emotional maturity

Good for Me; Bad for Me: II (corrected)

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Personality, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the second of three blogs regarding the concept of something that is, quite simply, “good for me” or “bad for me.” In the first blog on the subject I noted that these terms, while valuable and important, cannot be fully defined. That having been said, you can recognize when something has either been good for you or bad for you. We also discussed the quantification of something that is good or bad for you. In this blog we will discuss primarily (1) things that are bad for you, (2) the quantification of something that is bad for you, (3) how to recognize when something is bad for you, and (5) what you might do about something that is bad for you.

Things that might be “bad for you”

When I use the term “things,” you might think primarily of property or of something that might come into your sphere of life that doesn’t feel right. But there are many things that can be bad for you including:

  • Specific people, groups of people, or an individual person
  • Geographical location
  • Many kinds of food
  • Physical property
  • Weather
  • Smells
  • Sights
  • Physical touch
  • Noise, including people talking
  • Silence, including people not talking
  • Information, whether from individuals or from media
  • Dreams, whether nighttime or daytime
  • Your own thoughts
  • …and many more

It is not necessary that I elaborate on each of these items, but allow me to comment briefly on some of the ones that I deem less important as a precursor to our later discussion of how these things affect our personal and interpersonal lives. You might find it profitable to list, whether in your mind or on paper, things that you think of, that might be bad for you. For instance, some people are very sensitive to one of the five physical senses and have some kind of immediate reaction to, say, something that might be malodorous to them, while other people are more adversely affected by what they read or see on TV. I want to focus on the times when people are bad for you and situations that are bad for you noting that “things that are bad for you” might be people, places, or certain times of you day or life.

Quantification of “bad for you”

In a review of the previous blog on Good for Me; Bad for Me, I proposed that there is a spectrum of such things, namely

Bad for me                   /                     Good for me

(Very bad for me)   (Moderately bad for me)         (Moderately bad for me)     (Very bad for me)

____________________________________  /  ______________________________________

In this blog we will discuss the “bad for me” side of this spectrum. In the next blog we will discuss the “good for me” side of the spectrum. First, a reminder of the words I have chosen to subcategorize the “bad for me” side of the spectrum. In ascending order of “bad for me,” meaning increasingly bad for me with groups that are very bad for me and only moderately bad for me:

Lethal   Toxic   Dangerous                                          Aversive   Unpleasant   Uninteresting

(All in the very bad for me group)                              (All in the moderately bad for me)

____________________________________________________________________________ /

It is important for you to find an approximate place on this spectrum of how bad something might be in your life. This is sometimes a challenge because something might be very bad for you at one time and not so bad at another time. Or, something might be moderately bad for you at one time and then moderately good for you at another. We will delay this discussion for now as I ask you to consider something in the possible list I noted above that is, roughly, “bad for you” in some way. Maybe eating broccoli is in the moderately bad for you category, as it is for my grandson, or potentially toxic as it is for my wife. It might be valuable for you to consider how an individual person might be bad for you in some way, or perhaps an activity of some sort. If you have some trouble in this endeavor, I might be able to render some help in identifying when something is bad for you and to what degree it might be bad for you.

Recognizing when something is bad for you

We have presented a paradigm of recognition of feelings in I Need to Tell You How I Feel. In this book we propose that “feeling,” however central in life is not a definable element of psychology. Rather, we understand feelings by the process that “feeling something” takes and by the effects of feelings. So, feeling that something is bad for you (or good for you) can be understood and valued but that feeling cannot be adequately defined. Instead of defining feelings in general of the feeling that something is bad for you in particular, you do best to understand the feeling process, which flows a distinct pattern: physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. In other words, when I feel something, I first have a physical feeling, then an emotional feeling, thirdly a cognitive feeling, and finally a feeling that shows itself in physical action. Note that the third process in feeling something is what we call “cognitive feeling,” which might seem a contradiction of terms, but we find that cognition is where many people land when they feel something. Additionally, the “action” that is taken is always physical, but it could be some kind of physical movement, some kind of stationary commitment, speaking or choosing not to speak. So, it is with this paradigm that I suggest you understand how to know when something is bad for you: physically, emotionally, cognitively, or actively. You will note that you probably have a preference for one, or possibly two of these expressions of feelings. You might need to read more about this feelings expression in our book. For our current interest, allow me to suggest how you might recognize that something is bad for you:

  • Physically: You feel something in a part of your body, probably determined by your biological heritage and physical awareness. Typical physical symptoms of something that is bad for you include some kind of stomach agitation, chest pain, breathing changes, facial grimaces, or coldness of extremities. Less often people feel actual headaches, or stomachaches, and some people come to tears easily.
  • Emotionally. An emotional experience is one that includes one or more of the four basic emotions: joy, sorrow, fear, and anger. By the way, these emotions come in that order: joy first (you like something); sadness next (you lose something); fear next (you are afraid of losing more), and finally anger (you react against the force that took something away from you). In the “bad for you” category, you will have the last three of these emotions, but note that you have these only because you have loved something. So, when something is bad for you, you will first feel sad, then afraid, and the anger although the transition from sad to fear to anger may take a split second. Note how you feel emotionally.
  • Cognitively. It may seem odd to refer to cognitive action as a “feeling,” but it is, and it is predominant with some people. When something is bad for you, you will usually be in the fear/anger range thinking of what this person did or didn’t do, how some situation is bad for you, or what is wrong with the universe in some way. Then…
  • Actively. In this category of “feelings” you will do something or say something. People tend to be say-ers or doers, but this part of feelings is always the end place of feelings. When something or someone is bad for you in some way, you will want to bark back at that person or throw the hammer at the wall because the hammer hit your finger and not the nail.

Read more about this feeling process in I Want to Tell You How I Feel. After you have recognized the feelings that erupt in you when something is bad for you, you will then see the effects of this thing (or person).

The effects of something that is “bad for me”

There is an important principal in economics that I find helpful in deciding what to do about if and when to do something. This is the concept of marginal utility. Economists use the created denomination of utils in order to formulate an equation for the proper action to take in business. I will not belabor the point of marginal utility and utils at this point, but you might look the terms up and see how economists’ idea of marginal utility to suggest how people should make business decisions. I find it equally valuable to use the concept of marginal utility when deciding “go” or “no go” with something in your life. While it is dreadfully important to “do something,” whether that means stay the course or change course, you have to count the cost of the staying or the leaving. When you do that, you will be looking at the effects of staying or leaving. Then, if you can create a kind of equation according to the principals of marginal utility, you will be able to honestly and fruitfully think clearly to yourself, talk clearly to someone else, and take definitive action. Instead of discussing the equation of marginal utility, I suggest simply that you examine the effects of something in your life in order to know whether you should work to enhance something that is largely good for you, or how you might examine the deleterious effects of something that is largely bad for you.

In order to adequately examine both the “good for you” phenomena (situation, person, or thing) as well as such things that are “bad for you,” you need to see how far you are on the spectrum of good or bad. If for instance, you are on the “bad for you” side of the spectrum, you have to see how bad this thing is, namely whether it is in the:

  • Mild category of uninteresting, unpleasant, aversive or
  • Strong category of dangerous, toxic, or lethal

In making this decision, you will notice that you might want to push something that is not good for you towards the mild side of the spectrum or push it towards the strong side of the spectrum. You will need to be honest with yourself as to how strong the “not good for you” might be. Let me explain how you might make that determination:

  • Roughly speaking, the three categories of mildly not good for you do not cause lasting or permanent harm, whereas the strongly not good for you categories do.
  • You can live with uninteresting pretty easily; unpleasant is…well…unpleasant, and aversive experiences can be tolerated, but not forever
  • Strong “not good for you” things need careful attention because you cannot sustain a life with something in the strong categories, e.g.:
    • If something is dangerous, you live in some kind of fear, which in the long run will be deleterious for you, certainly psychologically and ultimately physically
    • If something is toxic, you can figuratively hold your breath, i.e. survive for a time under toxicity but not for long
    • If something is lethal, you need to move away from it as soon as possible.
  • The problem, as you certainly see, if how to discover where you are on the “bad for you” side of the spectrum. There is a danger of staying too long with something that is dangerous, toxic, or lethal, and there is an equal danger of “pushing” something that is just mildly not good for you into the totally bad for you side of the spectrum.
  • People want this decision of “go” or “no go” to be easy but it is no such thing. It is hard, it is painful, and it is always sad. But sad does not make it wrong.

Once you have discerned that something is bad for you, have determined just how bad it is, noted your feeling reaction, and seen the effects of this thing, you are ready to do something. If something is simply sad, you can profit from the sadness, but if something chronically makes you sad, you might need to do something about it.

Doing something about the “bad for you” element in your life.

There are people who delay doing something about things that are bad for them forever. They tend to get stuck in the previous stages of the process and end up tolerating, complaining, or dreaming of some magic solution to get them out of the “bad for you” situation. There are an equal number of people who jump right into doing something before they have understood how bad the thing is, what they feel, and the actual bad effects this thing has on them. We might call such people “intolerant” and the other folks “tolerating,” but neither operation is sufficient in all circumstances. Making an adjustment to life sometimes means we need to tolerate and sometimes we need to do something that is bad for us. Consider which side of the do something/do nothing spectrum you tend to be on. I suggest the following process, which reflects the process of noting what is bad for you:
1. Note what you feel: physical, emotional, cognitive, or active.

2. Determine the severity of the “bad for you” experience (mild to severe)

3. Note the effects on you, namely how you have been hurt or damaged in some way. You will see that you have lost something that is important to             you and this loss has created sadness in you.

4. Reflect on your feelings, the degree of hurt you have sustained, and the effects that something has had on you.

5. Then take action

Taking action, most importantly, requires that you know the degree of suffering you have encountered by this thing (or person) that has been bad for you. Roughly speaking, you might take the following actions under the following degrees of “bad for you.”

  • Uninterested. Probably take no action. You can’t be interested in everything, and you need to have a life where things that are uninteresting might profit you sometime, some day.
  • Unpleasant. Not much different from uninterested. Note that something is unpleasant and allow this to be bad for you for a short period of time. Don’t jump to action. Don’t complain. Just suffer the unpleasant experience
  • Aversive. While still in the “moderate” realm of “bad for you,” you might just need to be in this aversive condition for a while before you take any kind of action. It depends on how long the aversive element lasts. Roughly speaking, you can do with something aversive for minutes, perhaps for hours, but not for days.
  • Dangerous. This is where you need to be hyper aware of your feelings, namely your physical and emotional feelings. “Dangerous” is theoretical, but not real. You see that the situation or element is potentially harmful to you, possibly permanently. To live with something dangerous is sometimes necessary, but it always takes a toll. So, if you have to live with it, do so realizing the cost on your body, mind, and relationships. Take action after hours or days, not weeks or years.
  • Toxic. This is much worse than dangerous because this element is currently causing damage for you. You feel it in your stomach, in your mind, and in your soul. You need to get out and you need to get out soon. The only thing that keeps you here is your own inability to move quickly enough. But know, the longer you stay with something toxic, the more you will deteriorate.
  • Lethal. Not much option here. Get out, get out immediately. You will die if you don’t. Don’t count the cost of staying with something lethal. Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever you like about the situation, you are beyond danger. You are dying. Get out and get out now. You can cope with the loss later. If you truly can’t get out of a lethal situation, note the deterioration that occurs to you and plan to find a time of restoration.

An example

Deb and I recently had our 14-year old grandson living with us for three months, an experience I now see as the hardest thing I have ever done. This has been a very interesting experience because it was almost entirely “bad for me” for these three months, and I still have the effects of this experience. Having Gavin here was interesting partly because he is a good kid, a “lover” and “player” by nature, quite bright, and fun to be with. My best connection, perhaps my only real connection was in the realm of play, usually around table games, which he adored. (Deb connected with him on their shared value of nature.) The difficulty I had with him was that his player temperament had been indulged by his parents to such an extent that he had almost no understanding of the care of property. I won’t indulge myself in explaining the challenges that deficiency brought to me but to note that my primary temperament (read the blogs on temperaments) is “caretaker,” namely a person who values property as sacred. So during the months he was with us, I ranged from unpleasant to toxic on the “bad for me” scale. I found myself complaining about his lack of responsibility, and complaining is something that I rarely do. But I found myself caught in the commitment we had made to Gavin’s father to keep him, home school him, and live with him until his dad got settled in their new home in Los Angeles. This put me in a very difficult situation because I started to notice physical changes in my body, most specifically my heart “talking to me” with a mild pain, particularly as I ran. So, here I was in the situation of taking care of someone whom I dearly love, and someone who had only 8 months ago lost his mother, and now had temporarily lost his dad as well. But this person was increasingly “bad for me” despite his need of my care and my love for him. Due to my biological heritage of heart disease, I was aware of the potential lethal nature of my caring for Gavin and I considered ending the time of care within a month of his being here. But there was a cost to me, first the tendency to complain, which I deplore in anyone, particularly me, but also in the feeling that I could die in the process of taking care of someone whom I love. There is a substantial amount of literature related to how people fare in the caretaking of an impaired person, or situations that are otherwise stressful: you die earlier. Such was the case with my brother who died at 59 having cared for my Alzheimer’s impaired mother for 5 years as well as other stressful circumstances. He died of a heart attack. I could feel this potential heart attack during these months with Gavin…this kind, loving, playful, bright kid whom I loved.

Such is the nature of the “bad for me” situations that people have: not all good, not all bad; love and dislike together; sometimes good, sometimes bad; good person bad for you; necessary situation that is potentially lethal. Consider the difficult situations you are in, whether property, person, geography, vocation, interpersonal, or just what you eat or drink. Consider the nature, the effects, what you feel, and what you might do. Take care of yourself first so you can take care of people and property as you need to do.

I look forward to writing about things and people that are “good for me.”

Good for Me; Bad for Me: Part 1 (corrected)

Ron Johnson Discovery, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the first of three blogs regarding the phenomenon of “good for me” and “bad for me” that I have used for many years as I have attempted to help people know when something is, quite simply good for them or bad for them. In this blog I will propose the basic concept of how to know when something is either good or bad for you as well as the variations of “good” and “bad.” Like many other significant psychological terms, these expressions do not lend themselves to exact definitions, which is to suggest that we cannot fully define “good” or “bad.”

Undefinable

The fact that we cannot exactly define “good” or “bad” does not take away from the value of using these terms. It is noteworthy that several other very significant psychological terms do not have exact definitions, like love, truth, feelings, and understanding. Nor do we have exact definitions for the three basic ingredients of the known universe: time, space, and mass. We understand these important aspects of the universe, as well as the elements of psychology by seeing the effects of such things. Furthermore, we can quantify such things as time, space, and mass even though we do not define them. Likewise, we can quantify love by noting how much we love something, and we can quantify truth as well from somewhat true to entirely true. Feelings do not lend themselves to quantification but we can see the effects of feelings as we have discussed at length in previous blogs and in our recently published book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel. In the present discussion we will study the quantification of “good for me” and “bad for me.” We will discuss the effects of good or bad in the forthcoming blogs.

Quantification of “good for me” and “bad for me”

Allow me to first discuss the quantification of “good for me/bad for me” by suggesting a continuum, or spectrum, with “good for me” on one side and “bad for me””

__________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

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

My suggestion with this proposal is that there is a spectrum that ranges from very bad for me to very good for me. Before I elaborate more about this spectrum, I should explain what can be good for me or bad for me. Pretty much anything can be good for me or bad for me. For instance, some foods may be good for me or bad for me. Likewise, some life situations can be good or bad for me, like work, relationships, geographical locations, or insertions into my life. Insertions include the finding of $10 bill on the street to a dog barking loudly while you walk by a house, but the more significant and lasting the “insertion,” the more significant the effect on you. If you find a $100 bill, it would be really good for you, or if the dog bit you on the leg, it would be really bad for you. Additionally, something that someone says too you might be good for you or bad for you, or in more extreme circumstances, a person him/herself at tone time might be good for you or bad for you. So, as we continue to discuss this “good for me” and “bad for me,” consider that anything, human or otherwise, living or nonliving, real or imaginary could be good for me or bad for me.

Having proposed that there is a spectrum of “good for me” and “bad for me,” allow me to elaborate about this continuum and suggest a number of terms that might serve as indicators of the strength of “good” or “bad” for me. We might have relatively mild experiences of “good for me” or “bad for me”, i.e.:

Aversive     Unpleasant    Uninteresting                   /                   Interesting    Pleasant    Exciting

_____________________________________________________________________________

We might also have things that are more extremely good or bad for me, and find the use of stronger terms valuable, i.e.:

Lethal    Toxic    Dangerous               /                   Enlivening    Life-enhancing    Life-sustaining

____________________________________________________________________________

Putting these terms together we have a continuum on the “bad for me” side ranging from something that is mildly “not good”, i.e. uninteresting, to something that is lethal, meaning something might kill me. Likewise, on the “good” side of the continuum the range is from interesting to life-sustaining, meaning that I can’t do without it.

I have found it helpful to assist people to know how to quantify things and people in their lives using this continuum starting with the simple “good for me” things be asking them what people, places, ideas, and situations are good for them, and then to help people note relatively good these things are. Then I follow by assisting people to similarly identify things that are bad for them along the negative side of the continuum. I have found that while it is hard for people to describe exactly how good or bad something is for them, they can approximate the good or bad somewhere on the continuum. The idea of a continuum, or spectrum, of good or bad rather than an absolute good or bad is helpful for people to see how things adversely affect them or enhance them in life.

Quantification: a sign of emotional maturity

While many people find it valuable to see a continuum from extremely good to extremely bad for them, some people are not willing or able to make these distinctions. Such people often use the extreme terms for everything, namely “dangerous” or “lethal” on the bad side or somehow necessary on the good side. People who regularly use such extreme terms often talk more than do, by which I mean they complain a lot about things but do nothing to get out of situations that are not good for them, or they dream about things that they think would be good for them but do nothing to fulfill those dreams. I find that such people have simply not matured in life sufficiently to see that very few things are truly life-sustaining or lethal, but many things are simply interesting or uninteresting. These people are stuck in their helplessness or stuck in their dreams. They have not matured beyond a childlike view of life that they should have everything they want without work or that they are helpless to do anything to enhance their lives. Extremes of any sort are the natural stuff of childhood but not of maturity. As people mature in their understanding of life, they tend to use less extreme terms leaving such terminology for very few cases. When people mature in this way, they are better able to make adjustments in life.

There are at least three elements of maturing in the business of enhancing life with what is good and reducing elements that are dangerous: (1) thinking and feeling to yourself about such things, (2) speaking to someone else, and (3) doing something. People tend to skip item (1), thinking and feeling, and go right to item (2), talking to someone or item (3), doing something. But it is important to first think and feel before talking or doing. If I talk to someone right away or take action right away without first truly knowing how I feel and think, I will not find it profitable and productive because my personal thoughts and feelings will not be the foundation of what I might ultimately do.

You might consider the many other situations that occur in life, like an intimate relationship that is good for you, and then think of how you might enhance the relationship rather than taking the good person in your life for granted. Likewise, you might consider how you might make an adjustment to a relationship that is less than good for you rather than taking leave of the person who might just be uninteresting to you in some way. You could also examine what you eat or drink, what you do for recreation, or what color you would like to see on your house. In fact, if you can examine the less important things in your life, like what you eat or what color you have on your house, you might be better able to honestly examine the more important things in your life, like your relationships, your work, your geographical location, or something that is truly sacred in your life.

You might consider talking to someone about your “good for you” feelings and “bad for you” feelings once you have studied your feelings for yourself. There are equal dangers of keeping your feelings entirely to yourself, which tends to be a tendency of introverted-thinking people, or constantly talking about your feelings that frequently occurs with extraverted-feeling people. If you can be honest with yourself about what is good for you and what is bad for you, you will be in a better position to profit from talking to someone else. After thoughtful self-examination of the goods and the bads of something in your life, and then talking to someone about those feelings, mature people do something.

Sometimes the “doing” doesn’t actually look like doing because the person decides that the best course of action is to stay the course. Equally possible, is the need to actually do something about your life, particularly when you find yourself on the “bad for me” side of the spectrum. People tend to jump to action too soon or avoid any kind of action for fear of loss. In the long run, when a mature person has come to a decision to take action or not, there is always sadness involved in the action. For instance, it might be sad to give up alcohol if you decide that it is largely bad for you, or you might be sad if you decide to keep drinking because the loss of alcohol in your life is worse than then ill effects of alcohol. You will be sad staying with someone who is not always good for you and you will be sad leaving such a person.

Sadness

The universal experience of feeling sad when you have actually done something is important to understand as we have written in The Positive Power of Sadness. People often avoid doing something because they simply don’t want to experience the sadness of losing something. They would rather live in the fantasy that they can have it both ways, like living happily with a person who you find “not good for you” occasionally and simultaneously leaving such a person without any regret of having lost an intimate partner. You can only do this in fantasy, not reality. To honestly stay or leave, and then profit from the staying or leaving, you have to look at the effects of staying or leaving.

In the next two blogs, where I will discuss the effects of something that is good for you or bad for you and how to take action with such things. Consider what might be in each category:

  • Good for you could be person, place, property, experience, or idea
  • Bad for you could be person, place, property, experience or idea

 

 

You Value What You See

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Personality, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

I don’t see much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but there’s lots of truth in it. An important part of this “not seeing much” is related to the fact that I am colorblind. Not seriously so, like people who actually don’t see colors at all and live in a kind of black-and-white world, as I have a red/green colorblindness, which is the most common. So when Deb asks me to look at the (red) tulips in the yard, I can see them only if they are pretty close to me, but when far away, I can’t distinguish the red tulips from the green foliage. There are lots of other times when I mix colors or fail to distinguish colors. I have failed to distinguish red, green, brown, and gray depending on the depth of the color and what might be the background confusing the “cones” in my eyes. I recall the first time everyone realized that I was colorblind because my paternal grandfather asked me to plug the meter in his green Nash standing right in front of his office building where he could watch me from 6 stories up. Mom and he watched as I plugged the meter of the brown Nash right next to his green one. Colorblindness comes through the mother’s side of the family and rarely affects girls, so my maternal uncle was colorblind, my daughter not, but her son is. It is funny to play Sorry with Gavin when we struggle to distinguish the green movers from the red ones. Enough about the colorblindness, already. What does this have to do with anything important in life? It’s not terribly important if you or I are colorblind, but it is dreadfully important to know what we see and what we don’t see because we actually see different things.

First, let’s enlarge upon the word see for a moment. We can use this word “see” to include at least all five senses and possibly the “sixth sense” of intuition. Intuition is very close to the feelings that I have disused at length in previous blogs, but for our current purposes, we shall use the word intuition as a kind of sixth sense. Then we can use the word “see” to include all the ways people gather information: seeing (physically), hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and by intuition. I mention this 6-part way of “seeing” as a way of dealing with several important factors in one’s psychological makeup, not the least of which is that there are great differences among people in the way they see things. Some people are particularly good at seeing through one of their six senses, and some people are good at using all of their senses. Furthermore, there are people called synesthetic, who actually integrate their senses so much that they do such things as “taste the color blue,” smell the green grass, feel “touched” the thing that they hear, and many other combinations. There is at least one good book on the phenomenon of synesthesia and many articles, some of them in the popular genre. Blind people often have developed a particularly sense of hearing, and deaf people are often particularly good at seeing with their eyes. Beyond the fact that many people have a preference for one or two senses, there are people who aren’t particularly good at using any of their senses.

Beyond the use of the physical five senses plus intuition, there are some very interesting things about what we see that are very close to many other psychological factors, not the least of which is what we value. Think of it this way: if you don’t really care much about colors, as is largely true for me, you won’t really see colors, or if you do, you won’t care much about colors. Thankfully, Deb chooses my ties every day and often chooses my suits, jackets, pants, and shirts. I care about how I look but I don’t care about colors particularly as Deb has learned over our 40 some years together.

Having briefly presented some information about what we see with our eyes, what we see with the other physical senses, what we see with intuition, and also what we value, allow me to tell you a bit about a very important understanding that was made a century ago. Carl Jung, psychoanalyst and psychologist was a student of Sigmund Freud around the turn of the last century but came to believe that Freud’s understanding of the human condition was not sufficient to help people grapple with the difficulties in their lives. He proposed. Among many other things, that people had substantially different personality structures, one of which was the way that people see things. He referred to this structure as the perceptive function. Jung observed that people seemed to attend to very different things, perhaps see different things, and certainly value different things. Simply stated, Jung suggested that there is a spectrum of these differences representing how, what, and why people saw, attended to, and valued different things. He called these two different ways of seeing “intuitive” and “sensing,” terms that have continued to be used for the past century. I have found it more valuable to use the terms “objective” and “subjective” in explaining these differences of seeing. Thus the spectrum of perception is:

_______________________________________/______________________________________

Objective (Sensing)                                                                                     Subjective (intuition)

 

There have been scores of books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of pages written on Jung’s understanding of personality, so permit me to simply indicate how people with these different perspectives see the world.

Objective (sensing) people tend to:

  • See what is real
  • See what is factual
  • Value the physical world
  • Engage the physical world
  • Produce something
  • Examine things (and people) individually

Subjective (intuitive) people tend to:

  • See what is unreal
  • See what is possible
  • Regard the nonphysical world
  • Engage the nonphysical world
  • Create something
  • Examine things (and people) relationally

There are many more things that can be said of these important ways of looking at the world, and nay interested reader will have no difficulty finding relevant material on this subject. My point in presenting this difference in seeing is to highlight the strengths of both of these ways of seeing, and to shed some light on some of the difficulties people have engaging these different worlds (physical and nonphysical), as well as the difficulties people have relating to one another.

For purposes of personal revelation I should note that I am particularly on the objective side of this spectrum, namely being a person who sees the real world and engages the real world. However, I am married to someone who sees the unreal world and engages quite well with this world. Furthermore, I have had the opportunity of living with my 14-year old grandson for the past three months who is distinctly on the subjective side of the spectrum of perception. The interesting thing about living with these two people who share this subjective way of seeing the world is in their seminaries in how and what they see and ultimately what they value. Additionally, as would be expected, they display differences in maturity that come with being either 14 or 65. Deb grew up in a very objective family and learned how to deal with the objective elements of the world, so from her earliest years she knew how to engage the physical world, reflected to some degree in the way she cared for property. My grandson did not grow up in such an environment largely because his mother took undue care for all the property in her household leaving my grandson to be able to continue undisturbed in engaging the “unreal” world, more accurately described as the “possible world”. It has been remarkable for me to see Gavin who is truly “subjective” in what he sees compared to my wife who also sees the subjective but also engages the objective world. This has given me an opportunity of seeing a bit clearer what subjective people “see” and hence what they do with what they see, and what they value because of what they see. This can be simply summarized in the matter of socks.

Socks? Yes. Some weeks ago, before I had truly grasped the differences in how my grandson and I “see” the world, I noticed that he had left his socks on the bathroom floor when we were visiting our cabin up north. I noticed the socks after he showered for the day. I noticed them at noon, again at 5 PM, and at 8. I noticed the socks because I notice such things. At 8 o’clock I asked Gavin to look in the bathroom and see what might be “wrong,” which was an interesting word I chose for what he saw. He immediately said that he saw the socks on the floor. I then asked him if he had seen the socks on the floor during the several times he had gone into the bathroom during the day. He said that he hadn’t seen the socks. While hard for me to believe, I came to the immediate realization that he hadn’t actually seen the socks. I thought, “How can someone walk into a (relatively small) bathroom and not see the socks that are on the floor?” But this wasn’t so much a question as it was a rhetorical question, something that I restrained myself from asking because such questions only stir shame rather than instruct.

Since the incident with the socks there have been perhaps several hundred such incidents over these past 12 weeks that Gavin has been with us, many of which I ignored, many of which I attended to by picking things up, and many of which I asked Gavin to attend to. This experience of “socks” and all that the socks represent has stirred a new understanding of people who have the subjective way of looking at the world.

I know this: it is the subjective people of the world who have made the most important discovering and improvements in the world, not the objective people like me. This very blog is a testament to this fact: nothing that I have written is “new” because Jung and his predecessors “discovered” this difference in perception long ago. Theologian Soren Kierkegaard predated Jung by nearly a hundred years and said the following about how people perceive. He called objective folks “people of possibility” and subjective folks “people of reality.” Then he went on to note the difficulties that both kinds of people have:

  • People of reality do everything but nothing (or very little) is of value
  • People of possibility do nothing (or very little), and everything they dream about is valuable

There are many more musings on this matter, not the least of which is what we value. Thus, Gavin values what he might do rather than what he does, whereas I value what I have done more than what I might do. I’m sure it’s been a challenge for Gavin to live with me for these past months and it certainly has been a challenge to live with him. More importantly, this is not about Gavin and me. It is about what we see and what we value, and ultimately how we can understand and value one another.

Further Reading

Jung, C. (1921/1974). Psychological types. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen

Myers. I.B. (1980). Gifts differing. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press

Johnson, R. (1993). Watch your temperament. Madison, WI: Midlands Psychological Press