emotional maturity

Feelings VII: It’s Not All About Hurt

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, happiness, mindfulness, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

How odd it must seem to start this blog with what seems like a contradiction to the title of the previous blog, “It’s All About Hurt.” All about hurt? Not all about hurt? What am I trying to say? I am saying that both are true, however paradoxical that sounds. In Feelings 6 we talked about the centrality of hurt, something that began to talk about in Feelings 2. If we knew how to process hurt, we would reduce wars and divorces to a minimum and reduce arguments to zero. Yes, hurt is very central in the business of human relationships, and I work diligently to help people understand hurt and effectively process it. The centrality of hurt that we discussed in the previous blog has to do with the origin of hurt. Hurt always originates from love. We can’t prevent hurt and we don’t want to prevent hurt. Why? Because without hurt we would have no improvement, no excellence, to success because all of these important matters of life depend on being hurt, recognizing that we have been hurt because we have lost something that we love, and then becoming better as a result of this lost love. So, we begin the current discussion by affirming that hurt is a central ingredient in life and that we have to recognize it, understand it, resolve it, and learn from it.

This is the seventh blog about feelings, and it is feelings that drive us, however impossible it is for us to define “feelings.” Hurt, and the emotion of sadness that is the core of hurt, is an important feeling but it is not the most important feeling we have. It is just the most difficult one, at least in this North American culture. Recall from Feelings 1 that there are two basic feelings that erupt from love: joy and sadness. If you want to improve your emotional and interpersonal life, you need to recognize and value both joy and sadness. In our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, we talk about the importance of sadness. But joy is equally important. If you want to have a fulfilling life, you need to learn how to express joy at least as much as you express sadness. Learning how to express joy, the practice of it, is just as important as learning and practicing hurt

We have spent a lot of time in the last blog on defining and discussing hurt.  Now we want to define and discuss joy. And even though it might seem peculiar, many people do not know how to really engage and express their joy.

Joy

All four basic emotions have to do with love. Joy is the feeling of having something, whereas sadness is the feeling of losing something, anger the feeling of having lost many things, and fear the feeling of potentially losing something. There are many forms of love, perhaps as many as there are experiences in life, but it is the experience of loving something that we call joy. If we love something, the loving of this something causes joy in our lives. But everything we love we eventually lose, so it is important to know both the emotions of joy and sadness that always accompany love. We will lose the people we love, the property we love, and the ideas we love…eventually. The fact that we will eventually lose something that we love should not keep us from loving, but it often does. The only way we can protect ourselves from feeling hurt and sadness is to avoid loving something. But in avoiding sadness, we also avoid joy. If we are going to love something, we need to experience the joy of having this something as well as allow for the process of feeling sad when we lose this something. Joy and sadness are companions in life as we love, lose, and love again.

We previously discussed the emotion of sadness that accompanies hurt. In this and following blogs we want to begin to discuss the other half of love: joy. As we go forward with this discussion, note how often you have some form of joy in your daily life and then note how often you express this feeling. If you really want to enhance life, you will get better at expressing the joys you have in life. Sometimes joy is a simple, indescribable, ineffable experience like Deb and I had the night before I wrote these words. We were sitting on our dock “up north” at our cabin in the waning dusk of the day and saw three loons pass in front of us just a few meters away, seemingly completely disregarding our presence. We had earlier seen two other loons that day and thought that this group of three might be the brood now on their own. We just watched as the three took turns diving into the water only to surface some 100 meters away barely visible in the dusk. This was one of those ineffable experiences that brought a sense of joy that was multifaceted: we felt a peacefulness, a connection with nature and a felt sense of gratitude as well. (Watch for Deb’s forthcoming blog on Grieving Loons) The moment passed quickly but the memory stayed. It was a moment of genuine joy.

Wondrous as the loon experience was last night I remember a time some years ago when a severe storm damaged the loon nest that was situated on the island just across from us on our little lake. Lost to mother and father loon were their young ones, and we heard the most woeful waling of the loons for several hours. They had loved their little ones and now they had lost them. These two very different experiences with Nature showed us how joy and sadness are intrinsically related to love. In this series on Feelings we have previously focused on the hurt, sadness, and relational difficulties that result from loss. The feeling of joy could come like it did last night, simple and wondrous, but it can come in many other forms, times, and places.  We want to turn our attention to the other half of the love phenomenon, the joy of loving something, which means the joy of having something. In forthcoming blogs we will be discussing:

  • How we experience joy in our five senses
  • How we experience joy in our sixth sense, which we might call intuition
  • How we experience joy with people
  • How we experience joy alone
  • How we experience joy with property
  • How we experience joy with ideas, hopes, dreams, and plans
  • How we express the feeling of joy in each of these experiences

Consider your own experiences and expressions of joy as we explore this important emotion. And as always, please feel free to comment, correct, or otherwise add to this and all our blogs. It is a pleasure to be of service.

Further Reading

Previous Feelings blogs

Forthcoming Feelings blogs on joy

West, M. (2007). Feeling, being, and the sense of self. London: Karnac

Damasaio, A. (2003). Joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. New York: Harcourt Books.

Feelings 6: It’s All About Hurt

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

We have talked about the phenomenon of hurt in previous “Feelings” blogs, primarily in Feelings: 2 (Expressing Feelings), but it behooves us to return to hurt and unpack it a bit. I will cover the following things about “hurt”:

  • Hurt is another of the important undefinable words that we can have an understanding about without an exact definition.
  • Hurt comes from an “assault.” What is “assaulted” is something that you love. These assaults are usually unintentional. Sometimes they even come from yourself.
  • Hurt is the substantive cause of all arguments, most divorces, and most wars.
  • Hurt is very difficult to adequately express, much less communicate, much less understand when someone says they hurt you.
  • Unfortunately, when someone tells you that you have hurt that person, this often comes as a kind of assault on you, usually causing you to defend yourself.

Hurt is a love problem

I want to bring the expression, “I am hurt” out of the negative appearance that it normally has. Hurt is actually a very positive feeling, positive because we feel hurt when we have lost something that is important to us. We get hurt when we have lost something that we love. When something we love has been lost, we feel sad. Recall that sadness is a love-based feeling. I feel sad when I have lost something that I love, or value. First, I love something; then I get attacked in some way; then I l lose something; then I feel hurt; and then I get sad because I have lost something that I love. Hurt naturally makes us sad. We discuss this at length in The Power of Positive Sadness, which we would suggest you peruse for a more cogent explanation of this love-attack-loss-hurt-sad phenomenon.

Hurt is about me

“You hurt me” is a very important statement to make and a very important statement to be heard and understood, but it is extremely difficult to do on both counts. When I say, “You hurt me” to someone, this statement is about me, not about the other person. This is not a concept that is easy to grasp, mostly because when people say, “You hurt me,” they tend then to indulge themselves in saying what is wrong about the other person. Thus, “You hurt me” usually leads into a criticism of the other person in the form of, “You shouldn’t have said this or that…” or “You should have said this or that….” When most people say, “You hurt me,” the focus is on the you, not the me.

So, how is the statement, “You hurt me,” about me? It seems I am talking about the other person when I say that s/he hurt me. But think about it: when I tell someone that they have hurt me, I am really talking about the emotional effect the other person had on me. Yes, the other person said or did something (or failed to say or do something), but their words, action, or lack thereof hurt you. Why? Because something important in you was assaulted in some way. I have heard people say that instead of saying, “You hurt me,” that you should say, “I feel hurt.” I hotly disagree. “I feel hurt” lies flat and says nothing about me, nothing about the relationship, much less what really happened. I know I am asking a lot of people to say, and to hear, “You hurt me” because it sounds like an attack on the other person. Once people get used to saying and hearing, “You hurt me,” they will begin to understand this very central ingredient of human relationships. We hurt each other all the time, and we need to have a meaningful and honest mechanism to deal with it. If we can’t feel hurt through and think it through, hurt migrates into anger, resentment, fear, or punishment.

When hurt turns to resentment

Hurt turns to resentment when it is not felt for what it is. Hurt is essentially sadness, or perhaps sadness results immediately after you have been hurt. If you can stay with hurt and sadness, you will stay with love, namely something that you have loved that you have lost. If you fail to acknowledge that you have been hurt, this hurt/sadness will almost immediately turn to anger, resentment, and fear. And possibly to punishment. Anger, fear, and the like come about because people have not adequately expressed hurt (and sadness), and/or have not heard hurt (and sadness). It is not natural to become immediately angry when I have been hurt. The natural process of hurt and its resolution is the following:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted
  • I lose that something that I have loved
  • I feel hurt. I naturally feel sad
  • I recognize that I have loved something and focus on this love
  • I may choose to say I am hurt or allow the hurt to finish on its own

Hurt turns to resentment, anger and fear because normal (not natural) way people process hurt is:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted and lose that something
  • I feel hurt but quickly move beyond hurt. I don’t want to be hurt again so I defend myself by being afraid and angry.
  • I may say, “I am hurt,” but I will say it as an attack.
  • I remain hurt, but now I have added resentment, which might never go away.
  • Hurts and resentment tend to pile up. I have new hurts over old hurts. (We all have unfinished and unresolved old hurts that are unfortunately brought into any new hurt, but this is a more extensive discussion that we will delay)

Hurt in work, play, and personal contacts

Hurt doesn’t always come from parents or from intimate partners. Hurt can come from work and other relationships. As adults, work is where we spend most of our time with people, and it is the place where most hurt actually occurs. But because we are at work, and work is not the place to express feelings, we have more hurt stored up there than anywhere else. And it is a primary reason we are hardest on our intimate partners because they take this hurt home and expect their partners to somehow fix it. Hurt easily occurs in extended family settings where you see family members once a year and do not have intimate relationships with these folks. Again, this hurt is often taken home because it can’t be resolved at the family reunion. Hurt can even occur in recreational activities. Much of this is due to the competition that is often part of recreation. Too many pickup basketball games end with some kind of verbal clash, if not even physical. Even a friendly card game can bring some kind of hurt, much less an intense game of chess. A baby shower, however benign in its appearance, can lead to hurt depending on what is given, received, and appreciated. Hurt comes in many forms, in many places, and at many times.

Daily hurts

It is a rare day that I am not hurt in some way. Recently, a patient expressed dissatisfaction with a report I had completed for him. He had every right to be disappointed with what I had to say. It doesn’t matter how much I worked on the report, what I thought of the report, or even the ultimate value of the report to him. In his mind he expected something other than what he got, and he has every right to be disappointed. And I have every right to be hurt. In this circumstance, namely in the therapy room, it did not behoove me to express my hurt, but I knew that I was hurt and did not let it migrate into fear or anger. In fact, I actually understood why he has some trouble with relationships in the way he challenged my report and what his expectations are. But importantly, my cognition of his demeanor and the reasons for his challenge did not diminish my hurt. I did my best in my report; it was not good for him; he was hurt; he expressed his disapproval; and I was hurt. This kind of daily hurt, unavoidable hurt, needs to be recognized, felt, and finished. Sometimes, you will say you are hurt and sometimes you won’t depending on the situation.

Sometimes you hurt yourself

Hurts don’t always come from someone else. They can just as easily come from a mistake you made, a misunderstood word spoken to you, or no word of appreciation spoken to you. If you recognize that you are hurt by these small things, you will be better able to deal with the larger hurts in your life. This is simply saying to yourself, “My bad” and allowing yourself to feel a moment of hurt and accompanying sadness. If you can allow yourself to be hurt by some mistake you made, you will become more aware of other people’s hurt, and accept it as normal

Knowing others’ hurt

We had an experience recently with friends who wanted to take us out to dinner. The request came when we were actually quite exhausted and needed a simple night home reading a book or playing a game. These friends are good people and some of the people we most enjoy being with, but on this particular night we didn’t want to be with anybody. This sometimes happens after a hard day’s work listing and working with people struggle with their lives. When we told Sam that we appreciated his offer, but that we were truly tired, he accepted our regrets with a kind demeanor. We came to know that our declining his invitation had hurt him. It wasn’t his initial kindness and demeanor that stuck us, but rather his words and actions afterwards. He said that he wanted to stop by and pick up a tool that he had left in my garage but that he was in a hurry and just buzz in and buzz out. It seemed quite clear to me that he was hurt, and that he was avoiding us because of his hurt. Now, this is no big deal, and we will likely never talk about it, but it was important for us to know that we had hurt him. I wonder how a conversation might have gone if he had simply said, “Ron, I was really hurt when you declined our offer for dinner.” I don’t think Sam is ready for that kind of conversation, so I will simply need to know that I hurt him and do my best in the future to be kind to him. It can be a bit of a burden to know your own hurt, know someone else’s hurt, and wisely choose to keep it all to yourself.

Resolution of hurt

So, what do we do with all this hurt: hurt at home, hurt with my intimate, hurt with my relatives, hurt with friends, hurt at work, hurt at the grocery store, and hurt in play situations? You do the following in order: (1) recognize hurt when it happens, (2) prevent hurt from migrating into anger or fear, (3) remember that hurt always comes from love, (4) determine whether you have the place, the time, and the person with whom you can share hurt, and if not, (5) note this hurt in your memory as something you might want to come back to at another time; (6) note that the feeling of hurt may have evaporated on its own. The key is # 1: recognizing hurt.

Further Reading

Feeling blogs 1-5

Forthcoming blog Feeling 7: It’s Not all about Hurt

Forthcoming book: Let Me Tell You How I Feel.

Mind over Matter IV: Addictions

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, men's issues, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the fourth blog in the Mind over Matter series. Initially we discussed the theory of mind and brain, noting that the “mind” is a real entity but undefinable, along with the different functions of the mind and the brain. In Mind over Matter II we discussed how the brain creates anger, anxiety, and depression to provide safety for the person. In the last sessions, Mind over Matter III, we discussed means of practically using the mind to manage emotions. Now, in this discussion we want to briefly note how addictions are the result of the mind/brain interaction, and make some theoretical suggestions for people plague by addictions and people who try to help these folks.

A few words about addictions

  1. Addictions have a tremendous cost: loss of health and life, loss of relationships, loss of jobs, loss of money, and loss of productivity. Ultimately, all these losses cause immense damage not only to the individual but to our culture and the world.
  2. There are great disputes in psychology about the definition of addictions, the course of the addictive process, and the treatment of addictions.
  3. We are not addiction specialists, much less addictionologists (specialists in addictions). We do encounter many people with the full range of addictions in our office, and deal daily with the ramifications that addictions have on life.

The mind and the brain in review

  1. The mind, while undefined, uses the “machinery” of the brain to do various activities, from walking to talking and many other activities.
  2. The brain knows only safety (or the lack thereof) and pleasure (or the lack thereof)
  3. The mind knows everything else.
  4. Much of what the mind “knows” and what the brain does remains in what we must call the “unconscious.”
  5. A central feature of human existence is another undefined word: feelings. We discussed this largely in Mind over Matter III

Kinds of addictions

There has been great debate about what constitutes an “addiction” because the word was originally used largely with the abuse of alcohol and to some degree other chemicals, like opiates. Over the recent years in particular the term addiction has been given a wider view including what are generally called behavioral addictions. While the American Psychiatric Association has yet to accept behavioral addictions as a formal diagnosis, the International Diagnostic community has.

Roughly, we now have:

  • Chemical addictions: alcohol, opiates, stimulants, and hallucinogens
  • Behavioral addictions: something that one does “to a fault”, which ultimately adversely affects his or her life.

Behavioral addictions have become of much greater interest in the psychological community and include:

  • Gambling
  • Property acquisition (hoarding)
  • Eating (too much, too little, too restricted and limited)
  • Working
  • Sexual activities and expression
  • Video gaming and other electronic engagements, even texting.
  • Many others, all of which might be seen as some activity “to a fault,” and might even include playing, exercising, talking, refusing to talk, sleeping, or even joking

Definition of an addiction

Again, there is much dispute over the definition of an addiction, and hence whether something should even be considered to be an addiction. Just because someone drinks quite a bit does not make him/her necessarily addicted to alcohol. On the other hand, if someone doesn’t drink at all but craves alcohol to such an extent that s/he thinks about it 24/7, that might be a thought or cognitive addiction

The traditional definition of an addiction includes the following:

  • Excessive use of some chemical or behavior
  • Increased use of the chemical or behavior over time to give the same amount of pleasure or satisfaction
  • Many failed attempts to reduce the excessive use
  • Encroachment on other elements of life because of the use: relationships, work, money. Certainly on self-esteem.
  • Attempts to hide the addictive behavior

The course of an addiction is something like this:

  • Some behavior is found to be pleasurable or provides safety
  • This behavior becomes a habit. In other words, the person begins to do this pleasurable or safety-enhancing thing without thinking about it
  • This behavior subtly encroaches on other elements of life and becomes the “go to” thing when life seems unhappy or unsafe
  • Attempts to hide the addictive behavior

Mind over brain in overcoming addictions

We remind our readers that we are not addictionologists, who know a whole lot more than we do on this subject. Our approach to addictions is almost wholly psychological, meaning that we look first to understand the behavior that has become addictive more than “diagnosing” it as addictive. This places us in a fairly different position than most people who work with addicts, like alcoholics, to change their lies. We deeply respect the hard-working and committed individuals who do this addiction recovery work. We don’t do it.

Our focus being on causes and understanding leads us to see an addiction as a “brain over mind” matter, and we seek to help people restore the “mind over brain” operation in life. Recall that the brain (not the mind) knows only safety and pleasure, and hence is constantly looking out for our welfare by providing safety and seeking things that are pleasurable. Unfortunately, the brain “doesn’t know when to stop.” We might say something like, the brain sort of thinks “there can’t be too much of a good thing.” So when, for instance, a young man I saw not long ago spent 70 hours a week playing video games, his brain was simply calling him to do something that had been fun…even though his fun was less and less. So much so, in fact, that he said he “hated” playing games but “somehow” continued to do so. Why? Because his brain had been wired to previously find pleasure in gaming. This is the approach we take to all addictions and it can be seen as a progression from simple pleasure to habit to addiction without the mind knowing what the brain is doing. The brain is, as we said, thinking that there can’t be too much of a good thing. Remember that the brain doesn’t know time, money, relationships, work or anything else: it just knows safety and pleasure. In an addiction the brain is ruling the roost of the person, not the mind.

To get the mind back in control, you have to keep in mind what I have repeated in this blog series, that your brain is a wonderful machine that you can’t live without. Even so, your brain is not your mind, it is a part of you but it is not the whole of you. Your brain is the machine that keeps the whole of you going.  I often say that I can’t live without my computer and books. But my computer and books are not me; they are a reflection of me. You can teach your brain what to reflect of you. Getting the mind back in the driver’s seat is simple but extremely hard, and the only way to do it is to realize that you will be fighting your brain that will be screaming at you. You will notice that you don’t want to continue in this addictive behavior but you feel compelled to do so. The wanting to stop is the mind; the compulsion to continue is the brain. We recommend you read our blog on Wanting and Liking for more on this. So, first, recognize that your brain is in control. Don’t be mad at your brain; rather, simply appreciate that your brain is trying to protect you and find pleasure for you because that is what it does. That is all it does.

Now, take it a step further. Let your mind see the benefits of changing your addictive behavior. Let your mind see all the dangers and losses of the addiction. Don’t feel guilty or ashamed; that will do no good whatsoever. Just see what you would like to do and what you have lost for not having done it. Doing this, you will notice that you will feel sad. Why are your sad? Because you have lost something that you have loved. Now you’re on the right track. You are on the love track in your mind and life rather than the pleasure/safety track of your brain. You have to be honest about this sadness with addictions. You can’t make justifications or promises. Justifications will keep you mad and defensive. Promises will just fall though and bring you shame. You have to do the sad.

The third step beyond recognizing that your brain is in control and seeing all the things you love is to notice that every time you fall into addictive behavior, you feel sad. You feel sad because you have lost something. Now you are on the road to getting your mind in control of your brain.

Further Reading

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2017). The positive power of sadness. Praeger Press.

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2018). “Mind Over Matter I, II, and III” blogs