emotional maturity

Who’s in Control

Ron Johnson Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

I’ve heard a lot about “control,” most of it negative. Like, “He’s a control freak,” or “She just has to control everybody in her life.” And then there is the other side, which seems to affirm that you can’t control anything and shouldn’t try like, “What’s going to happen is just going to happen” or “Just let go and everything will work out.” I don’t think there is a good concept of what control is, what it isn’t, how it can be good, and how it can be bad. There are also a number of psychological diagnoses, like OCD, that suggest that there is some basic pathological tendencies in control. My interest in this treatise is largely about how people feel in control or controlled. Let me share my thoughts.

Locus of control

One of the very valuable tests we use in our office is something created by psychologist Julian Rotter in 1954 called the “Internal-External Scale”, usually referred to as the IE test. There are only 29 questions on this test which attempts to determine whether a person has an “internal locus of control” or an “external locus of control.” Rotter defined people with an internal locus of control as having control of their lives, compared to people with an external locus of control as having little or no control over their lives. Rotter found that people with an internal locus of control fared better in life, a finding that proved true in research. Many research studies, including my wife’s doctoral dissertation, included the IE to study people’s view of control. An important finding of the IE research showed that people with an external locus of control were more depressed and felt helpless in life. Helplessness, together with hopeless, and a number of other symptoms are symptoms of depression.

I have generally found that people with an internal locus of control do succeed in life, feel better about themselves and other people, and find ways to cope with life’s difficulties. The feel motivated to do something about their lives, both facing difficult challenges, and enhancing their strengths and utilizing passions. Another symptom of depressions is “anhedonia,” or the lack of motivation and interest. You can see how the arrow could go both ways if you have an external locus of control: (1) you feel helpless to do anything to make a life for yourself, and (2) not doing anything in life can cause you to feel helpless. I have seen both, and it tends to be a downward spiral: feeling helpless; acting helpless. But there is much more about this locus of control business.

Beliefs associated with an external locus of control

Bad luck, for one. People who feel controlled by the world often use this phrase when they fail at something. They even use it to prevent them trying to do something because they “are not lucky like some people.”

Other people. More often it is not bad luck, it is other people who seem to control one’s life. In other words people with an external locus of control feel “controlled” by the people in their lives. This felt external control can be with spouses, parents, children, friends, employers, employees, or government officials. So they feel, “They won’t let me…,” sometimes not even knowing who the “they” are.

Blaming. An adjunct to the “they” problem that these folks have is tendency to blame others in some way like, “the dog ate the homework,” “the teacher didn’t tell me how she wanted me to do the homework,” or simply, “It wasn’t my fault” statements we sometimes hear from children. Adults will blame their spouses, bosses, friends, children, or parents because these people “controlled” them in some way.

Accidents. A patient I saw for maybe seven years (quite unsuccessfully, I must add), told me several times that she (yes, one of the very few women I have seen as a patient in the last 30 years or so) felt that “if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong with me.” This same woman, by the way smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, slept 14 hours a day, watched TV the rest of the day, and now having gained back 100 pounds of the 300 she had lost in bariatric surgery some years beforehand. As I said, the arrow goes both ways: feeling helpless and acting helpless. Freud wrote about what he called parapraxes, which included accident proneness, which he theorized was caused by unconscious factors.

Body ailments. This is a big one. People with a myriad of physical and medical problems almost always have an external locus of control. They speak of their bodies as if these bodies were somehow external to themselves. I hear “my heart this…,” “my arms that…,” my legs that…,” “my eyes this…” and many other physical symptoms. This kind of external locus of control is the most insidious because while the so-called problem is actually within one’s body, the person feels that his or her body is somehow controlled by external factors beyond their control.

Beliefs associated with an internal locus of control

Self. This is the key ingredient with these people. They have a sense of what we psychologists call “self”. This is understandably a vague term without an exact definition but one that is very central to the heart of depth psychology. In its simplest form “self” is the feeling that I exist. Believe it or not, many people operate as if they don’t exist. They just go through life doing what is expected of them but not knowing why, and perhaps not even caring why. This sense of self, that I exist, breeds some other ingredients that lend to an internal locus of control.

Self-confidence. This is not to be confused with arrogance, which is the feeling that I am better than other people. Symptoms of self-confidence include the ability to make mistakes, feel sad for a moment or two and recover from this mistake. The root of the word confidence, by the way could be translated (from the Latin) as “with truth.” So self-confident people tend to be truthful.

Self-reliant. Simply put, they rely primarily on themselves. They share their thoughts, feelings, and doings with others but always at a bit of a distance because they tend to think that they can survive without anyone. This is tantamount to independence.

Disinclination to complain. They tend to take responsibility for their actions, sometimes to a fault or sometimes when it wasn’t actually their fault. But this tendency away from complaining makes them more likable. Do you know of someone who is always talking about what he/she/they/it did to them? You tend to stay away from such people.

A balanced life

No one is in complete control of his or her life. Externally controlled people may have a sense of how we all need each other, but they tend to lose that very important sense of self that is so central in life. We are all dependent on circumstances, other people, and perhaps that random good or bad luck from time to time. The task is to find that internal sense of control that helps you face the challenges and enhance the opportunities.

Further Reading
Brock, D. (2004). Comparisons of personality type, psychopathology, and church denomination in women. Available on Dissertation Abstracts
Johnson, R. (2018). The Other N Word blog and the Feelings blogs
Rotter, J (1954). Monologue on locus of control. Available on the Internet.

The Other N Word

Ron Johnson Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, men's issues, relationships, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

I have to be real careful with this blog. It could be very offensive. The “N word” that we all know…unfortunately…is all too rampant in America. Not so, by the way in most of the rest of world, and not even very prevalent in North America. I never heard the N word when I lived in Canada partly because when a man was Black, he didn’t first define himself as Black, but as Canadian, or more likely a Newfoundlander or a Torontonian. This came to as a pleasant surprise when I was at a party with people of various colors and national origins, as Canada tends to be much more than the U.S. Somehow I had a conversation with this Black guy, and it was normal for me to think of him first as a “Black guy.” But that wasn’t how he thought of himself. I learned that he was from Toronto, that he was an engineer of some kind, and that he has a passion for music. Far down the line he would say something like, “Oh, yes, I am Black but that isn’t how I think of myself.” Not so in America…sadly. My two sons–in-law are Black. They were both raised by White mothers, and for one of them, predominantly by mother, and neither was particularly raised in a Black subculture. Blackness is important to both of them, perhaps one more than the other, but it seems not to be at the top of the list.

The N word originated more than 200 years ago and has remained a part of the English language, again, especially in America. It is primarily a derogatory term, but it can be used as a term of endearment among Blacks themselves, or a friendly way of engaging a competitor. I can’t say how that feels because I am not Black, but even this most hateful word can be used lovingly, if carefully. I don’t know how my one my son-in-law really feels when his mother jokingly says to him, “That is mighty White of you.” I cringe, but know that she means this as a term of endearment. This whole discussion reminds me of my previous blogs of Feelings, and it is in that light that I want to talk about “the other N word.” The other N word is need.

Need
Having thought about, read about, and written about feeling words recently, I continue to find myself intrigued by this other N word. Some people use it frequently, some use it sparingly, and yet others never use it Need tends to be a word that is used more by women than by men, but that is only part of the story. People with a feeling-based personality type use it more than people with a thinking-based personality. People with a “lover” temperament use it more than people with an “analyst” temperament. (I’ll discuss these personalities in later blogs.) It amazes me how natural and easy it is for some people to use the word need compared to many people who never use it.

It is important to distinguish between wants and needs. People for whom the N word works well tend not to make the distinction between wants and needs. Their preferred word is need, and this preference suggests that their use of the term includes both wants and needs. This can be confusing for someone who never uses the word need. Given that I am disinclined to use the N word, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when someone uses the word easily and frequently. I am even more uncomfortable when he or she uses it in regards to what they want me to do. Notice how I immediately translated the word “need” to “want” without event thinking. So I have come to realize that this want/need distinction may be a bit artificial. There may be a spectrum of want on one side of the spectrum and need on the other. This may help a bit, but I think the matter is more complicated than that.

I think the word need needs to be used, if sparingly and carefully. There: I used the N word. But I used the N word in regards to what I thought you need. It is much harder for me to use the N word when I have some need. I use it rarely, and I am far from comfortable with using it for myself, much less feeling the felt need that underlies the word need. I am coming to believe that felt need is real important but like any feeling, it is not exactly definable. If you read by blogs on Feelings, you will remember that we know what feelings are but we can’t exactly define them. Such seems to be the case with the N word. There are some dangers in allowing the N word into one’s vocabulary as there are dangers in failing to distinguish between wants and needs. Nobody likes “needy” people.

Neediness
“Neediness” may not be as bad as the original N word, but it is close. Who wants to be around a “needy” person? A “needy” person is someone who gloms on to you and you can’t get away from. You know what I mean. The guy in the gas station who wants to tell you about his sister’s cancer; the relative who always has some kind of physical ailment; the guy you try to avoid because you know that he will want more of your time than you can give him. “Needy” people are dependent. That is the essence of so-called neediness. “Dependent” is not much better than “needy” but it at least strikes a chord in my psychological understanding of things. Not the best word, but somewhat accurate, at least in psychological parlance. Even a bit harsher is the formal diagnosis of “dependent personality disorder,” one of the many diagnoses that is like a death curse.

Instead of needy, dependent, or personality disordered, I suggest that people with this tendency are looking for something. They are looking for what they never received as children. It is natural for children to be needy, 100% in infancy, 90% in toddlerhood, about 50% the rest of childhood, and about 20% in adolescence. Adulthood…well, we’ll get to that in a minute. So-called needy people didn’t get their needs met in these early stages of life and as a result are continually looking for someone to lean on. Unfortunately, they often lean on anyone they can find, and the more they lean, the more that people avoid them or tolerate their neediness. It’s a sad story. They’re just trying to get what they didn’t get as children, but they never get it. Fritz Perls (therapist, largely in the 1960’s time) said it right: you get your childhood dependency needs met in childhood or you never get them met. Note one important phrase in this statement: childhood needs. You get your childhood needs met as a child or you never get them met. Wow. That sounds awful, but this is not the end of the story.

When I failed to get my childhood needs met in childhood, I no longer need them met. I don’t need to have my diapers changed. OK, I’m 75 and may need palliative care someday, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t need to be fed; I don’t need to have a lot of physical comfort; I don’t need to be governed; I don’t need someone near me all the time; and many more childhood needs. When “needy” people are talking on and on or wanting a hug every time we meet or want more than we have to give, they are looking for childhood needs. They don’t know it, but that is what they are actually seeking. And you can’t give them what they need. That is why they keep asking for it and demanding it. They need to give up ever getting their childhood needs met. Then what?

They can get everything they need as adults. Needy people don’t know that, but that is the case. They can be listened to, hugged, cared for, cried with, laughed with, and all that is in a normal adult life. They can get these things, but it is work. And the work begins by giving up on ever getting childhood (and infantile) needs. Needy people need to grieve the loss of childhood needs in order ever to get their adult needs met. I would dare suggest they need to read our The Power of Positive Sadness, or some better book about how to grieve the losses of early life. Then they can face normal adult needs.

Normal adult needs
What are “normal adult needs”? Not an easy question to answer, but an important one to examine. I will not indulge myself in offering a treatise on adult needs, but there are several obvious ones: physical needs, like food, clothing, and shelter. Some people have special needs, while others seem to have few needs. I will simply state that outside of the special needs and physical needs categories there are some psychological needs present in all of us. They roughly fall into the additional categories of need to be alone and the need to be with people. As a result of these two needs, which we might say fall on a continuum, there are many secondary needs, but allow me to speak simply about these two quite different needs: away from people and with people.

I will defer the important discussion of introverted people and extraverted people to a later time, and her focus on what I perceive as natural independence and natural dependence. People who are naturally dependent know that they need people; people who are naturally independent know that they need to be away from people. I’m not talking about extremes, like the hermit who never sees people and seemingly doesn’t want to or the woman who works 80 hours a week and never sees her family…or doesn’t have a family to see. I am talking about these two needs that are quite different and both important.

I tend to be in the “need to be alone” category, the independent person. My wife tends to be of the same ilk. As we speak she is in Utah somewhere climbing and hiking to her heart’s content, while I am doing other things…like writing this blog. Both of us are quite content. Since we are rarely apart and talk incessantly, we need to be away from each other from time to time. I have no idea where she is and what she is going, and for the most part, I don’t care. I just hope she is happy and well and that she comes home when she has had her fill of her beloved canyons. Likewise, she doesn’t really care what I am doing, whether writing, seeing patients, or playing basketball. She just hopes I will hold the fort here and not get hurt on the court. Otherwise, each of us is content to be left alone while we do what we want. But having sung the praises of this independence that we have, I must admit that I am not good at the other side of the spectrum: dependence.

I am slowly, painfully learning to use the “other N word” in my vocabulary, which is an outgrowth of my actually admitting that I have needs. It has been a challenging ride to admit that I “need” anyone, and it has been a good thing for me to do. The need, the true need, the natural need for someone else in my life is now something that I can see without seeing it as needy. God forbid, I don’t want to be needy. I just need. I need Deb in my life. I need my friends in my life. I need a few guys who put up with my less than good skills at basketball. I need my office manager, Cheri, God love her. Unfortunately, she is not in the office to correct my misspellings on this blog, nor is Deb to add and subtract, which is her real art in writing. So I have to do the independent thing and forego my need for someone better than me to assist me in what I don’t do well.

I see many people like me in my office, and they all have the same trouble with the N word. Some feel it; some think it; but very few of them actually say it. I know their difficulty with the N word. But it is a good word. If used carefully.

Further reading
Johnson, R. and Brock, B. (2017). The power of positive sadness. Santa Barbara: Praeger
Johnson, R. (2018). Previous blogs on feelings.
Reik, T. (date?). The need to be loved. (A difficult read)

I Don’t Want To Grow Up

Ron Johnson Children, emotional maturity, Feelings, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

I found myself saying something to a patient the other day that was one of those “My mouth said that” statements (note a previous blogs on this phenomenon). In other words, I didn’t know it until I said it. The statement was this: “You want to be grown up. You don’t want to grow up.” This means that the individual wanted to be a person of (emotional) maturity, but he didn’t want to go through the growing pains of growing up; he wanted to be grown up. You can’t just “grow up” in a heartbeat. You need to go through the growing process, which is always painful. It is painful for people to go through the process of giving up an addiction, like alcohol, food, or gambling, but no one wants to give up these things; they want to have them given up. The difference is this: having given up is an idea; giving up is reality. I am not primarily interested in giving up addictions or bad habits in this paper. I am more interested in the whole process of growing, or growing up. More specifically, I am interested in the lack of emotional maturity. The lack of emotional maturity is the heart of the psychological problems that people have. As I see it, no one wants to grow up; they want to be grown up. Furthermore, no one is perfectly emotionally mature. We all have pockets of emotional immaturity. But what is “emotional maturity”?

Emotional immaturity
Most of the people I see have some kind of immaturity. Instead of saying that they are “immature,” I prefer saying that haven’t grown up…in some way. People who haven’t grown up have failed to mature in the arenas of emotions, and ultimately in social engagement. We refer to such people as suffering from “emotional/social” immaturity. In a previous blog I discussed what I call the “4-8-12” phenomenon. Most of the kids who are brought to me have this phenomenon in their make-up. The 4-8-12 phenomenon is this: the kid is eight years old physically, but he is very bright, so he is 12 years old intellectually. In other words, he has the knowledge, vocabulary, and abstract reasoning of a12-year old. Unfortunately, he has the emotional development of a four-year old, and hence he has the social maturity of a four-year old.

I saw one of these kids yesterday. He is actually 14 physically and about 18 intellectually. He doesn’t do homework because it is “stupid.” When I hear “stupid,” which I call the “S word,” I usually am in front of a person who smarter (intellectually) the people around him. He probably feels smarter than the other kids in class and very possibly smarter than his teachers. I met with his mother and him together for a few minutes, and it was obvious to me that he was smarter than his mother. I have never met his father, but his mother reported that this young man’s father is very argumentative and challenging like his son. Thus, it is likely that his father may also have the 4-8-12 phenomenon going on in his life. Maybe the father is 40 physically and 60 intellectually. It also likely that the father’s emotional/social maturity is significantly below these numbers, maybe as low as age four (emotionally and socially). It is very difficult to be smarter than the people around you, something I told this young man in the presence of his mother. After his mother left the office, I invited Tom to play something. He suggested chess, a game he has evidently played once or twice. He remembered some but not all of the allowed moves of the various chess pieces. I helped him a bit at the beginning, but after a very few minutes, he was beating me in chess. Now I am far from a grand master of chess, in fact much less than that, but I have probably played several hundred games of chess over 60-odd years. But this kid beat me having only played once or twice. That suggests that he is very bright: he learned quickly, both from his mistakes and from mine.

Unfortunately for Tom, his emotional/social maturity is far below his 14 physically and 18 intellectually levels. I place his emotional age to be eight at best, but frankly some of what he says and does is more like what we would expect from a four-year old. So this young man is 4-14-18. Can you see how this constellation of emotional, physical, and intellectual development can be problematic? It must be difficult for Tom to be in a class with a teacher who doesn’t have the intelligence that he has but perhaps has more emotional/social maturity. In History class, for instance, he might understand the historical facts quickly, and then wonder, for instance, how America justified the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Viet Nam, the Philippines, or Mexico. Discussion of the justification for these wars and invasions might be very stimulating to Tom. He might be more interested in the Why of these wars than of the What. So he might ask questions in class that don’t have much to do with what happened as they relate to why they happened. This might be genuine intellectual curiosity. But if Tom is forced to write a paper on what happened in any of these wars, might demur that assignment because it is obvious what happened, whereas it is far from obvious why it happened. So Tom might avoid doing this what assignment or forget it altogether. Or he might ask why questions in class that could be frustrating to the history teacher who thinks it is more important to know what than why.

Tom might forget to do his what assignment, or refuse to do it. He might even put up some kind of fuss in class, talk to some other kid in class, or look at his cell phone. Any of these things could get him in trouble. He might do the same thing at home, refusing or forgetting to do his homework assignment. Furthermore, he might be irritable, disagreeable, or otherwise difficult because the history/homework is somewhere in the back of his mind and he is fighting off the feelings he has about the what assignment. Likely, Tom doesn’t even know why he is irritable. He just doesn’t like something. He might say that History class is stupid, or he might say that school is stupid; he might even feel that he is stupid because he can’t seem to do an assignment in History class. None of this, however, does he say. He just acts like a four-year old having some kind of tantrum or resistance or avoidance the way four-year old kids naturally do when they have to do something they don’t want to do.

Emotional maturity
So what does it mean to be emotionally immature, and what is emotional maturity? Emotional maturity is this:
 Knowing how you feel
 Expressing how you feel
 Communicating how you feel
 Governing your expressions of how you feel
 Then:
o Knowing how other people feel
o Giving them liberty to express their feelings
o Valuing other people’s feelings…even though you don’t agree with them

The first order of business is to know how you feel. Emotionally immature people rush right into expressing some kind of feeling without knowing how they feel. What happens with 4-8-12 kids, as well as many emotionally immature adults, is that they jump right into some kind of emotional outburst. The 4-8-12 kid (or adult) doesn’t really know how they feel. Rather, they just rush right into some kind of emotional expression, usually anger, although sometimes silence, withdrawal, anxiety, or depression. So knowing how you feel is the beginning. This means knowing the four basic feelings:
 The love feelings: joy and sorrow
 The defense feelings: fear and anger
When you know how you feel, you will notice one of these feelings. It is easy to know and appreciate joy. It is much harder to know sorrow. Most people rush right through the sorrow and end up with one or both of the defense feelings of fear and anger. But if you know that you love something and know that you have lost it, you will know that you are simply sad about the loss. You have a “love problem”: you feel something (sad) singularly because you loved something and lost it. This is where most people get lost. They don’t know that they have loved something and they don’t know that they have felt sad when they lost this something. They just know that they are anxious or angry, usually angry. Emotional awareness starts with knowing what you love and knowing when you have lost something you love.

Note that there is a difference between expressing your feeling and communicating your feeling. Communicating “feelings” is extremely difficult and something that most people fail to do successfully. The problem with communicating feelings is that feelings aren’t words, and they are not thoughts. There are what we call a “third force” of human existence. When I “feel” something, there is always an emotional component, but there is also a physical component. When I feel something, I “feel” it in my chest, or my head, or maybe even my hands. Think of a time you felt “something” in your chest, hands, or head but you couldn’t put your finger on what this feeling was. This was a “feeling”: partly emotional and partly physical. But feelings also have cognitive components, and there is the problem with communicating feelings. We all try to put our feelings into cognitive words, and it rarely works. I just can’t find the right words to communicate my feelings because the words aren’t quite right. So I say things like, “I have this odd feeling but I can’t put it into words.” This “odd feeling” may be very important or just a passing fancy. So when I try to put my feelings into words, it is a struggle. This struggle is what makes human relationships so difficult. If I could magically put my feelings into words that the other person really understood, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. However, putting feelings into words is exceedingly difficult. Unfortunately, most people think it is easy, like, “I feel it, I say it, and you should understand what I feel.” Rarely, almost never. Communicating feelings is difficult and always will be. Keeps me in business.

And it keeps poets, musicians, and all artists in business. These are the guys and gals who really know feelings and don’t try to put these feelings into cogent words. Poets have “poetic license” when they write, and they work diligently on communicating feelings with words. They are the best with the possible exception of musicians who put feelings to words and music. Better yet might be the sculptors and painters who put feelings in clay and canvas. You want to learn how to communicate feelings into words, read poetry. You want to learn how to communicate feelings even better, take a pottery class or learn to play the Irish tin whistle. Or take a karate class, which puts feelings into physical action. Karate, poetry, and music lessons have helped me learn about communicating feelings without words.

After expressing feelings, and doing the hard work of communicating feelings, the job of emotional maturity is not done. Once you know your feelings, express your feelings, and get better (never perfect) at communicating your feelings, you need to learn to govern the expression of your feelings. I just spent a weekend with several family members. During these various visits I keep most of my feelings to myself. Why would I do that? Because it would not be possible to express my feelings when someone else was expressing theirs. Furthermore, the expression of my feelings would have been hurtful, or even harmful to these people whom I love. I was often sad because I so wanted to say how I felt, but I knew that I could not do that successfully because these family members would have misunderstood my feelings or concluded that I didn’t care for them. So my “containing” my feelings meant just that: I knew what I felt; I could have expressed it; but I concluded that I couldn’t adequately communicate my feelings; so I kept them to myself. Then I felt sad…because I couldn’t/shouldn’t express my feelings. And then I got over feeling sad. And now I can just love these family members.

Finally, if I contain my feelings (after knowing, expressing, and communicating them on earlier occasions), I can then move into social maturity, where I learn how to actually relate to other people. Psychological growth and emotional growth is not all about me. It is ultimately about other people. When I truly care about other people, I am socially mature. But this is another topic for another time.

Further reading:
1. The 4-8-12 Child, hopefully published this year, or you can read my blog
2. The Positive Power of Sadness, published this month (Praeger Press) written by Deb and me.
3. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman