Midlands Psychological Associates

Responsibility in life is central. I once heard a musician (Richie Havens) talk at his concert about responsibility being the “ability to respond.” There is some important truth to this simple understanding of the word. Importantly, people have different natural abilities, and hence different abilities to respond, and hence different kinds of responsibilities. In other words responsibility for one person might be quite different from another person. I find the different kinds of “response-abilities” to relate to different kinds of personality structures. Furthermore, responsibility is related to both opportunity and obligation.

An important distinction of personality traits is drawn from Carl Jung’s understanding of what he called “psychological types.” This understanding of differences in personality has been popularized over the past 40 or so years and has morphed into “personality types”. Among the differences in personality/psychological types is what Jung called “intuitive vs. sensing” types. This refers to how people actually see the world, not so much how they evaluate the world. Readers who are familiar with this psychological genre will know the popularized version of personality typing that uses various letters to identify people’s personalities. I wish to concentrate on two of the so-called intuitive/sensing dimension of perception and another dimension, but I will use my preferred nomenclature to do so. And then I want to propose a way of looking at responsibility from this lens.

The first dimension, namely of perception, I prefer to an “objective vs subjective” way of looking at the world. Objective people tend to see things as they are, and hence Jung’s use of the term “sensing,” by which he meant that such individuals used their five senses to see the world. The other side of this objective vs subjective way of looking at the world is very hard to actually put into words. I disagree with how Jung came to use the term “intuitive” although that term has some value. Rather, I suggest that so-called sensing people are “objective” in that they see what is real, physical, obvious, and concrete. So-called intuitive people, those I call “subjective” have a more self-oriented and to some degree self-generated perception of the world. Sometimes I think these “subjective” people have a kind of reflective mirror inside of themselves and look at the mirror rather than at the things their five senses perceive. See how complicated and obtuse this is? Bear with me here.

The second dimension that I think is important to note is not exactly Jungian in form but Jungian in origin. This is variously called a style or a preference for going about life, but I think of it as a boundary dimension. Specifically, people are “high boundary” or “low boundary” in orientation. Boundaries have to do with limits and rules. High boundary people value boundaries because they provide security and a certain sense of stability as well as a frame of reference. High boundary people plan for the future and execute these plans. Low boundary people are quite different. They see boundaries as all artificial. They also value freedom and spontaneity. They tend to feel unduly limited and constrained by too many boundaries. Importantly, the world is largely run by high boundary people; these would be people in charge of banks and other businesses, most teachers and certainly principles, and many supervisors and bosses. Low boundary people either put up with doing what they have to do with their high boundary teachers and bosses or do their own thing.

Now there are various combinations of these two dimensions as well as a myriad of combinations of the other Jungian dimensions, to say nothing of other ways of looking at people, for instance with what is called temperament analysis. But I want to focus on two combinations, namely:
— Objective and high boundary people and…
—  Subjective and low boundary people
 …whom I believe have very different “response-abilities”

Objective high boundary people are doers:
o They like to do things
o They produce things
o They rarely get bored
o They are often busy

Subjective low boundary people are dreamers:
o They like to dream about how things could be done
o They create ideas, and sometimes things
o They often get bored
o They are often lost in their dreams

Now in our society “doers” seem to be the way we all should be, and the term “dreamer” has the connotation of someone who doesn’t do anything. Our society is run primarily by doers. Dreamers, on the other hand are the people who, as the name would suggest, come up with things to do, new ways of doing things, and creating. Other societies, like much of Europe, value creating and dreaming more than doing and producing. So in America, and to some degree Canada, doing is seen as much more “responsible” than dreaming. If we think about it, however, it is the dreamers of the world who have come up with the really important ideas…although it was often the doers who produced these ideas. Simply stated, it is easier to be a doer in America than a dreamer. I speak as a doer, and in many ways I fit in quite well with this doing way of life.

In later life both doers and dreamers tend to become unhappy. This unhappiness has to do with what Carl Jung called the “shadow” of one’s personality, although I am stretching this term shadow beyond Jung’s original conception. We might think of it as the parts of our personality that are not developed. For dreamers, doing is not well developed, while for doers dreaming is not developed.

Now let’s get back to the idea of responsibility and I will put a period of this blog. I will put it succinctly:
— To be responsible dreamers need to do something, to produce something
—  To be responsible doers need to dream something, to create something
 …and these are very different kinds of responsibility.

I see mostly dreamers in my practice, which makes sense because the doers of the world are busy working and otherwise doing. They always want the 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock appointments because they are busy all the rest of the day, and often into the night. Dreamers seem to be able to come to my office at any time of the day because, well, they are not busy. At least they are not busy doing; they may be busy dreaming. I have been seeing a young (26 year old) man for some time who is certainly a dreamer. He is, as noted above subjective in how he evaluates the world and he is certainly low boundary. Unfortunately for John (let’s call him John) he spent the first 20 odd years of his life doing, like doing what was expected of him, and he made a pretty good life. But then about 9/10s through college he discovered that he didn’t care about doing anymore and fell into dreaming. Had he been truer to his dreamer nature, life now would have been easier for him, but it is certainly not easy. He sees all these things that he should do, like get a job, finish his college, find friends, and do something other than play video games 50 hours a week. But he can’t seem to bring himself to do any of these things although he is plagued by what he calls guilt (it is really shame) for not doing…much. I am attempting to help him become responsible.

Responsibility for John would be to do something. He doesn’t know it, or believe it, but doing anything would be better than dreaming and playing video games, but nothing that he could do seems interesting, much less creative. So John is caught in his dreaming life, and I expect it will be some time until he finds a way to become responsible. By the way, being responsible is being responsible to oneself, not to anyone else. He needs to find a way to be responsible to his life ahead. But right now it is way too difficult.

Doers, by the way, also need to become responsible, but for them it is a daunting task because most of them become increasingly fatigued in life for all the doing they have done, and often burdened by concrete responsibilities like going to work, caring for the house, the dog, and the family. So doers’ idea of responsibility is to do more, but as they age, they lose interest in doing because they have done it all before. It is a daunting task for a doer to find and accept the responsibility of dreaming and creating. Few manage the transition. It certainly has been hard for me.

There are many other ways of looking at what responsibility would mean depending on one’s personality. Extraverts need to become responsible in talking less and listening more, while introverted need to speak more. Women need to ask fewer questions of men, and men need to be more forthcoming with their feelings. Freedom-loving parents need to be more limiting with their children, while limit-setting parents need to loosen up.

In encouraged you to find your own responsibility because, however it is composed, responsibility to yourself will lead to being responsible in the world. It is our opportunity to improve the world, and it is our obligation.

The term “unacceptable” has become popular among parents in recent years. I find the word unacceptable. Let me explain. The term “unacceptable” does not assist children in understanding their difficult behavior and ultimately adjusting such behavior. Furthermore this word and several other such words are harmful to the children who hear them. Let me explain.

First let me note some of the words that have become popular with parents when dealing with a child’s challenging behavior:

• Unacceptable
• Inappropriate
• Irresponsible
• Immature
• Selfish
• And probably a number of other words

Examine with me the essence of such words and you will find an important, but subtle, element: they all speak about the other person, usually a child who has said or done something that the parent doesn’t like. We who have been parents know a myriad of such things. Since I have a large contingent of children in my practice, I have heard a number of such behaviors including:

• Swearing
• Yelling and screaming
• Hitting a sibling, a friend, or a classmate
• Throwing something at someone
• Refusing to do homework
• Urinating in the toilet without regard for “aim”
• Throwing dirty clothes on the floor
• Slouching at the dinner table
• Whining
• Chewing with one’s mouth open
• And many others

Let me state the obvious. I dislike these behaviors as much as the next parent, or in my case the next grandparent. I have my particular pet peeves with my grandchildren include all of the above plus grammatical errors, like, “Me and Grandma” that my 10-year old tends to say. I recall my father finding it unacceptable (although he never used that term) when anyone would use one’s table knife to get some butter of the butter plate. And he also really disliked (as I dislike it) when someone scrapes food scraps off plates after dinner is finished. He used to say, “This is not the place to display garbage. Please bring your plate to the kitchen.” So “unacceptable” for one person is not necessary unacceptable to another person, as I know many people who find it courteous to scrape their plates after dinner is finished.

I had a conversation with a couple who had been good friends for decades not long ago. They were at our house and we had just finished dinner when Rachel started collecting plates and scraping them at the table. I interrupted and said, “Rachel, please let me tell you something that is very important to me. Scraping dishes at the dinner table is not something I like. Furthermore, it is actually a bit disgusting to me. Now I know that you are doing this as an act of kindness, and I appreciate your kindness. And certainly most people would not be offended by such an act of kindness. But I was raised in a home where my father instilled in me the idea that scraping plates at the dinner table, while common, and even gracious, is not something that he liked. And so I have come to dislike it.” So graciously Rachel stopped her gracious activity that was not gracious for me. I am quite sure, however, that my comment and suggestion was hurtful to her, as she might have thought of the many dinners we had shared over many years, sometimes at her house and sometimes at ours, all of which had had the dish-scraping part of the end of dinner.

I could have said that dish scraping was “unacceptable,” but I didn’t use that term, much less any other term like unkind or stupid. I didn’t say what my father would say, “the dinner table is not a place for garbage.” I simply told Rachel my feelings and then a bit about the origin of my feelings. I told her how her behavior affected me. I told her about me, not about what was wrong with her or even wrong about what she was doing. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was doing something that hurt or offended me.

My hope is that parents can do the same with their children, namely speak about themselves. You see, telling a child that what she is doing is unacceptable (or irresponsible or inappropriate) is telling the child that something is wrong with him or her. There is no way children can hear “your behavior is unacceptable” without thinking something is wrong with them, or at least that their parents think there is something wrong with them. We don’t need children thinking there is something wrong with them. Rather…

We need children to understand two things:

• You, as parent, believe there is something wrong with what your child has done.
• Your child’s behavior has affected you in some way, usually in a negative or difficult way
• In other words, I suggest you learn to speak to your children about their behavior and about your feelings. Telling a child that his behavior is “unacceptable” does neither.

Let me give you some examples of how this might work when you encounter difficult, hurtful, or harmful behavior in your child. Let me help you to know what you might say in such circumstances:

• Your child hits his sister. Normally, this would be “unacceptable”, but instead of saying that, you say…
• Johnny, I feel sad that you have hurt your sister. I know that you love your sister and that she loves you. It saddens me when you hit her.
• Johnny says something in his “defense,” like his sister made a face at him or “hit him first.” We’ve all heard these defenses.
• Parent: that may be true, Johnny, and if that is true, Grace’s behavior also saddens me. I feel sad when someone makes faces and teases someone else.

In this proposed encounter, there is no:

• That is unacceptable
• That is mean
• You should know better than that
• What is wrong with you?
• How would you like it if I hit you?
• Because…

All of these statements and rhetorical questions are shaming. Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with the person. Shaming always leads to hiding and defense. If you shame a child, that child will do both hiding and defending. Children never profit from shaming. They profit from understanding how their behavior affects other people. I think the most important thing parents can do for the psychological well-being of their children is to reflect how they feel when they hear or see something from their children that affects them. These emotional reflections can be:

• Sadness, which is the essence of something that I have lost that I love. “Hurt,” by the way is essentially sadness.
• Fear of danger to someone
• Anger, which is a defense against danger, and always follows sadness and fear
• Joy at what the child did
• And combinations of these feelings like excitement, surprise, disgust, and hopeful

Children can profit from hearing your feelings, both good and bad, that you have when they do something or say something. We don’t have to be “affirming” all the time. We don’t have to mince words. We don’t have to avoid the necessary times of anger, hopefully few. We do need to help children understand that they cause emotional responses in other people, both good and bad.

As a final note (sic), if you continue to use “unacceptable” and the like with your children, it does one good thing: it keeps me in business.

A patient I have seen in my office off and on for a number of years told me of a disturbing experience he had had on Christmas. I diagnosed his problem. He had a love problem. I see a lot of people with love problems. And I am not talking about relationships, at least not for the most part. I am talking about the love problems that we all have every day, problems that turn into anxiety, depression, anger, addictions, and avoidances. Let me explain.

Jim (not his real name of course) told me about what began as a wonderful experience around Christmas as his adult children and their families joined together for the first time. Because of in-law obligations and other duties his extended family had not actually shared a Christmas together since his children had left home and got married. Jim described the gathering as wonderful. He felt overwhelmed with gratitude, being grateful that his daughters had married good men and had found good lives together. This Christmastime seemed to be a time of simply basking in this gratitude and enjoying his family, now together for the first time. His sons-in-law seemed like sons, and they evidently had similar feelings about him as a new father. Nothing was wrong, and more importantly, everything was right. But then an odd episode occurred.

Jim took one of his daughter’s dogs out for a walk in the woods, a woods that he walks frequently, usually daily summer and winter. He knows all the trees and often spends hours there walking and doing yoga in his woods. But while he was out on the walk, he noticed that his daughter’s dog was not around him. Now dogs tend to wander and come back to their masters pretty routinely. (Interestingly, Deb and I were very likely walking about the same time, we with our friend and his dogs while visiting him in his Colorado mountain home.) When he couldn’t see or find his daughter’s dog, Jim became quite worried, so worried that he felt “something” in his chest, a feeling probably akin to panic. Now I know Jim quite well and he is not inclined to fear, anxiety or panic. But this situation of possibly losing his daughter’s dog somehow hit him like a thousand of brick. He looked around for the dog, called for the dog, and began furiously looking in all portions of the woods for the dog, all to no avail. Then he thought he would simply go back home hoping that the dog had somehow found her way home. But at one point on the way back home, he had become so overcome by this…feeling…that he actually felt feint and fell to his knees. After he stumbled home, he was relieved to see that the dog had found his way home, but still somehow overcome with this feeling. In fact, he was so overcome, that he continued to feel “weak” and fatigued. After a few minutes, the Christmastime meal began, something that all had been looking forward to, and he had not yet recovered. He told me that as the meal started, he actually fell asleep, or seemed to fall asleep for a minute seemingly out of some kind of exhaustion. Then understandably, his family became quite concerned, and because one of his daughters is a nurse, they made a quick decision that Jim needed to be attended to professionally. They called an ambulance and soon he was at the ER and then overnight in the hospital. Of course the hospital staff did all sorts of tests but nothing could be found that made any real sense, and he was released the next day.

After hearing this story, I told Jim that he had a “love problem.” What in the world does that mean? This is the way I understand Jim’s “problem.” Certainly, he was very distressed. Certainly, he was in need of some external care. Certainly, there was something “wrong” as evidenced by his physical reactions as noted. But was there something “wrong” with him? Or was there something “right” with him. This is the idea of having a “love problem.” As I saw it, even from the very beginning of his story, Jim was having a “love crisis” of sorts. He was a man seeing the five people he really loved and feeling overjoyed. But Jim is also an internal person by nature, this internality despite his gregarious nature and obvious intelligence. So Jim is inclined to keep most of his deep feelings inside and doing so feel quite satisfied with life. What evidently happened in this circumstance is that Jim was quite overwhelmed by these positive feelings of love for his adult children and their spouses. But he was disinclined to say much about these deep feelings, probably largely due to his internal nature as well as his intellectual and cognitive nature. People we call “introverted thinkers” are very often people of deep feelings but they do not necessarily have a vocabulary for these feelings and are content to just feel them, and perhaps make some intellectual comment, or flippant comment rather than blubbering all over the place with feelings of love. In this case evidently, Jim was not able to adequately express these deep feelings of love, and then when the dog was lost, and possibly lost forever, this potential loss seem unduly tragic. His love for his children had evidently spilled out on the dog, and now, so it seemed to him, he might have lost the dog…and possibly his children. He was just overwhelmed…with love…and potential loss…and he didn’t have words for these deep feelings.

I use the term “love problem” with patients frequently as I see people who have loved, do love, or hope to love something or someone with these feelings causing all sorts of so-called mental health problems, e.g.:
 Anxiety. Anxiety is the fear of losing something I love…in the future.
 Depression. Depression is the loss of something that I have lost…in the past.
 Anger. Anger is the defense against something that I am losing…in the present
 Bipolar disorder-like symptoms. (By the way, this diagnosis is way over used as there are very few people who truly have the disorder.). Bipolar symptoms are a mixture of feelings that are hard to manage, like
o Loving someone but not liking that person
o Wanting something but not wanting what comes with it
o Feeling happy one moment because of loving something, but then unhappy the next moment because you might lose it
 Addictions. Addictions are clearly a love problem in that the individual loves the thing, person, or behavior to a fault, like:
o Loving food
o Loving excitement
o Loving freedom (that alcohol might bring)
o Loving social life (that alcohol might bring)
o Loving the high of drugs (because one’s life is without natural highs)
o Loving things (and hence hoarding)
o Loving frugality (and hence not buying anything)
o Loving intimacy (and hence getting too quickly into intimacy)
o Loving cigarettes. (I tell my smoker patients that smoking is the best thing in their lives. Why? Because it gives them so much joy that they can overlook the health problems. They must really love it that much.)
o Loving sex (and then getting lost in it)
So think about what you love, or who you love, or what experience you love. You might also see some history of loving “to a fault”. But isn’t it nice to have a “love problem” instead of an illness?