appreciation

The Joy/Sadness Dyad of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Examples of feeling emotional

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passion, Purpose, and Product

Ron Johnson appreciation, Feelings, mindfulness, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

A good life is a life that produces something. I have to very careful here because “producing” doesn’t necessarily mean some kind of physical product, like the infamous “widget.” A product may be an idea, perhaps an idea that changes the world, or at least part of the world, for good. The product might be interpersonal, where someone is meaningfully helped in life. The product might be some kind of physical movement, like dance, drama, or chiropractic where the movement is good for people. And, of course, the product might be some kind of widget. A life without a product is not worth living. Sadly, many people do not have a product in their lives despite their having worked very hard at something or as the result that they haven’t worked very hard at something. Let’s start with passion.

Passion

Let me explain these three words before I say more about the product. First, the passion. Passion is one of those words that is undefinable, like I have written about before, most importantly the words feeling, love, wisdom, meaning, and many other psychological/philosophical terms. Recall the known universe is composed of (at least) three undefined terms: time, distance, and mass. We all know what time and distance are, and we might say that mass is something like physical stuff (sorry physicists; I’m doing my best here). We know what these elements are but they are not defined. Velocity is defined as distance over time, but distance and time are not defined. Likewise, feelings, as we use the term is that which emanates from our inner self or soul, but there I have used another undefined term. All of this talk is about the centrality of many concepts and words that represent those concepts that are real but undefined. Passion is undefined although we know what it is and we know what it does, just like we understand feelings, time, and love.

Passion is some kind of mixture of feelings that themselves are comprised of the four elements of feelings: physical sensation, emotion, cognition, and activity. One has passion when he or she “feels” a desire for something good. God for the person and good for others. Thus, passion leads to something good…or ideally should lead to something good. We may have passion for a football team, a country, physical work, play, or any number of ideas, things, or activities. We can even have passion for something that is not real, like a TV character who somehow inspires us to this undefined element of passion. If we don’t have passion, we can never have a product. Many people fail to find a passion in life. I am dealing with such a person in my current practice.

Jake has no interest in anything. He likes to play video games and is often on his cell phone playing or rambling through the Internet, but he has no interest in doing anything good. I’m sure, somewhere down inside of him, he has a real core self that is pure and godly, but beyond this esoteric understanding of Jake, I see no interest in anything that has any lasting value. He is like many young men: he likes sex and he likes money, but even these likes are quite fleeting because he has neither at the present time because he doesn’t know how to nurture his passion. Jake came to me because he was “depressed” but that word, that diagnosis, does him no good because it is just a statement of his lacking passion. On the other hand, I know many men who have very specific passions in life including boating, fishing, hunting, dancing, playing golf, interpersonal connectedness, raising children, working hard at a secretarial job, gardening, and writing. My own primary passion these years if for writing although I am equally passionate about therapy and a few other secondary passions like basketball and minor carpentry. Passion is great, but passion is not enough. You have to have purpose.

Purpose

While passion is undefined and something you can only understand by observation and by feeling, purpose is quite specific. Simply put, purpose is the drive that put passion to work so that there can be a product. Purpose is movement, whether by mind or body, that pushes one’s passion into something real and meaningful. I have to be careful about using the term “real” here because real could be quite esoteric, like an idea that could change the world, or it could be real like painting a house. I know, for instance a professional painter who is passionate about his work and can’t wait until he can return to “the wall,” as he calls it. The purpose of John’s passion is to pain well and finish well. Likewise the purpose I have in this present blog is to be of some service, but as I write these words, I have not completed a product, which will hopefully be a document of some use to someone.

Sam is a really smart guy. He is also an analyst by nature (you’ll have to read the analyst blog), which means that he loves problems to solve. The other day I was with him in a situation that had a kind of conundrum, which perplexed him but also intrigued him. The dilemma we had at the moment had no significant value in the world at large, but it consumed Sam for the moments that we were uncertain as to what we should do in the situation we were in. At first, I thought I could recommend a course of action, namely how I saw the dilemma, but he would have none of it because he was so taken by the problem that he could have spent hours just contemplating what he (or we) should do. I gave Sam as much time as I could genuinely give him and then said that I thought it was best that he take his course of action. He was slightly upset with me because I evidently didn’t want to muse about what he (we) might do. Many people are like Sam, musing, thinking, feeling, dreaming, wondering, or analyzing. Behind their musing and such is a deep passion for something. In Sam’s case, his passion is to solve problems. But to my mind he has never solved any significant problem in his life and has spent hours and years musing. Some people get lost in the things they own but they are not really passionate about things, while other people are passionate about relationships while not having any, and still others are passionate about ideas but never find one that leads to a product.

I also know of many people who have passion and purpose and go farther with it. Fist, however, before they actually do anything, they achieve some sort of skill at the doing this passion. I have a friend my age who is passionate about several things, one of which is water skiing. A couple years ago he water skied some 100-plus times over the summer. Furthermore, he is passionate about helping people learn to water ski and even more passionate about have weekly get-togethers where everybody talks, plays, eats, and water skies. I know of a man who is passionate about matters theological, another matters psychological, and another matters that have to do with construction. In all of these man there is some product, whether intellectual, relational, or physically productive. While many men get stuck in the first stage because they don’t have passion to do anything, many more get stuck in the second stage because they are willing to step forth and produce something.

Product

As central as passion is as a reflection of one’s soul, and as fun as it is to muse and consider this passion and what might be done with it, life is ultimately not meaningful if one does not have a product. As noted, the product be of almost any form, but it has to be something more than passion, which is beautiful, and purpose, which is fun. That having been said, it takes a number of things to move from passion and purpose to product. In a nutshell, it takes trial and error, or more accurately, many trials and many errors. Even more importantly, it takes the difficult experience of being misunderstood, misjudged, corrected, or challenged. You see why so few people get beyond passion and purpose: no one likes to make mistakes and no one likes to be criticized. Let me put some meat on the bones of this passion leads to purpose leads to product.

  • Mahatma Gandhi was a failure for most of his life. He failed in South Africa where his work began. He failed in India for decades. He failed in keeping India united instead of splitting into Pakistan and India. But his passion led to purpose, which in turn led to product: the freeing of 600 million Indians from British rule.
  • Martin Luther King was largely a failure. We remember his “dream” speech, which was wonderful, of course, and the peace marches he led. But he did not succeed during his lifetime, and his legacy continues strong where his product is still unfolding.
  • Sojourner Truth, a very significant Black woman in the 19th century who said, “Ain’t I a woman?” when questioned about her beliefs. Read about her. She had passion, purpose, and did something.

But the people who actually do something, actually have a product in their lives don’t have to be these well-known people. Most are not well-known, nor do they want to be. They just want to do something important, something good in life, maybe like:

  • Helping a challenged child learn to walk or talk
  • Be a recovering alcoholic and help others to recover
  • Write a song that is good for one person, one family, or one country

May you find your passion in life, purpose to do something, and then do something. People will love you. People will hate you. But it’s not about people loving or hating you. It is about the passion that God has given you that needs to be given to the world in the form of product.

Daily Disappointments

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

S**t happens, right? Indeed it does. No way around it. Things happen that are unexpected…and ultimately disappointing. If that were the end of it, I wouldn’t be writing this blog because if people actually understood that s**t happens, they would be able to handle it, process it, remember it, and prevent the almost universal reaction to the s**t that has happened. It would be great if people could really understand that things don’t always go as you expect them to go, that you are naturally and understandably disappointed in what happened…or didn’t happen, and then find a good way to accept the loss and the accompanying disappointment, together with the emotion attached to disappointment without allowing disappointment to deteriorate into anger, avoidance, anger, assault, and addiction.

Since Deb and I have traveled quite a bit out of country, we have had the opportunity of learning about other countries together with their customs, many of which are substantially different from what we have in the U.S. So, we have learned to expect the unexpected, the wrong turns, the mistakes, and the simple misunderstandings that occur when you are in a different culture, much less a different country with a different language, different currency, and different physical/emotional customs. We have such differences in subcultures in the U.S. and in Newfoundland, Canada where we lived for four years. When seeing someone in my office of Asian descent, Latino background, African-American heritage, or nonbinary gender, I have learned to pay close attention to cultural and subcultural differences although I readily admit that my understanding of cultural and subcultural matters is minimal at best. I’m pretty good at seeing and understanding differences in personality type, personality temperament, developmental differences, and gender differences albeit certainly with an orientation of being an American. Facing a different culture, even a subculture can bring a good deal of disappointment, whether from misunderstanding someone, being misunderstood by someone, or simply not liking some part of the culture because it is irritating. But disappointment is not limited to culture or personality factors.

I think disappointment comes every day, usually several times every day, and it is a central piece of what it means to be a person, to be a person with emotion, to be a person with thought, and to be a person who loves something. Deb and I are just back from a lovely trip to Europe, starting in Malta (and accompanying island of Gozo), which lies just south of Sicily, which itself lists just south of mainland Italy. Let me give you an example of one day that Deb and I had during our recent trip.

  • The day started out looking good as we intended to hike a good part of Gozo, a relatively easy hike without a lot of steps or hills to climb, almost all of the hike being on the seaside. We were disappointed to learn that the “bed and breakfast” didn’t serve breakfast. OK, but disappointing.
  • We came to a place in our hike where it was unclear as to which way we should go because of the lack of signage. (The Maltese islands do not have much in the way of signage, whether of hiking paths, roads, or even villages.) Disappointing to not really know whether you should go right or left. We chose right. We chose wrong. We were disappointed to find that the path eventually deteriorated.
  • We found our way to a small village and asked for directions from a generous Maltese fellow whom we encountered as he was about to enter his house. He directed us in a certain direction. We thought we understood him and proceeded to take our best guess of following his directions. Wrong again. Disappointed again. Now we were in another village with another choice of direction.
  • We proceeded further down what seemed like the best path to get to a place that we had read about. Eventually, we saw our destination down a mountain (high hill) just on the east coast of Gozo. About halfway down the path we discovered that we had taken the wrong path and needed to forage out way through various rocks and crevices to get to the sea. Disappointed again. Not bad though. Just disappointed.
  • We stayed at the seaside for a cup of espresso and then began our trek back to our lodging, and oops, another wrong turn and then needing to retrace our steps. Disappointed again.
  • We eventually got to the larger village on the island but were pretty worn out having hiked about 7 hours, and hoped we could find a taxi to take us the last couple of kilometers to our temporary home. Couldn’t find one. Disappointed again.
  • When we finally got home truly ready to eat dinner, we couldn’t find a place open. Note it was about 6 PM. Nothing open. Eventually, someone told us that restaurants don’t open until 7 “or so” (usually about 7:15 at the earliest). Disappointed. And hungry.

Note all these disappointments, pretty much all of which having to do with our misunderstanding of the Maltese culture, like lack of signage, different language (Maltese is a language of Arabic/Italian/French heritage not spoken anywhere else.) These disappointments were essentially unavoidable because of our limited understanding of the landscape, the seascape, the language, and the culture. So, we allowed ourselves to have these various disappointments and trek on. Along the way, however,, we also had many experiences that were quite pleasing, and even astonishing: the guy who gave us some directions was very kind and generous; the seascapes that we did see off the standard path were stupendous and probably not seen by many off-islanders; the destination at the east coast was marvelous; the espresso was great (I get a cappuccino. Deb gets the real stuff.); we were not hurt; we had a wonderful hike; we had our standard lunch of bread, cheese, fruit, and wine; and we got home safe. Then when we finally got to eat, we had a wonderful meal with great service. And the next morning the matron of the B & B set out a bit of breakfast for us knowing that we had been a bit disappointed the day before.

So, what’s this disappointment all about? Expectations for sure. Misunderstandings for sure. But more important than that, a deeply felt awareness that we needed to be disappointed, allow for the emotion of sadness to occur, and then see how the disappointment and sadness waned on their own. Much different from what seems to be the American way: get irritated, get angry, or God forbid, get even in some way. Not that such things didn’t cross our minds, but we have worked on this central theme of the necessity of sadness, that we migrated the waters of disappointment pretty well. I could bore you with every other day of our two-week travels replete with disappointments every day, like taking a left turn when I should have taken a right turn, both literally and figuratively. Thank goodness for the prevalence of roundabouts in Europe where you can get back to where you should have been easily.

I’ve been thinking about disappointment as coming in levels, like maybe 1 to 10. I’m using the nomenclature of D-1 to D-10 depending on the significance of the disappointment. Like, the disappointment of taking the wrong turn on the hike is maybe a D-2; the disappointment of no breakfast at the B & B maybe a D-3; the disappointment of the taxi maybe a D-1. I think it is important to allow for as much disappointment, as much emotion, and as much time as is needed to finish the disappointment phase of the day. Could be seconds (taxi), minutes (hike misstep), or more minutes (B & B breakfast).

Then there was the disappointment that occurred to Deb (and somewhat to me) that occurred at a train station in Florence, Italy. We were waiting for the train, which was a bit late, and Deb ran for another espresso. About that time I thought it right to take both of our luggage rollers up the track to train car # 10 where we were supposed to board. Wrong decision. I thought it was right and would save Deb from having to carry the luggage. But when she got back to where we had parted, I was nowhere to be found. She told me later that she walked up and down the gateway looking for me. Finally, I saw her about 4 minutes before the train was about to leave and instructed her from about 100 meters away to get on the train where she was (about train car 7) and walk through cars 7, 8, and 9 to meet me at car 10. Minor disappointment to me because I thought she would understand that I had moved up to car 4. Maybe a D-3 for me. Big disappointment to Deb. Maybe a D-7 or D-8. It took many apologizes, much sadness, much restraint of understandable irritation for this D-7/8 to finish. Maybe an hour. But it did finish.

This “finishing” is not what often happens when people get disappointed. They get irritated. They get angry. They get even. And they explain. Yes, they explain, explain, and explain. This is the stuff of arguments, which all have the essence of, “The way I see it is….” I certainly wanted to explain my perspective of what I did, but restrained myself from doing so. Deb needed to explain how she was upset at not finding me and not knowing where I was, whether on the train, off the train, or God forbid, somewhere else in some kind of trouble. D-8, I think. She did explain a bit, and I did a bit, but mostly we just felt the disappointment until we were no longer disappointed. Hard work, but it is work that we continue to learn to do. What are the other options: not good, not productive, and “delusional” as we have suggested in our book. Anger is the delusion that I can change the past by being angry; anxiety is the delusion that I can change the future by being anxious. Reality is disappointment. And sadness. And finishing. Eventually, what is important in such things? S**t happens, good things happen just as often, and s**t ends…if we let it end.

Consider your day and the disappointments that come every single day, some small, some large. Almost all of them ones of misunderstanding, missteps, or miscalculation.