appreciation

Good for Me; Bad for Me V: Discerning Good for Me

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the fifth of a series of blogs on things that are, simply put, “good for me” or “bad for me.” We have previously made a case for the value of using the terms “good for me” and “bad for me” but with discernment as to how much something is either good or bad for me. The immediately prior blog focused on discerning how bad something is ranging from mild to profound. In this blog we will be discussing also examine how things can be mildly good for me or profoundly good for me. We begin by studying how to discern how good something is, and ultimately how I can enhance good things, particularly if they are profoundly good for me.

Discerning how good something suggests a spectrum of “goodness” just as we studied a similar spectrum of “badness” in the previous blog. You may want to review the whole spectrum ranging from very bad for me to very good for me. In this blog we will study how good something can be using one of the following terms that occur in two divisions of the “good for me” dimension:

Mild to moderate “good for me” things:

  • Interesting
  • Pleasant
  • Exciting

Serious to profound “good for me” things:

  • Enlivening
  • Life-enhancing
  • Life-sustaining

So, the range of “good for me” things is from mild, like interesting, to profound, like. The mild/moderate things that are good for me are things that are temporary in life, while the more profound things that are good for me are more long-lasting in life and may be permanent.

  • Such things could be some sports talk that I discussed in previous blogs. Interesting things tend to grab the attention of one of your physical senses, like something you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Something that remains interesting tends to remain in one or more of these senses but does not cause much thought. Interesting also includes watching a movie or video that catches your interest for a few minutes or an hour’s a book or a magazine that attracts your attention briefly. Interesting could also be a spider weaving her web, a discussion that you hear or a conversation that you are involved with. Something that is interesting tends to be for seconds, or minutes at the most. If something remains interesting for longer than minutes, it may fall roughly into the category of:
  • Something that is pleasant has a physical effect on you. Things that are just interesting affect your five senses, but pleasant things move you to a deeper physical sensation, which could be a sense of physical calm, a deepened alertness, and/or a certain attraction to something. Pleasant things cause some initial positive emotional reaction like joy or sadness. Note that both joy and sadness are born of love, so both of these emotions are “positive” although, unfortunately, many people think of sadness as negative. Whether physical or emotional, these things tend to last longer than something that is just interesting. Pleasant things could be any of the things we’ve noted as interesting, like an aroma that seems to call you toward it, perhaps smelling the flowers as you walk past your neighbor’s house, or a sunrise that calls more than your momentary attention. While people can be briefly interesting, they can also be quite pleasant, like the server at breakfast who just made the meal better because of her demeanor. Discussions and conversations rarely from interesting to pleasant, but when they do, you feel compelled to engage in listening or talking. Beyond the common, “How’s it going” you hear from a stranger could be the deeper question that we hear more often these days of the pandemic, “Are you well?” or the parting comment, “Stay well.” Beyond interesting and pleasant lies the arena I call:
  • Exciting. It may be exciting to have a conversation with someone, but this is rare. More often, something that is exciting charges you up. It may be exciting to anticipate a visit from an old friend or an unexpected visit of such a friend, especially of you have not seen or heard from your friend for some time. Excitement can last more than minutes, but rarely last for hours. A good basketball game can be exciting, whether as a participant

If I move beyond things that are interesting, pleasant, or exciting, I then am in a category of things that are positively life-changing in some way: enlivening, life-enhancing, or life-sustaining. Such things make some kind of indelible positive mark on my life: I am changed for the better in some semi-permanent way.

  • You feel “enlivened” when you something physical happens your body that makes you feel more alive and excited although this “something” is more than the excitement you feel on a Ferris wheel or buying a new car. Enlivening, the first of the three positive life-altering “good for me” experiences, is an experience whereby you feel your inner essence improved in a way that remains primarily physical. Recall that there are four expressions of “feelings” that we have written about, both in these blogs and in our new book. We always experience “feelings” first physically, then emotionally, then cognitively, and eventually with something we say or do. The enlivening experience remains primarily physical. People say that they “feel more alive” and sometimes say that they “feel more engaged” with themselves, an obvious reference to their feeling a greater sense of “self” physically.
  • Life-enhancing. A step beyond enlivening is “life-enhancing.” By this I refer to a time in your life where you are significantly changed, and probably permanently changed. In our previous blog we looked at the permanent negative changes that can occur when profound “bad for me” adversely affect us. Life-enhancing events, places, or people are those that make me a stronger person, a more confident person, and a better person. These elements, whether personal, impersonal, or spiritual help me become more secure with who I am, and in so doing make me more confident in myself. These events do not change me but they make me more aware of myself, particularly my gifts and abilities and see that I have something to give to the world. To be enhanced in my life does not make me more interested in myself; enhancement makes me better able to feel confident in my basic goodness to such an extent that I can forget about myself.
  • Life–sustaining. When something that is “good for me” to such an extent that it keeps me alive, it is life-sustaining. Think of food, drink, and air in the obvious category as these things are essential for me to keep living. But I am not talking about the physical things that keep me alive physically; rather the psychological things that keep me alive. In fact, when people miss some of the basic psychological things in life, they may indeed, die of “psychological starvation” or take their lives. I frequently assist my patients to admit that they “don’t want to live” but certainly want to die, much less take their own lives. Consider the elements in your life that are psychologically essential: perhaps freedom, relationships, play, or work; perhaps certain elements of property; perhaps a place that is sacred and essential for your well-being.

Discerning how good the “good for me” is

It’s not so important that you discern every one of these words. Obviously, things blend together, sometimes just interesting, sometimes more important. My desire is to give you a rough paradigm to work with so you can see what is good for you with more clarity. My hope, of course, is that you find ways to increase the number of good things and increase the frequency in your life.

There is a danger of “pushing” the good for me to far to the right, meaning too far towards the life-sustaining. Some very good things, some things that you really like, and some things that seem in the moment to be life-sustaining might actually be more in the mid/moderate range rather than in the profound range. We will discuss this matter of discernment in a later blog.

Take some time in the discerning process. Feel through it. “Feel through it” means just that: feel. Feelings, as I have previously written is not singularly emotional; feeling through something is physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. If you are an “active-feeler”, you will need to notice just how important something is when you act on it. Or, if you’re an “emotional-feeler,” you will need to know how something feels emotionally.

You will discover that the “things” that are good for you fall into the categories I have suggested (and perhaps more that I haven’t thought of), namely people, places, experiences, and physical objects. Let me give you some personal examples

Personal reflections on “good for me”:

I could discuss physical, experiential, or geographical things that are good for me, but allow me to just speak of the people in my life who are “good for me:

  • My primary mentor, Dr. Vernon Grounds, made an indelible positive effect on me, something that is with me as we speak. Perhaps not life-sustaining, but certainly life-enhancing. I might have found someone else to enhance my life the way he did, as I have met many find people, but as I think of Dr. Grounds, I am moved to appreciation.
  • The only person I would put in the life-sustaining category is my wife, Deb. Yes, I certainly could live and survive with her, perhaps even thrive, but as I think about what she is in my life at the present, she sustains my life
  • I have several friends, perhaps a total of 12 who are in the enlivening category, and perhaps two or three of them are in the life-enhancing category
  • Moving back to the “left” on the spectrum and into the mild/moderate good for me category, I find my basketball friends to be in this realm. Not able to play basketball these days because of the pandemic, I miss the ball and I miss them. Basketball and all that it means to me is exciting, certainly beyond just pleasurable
  • People who are in the pleasant category are those I meet in the office building, the folks that I visit with at the counter of the Kwik Trip, and the other occasional meetings. I could do without these chance meetings, but they are pleasant.
  • There are people who are just “interesting” and mildly good for me. These would usually be folks that I just see but don’t talk to, or perhaps someone I read about in the newspaper or see on the Internet. Interesting that this gal did this or that, or the kid who gave away his allowance to a good cause.

I suggest that you look at the things, people, experiences, and place in your life and see if you can find something that is somewhere along the positive side spectrum, preferably something human, something living, something nonliving, and some experiential.

Next up: complexities, like:

  • Like it, not good for me
  • Don’t like it, good for me
  • Good for you, bad for me; visa versa
  • Good for me now; bad for me then

See you soon

Good for Me; Bad for Me III

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, morality, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is the third in a series of “Good for Me; Bad for me”, which is a study of how things, people, and situations can, quite simply, good for you or bad for you. In previous blogs I have proposed a system of discernment about things that are good or bad for you, in other words, a way to quantify just how good or bad something is.

Review

To begin with I proposed that there is a spectrum that ranges from good to bad or very good to very bad

_____________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

(very bad)                                (not so bad)          (pretty good)                                      (very good)

I further suggested that could label things more specifically on both sides of this spectrum. Specifically, I suggested that we could subcategorize the “good for me” side of the spectrum into things that were mildly or moderately good for me from things that were more significantly good for me, i.e.:

In the previous blog we studied the “bad for me” spectrum suggesting that there are mild/moderate things that could be uninteresting through unpleasing to aversive. Things that were more seriously bad would range from dangerous through toxic to lethal. Thus the “bad for me” side of the spectrum ranging from mild to serious would look like:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                 to                                             (profound)

In this blog we will be discussing the “good for me” side of the spectrum, namely the range from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting      Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                  to                                             (profound)

As we did in the previous blog, we will discuss how to deal with the various things that are good for us, namely how to engage the things that are good for us to some degree with an emphasis on how to observe, accept, and enhance such things.

Observing something that is good for you

Here I will replicate what I said in Blog II, namely suggest that observing something, whether good or bad is a feeling process. As we noted in the previous blog, this human feeling is so important that it is undefinable, just like the important things of physics (time, distance, and mass) and the important things in psychological functioning like love and wisdom. Admitting that feeling is undefinable, we can however, note how central it is to human functioning and that feelings are the first (undefinable) expression of one’s central core (another undefinable element, by the way). Feelings evolve quite specifically through a four-step process, namely first physical, then emotional, then cognitive, and then active. So when I experience something that is good for me I will first feel something physical and then experience the other three expressions of feelings subsequently. Notably, however, people tend to “feel” their feelings in one predominant modality or perhaps two even though everyone feels all four expressions. It might be valuable for you to identify which one or ones of these expression is your primary means of feeling expression. Or you might read our book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel.

Feeling something physically usually means that a certain part of your body will “talk to you” as body therapists talk about. You will feel something in one of your extremities, somewhere in or on your head, in your chest, or in your stomach area although there are other areas on the body that people experience feelings, and sometimes it will not be possible for you to actually discern what part of your body feels something because you have a kind of whole-body feeling experience. Regardless of what you feel and how you feel something physically, the feeling will be pleasant to some degree.

Following your physical experience of feeling something good for you, you will have an emotional expression of feeling. This will generally be a joyful feeling. You will notice the joy in some physical expression like a spontaneous smile, but this joy could also show itself in some body movement, like jumping, dancing, or swinging your arms. To the degree that something is good for you, you will feel some kind of excitement. It is also possible that your emotional experience could be milder, something that might be described on the “good for me” spectrum as simply “interesting” or you might experience a more profound sense of pleasure that leads to some outlandish vocal expression. Truly joyous experiences can also lead to tears of joy.

If you are less inclined to feeling expressions that are physical and emotional, you might notice that you are thinking, and that you are thinking about the object, situation, or person that has brought you to a pleasant experience. People who are inclined to this kind of feeling expression are generally less inclined to vocal expressions of joy or excitement, but rather tend to think about how something that is good for them came about and how it has developed.

Finally, there is an expression of feeling of action, or sometimes words that reflects a feeling of “good for me.” If you are inclined towards action, you will feel compelled to do something to enhance this positive experience. If you are more inclined to words, you will tend to talk about what could be done or might be done to enhance the experience.

Once you have experienced these four expressions of feelings, usually primarily preferring one or two of them, you will be at an important time in your day, or perhaps in your life: you will need to accept the “good for me” experience.

Accepting something that is good for you

You might think that this would be natural, i.e. to accept something that is good for you, but that is not always the case. In fact, the better something is for you, the harder it is to allow the process of feelings to move from physical to active. Recall a time, for instance, when you thought something was “just too good to be true.” But before we explore this “too good” phenomenon, let’s look at things that are in the milder range, i.e. something that is just interesting, pleasant, or exciting. Such things tend to occur in the immediate present, short-lived, and not particularly necessary in life. If you’re a sports fan, you might have one of these milder forms of pleasure when you team wins, or perhaps within the game a moment of pleasure when someone scores a goal or achieves some kind of success. If you’re more artistic by nature, you might experience something mildly pleasurable when you visit an art museum, hear a particular piece of music, or enjoy some form of nature. Accepting these simple joys is not very difficult and makes life, well, more pleasurable and joyful. It is easy to accept something that is mildly or moderately good for you because you know that such experiences are generally short-lived however fun they are.

It might not be so easy to accept something that is on the more profound side of the “good for you” spectrum. Note that the three terms I have chosen for these pleasurable experiences all have to do with some lasting effect they have on your life, from enlivening, through life-enhancing, to life-sustaining. Note the centrality of the element of life. Things that might alter your life in some way would include such impossible things of winning the lottery, being hired for that perfect job after a grueling series of interviews, or seeing your new infant taker her first breath. There are many other life-changing events and experiences. A person, or less likely, a group of people, might change your life for the better. We will discuss the great variety of things that are good for you, as well as things that are bad for you, in our next blog.

Before we leave this section of accepting things that are good for you, it behooves me to discuss grace. Grace is defined as “unmerited favor,” or something that you didn’t deserve. Many of the things that are life-changing come to us without our bidding, and often without our having earned the privilege of having such a person, thing, or event. I will not belabor the point, but it is important to note that grace is very hard to accept because of the very element of “not deserving” such a thing. We do not deserve the love that people have for us, this regardless of how important it is to be loved. We do not deserve the other joys of life that come without warning. And we certainly do not deserve to win the lottery, which of course, is much more by luck than by someone’s grace. When these very special…gracious…things come our way, we often come to tears. We might even feel “embarrassed,” which by the way, is repressed joy. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to accept the truly great things that come our way because we do not earn such things nor can we pay for them. They come by grace. Accepting and enhancing good things can be quite hard for people who seem to be in most need some grace from the world, largely because such people may have fallen into a life of felt neediness too long, that they have developed an unfortunate feeling of entitlement.

Whether something is on the mild/moderate side of the “good for me” spectrum or on the more profound side of the spectrum, it is important to move beyond observing and accepting these things to a place where we enhance such things. Before we engage in that discussion, however, let’s look at some of the things, experiences, and people who are good for us:

Things that are good for me

Things:

  • Money
  • Property
  • Nature
  • Art
  • Music
  • Color

Experiences:

  • Nature
  • Play
  • Work
  • Rest
  • Health
  • Forgiveness

People:

  • Parental figure
  • Mentor
  • Good friend
  • Accepting group
  • Reuniting

I invite you to note one or two elements in each category what might have come your way. You will immediately see that many such things have come unexpectedly. You might also note that you did not necessarily truly observe or accept such things as they came. More importantly, you might not have taken the time to find ways to enjoy the moment of the mild/moderate “good for me” experiences or found ways to enhance the more profound things in your life.

Enhancing things that are good for me

The first ingredient in being able to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life is to observe them and accept them as well as taking time in each of these steps, each of these processes. There is the simple, “Take time to smell the roses” in life, but enhancement of things that are good for me are not always obvious, like the sight or smell of roses. The group of things that are in the mild/moderate side of the good for me spectrum come usually unbidden and unexpected, and can go unnoticed. It is easier to notice the good things that I have earned, perhaps by some effort. This does take time, but more than time, it takes observation and acceptance. As noted above, it can be much harder to accept things that we have not earned and are truly coming from some part of the gracious universe. You will find that the more you observe and accept the simple pleasures of life, the more your life will be enhanced.

It might seem easy to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life, but many people struggle with being able to do so. There are many impediments to accepting and then enhancing things that are good for me:

  • I might be afraid that I will lose this thing that is good for me. Note the key word here: fear. Fear is by far the greatest impediment to enhancement of joy and pleasure.
  • I want more of what I received and thus fall into the trap of thinking that I have earned something that is good for me. You can never earn someone’s love. Neither can you keep it forever, just as the Israelites could not keep manna from heaven from one day to the next
  • You don’t know how to enhance something that is good for you, or it might be costly for you to do so. You might have to give something up in order to enhance your life with something that is truly good for you.

If you choose the path of enhancement of joyous and pleasurable things, you will notice that these things last longer than you expected, that they almost always end sometime, and that they have left an indelible mark on you. This mark is humility: you have recognized that you didn’t earn many of the good things you have, that you can’t pay someone back for the grace they have shown you, and that you can only “pay it forward” to others. So, you might:

  • Simply thank the person who gave you something, whether property, time, or comfort
  • Enjoy the moment however that moment might last, seconds or years. The moment will most surely end but there’s no value in worrying about it ending.
  • Remember what you have enjoyed, what was good for you
  • Make some note of how you can inculcate this “good for you” thing in your life
  • Pay it forward

Next up: Complexities in the Good for Me; Bad for me:

  • Good for Me: Bad for You.
  • Good for You; Bad for Me.
  • Good for Me but I don’t like it.
  • Bad for me but I do like it

Self, Selfish, and Selfless

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

There is much talk in the psychological community about “self,” and rightly so because the idea of self is central to understanding the very basis of psychology. Unfortunately, “self” is not defined, nor should it be, because it is one of those concepts that is so important that it can’t be defined. You might recall that I have written (as have many others) that the most important concepts in psychology are undefined, like feelings, love, wisdom, and perhaps other ones as well. Additionally, the three basic ingredients of the known universe are all undefined: distance, mass, and time. All other physics concepts are based on these three undefined concepts. We can measure time, distance, and mass, and we can combine them, like distance/time = velocity, but we don’t define them. Neither do we define “self.”

Not all psychologists use the term “self,” preferring “core self,” “soul,” “spirit,” “inner self,” and other such concepts that all refer to this essence of being human that is not only undefinable, but also fraught with implications according to how people use such terms. I will not debate the values and dangers of these terms but simply state that my preference is “core self” for the most part, but for this blog I will be using “self.”

What is self?

When you have an important concept like self, or time, distance, and love for that matter, you can understand the concept not by a definition but by three ways: (1) observing the absence of the concept, (2) observing more complex concepts that are comprised of self in combination with self, and (3) observing the effects of the concept. Note that the operative word is observing. Let’s look at these three ways of observing self.

The absence of self

We can understand self to some degree when we see what we call an “absence of self.” This terminology is not the best, I grant you, but it does communicate something of what apparently happens with some people: they have failed to develop a clear concept of who they are, that they are important in some way, or even that they exist. A related phenomenon exists with some severely impaired autistic people, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t have a concept of their actual existence.

But this is not what we are talking about with people who have an absence of self, or more accurately don’t have a good sense of self. The primary symptom of such people is an undue attachment to something other than oneself. There is some truth to the theory that people who become addicted to something, whether person, property, substance, or behavior, might not have a good sense of self. So they find a kind of attachment to one of these things (or behavior), which then gives them a sense of existence. This is tantamount to a person feeling such an attachment to, for instance, gambling, that s/he feels a real sense of self when s/he gambles. More often, however, the attachment is less to a behavior, person, property or whatever, as it is to the endorphins that are churned up when the individual is attached to this thing. It is like the person feels, “I feel real when I…(gamble, drink, or fuse with someone else, etc.).”

Most people have at least some sense of self, and hence “absence of self” is not quite right, but when someone has failed to develop a sense of his basic existence apart from anything, we do have this lack of a good sense of self.

Self combined with other elements

People who fuse with something so much that this thing, whether person, property or whatever, becomes what the person is rather than attached to the thing. There is a much healthier and profitable experience than fusion and consequent lack of identity: attachment. There is a literature on several kinds of attachment, but for our purposes here, we are talking about secure attachment. This is typified by the person who can separate him/herself from the behavior or product but finds that the use of something makes him/her a better person. Thus, a person who has a good senses of self can develop a passion for swimming and see swimming as a reflection of one’s self rather than swimming being the essence of oneself. In fact, the best competitors, whether in swimming or playing chess, are people who can attach to the sport and then detach from it without discomfort. To some degree, you can observe a person with a good sense of self engaged in some activity, do well with it at one time, do poorly with it at another time, and have other activities that assist the person to display his/her “self” in the activity. People who have to win at everything do not have a good sense of self, neither do people who simply do not try or give up too easily.

Aside from attaching and detaching from a sport, people with a secure sense of self can truly enjoy something like reading, writing poetry, painting, working, playing, singing, and many other elements of life. Common among people with a good sense of self is their being able to attach and detach from several things, which also suggests that the individual is able to love more broadly, say love swimming, love being alone, love being with people, love playing checkers, and love reading.

The effects of having a good sense of self

In all of these ways of attaching and dethatching to things, the person with a good sense of self is appreciative of the many aspects of life. The primary effect of having a good sense of self is that the individual appreciates life and has a sense of gratitude for living. People with less of a good sense of self do not feel such gratitude. Rather, sadly, they feel that they have not had enough and need more. This effect of having a good sense of self yields a deeper and deeper appreciation for what the world provides them, sometimes as simple as air to breathe and water to drink, but also property, people, and position in life.

In addition to feeling a sense of gratitude the second effect of someone with a good sense of self is that s/he has a passion to do something for humanity. You don’t have to be a philanthropist or a tree hugger to do something for humanity. You can be that cheery cashier or the honest attorney who both feel a passion to do something good for other people. When these things happen, namely feeling grateful and feeling a passion to give to the world, an interesting thing happens: you forget about yourself.

Forgetting about yourself

Now this must seem quite contradictory to what I originally wrote, namely that ideally a person has a good sense of self. So what do I mean suggesting that one “forget about him/herself?” I mean that when one’s sense of self is truly solid, s/he doesn’t worry, doesn’t fear, rarely gets angry, and spends a great deal of time thinking of how to serve the world. Such people are not defensive because they know their limits and their flaws. They are not critical because they know that everyone is doing their best to survive in life. They do not worry what other people think of them because they know that most people don’t care about them whatsoever, while there are probably an equal number of people who do like them and don’t like them. In their doing, they make mistakes and quickly come out with a “my bad” expression. They listen to criticism, whether right or wrong; they know they are hurt, but they don’t let their hurt lead them into anger or fear. Most importantly, they are more interested in other people than they are in themselves. They don’t live through other people, but rather have a life orientation of service. You can’t serve, give, and sacrifice if you are constantly thinking of what you want, which is so common among people with an inadequate sense of self.

Be yourself. It is the best thing you have. When you really know that, you will be able to “forget about yourself” without losing yourself. It is like having such a good foundation that the upper stories can collapse but never damage the foundation.