Development

Looking for Magic

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, happiness, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Everybody loves magic. I always admire someone who is skilled at doing magic, whether someone who is professional on a stage like a colleague of mine (Dr. Dan Feaster), or someone who is just good at some card trick. I always enjoy doing some kind of simple magic with young kids where I make a penny “disappear” and then “reappear” on the kid’s ear, but I’m not really good at any kind of magic and leave it mostly to professionals and folks who are just good at some kind of parlor trick.

A few years back I wrote a blog entitled, “The Magic of Psychotherapy” in which I suggested that people look at psychotherapy as being some kind of magic, namely (1) a magical diagnosis, (2) a magical treatment, and (3) a magical cure. There is no magic to psychotherapy, whether in a so-called diagnosis, treatment, or cure. Rather, therapy is a delicate operation that is conducted by two people trying to make sense of what is working and what is not working in life and finding ways to make life work. It is hard work for both the therapist and the patient, not work that most therapists know how to do, and not the kind of work that patients really want to do. Yet, somehow, many therapist and many patients find ways to do good work and find ways to make life creative, productive, and ultimately meaningful.

Believing in magic

There is another kind of magic that I hear from many of the people in my office. This kind of magic involves an individual’s belief that something will fall from the sky and cure all that ails them. I have heard the following:

  • A very successful clergy person who is over 75 years old made some kind but unwise choices in his personal life, namely spending too much money pleasing his wife leaving them now in serious debt with no visible way out. Because of their moral/ethical stance they are unwilling to file for bankruptcy. Mack’s magic is that “someone, something, or God Himself” will somehow drop $200K into his bank account.
  • A man of good character, self-made, successful, kind, honest, formerly professional and now retired has been unsuccessful in establishing, maturing, and enhancing any female relationship. His magic is that there will magically be someone who will knock on his door or respond to his internet postings.
  • Many people with some kind of anxiety-based life have a magical desire about their lifelong struggle with anxiety. They think that if they just do everything right, everyone will like them, they will never make a mistake and never be criticized.
  • A very outgoing and friendly man who has also been quite successful in life was divorced by his wife recently, something that he didn’t see coming and was not prepared for. Two of his three adult children have essentially abandoned him together with only a tangential relationship with his third child. He “prays for his wife” specifically that she will “come back to the Lord” despite the fact that she apparently never has loved him, does not like him, and has sought no contact with him during and now after the divorce. Prayer is not based on what we think someone else should do, nor what God should do for that person
  • Several people who are addicted to something, whether it is chemical like alcohol and drugs or behavioral like video game-playing and gambling, look for some magic to get out of their addiction. A real addiction originates in some kind of pleasure, then becomes a largely pleasurable habit and then mutates into an escape. So, eventually and addiction is where the brain demands that you can “feel better” if you only return to the addictive substance or behavior. It is magical to think the addiction will just go away on its own.
  • Another man of good character and someone who has always been a good and faithful worker unfortunately acquired multiple sclerosis some years ago and has lived for the recent years in residential care because now he has no use of his appendages and is slowly losing his ability to speak. Unfortunately, this assault of the M.S. kept him from continuing to work. He had taken out a second mortgage on his house to do some repairs while he was still working and had a standard amount of credit card debt, but when he was no longer able to work, his wife was not stuck with an immune am fount of debt that she had no way of paying. Jack said that he “just needed someone to give him $100K” and everything would be OK. He died not long ago never having seen this magic.
  • A young man who made a rather silly insignificant choice in college that was judged to be plagiarism. It took him several years to finally finish his degree. He really wants “to do something for other people” but can’t seem to maintain a job. He wants his employer to fund his failure to work diligently.
  • Many people who have sought “disability” status because they think they have PTSD, ADHD, bipolar disorder or some other psychiatric disorder even though they are quite bright and capable.
  • A gay man who wants to “get married and have children” and then perhaps have some gay sex on the side. He can’t seem to find a woman who plugs into this magic. Many other gay men who want to be something other than gay
  • Another very bright person who is very ideational and imaginative but has never really succeeded in life despite his master’s degree and previous success in his profession. I have known him for many years and watched him go from job to job, usually within his chosen profession, which by the way, for which he is quite ill-suited. He goes from dream to dream, from idea to idea, for “aha” to “aha” but never really does what it would take to find a way in life that is meaningful.

All of these people tend to be intelligent and many of them are people of good character and often of deep spiritual commitment and engagement. Yet they retain the idea, or should we call it a “feeling” that something magical will come into their lives to make life better for them. These are not bad people, not unintelligent people, and not people with insufficient character. But they have all fallen into believing in magic of some sort. Along the way, each of them has become quite depressed and occasionally despairing of life in some way. Most of them say what I often hear from men: “I don’t want to live” even though they don’t want to die and are not suicidal. They just don’t want to live in the lives they have because, aside from a magical intervention, they can’t see their way out.

So what can they do, or what can I do as therapist to help these folks give up magical thinking and find some meaningful way to face the reality of life and the necessity of appropriate decisions?

Overcoming magical thinking

…is very very hard. When people get into magical thinking, it is much easier to believe in magic than face the reality of life. So what is “the reality of life”? Hurt, doing something, hard work, time, mistakes, failures, others’ criticism, and imperfection. Successful living outside of magic is facing all of these things courageously, finding some understanding of these elements of life, and ultimately finding true joy, success, and happiness sin life.

Facing Hurt

There have been many people, many of them quite intelligent and philosophical significant, who have said that life IS pain. Buddha suggested something like this although there is much more to Buddhism than this idea of pain. Contemporary statements about like, “Life sucks and then you die.” I think this is a very unfortunate way of looking at life. Indeed, there are people for whom life is painful all the time and some of these people never find much joy in life, but for most people life is not purely and primarily painful.

Hurt, emotional hurt, is an extremity important element in life that needs to be faced. It is so important that I have come to think that successful life starts with the experience of hurt, the understanding of hurt, the careful expression of hurt, finding ways of overcoming hurt, and ultimately becoming used to hurt in hits many guises. Hurt (emotional hurt) is always love-based. This means that I am hurt because I have lost something. I encourage you to read previous blogs on hurt and/or our book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel. The heart of emotional maturity, social maturity, and general life maturity is based on understanding and resolving hurt in life.

It is much easier to believe in magic, like I will never be hurt again, hurt will just go away, I will never hurt anyone, or God forbid, I just have to live with being hurt until I die.

Facing the need to do something and hard work that goes along with it

Doing something is easy for some people, like me, and difficult for other people who tend to be more ideational. There are dangers for doers, like me, and idea people. I tend to jump right in and do something and usually make a lot of mistakes along the way. People who are more ideational than productive very often fail to do enough to find what they need to do in life. While there is some magical thinking with us doers, there tends to be a lot more with people who are idea people. I think I am speaking mostly to people for whom doing comes hard when I suggest that you have to do something. A few of the men I described above are doers who have done a lot but not thought through what they were doing.

Doing something is not just doing anything. Doing something needs some thought behind it, which suits the idea people for whom magical thinking is so easy. Doing something for idea people is hard because they tend to be more exacting and quality oriented people than us doers. They want to do it right the first time and often get lost in thinking of what they might do, considering all the options, and trying to make the doing something that is perfect the first time. Nothing is perfect the first time. Furthermore, nothing is perfect. Period.

The hard work of doing includes mistakes, failures, and criticisms, which we will discuss briefly, but more importantly, it means doing a lot of what you don’t want to do in order so that you can do what you do want. This means a kind of discipline. I have had to discipline myself to do much more running and working out, as well as eating much better, since my heart attack. And, I never like it. I discipline myself to do these things because I want the product: being alive.

Facing mistakes, failures, and others’ criticisms

This, I think is the reason most people fall into magical thinking and believing in what is magical: they mistakenly think that if they do something, it will be right the first time. If they wait until the right moment, something magical will happen so life will unfold wonderfully. If they have all their ducks in a row, they will do it perfectly. None of this is true. Rather, if you find a way out of magical thinking, you WILL make mistakes, you will have failures, and you will most certainly have other people’s criticisms of you.

I think it is the facing of mistakes that is most devastating to a successful life in all its arenas, namely vocationally, interpersonally, intimately, and personally. People who believe in magic are often plagued by their former mistakes and hence the fear of more mistakes. Additionally, there are many people who have a feeling that something is deeply flawed in them, that they are somehow plagued by a dark spirit or something, and hence are unable to reach forward, do something, and find meaning in life. These amount to old wounds, usually originating in early childhood and perhaps stretching into adolescence, only to be aggravated by things that happened afterward.

Magic people may also be people who have actually not made enough mistakes in life. Perhaps they came from a perfectionistic family where they couldn’t make mistakes, or a family where they were criticized all the time, or a family where they were indulged so much that they never faced the mistakes that are so necessary in life.

Mistakes are essential in order to do something significant and meaningful. They may be mistakes of marriage or failing to marry the right person, mistakes of schooling that brought you to a profession that does not suit you, mistakes of spending too much and getting in too much debt. You might read my blog on Regrets where I identify some of the mistakes I have made in life, and hence regrets that I have. As a doer I have made more mistakes than most people.

While old mistakes, old history of an inadequate childhood, or the unreasonable fear of future mistakes, much of our fears of mistakes and avoidance of mistakes are related to what we imagine other people might say negatively about us. It is easier to be magical thinking that I will never be criticized than face the absolute necessity of criticism if I actually do something.

Facing imperfection

This is the hardest battle for people who believe in magic. Nothing is perfect. No action is perfect. No person is perfect. This is easy for me to say but to face imperfection, especially for magical thinkers, is extremely painful, which brings us back to the centrality of pain. Magical thinking is essentially believing that I can live a life without pain if something magical happens. Maybe this one hundred thou drops out of the sky, or that perfect woman will knock on my door, or I will find the perfect profession and job. None of these things is real. Rather, there might just be a really good woman…who is imperfect, or a perfect profession/job…that is imperfect, or a slow painful decision regarding money…that is imperfect. Perfectionism is quality thinking that has gone crazy. Magical thinkers think…magically…that something is perfect…if they can only find it. They will never find it, but they can find success and happiness in life if they dare face pain, mistakes, criticism, and imperfection

The Things That We Love

Ron Johnson appreciation, Connection, Development, family, Feelings, love, mindfulness, Personality, Self-Awareness

We all love different things. Our most recent book, What’s Your Temperament, discusses how our temperaments determine what we like, and more importantly, what we love. We made a distinct point that one of the defining characteristics that we have is our temperament, and implicit in each temperament is a distinct tendency to love something. Analysts love truth (and seek to solve problems; caretakers love property (and seek to protect it); players love experience (and value physical engagement), and lovers love people (and seek connections). You can read more about these identified temperaments in some previous blogs or catch a bit of it free at Amazon if you like. Instead of plowing the same ground with temperament, I want to suggest that we do, indeed, love different things although it may not always seem like love. While there is never anything wrong with loving something, this actual loving can lead people into difficult situations, sometimes personal, sometimes interpersonal, sometimes physical, and sometimes emotional or intellectual. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy lately and found it interesting that the actual word philosophy from the Greek words for love (philos) and wisdom (sophia), which is a reference to the goddess Sophia, the goddess of wisdom. With the danger of too much repetition allow me to summarize the “loves” of the different temperaments, the values of this loving, and the dangers of this loving. Then we will progress into other, perhaps more mundane and day-to-day loves that are good at heart and sometimes difficult in practice:

The loves of the different temperaments

Caretakers:

  • Basic love: property
  • Value of this kind of loving: providing safety for the world
  • Danger of this kind of loving: materialism, busyness

Analysts:

  • Basic love: truth
  • Value of this kind of loving: finding truth and bring it to the world
  • Danger of this kind of loving: independence; too often finding too much fault

Players:

  • Basic love: experience
  • Value of this kind of loving: fun and learning from experience
  • Danger of this kind of loving: intrusion into others’ lives

Lovers:

  • Basic love: people
  • Value of this kind of loving: connections, sacrifice
  • Danger of this kind of loving: giving in, dependence, and ultimate resentment

Other kinds of love

  • Play:
    • Value: relief and restoration
    • Danger: physical and emotional danger to others
  • Alcohol:
    • Value: enhancement of life
    • Danger: alcohol dependence
  • Talking:
    • Value: communication
    • Danger: failure to listen
  • Listening:
    • Value: hearing other people
    • Danger: failing to reveal one’s own feelings
  • Working:
    • Value: production
    • Danger: fatigue, physical danger
  • Saving:
    • Value: protection
    • Danger: miserliness
  • Spending:
    • Value: joy and fun
    • Danger: irresponsible spending
  • Ideas:
    • Value: possible solutions to problems
    • Danger: not ever doing anything significant
  • Family:
    • Value: care for one’s own
    • Danger: getting lost in family problems
  • Quality:
    • Value: doing something right
    • Danger: never satisfied with good enough
  • Quantity:
    • Value: having lots of things
    • Danger: having too much, lack of quality
  • Reading:
    • Value: learning
    • Danger: always learning, never practicing
  • Sports:
    • Value: joy, physical improvement, comradery
    • Danger: lost in sports trivia
  • Working out:
    • Value: physical improvement
    • Danger: physical becomes dominant in one’s life

Examples:

  1. Jack is a real hard worker, often working 80 or 90 hours a week in his trade of accounting and related work. He is a millionaire several times over largely due to his hard work. Jack has lost his wife and at least one, if not two, of his children in the process because he has been so busy all the time
  2. Janice is a real loving person. She loves to love and does it with vigor. She sacrifices herself easily and freely. She really loves her family. There is no one who is more sacrificial. Unfortunately, she has indulged her children to such an extent that they can’t think for themselves, much less do for themselves.
  3. Sam is quite bright, perhaps one of the brightest people I know. He did quite well in his profession for a number of years. Sam also loves sports and came to love drinking quite a bit, usually getting drunk daily, passing out, and then waking up to watch TV. He has no one significant in his life because he couldn’t find a way to translate his brilliance into a relationship, much less govern the use of alcohol.
  4. Peter really loves women. He is quite handsome and becoming and has been quite successful in attracting women, often bedding them, with ease over his years of life. He has not, unfortunately, been able to establish for himself a lasting, meaningful female relationship. He is good at getting, and not so good at maintaining and improving.
  5. Frank is a pastor and has done quite well in his work over his 50 odd years of professional life. Unfortunately, he hasn’t really developed much else in his life, like a good hobby, good long-term relationships, and abilities beyond preaching and teaching. Now in his semi-retirement years he feels quite lost and has finally come to realize that he hasn’t been the best of husband because his focus was so much on being a pastor.

Consider what you love, the goodness of your love, and the fact that you may actually love something or someone better than most people. Then consider that you might be “loving to a fault” and might need to broader your loving to things beyond what has become easy and natural for you.

 

Good Men to Great Men

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, men's issues, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

In my work with men I have found myself telling men that they are “good men” but not great men. I have been pleasantly surprised how this phraseology has resonated with men. Somehow, they seem to understand that, however good they are, they can be great. In this blog I will attempt to discuss “goodness” in men, potential “greatness”, what these words mean, and how men some men achieve greatness, and how men have achieved greatness. I apologize for my attention to men in this regard of goodness and greatness as I mean no disservice to women but rather to honor my understanding of men. I leave it to others to examine this matter for women. Please allow me to use the masculine pronoun most of the time.

What is “goodness” in men

The word goodness, like so many other important words in the psychological dictionary, is undefined. Don’t be concerned. In my mind, the most important aspects of psychology are undefined, like the terms love, truth, and even God. Furthermore, the basic ingredients of physics, time, distance, and mass, are also undefined. We understand something that is undefined by observing it the way we observe time or love, not in a rigid definition of such things. Goodness is like that: we know it when we feel it and we know it when we see it.

Having said that goodness is undefined, we can look at some ingredients and results of goodness. The basic ingredient of being goodness in a person is the result of that person having a good sense of self. Oops, we’ve used another undefined term, but hopefully you can ride with me on this one because the concept of self is pretty basic to psychological functioning. While it is undefined, self refers to the essence of a person, which might be called spirit or soul. Importantly, a person with basic goodness has a sense of his/her “self” (or soul, or spirit). Importantly, if I have a sense of self, I will have a sense that there is something good inside of me. This goodness is something like feeling a kind of perfection in me. This feeling of goodness or self is not the same as perfect speech or activity, both of which are often imperfect, just as the words I am writing this very moment are imperfect. A person with a sense of goodness knows, perhaps without words, that inside of him/her there is a kind of perfect something. We call it self.

Beyond feeling this goodness, good people do good things and say good things. In other words, their goodness is reflected in what they say or do. The saying or doing good things is not the core of goodness but rather the result of goodness. In fact, the more a person feels his/her inner goodness, the more they will say and do good things.

I often speak to men about their basic goodness, or they’re being “a good person” or sometimes “a very good person.” Having said that, I often suggest to the man that however good they are, they can be great. What does that mean?

Greatness

Greatness is another undefined term that you can understand and use by seeing the result of greatness. Basically, and importantly, greatness is achieved when a person (a good person to start) has got beyond himself. This is tricky to explain because I suggested that goodness is achieved when a person knows himself and accepts himself. Greatness can only be achieved after a man (or person) has this sense of the goodness of his soul and the understanding that his self (soul, spirit) is perfect in its basic construction. When a person has this feeling of goodness and inner perfection, he is then finds a way to move beyond self. Moving beyond self does not mean that you abandon yourself, but rather that you use your self/soul/spirit in some kind of way that I define as great.

Greatness is usually demonstrated by some kind of activity that helps humankind in some way. This can be creating a masterful piece of art, solving the problem of nuclear fusion, writing a book, or finding a way to make trash collecting more efficient and productive, both for the workers and for the customers who choose to recycle. There are many other forms of greatness that might now actually show on the surface. A great person may devote his life entirely to parenting an impaired child or in some kind of volunteer work. The key in all of this is what I call a feeling, “This is not about me. It is about serving the world in some way.”

Understandably, the result do greatness may be fame and fortune but for the truly great person neither of these is important. Very important, however, is for the good-to-great person to overcome anger and fear. A good example of a great person is that he is not worried at all about what people think of him because his focus is on being great and doing something great. This is very hard to achieve as most men are too quick to anger and many hold a deep-seated fear that shows itself directly in anxiety or indirectly in addiction and avoidance.

Some examples

These are real men but their names and stations in life have been altered to protect their privacy.

  • Jack is a semi-retired broker who is probably a millionaire or more. He has always been hard-working, honest, and faithful to his wife. He has had an inclination to anger and a kind of sexual addiction that showed itself in undue sexual pressure with his wife. Greatness for Jack, as I told him, would be to overcome anger entirely, treat his wife with respect. He appears to be quite demanding as he has been in charge of all of his life, his wife, his kids, and his work all his life. And, oh, by the way, not to give in to her.
  • Sam is a pastor, a truly good man who has served in the ministry for 50 plus years, quite successfully. He has had a financial problem that has plagued him all his wife shown most specifically in his having been unable to say “no” to his wife. He also has suffered low self-esteem that no one knows but me (and now his wife), which led to his intense fear of hurting his wife and having her disappointed in him. Greatness for Sam would be to be true to himself, honest, and slowly erase the feeling that something is wrong with him.
  • Peter is a retired police officer who served his community for decades, lastly as chief of police. He has fallen into a tendency to be irritable and not particularly honest about his medical/physical life. Greatness for Peter is to be honest, first with himself and then with his wife. Then he would be able to transfer some his former greatness into his new life, which is not family, kids, grandkids, and perhaps other activities.
  • Brad is a successful businessman but had a lifelong tendency to be angry after trying hard to achieve harmony. In fact, when he can’t find harmony, he explodes, a phenomenon that is quite common among harmony-based people. Greatness for him is to reduce anger entirely, develop a better self-esteem and acceptance of his limitations and mistakes. Then he would need to deal effectively with his wife who, sadly, like many wives, is often critical of him.
  • Tom is quite bright, achieved a master’s degree in his chosen profession but has been unsuccessful in his profession and in all of his relationships. His goodness is composed of intelligence, integrity, truth, and good work. His downfall is the feeling that he has to be perfect so he is harder on himself than anyone else. He has been fired several times because of his intransigence. First, he has to find his basic goodness, that followed by finding a way to enter his profession and succeed so that he can better the world.

Find your goodness. Find your inner perfection. Get some help to do that. Then you will be able to feel so good about yourself that you forget about yourself. Then you are a great man.