emotional maturity

The “End of Things” I: Theory

Ron Johnson Children, Development, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, social esteem

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs on what I am calling “the end of” certain things. In all of these blogs we will examine the various things, sometimes behavior, sometimes feelings, sometimes experiences, that plague humanity psychologically including:

  • Anger
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Addictions (behavioral and chemical)
  • Confusion
  • Physical distress
  • Relational distress
  • Loneliness
  • Vocational dissatisfaction
  • Lack of sufficient money
  • And others (?)

I use the expression “end of” carefully because to have an end of something suggests that there is something wrong. I am primarily interested in suggesting ways that these various maladies that occur with us might come to an end. I will be making a case that these challenges, whether they fit nicely into a formal psychiatric diagnosis or not, are caused largely psychologically and can be successfully dealt with psychologically. My overall perspective of all these various challenges is that they have similar derivations and hence similar ways that they can come to an end. The following is my overall perspective about these various challenges in life:

  • There is a lack of development in all of these situations. This means that some portion of one’s nature did not develop sufficiently.
  • Most of the time this lack of development was due to inadequate parenting in some way.
  • As a result of inadequate parenting and the subsequent lack of development, certain things in life did not work as they were designed to work
  • The brain got involved and created a means of facing life without adequate tools to engage the world
  • The brain found alternate ways and means of engaging in life as a way of compensating for the lack of development in some area.
  • The brain continued to direct the person into alternate means of engaging life despite the fact that these alternatives had deleterious effects
  • In most cases the person tried to correct or change these alternatives without success in that endeavor
  • The alternatives in life began to dominate the person’s life and ultimately became life-damaging, if not life-threatening
  • It appeared that there was no cure for the ailment, i.e. no way for it to end, which became a dominate factor in the person’s life. It also appeared to be unchangeable because the person had lived with the alternative to adequate development all one’s life: anger and/or all the other phenomena that happen to people in this situation

The developmental understanding of distressing and disturbing things

The purpose of these several blogs is to identify the causes of the difficulties we have in life…because we all have them. These difficulties do not come from some kind of vague biological origin, some cultural pattern, or the so-called “choices” we made early in life that set a pattern for some kind of unhappiness. This having been said, know that I am going against the current orientation in psychology, certainly borrowed from psychiatry, which states that the problems we have in life are of primarily biological origins and secondarily from cultural origins. Simply stated (and there is much more that I could say about this), there are both biological and cultural origins for the difficulties we have in life, whether the poverty that many underprivileged people have suffered to the inherited tendencies that we all have toward some kind of functioning the world, and ultimately to both the physical anomalies and the psychological anomalies that we all have. I will not discuss this matter further, mostly because it is out of the arena of what I want to say, but also because it is a very complex matter, namely the interaction of things biological, cultural, and personal.

As we look at the developmental origins of what ails us, we need to look carefully at what is normal, or perhaps ideal, development. Consider the following in the development of children:

  • The first year of life is one where the child needs three things: safety, comfort, and nurturance, probably in that order.
    • The predominant emotion that an infant feels is fear or the absence of fear. The infant does not feel joy, sadness, or anger. The crying that an infant does is generally without tears, as crying is because of fear, something like, “If you don’t take care of me, I will die.”
  • The second year of life is a time of exploration where a child needs a wide berth in her life in order to explore, both the exploration of words and walking and the exploration of the physical world.
    • The predominant emotion that a toddler feels is joy. She feels joy because she experiences the rudiments of love: love things, love parents, love exploration. This is also a time where an infant begins to have a rudimentary feeling of “self” and rather enjoys being herself. She talks of the blanket or puppy being “mine” and frequently says “no” as another way of establish herself as a separate being.
  • The next three or four years of life are times of experimenting with life as well as wanting, having, and losing. Now the child can walk, talk, run, grab, and perhaps break. During these crucial years of early childhood, the child has ideally had the safety of the first year inside of him, and the experience of having something. Now the child experiences wanting, and he wants much more than he wanted during the first two years of life, which were predominantly safety and experience.
    • The predominant emotion that a pre-school child has is anger. He gets angry because he doesn’t get most of what he wants not knowing that his wants have multiplied by 100 because he can walk, talk, and grab things. He wants more, so he gets less of what he wants. Of course, he doesn’t know that he wants more; he just knows that he doesn’t get much of what he wants.
  • The next six years of life (and to some degree for the rest of life) are times of experimentation in the world. This means achievement in something, like academics, music, art, athletics, or dance. It also means relationship development, which requires a whole bunch of things that were not necessary during the first six years of life. This is also a time for understanding the acquisition, use, and care of physical property whereas previously parental figures took care of such things, whether changing diapers or providing toys to play with.
    • The predominant emotion during these years of life (sometimes called “latency”) is sadness. The child is frequently sad because he/she doesn’t know how to manage the ways of the world, whether in activity, relationships, or property. A child in this time of life loves a lot, whether people, places, or things, and loses a lot. A child who gets through this stage of life learns that all things end, anything that is love is ultimately lost.

When a child does not get to through these stages effectively

It must be obvious that no one gets through theses stages of early childhood unscathed, which means that no child is perfectly loved, cared for, encouraged, challenged, limited, and nurtured. Parents do their best…they always do their best…despite the fact that some parenting is awful. Again, I will not elaborate on this matter as it is out of the purview of the current discussion. More important that the awful parenting that some children get is the good parenting that most people get that is yet inadequate. My primary interest is to look at good parenting that is not good enough and the consequences of such deficiencies:

  • Infancy: when a child fails to get the safety, comfort, and nurturance that he needs, this child will retain fear as the predominant emotion in his life.
    • Then all the rest of life is based on fear, which includes the other emotions of joy, sadness, and anger. But beyond the emotions, the child who has not overcome the fear of dying will see death at every doorstep, namely with every person, every opportunity, and every experience.
    • The result is some form of anxiety
  • Toddlerhood: when a child is deprived or indulged in the arenas of exploration and opportunity, this child will retain do one of two things: she will continue to want everything, or she will fail to want anything.
    • If she is not given enough of the rudiments of wanting, having, and losing, all the rest of life will where she feels there is no way she can have what she wants.
    • If she is given too much of what she wants, she will continue in life expecting that she should be the center of attention as she was when she was a toddler.
  • Pre-school: frankly, this is where most disturbances come with most children, and ultimately with most adults. This should be a time, as we noted, where I want a lot, don’t get much of what I want, and get angry at that fact. There are two dangers:
    • Not getting enough and not being allowed to be angry (and sad) about not getting what the child wants
    • Getting too much of what she wants and failing to realize that in life you want too much, and that fact is simply difficult to accept
  • Latency: As noted, with these years that should be devoted to exploration and experimentation that naturally lead to a lot of disappointment, hurt, and sadness. If the child doesn’t get enough experience and experimentation, he will forever want it and not be satisfied. More importantly, he will not have the important ingredient of feeling sad because he wants something but doesn’t get it, and the accompanying experience that he can want something else and have it. The potential problems during this state of life include:
    • Not having enough freedom to experience and experiment, which then results in the child not having sufficient experience of wanting, having, and losing
    • Having too much freedom, largely without restraint, where the child does not come to value the essential nature of limitations.

As we explore some of the challenges of life as noted above, like anger and addiction, it will be my task to suggest the causes of such maladies, identifying particularly the lack of clarity that people have in their feelings and emotions, and finally suggest courses of action that might be taken to remedy these difficulties and allow them to end.  Be it know, however, that allowing such things to come to an end is extremely hard work, something that most people do not want to do. The best example is of a person who says he “wants to lose weight.” I would content that he does not want to lose weight. Rather, he wants to have lost weight because losing weight is extremely hard to do and no one likes the work it takes to do it.

See you soon.

Good for Me; Bad for Me VII: Good for Me; Bad for You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, family, Feelings, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

My wife likes masks. I don’t. So what does this have to do with “good for me; bad for me”? Lots. Let me explain, but first let me review what I’ve been writing about in recent blogs.

I have proposed that there is a spectrum of things that are, quite simply, “good for me” or “bad for me.” Furthermore, the spectrum ranges from mildly good for to very good for me on one side and then mildly bad for me to significantly bad for me. The spectrum in its simplest form is:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be subcategorized as follows:

  • The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive                /                      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                                      to                                                     (profound)

  • The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting            /           Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                        to                                                                    (profound)

We most recently discussed “complexities” of such things, like when you don’t like something that is good for you, like green vegetables that my grandson hates, or working out that I hate. The present discussion is also complex but the complexities are different because they include times when something is:

  • Good for you but not good for someone else
  • Good for someone else but not good for you
  • Good for you and someone else
  • Bad for you and someone else

I want to help you find ways to deal with all these possibilities because this is the heart of the what makes a good relationship, where a brief encounter at the grocery store or  a long-term marital relationship. Furthermore, there are challenges that occur in relationships when there is agreement as well as when there is disparity in what is “good for you” and “bad for you.” In the following categories I am collapsing “liking” and “good for you” for purposes of brevity.

Good for me; Bad for you

This is the most common challenge in relationships, again noting that “relationships” can be intimate or brief. In this category we have at least the following:

  • I like Trump; you don’t; and vise versa
  • I enjoy green vegetables; you don’t
  • Alcohol is good for me; not for you
  • I need to talk; you need silence
  • I watch TV; you don’t
  • I like to read; you don’t
  • It’s good for me to wear a mask; it’s not good for you
  • I trust doctors; you don’t
  • I am a theist; you are an atheist
  • I like debates; you don’t
  • I favor the Black Lives Matter movement; you think it’s awful

Let’s consider one or two of these. The current health, political, and cultural matters so dominate America, whether it is Black Lives, wearing masks, or Trump. How difficult is it for you to go into a store where you “have to wear a mask”, or is it difficult for you to go into a store and see other people without masks? This is an example of the highly emotional element that is always involved in something that is “good for you” or “bad for you.” When emotion runs high, there is a danger of a certain kind of emotionally-caused blindness, superiority, or anger. Consider how you react to the mandate for masks or the lack of people following the mandate for masks, and you will find emotion. Now consider that this emotion erupts from your inner self or soul. Deb and I have just finished our final review of I Want to Tell You How I Feel in which we discuss how “feelings” erupt from a central core self and go sequentially through physical, emotional, cognitive, and active expressions. While we all have all four of these expressions, some people tend to recognize and express themselves in one of these expressions predominantly. Furthermore, emotion is the least developed feeling expression in America and hence the most dominant. So instead of simply noting that you feel sad because you are mandated to wear a mask, you get afraid and angry. Likewise, you do the same jump from sadness to anger and fear if you see other people failing to wear masks. I would propose that it would be helpful for all to recognize that masks are “good for you” and “bad for others” as a start. But this asks a lot of people: it asks them to be sad rather than angry. In my mind this is emotional maturity, i.e. staying with the disappointment, hurt, or sadness rather than letting allowing anger and fear to take over. This is the heart of what Deb and I wrote about in Good Grief.

Back to my original statement: Deb likes masks; I don’t. Well, it’s not true that I “don’t like masks.” What is true is that I choose to wear a mask in my office, which I deem as private, only when requested to do so by a patient. Deb, on the other hand, wears a mask with every patient and requires her patients to wear masks unless it is particularly inconvenient for them to do so. We have found some commonality in the mask-wearing matter but only as we have identified the “core self” matter, which I will discuss forthwith.

We could take any of the other examples noted above and examine them from the perspective of how some things make me sad, a sadness that I might tend to race right by preferring to be self-righteously angry or unduly afraid. There is more to the story but allow me to delay this discussion for a moment and examine the case when something is…

Good for you; Bad for me

We could consider all the political and cultural themes noted above. Let’s look at the Black Lives Matter discussion. This is a very good example of how many people feel deeply passionate about this movement, whereas as other people feel terribly offended. Supporters of Black Lives suggest that Blacks have been disenfranchised in America and feel deeply that there should be some political and cultural change to rectify this inequality. People who are not in favor of this movement speak of “what lives matter also” speaking of Caucasians, or “blue lives matter” speaking of police. On both sides of this discussion, however, lies a tremendous amount of passion with an even stronger element of anger. We have good people who are passionately demonstrating for equality sometimes becoming so engrossed in their emotions that they throw rocks into windows out of anger. We have equally good people who value “land order” and see window-breaking as “wrong”, so they fight back at people who are seeing that America’s cultural state is “not good for them” while their opponents see the movement as “not good for them.”

Let’s consider a somewhat more benign situation that is not so hotly emotional, like it being “good for you” to believe in God compared to people who find such belief “bad for them.” How can this happen? How can people feel that believing in God is bad for them? Being a theist myself, I have to stretch on this one, but I conjecture that atheists find so much wrong with religion that to even speak of a god is to speak a kind of evil. And it is important to note that both theists and atheists talk about “facts” and “science” and “logic” in defending their positions, which are more accurately feeling-based. So what is “feeling-based” mean? How do things become good for me or bad for me out of my “feelings”?

Feeling-based convictions

Since I have just finished the final review of the feeling book that Deb and I have written, this matter is very much on my mind, and it gives me a perspective of this “good for me” and “bad for me” matter. Feelings, as I see them, are an eruption out of our core selves, but I must quickly note that “feelings” and “core selves” are terms that are not defined, nor more so, by the way than time, distance, and mass are defined in physics, life is not defined in biology, or love is not defined in the human condition. To say something is “feeling-based” is tantamount to say that this something erupts from my core self, which in my mind is perfect, or perhaps the better word is pure. Hence, I would contend that the core self of someone who loves Trump is speaking of this purity/perfection just as the Trump hater is speaking of this purity-perfection. Then these two people express their core selves in a way we call “feeling.” So far, so good, as we then have two people speaking from the purity of core self expressing their core selves in feelings. But this is where things go array because people tend to race right through the physical manifestation of feelings and the emotional element of feelings right into the cognitive expression not knowing that they have missed the point. The point is that they have a core self value that is pure but this core value is not easily communicated in words and action without first recognizing the emotional element along the way. If we could agree that the core self always is love-based, we would know that any expression of feeling is love-based. Then we might be able to talk about what we love rather than what we hate; we could talk about what is important to us rather what is anathema; we could talk about what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. This is a tough task and not many people do it.

Good for you; Good for me

This is rather simple category what simply suggests that something, whether Trump or masks, we can find some commonality with something being good for both you and me. Hence, we have political parties, athletic teams, musical themes, and academic pursuits that are good for you as they are good for me. There are actually a lot of them, and it behooves us to remember how many of these things there are.

By the way, something that seem good for me and good for you might not, actually be so good. It might not be ultimately good for Black Lives protesters to feel good about throwing rocks, and it might not be good for the folks on the other side to throw rocks at the demonstrators.

Obviously, the same goes for something that seems bad for you and bad for me. It takes an emotionally mature person to realize that when something seems bad for me, it might also be ultimately good for me. All of this suggests that it important to note the “good for me” and “bad for me” first, then the same for other people before trying to find the common ground, the common ground always being the purity of core self. Oh, that we could communicate our core selves to one another.

The challenge

The challenge is to actually see that our surface “good for me” or “bad for me” erupts from our core selves, which are as close to God (or godliness for you atheists) that we can get. Starting with this we can see that love is at the basis of all good and all that seem bad. Would that our cultural, religious, and political leaders could have this kind of conversation.

In the meantime it will be necessary to simply note, “this is good for me” or “this is bad for me” before we enter into any kind of discussion.

Good for Me; Bad for Me VI: Complexities

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, morality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the sixth in a series of “good for me; bad for me,” namely things that are, quite simply good for me or bad for me. The pronoun “me” could be “you”, but the point is the many things are those that enhance one’s life while other things depreciate one’s life. Importantly, I have also suggested that the “things” that are good or bad can be people, places, physical things, or events in one’s life. I have further proposed that there is a spectrum that might reflect the intensity of something being good or bad, namely:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

Furthermore, I have suggested that we can quantify just how good something is by the following words:

  • Mildly or moderately good for me: interesting, pleasant, exciting
  • Profoundly good for me: enlivening, life-enhancing, life-sustaining

Likewise, we could quantify things that are bad for me with the following:

  • Mildly or moderately bad for me: uninteresting, unpleasant, aversive
  • Profoundly bad for me: dangerous, toxic, lethal

I have suggested that it might be profitable for you to quantify the things in your life that may be good, very good, bad, or very bad. You may wish to examine the origin of this discussion in the previous blogs.

My purpose in the present blog is to deal with the complexities of something being good or bad for you because life is not so simple as just good or just bad. We will discuss some of these complexities, e.g.:

  • Good for me at one time; bad for me at another time
  • Good for me but I don’t like it
  • Bad for me be I do like it
  • Seemingly neither good nor bad; just not very important

Good for me at one time; bad for me at another

As I just stated, “life is not so simple” as to suggest that something is universally bad for me or universally good for me. Times change. I change. Circumstances change. People change. Consider something (someone, some place, some thing, some situation) that was good for you but not is not good for you.

There was a time that it was very good for me to speak my thoughts and feelings freely. Having been brought up in a very outspoken and expressive family, I was subtly taught that a person should simply say whatever s/he felt or thought regardless of the environment or the consequences. Thus, my family’s philosophy was based on the unspoken belief that we all have the right to our thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and furthermore have the right to express ourselves at any time with anyone. As you might imagine, and as I certainly know, it is not always wise or kind to speak oneself openly. I slowly earned that I needed to add wisdom and kindness to my expressiveness in what I said, something that we might call discretion. I should add that I learned this lesson painfully. Part of the pain was the fact that I unnecessarily hurt other people, always without intention, but I also learned that they hurt me in return, as the book title Hurt People Hurt People so succinctly suggests. (Don’t buy the book; just remember the title and its meaning.) When I was so quickly outspoken, I was just as quickly judged, often negatively. People made judgments of me, probably largely out of their having been hurt by me. I slowly learned that while my heart and head might have been in the right place, namely to be “honest and forthright,” I was not cognizant of my audience, particularly their feelings. Whereas speaking my mind at all times and with all people was originally good for me, it is no longer so. It is also not good for other people, but we will discuss this matter in a future blog.

At the present time in my life I rarely speak my mind and heart. Now, having given this example of something that was good for me but not good for me now, I often feel sad that I most certainly should not express myself in many circumstances. Most pointedly, I have learned that I can say precious little of my thinking and feeling while I am doing psychotherapy although I am almost constantly both thinking and feeling. I have a kind of nostalgia for my younger days when I just said what I wanted to say, and sometimes think, “Wouldn’t we all be much better if we just did that?” But then I come to my senses and admit that it might not be so good after all. As Desiderata so poignantly says, one must “gracefully yield the things of youth.” The cost of giving up such things is first sadness, then contentment, and then wisdom. I am still learning.

There are many other examples of things that have been good for me at one time, and then later bad for me. Almost all of these things are in the arena of wanting the freedom that we can only have in childhood. I rarely do waterskiing, something that was very central to my life as a teenager, although I do have good memories. I almost never eat any fast food, and interestingly have little desire for such stuff. I used to work 12 hours a day and thoroughly enjoy it, but have found that 12-hour days are no longer good for me, and sometimes in need a 4-hour day, God forbid. During the current political squabble that we are in here in America, I can no longer read the newspaper with earnest interest because the Trump factor stares me in the face, as does the current Covid factor, and even the Black Lives Matter movement. I remain avidly interested in political and cultural matters but find it “bad for me” to see our country so inflamed.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

It used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut. I have learned otherwise partly because I have learned that introverted people are naturally inclined to keep their feelings to themselves. It was bad for me to keep quiet but it is no longer bad for me. Certainly, this change is a matter of personal growth, but I now value keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, sometimes writing them as I am presently doing, and sometimes simply enjoying “going placidly among the noise and haste of the world knowing what peace there is in silence” (also Desiderata). In my psychotherapy work I probably say about 10% of what I think and 1% of what I feel although my thoughts and feelings can occasionally be quite helpful. More often in the past I have caused more harm by expression than by silence. If you had asked me some 40 years ago what I thought about being outspoken, I probably would have said something like, “everyone should just say what they think all the time.” By the way, my coming into psychology through the “back door” of existential therapy, there were many very good masters of existential therapy who did, indeed, suggest that you should just say anything to anyone at any time. While the hearts of these people were in the right place, their heads were not, and they were reacting against psychoanalysis, which suggested that the analyst said little or nothing, hence abstain from any expression of his/her own thoughts and feelings as well as Carl Rogers’ unconditional positive regard.

By the way, I could turn this story around and suggest that it was formerly bad for me to be so outspoken, but that begs the question. Yes, it was not exactly good for me to say everything I thought and felt, but it was something I needed to do because that is who I was, namely an outgoing, expressive person. I do not look at those years of being outspoken as being wrong, just lacking in wisdom and understanding. But there is the real opposite:

Formerly good for me, now bad for me

All “good for me; bad for me” categories can be of people, places, property, or experience. Allow me to briefly say that you can have a friend who is good for you and later bad for you even if s/he doesn’t change. Perhaps you just outgrow the person, or the person finds someone else who is better for him than you are. While painful, it is important to allow friendships…and family relationships…to be good at one time and then not be good at another time. The discovery that a person, even a very good person, someone who might have been a good friend or a valued family member, is no longer good for you…is hard to feel, hard to accept, and hard to know how to handle. I see many such situations in my office, two today where people moved family members into their homes and now resent these family members. At other times, a marriage has been very good but is not very bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

Aside from people being good…and then being “bad for you” there can also be places, property, or experiences. Maybe the house you live in is no longer good for you, maybe the car you have loved for many years is no longer good for you, or the books you treasure. Experiences that used to be good but no longer are might simply be those of youth that no longer profit you as an adult, or that some experience in life has superseded one that used to be top on the list.

If you  find something that was good but no longer is good, you need to admit to that fact, then accept that fact, feel through the possible change in your life, and then feel the sadness of loss that always occurs when you choose to give something up that has nostalgic value, whether people, places, property, or experiences. Allow yourself to feel, accept your feelings, feel your feelings, and then take action. Most people fail in one of these elements. Frequently, people fail to take action because they don’t want to lose somethings (person, place, thing, or experience) that used to be good for them. Just as frequently, people can take action too quickly not having truly thought through and felt through the change of “good for me” to “bad for me.”

Maybe getting drunk was good for you, or being promiscuous, or even lying. Yes, all seem bad, but that is not the case. I could make a good case that all of these experiences could actually be good for people at one time, but I will defer that discussion while noting that many people have found such things to no longer be good for them. You might note, however, that I am subtly suggesting that there is very little that is intrinsically bad, but again, this is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

Let’s talk onions: used to hate them; now I love them. Used to love the Gophers when I lived in MN as a kid; now I live in WI and love the Badgers. Used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut; now I find it a pleasant experience. There are lots of things, many of them childhood dislikes, that now are things that we like. But all of these are in the relatively mild/moderate “bad for me” that are now in the mild/moderate “good for me” category. It’s not terribly important for me to eat onions and enjoy the Badgers. The dial on the spectrum of good for me/bad for me has just shifted from one side to the other. You might think of things, often trivial, that used to be bad for you that are now good for you.

More important than onions and football teams could be people, places, and experiences. Consider someone in your past, perhaps a family member, maybe even an extended family member, a classmate or a workmate whom you really didn’t like. It might not matter why you didn’t like this person, but it is important that such a person was not good for you, or even was quite bad for you. You might think that your previous feelings about this person were “wrong” or that you were immature or something. I suggest that you simply admit that somebody in your past life was “just not good for you” and leave it at that while sequentially seeing that you now value this person and see that s/he is largely good for you.

In addition to things like onions and sports teams on the one hand, and people on the other, you might see that certain places or experiences might have moved from the “bad for me” side of the spectrum to the “good for me” side. I have replaced my three-times a week basketball playing, now eliminated due to the Covid phenomenon, with running. There was a time that running was mildly good for me, and then basketball replaced it to such a degree that I never ran. Even when I tried to run, I didn’t like it: it was mildly bad for me. Now, I run two or three times a week and find that running has barely crossed over to the “good for me” side of the spectrum. Our grandson lived with us recently for three months and pretty much hated the hiking and walking that Deb and I do pretty regularly. The needle moved quite a bit towards “good for me” evidenced by his walking on his own several times during his last few weeks with us.

Liking and not liking

I want to make a subtle distinction between “liking” and things that are good for me or bad for me. Such “things” could be person, place, experience, or something physical. There are roughly two categories in this discussion:

  • Things that I don’t like that are actually good for me
  • Things that I do like that are actually bad for me.

You probably immediately see the similarity to something that was once good for me but now bad for me, or something that was once bad for me but now good for me. I choose to distinguish the “liking” from “good for me” in order to make sense of many things in life that cannot wholly be described as good or bad.

There are, most importantly, some people that I don’t particularly like but see that they are actually good for me. Consider someone who you really don’t like, perhaps a political figure, a family member, or a friend who also is a good person in some way. Such a person might even be helpful to you in some way. But you just don’t like her. I think it is important to admit to you feelings of not liking this person while paradoxically seeing that this person is good for you in some way. Dentists come to mind. Who in their right mind “likes” a guy who digs into your mouth with nasty tools? The dentist chair could also be a “place” that you don’t like, and certainly don’t like the experience of a root canal while also seeing that the dentist, the chair, the tools, and the experience is good for you.

Consider the people in your life whom you respect, even love, but don’t like. They might be good for you, but you just don’t like them. Likewise, there may be experiences, places, or physical objects that you don’t like but see as essentially good for you. Who likes taxes? But they are eventually good for us, right? At least for the most part.

The other side of this discussion is something (person, place, experience, or thing) that you like but is bad for you. Certainly, all addictions fall into this category, whether addictions that are chemical or behavioral. It is hard for me to understand why people like sitting in front of a slot machine putting pennies or dollars into the machine for hours at a time while simultaneously knowing that they will most certainly lose more than they win. Gamblers just like gambling. I like sugar, God forgive me. I eat some kind of really-bad-for-you sugar just about every day despite knowing that sugar, at least refined sugar is bad for me. Additionally, I know that if I am ever to give up my sugar addiction, I have to start by admitting that I like sugar.

Not important

Certainly, you have wondered if there are things (people, places, experiences, or physical things) that don’t exactly fit on either side of the spectrum. I call these things “not important.” Consider things that are not important in your life. I hear from most people that the current political disaster in our country causes them much grief, and consequently, these people find that politics are very important. I also find people who simply don’t care about politics for some reason. I care deeply. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring. I care about psychology, theology, history, and culture, but many people don’t care about such things. A mother who is caring for a challenging child doesn’t even have the time to read, much less care about politics, nor does the nuclear scientist who works 12 hours a day looking for a way to control fusion.

In your regular life, there are many things that fall into the “don’t care” category. Certainly, this is true. I would simply caution you to know that if you are with a person, in a situation, in a place, or otherwise with something that is not important, you might stay too long there and find that the “don’t care” moved into the “not good for me” category.

Next week (?): Good for Me; Bad for You. And Bad for Me; Good for You.” These are real challenges and the heart of successful (and unsuccessful) relationships.