be that way to survive the shaming father in his life. Unfortunately, now he has also suffered the shaming of his wife who doesn’t know any way of dealing with the fact that he doesn’t consult her on his decisions.

Jack and Sam are representations of many men who have this biblical directive, “work by the sweat of your brow” without knowing that they are doing it. It just doesn’t occur to men who are exceedingly independent that there is a danger of going it alone. There is nothing wrong with independence, just as there is nothing wrong with communality, but there are dangers in both.

Dealing with men’s selfishness

  • Point one: value your orientation to life as an independent entity. You are good at doing your own thing and good at taking responsibility for your successes and failure
  • Realize that independence to a fault is selfishness, built on a lack of a clear sense of self. If you re in this category, you must find a way to get a better foundation of your self that is not only what you do and not only doing something on your own.
  • Admit to your significant other, or if you don’t have one, to a trusted friend, what you think, what you feel, and how you look at what you do in life. You will find that you don’t so much need advice as communality, i.e. a feeling of togetherness.
  • If you’re a person, say, a woman in this independent man’s life, tell him how you feel. Don’t tell how you feel about him. Tell him you miss him, enjoy his company, and enjoy hearing about what he does and where he’s going in life. He doesn’t know that he needs you, that he needs someone in life. Be careful to avoid telling him what he should do. Instead, tell him that you love him and want to be more a part of his thinking, feeling, and doing.  By the way, you got together with him in the first place because you liked his independence.

References

Gilligan, Carol. In a different voice.

Johnson and Brock, I want to tell you how I feel

Johnson, blog: “Why Good Men Lie”