emotional maturity

I Don’t Like My Kid

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

“I don’t like my kid.” This statement must sound outrageous. It certainly isn’t something that should be said frivolously or even teasingly. It most certainly shouldn’t be said to any child. It might, however, be a statement that could be said to a confidant who could be of some help understanding and dealing with not liking a child. We hear these statements rather frequently from people who come to us seeking some guidance with dealing with their children. More regularly, however, we hear statements of dislike for some member of one’s family, be it child, spouse, or extended family member. Let me give you some examples of the reasons people feel these things and feel safety saying them to us in confidence. Secondly, I would like to provide some reasons for why people don’t actually like people in their families, how liking and loving are often quite disparate, and thirdly, how people might handle such feelings.

Before we get to examples, causes, and cures, I should mention that people don’t readily make such statements about their family members. Rather, they tend to simply complain about them. With a few exceptions most people come to therapists with complaints about people in their lives, very often their spouses, parents, or children, and sometimes their bosses or colleagues at work. It is always a challenge to help people understand their feelings of dislike, which is usually based on some kind of loss and concomitant hurt, but it can take months or years, if ever, for people to see their own feelings. It is hardest for people to admit that they don’t like their children, which is where we will start.

Disliking children

Consider the following stories of children that we have heard (all identifying information adjusted retaining the essence of the complaint:

  • Child has molested several other children. The church the family used to attend has not allowed them to return to church, at least with this child. School has been on the alert because of the possibility of his molesting other children. He has been tested as intellectually functioning several years below his physical age
  • Child of nine tends to throw a fit when he doesn’t get his way, yelling and screaming, often breaking things, and rolling on the floor. He is actually quite bright and has been tested as being intellectually far ahead of his physical years
  • Child is almost completely nonverbal with anything he thinks and feels. He can be satisfactorily in his room playing on his computer for hours. He does not respond to questions or statements.
  • Child steals food, so much so that her parents have had to put a lock on the fridge door and pantry to keep her from stealing food.
  • Child frequently stops up the toilet with his feces and refused to deal with it. Often, he has left the toilet bowl full without telling anyone. Once, he tried to plunge the toilet without success and then used several towels to clean up the mess before hiding the dirty towels in a closet only to be found several days later by a parent.
  • Child is routinely dishonest, even about very small things, so much so that she can be trusted in any way. She might lie about what she did in school, what she likes, where she went, or what she feels.

None of these children is intrinsically likable although understandably, it is hard for a parent to admit they don’t like these children despite their tendency to yell at them, demean them, punish them, and complain to us about them. We have found it helpful to help parents of difficult children to admit that they “don’t like them.” Then, this disliking tends to decrease in intensity and duration and be replaced with not liking something about the kid, perhaps most things. This can lead to appropriate encouraging and challenging children who need both. Importantly, we do not suggest saying, “I love you but I don’t like what you do” because a child cannot really distinguish between what s/he does and what s/he is.

Dislike other family members

  • Man and wife couple. I regularly do an intake assessment on a couple in which I initially meet with the couple to hear what their concern is, then meet with each partner separately to gather a social history and make clinical observations, this followed by extensive psychological testing and then an interpretative session with both of them present. The couple in my mind is one where during my session with the wife, she demanded that she spend an hour talking singularly about what she determined was wrong about her husband, and wanted to continue for a second hour.
  • Other couples. With few exceptions all couples complain about one another taking the forms of feeling neglected or registering complaints about the spouse
  • Extended family members. This is very common, like the mother-in-law who isn’t liked, the father-in-law who intrudes on the family all time, the alcoholic family member, or perhaps just the family member who has a substantially different political or religious persuasion. These days, many people separate from extended family because one member loves Trump or hates Trump together with all that goes with these loves and hates.
  • A sister who alleged that her brother molested her when she was a child. This woman later admitted that it was their father who molested her, not the brother, but she hasn’t had the wisdom and courage to apologize for her allegation
  • A woman who has totally separated herself from her biological family bringing a good deal of hurt and misunderstanding to her family members. Many people have been in the same situation where one child is molested and damaged while another child is favored in the family making two people being raised in “completely different families.”

You didn’t have any choice to what family you were born. You do have a choice with whom you make friends., Certain family members may not be ones you choose as friends. Then you might find a way to keep a safe distance from family member you don’t particularly like. It is never helpful to tell family members that you don’t them, and even worse to act out your dislike of them by choosing to be with them more than you want to.

So, what are the things that have caused a person to dislike a family member, and what can be done about it? Let’s first look at the causes of disliking a family member.

Causes of disliking a family member

  • Simple, if also profound differences in persuasion, values, and beliefs
  • Projection of other people you dislike who are of a similar persuasion
  • Long-term dislike that has not been seen and expressed, much less resolved
  • Outrageous behavior that you have tolerated but not effectively tolerated
  • A genuine impediment in the other person, such as intellectual, physical, or emotional that has implications for how the person engages the social world
  • Envy of the other person, perhaps that s/he has something or has had opportunities that you haven’t had
  • You love the person, perhaps deeply, even though you don’t like him/her. This is something that Deb and I deal with all the time. Love is blind, so the saying goes, but liking or disliking is not blind. So, we end up with blind spots that are related to the people we love.

Dealing with not liking someone in your family

  • Admit to it: first to yourself and find a way to accept the fact that you may, indeed, love someone, perhaps very deeply, whom you don’t like.
  • Differentiate what you like from what you don’t like. You may discover that there is a lot more that you like than what you dislike but you have fallen prey to thinking that you have to like everything about someone.
  • Admit to at least one other person that you don’t like, not the person him/herself; perhaps a close confident or a therapist
  • Find a way to carefully distance yourself from this person. You may never need to deal with the disliking, but you can keep a safe distance so the dislike doesn’t turn into hate or disgust, much less your saying something untoward
  • Keep a safe distance, which may in terms of geography, frequency of contacts, and intensity of contacts. You may never really be able to particularly like certain family members but you can love them…at a safe distance.
  • Not liking spouse is a case in its own because ideally one’s spouse or life’s partner should be a friend first, a lover second, and a partner third. Many romantic relationships begin with love and sex first and then partnership but never friendship. Making friends with a spouse is a real challenge, especially if you have been unhappy with him/her for a long time and have been tolerating them.

The more you admit to not liking someone, the less the not liking will dominate your feeling and the more you might just be able to love the person more as the not liking shrinks.

 

 

 

Good Men to Great Men

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

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

What is “goodness” in men

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

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

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

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

Greatness

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

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

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

Some examples

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

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

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

Overcoming Shame

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, love, marital, men's issues, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Almost everyone I see in my office suffers from shame. I wrote a blog a few years back differentiating shame and guilt, which remains an important element in understanding and conquering the phenomenon of shame in one’s life. In this blog, I will give some examples of shame that people feel in their lives, then define shame, consider the causes of shame, examine the consequences of shame, differentiate shame from guilt, and make recommendations for conquering shame in one’s life. Let’s start with real people understanding that the names and other identifying information of these people have been changed…”to protect the guilty,” but not the shame.

Real people who feel shame:

  • Bud, who is a physician, feels shame because he has been unable to overcome his tendency to get angry very quickly, something that has damaged his life in many ways, not the least of which is the relationship with his wife
  • Sam, who is a very bright person as well as a person of very good character, feels ashamed of the fact that he is gay, largely because of his evangelical Christian roots and harsh father
  • Jason, who is also bright and successful, but feels shame because he is overweight, something for which he was bullied and teased as a child 25 years ago
  • Jack, also very bright and a deeply intuitive person but also unable to sustain a job in his profession or sustain a lasting female relationship because he hasn’t found a way to successfully relate to people
  • Rick, another very bright person, who took several years to get the last class he needed to graduate from the university, finally found a lasting relationship, but has not been able to engage faithfully in a job
  • Peter, another very bright person as well as person of impeccable character, a pastor for many years but quite unsuccessful in his marriage because he tried too hard to please and give to his wife to such an extent that now he is woefully in debt with little option to get out of it. He also feels more shame for even considering bankruptcy.
  • Cannon, a very capable musician and a person of good character as well as being in a lasting female relationship, feels shame because he is suffering and has suffered from anxiety since he was at least four years old.
  • Freddie, a young man of nine, who feels shame for not being able to do compositions in school and otherwise write despite the facts that his parents are really good people. I tested him with a 120 IQ and a possible learning disability (dysgraphia)
  • Dwight, a very successful businessman as well as a person of deep spiritual development, feels shame every time he has made even the smallest mistake. He also feels shame because his wife, also a successful professional and kind person, has a tendency to tell him what is wrong with him
  • Jose’, an 18-yearold man who recently won a state championship in his chosen sport and generally does well with his friends. He is reading at the fourth grade level and about to enter college. I told him that he was a “genius” in his sport, but he feels ashamed of his difficulty reading and writing
  • Jim, another physician, bright, and deeply spiritual, feels ashamed that he spent an undue amount of money having been convinced that the world would be deteriorating soon. He also feels ashamed because he gave $100K to a “false prophet” who has evidently taken advantage of many other people.
  • Greg, a very capable person and a person of very good character, feels ashamed of his sexual proclivity even though he has never been unfaithful to his wife or engaged in this unique form of sex.
  • Gavin, another person of very good character and a very likable person, feels ashamed because he frequently lies to his female partner, often regarding trivial matters.
  • Justin, a very bright person working diligently on his PhD in history having successfully completed two master’s degrees, feels shame at every drop of the hat and ends up getting angry or avoiding life in some way or another.

There is much that differentiates these men: age, religious persuasion, gender orientation, characterological development, marital/spousal status and other factors, but they have many things in common, namely the feeling of shame, the results of shame, and the challenges that are necessary to get out of shame.

What is shame?

Shame is the feeling that there is something wrong with me, a feeling that immediately leads to the tendency to hide in some way and thereby feel some assuaging of the feeling of shame. The feeling that “something is wrong with me” can take relate to many things that could be wrong: physical, emotional, legal, cognitive, financial, sexual, relational, professional, and others.

This feeling that something is wrong with me might seem to be normal. You might think, “We all have something wrong with us because no one’s perfect, right?” However, reasonable that seems, the matter of shame is much deeper and darker than simply admitting that you’re not perfect. Indeed, no one is perfect, and we might make a case for saying that nothing is perfect; perhaps just good, valuable, helpful on the one side of the spectrum and bad, not valuable, and harmful on the other side. Shame is not about being perfect and it is not about thinking that I should be perfect. It is a phenomenon that has deep roots in childhood as well as deep roots in daily life, and deep roots in causing an immense amount of difficulty in life.

In a way, shame is like so many other psychological, philosophical, and theological phenomena: it is not entirely definable. As I have previously written (and it is written many other places), the most important elements of life are undefinable: in physics time, distance, and mass are undefinable; life itself is undefinable; love is undefinable; God is undefinable. We know things like time, love, and life because of experience, not because of definition. We use these terms every day, or at least organize ourselves around these things, like time and love. So, we must grant that we can define shame to some degree but not with absolute definition, and certainly not without using other terms, like life and feelings that are undefinable. Shame is a feeling (there we go with another undefinable word) that occurs when I feel this “something is wrong with me” feeling and usually has deep roots in childhood experiences. Before we examine these causes of shame, let’s differentiate shame from other feelings that are second cousins: humiliation, guilt, and embarrassment.

Shame, humiliation, guilt, and embarrassment

These concepts are intrinsically related because they all have certain things in common. When I feel any of these feelings, I tend to hide in some way. I drop my head when I feel, guilt, for instance, cover my face with a piece of paper when I feel embarrassment, hide myself in my room if I feel shame, or run away if I feel humiliation.

Note that it seems that the source of these feelings is always external although that is not actually the case. In fact, however, these four experiences are profoundly different. Simply noted, the differences are in the emotions associated with the experience, the result of the experience, and the value or disvalue of the experience

  • Shame is fear-based. It is the feeling there is something wrong with me, not with what I have done. Secondly, shame is external in its origin, namely another person. This “other person” is usually an imagined other person. I imagine that someone will think ill of me for some reason. The first result of shame is that I hide from this person, or perhaps I might hide from everyone. The second more important result of shame is that in my hiding, I do not improve as a person and may actually deteriorate.
  • Guilt is quite different. It is sadness-based. I feel guilty when I have done something wrong. Note the difference between thinking there is something wrong with me and what I have done that might have been wrong. Note also, that guilt originates from me, perhaps my own ethical or moral stance, or what I expect of myself. It does not originate from an external source like another person. Most importantly, guilt makes me a better person because I can see what I did that was wrong and make personal improvements and perhaps make amends.
  • Humiliation is anger-based. It is similar to shame in that it is externally based, i.e. from another person, but distinct from shame, which is imaginary (“What will she think of me about this?”), it comes from a real person who intends to humiliate you. While shame occurs mostly in adulthood, humiliation occurs most often in childhood, very often by siblings, parents, or ex-friends. Most importantly, like shame, humiliation makes me hide and prevents me from maturing and becoming a different person.
  • Embarrassment is joy-based. I feel embarrassed when I eat that second piece of pie in front of a friend knowing that it is not good for me. I laugh at myself. Hence, embarrassment, like guilt, is self-based. It is not based on the anger I feel for what someone has done to me (humiliation) or the fear of what someone might think of me (shame). I simply laugh at myself, and as a result, I become a better person. Perhaps I determine to never have a second piece of pie.

In general, guilt and embarrassment are good for me because I admit what I have done wrong, while shame and humiliation are not good for me because I hide. So, how do these experiences, particularly shame, originate develop in life?

The origins of shame

Briefly stated, the origins of the other experiences are as follows:

  • Guilt: I am able to see mistakes and rectify them in some way
  • Embarrassment: I am able to laugh at myself
  • Humiliation: I cannot prevent being humiliated, but this occurs mostly in childhood, and is actually the origin of much shame.

The origin of shame is almost always rooted in a childhood experience of humiliation, e.g.:

  • A playmate on the soccer field pulls my pants down in front of everyone
  • A teacher berates me because I don’t understand what she has said
  • My brother teases me about being fat
  • My parent frequently ask rhetorically, “What’s wrong with you?”
  • And many others

These are real experiences that set the stage for thinking, feeling, or fearing that there is something wrong with me. How can I answer the rhetorical question, “What’s wrong with you?’ but to come to believe that there is something wrong with me…not just wrong with what I said or did? Shame in adult life is based on these early experiences when I couldn’t get away from my attacker and the feeling was awful. All I could do was to be quiet, hide, or find some kind of escape.

For the most part shame occurs in my mind, not in reality. I fear that someone might think ill of me in some way, and this ill feeling is too close to the awful feeling I had as a child that I become afraid to be myself, admit what I said or did, or just see if my fear of rejection actually occurs.

Shame in adult life comes in forms not dissimilar from those in childhood when I was humiliated, but when I was a child, I was angry at being humiliated, but not in a position to be angry in fact. I had to hide my anger. So, when I feel shame, my basic emotion is fear, and I hide myself from being potentially humiliated. I feel shame when I fear that he or she might say, think, or feel that:

  • I am a bad person
  • I am stupid
  • I am not honest
  • I will be rejected

I feel shame that people might see these things in me even if none of them is true. I can also feel humiliated when he or she actually does these things. Most specifically, at least for men, they feel fear of judgment or some kind of criticism when their partners might criticize them. Unfortunately, women are too inclined to “help” the men in their lives by finding fault with them, but this is beyond the score of this blog (Wait for my forthcoming book, Balls, where I unpack this undue fear that men have of female rejection.) Whatever the origin, whoever the individual feared, whatever the situation, shame has dire consequences.

The consequences of shame

The consequences of shame are dire. They are dire because shame inhibits much of what is good about life: truth, intimacy, openness, love, caring, enjoyment, and contentment. Most importantly, shame creates a sense of danger, which then creates fear and anxiety, which itself creates a life that is worrying about the future, not a life where you are enjoying the present or working on enjoying the present. The essence of these dire results of shame are that we live in the future, namely what someone might say to me, where someone might criticize me, or where someone might humiliate me. Shame leads to a basic fear orientation to life rather than life itself, which is composed of joy and sorrow, not of fear that is at the heart of shame based on the feeling of anger that occurred early in life.

The practical result of shame is some kind of hiding, whether that is hiding in your room with a blanket over your head, keeping quiet about what you think or feel, hiding in some addiction, or hiding that occurs with some kind of dishonesty. I don’t know of a single man who is not afraid of his wife’s or partner’s potential rejection. I wrote a blog some time ago entitled, Why Do Good Men Lie, and proposed that it is the fear men have of female rejection, which always is built on a basis shame that so many men feel, particularly with the women in their lives. This fear and the result of some kind of dishonesty with women is devastating to men’s female relationships and often leads to women saying, “I can’t trust anything you say.”

While hiding of some kind and the dishonesty that goes along with it is bad for men in their relationships, even worse is the feeling of low self-esteem that is the result of feeling shame. If I think there is “something wrong with me,” I most certainly do not want anyone to know about it, so I naturally will not talk about it. The result of this fear, I never come to grips with the reality of something that I did wrong or the falsity of there being something wrong with me.

When these two things, hiding and low self-esteem, begin to operate in life with a man, everything else suffers: vocation, money, property, relationships, and even play. Nothing is ever good enough because I am not good enough, or so I feel when I feel shame. I can’t really enjoy my successes because I feel this “something is wrong with me,” I have great trouble accepting the small mistakes I make for the same reason, and I certainly can’t accept criticism, whether accurate or inaccurate if I feel shame. My life is dominated by fear.

So what can be done about shame and how can I get rid of it? Possible. Necessary. Hard.

Getting over shame

There are essentially two elements involved in overcoming shame: honesty and sadness.

Honesty: the key here is to first be honest with yourself and then be honest (carefully and selectively) with someone else. I put being honest with God in between those two but your understanding of the universe may not include such an entity. The key is honest. Honest to yourself is admitting all that you can admit to that scares you, particularly the inner feeling that you are not good enough for some reason, however irrational the “reason” may be. When you first admit to what you feel, the words you use may be quite irrational, or even downright wrong, like:

  • I wish I weren’t alive (By the way, this statement doesn’t mean you want to die, much less suicide.)
  • I am a complete loser
  • There is something terribly wrong with me
  • I can never admit to anyone what I feel (or what I did or what I said)
  • I can’t trust that anyone really likes me or loves me
  • I have to leave the country; maybe I should just to go Lover Slovovia
  • I can’t do this job
  • I want to have an affair

Once you admit to yourself, however wrong or irrational the words are, you might be able to admit to someone else what your feelings are. But be very careful doing this because most people have their own shame, their own craziness, and their own feelings. You don’t need someone telling you that you’re crazy, or wrong, or selfish, or wonderful, or perfect. You need someone who can listen silently and govern their own feelings.

This being honest, especially if you have been dishonest for a long time, is very very hard, and you most certainly don’t want to do it. Of course you don’t want to do it. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t want to work out either but I do it because it is good for me. I’d much rather watch a movie or read a book. Honesty is central, but it might take some time to become honest: first with yourself, (possibly with God), and then with just one or two other people selectively chosen. If you’re working on being honest, be prepared to be sad. Sadness cures shame.

Sadness: Sadness is without a doubt the most important emotion we have. Read what I’ve said about sadness in previous blogs or in our book on sadness. You will learn that sadness is always the result of loving something. If you love something, some person, some thing, some idea, or anything, you will most certainly lose this thing. Perhaps in an hour, perhaps in 50 years. But you will lose everything you love, so you need to have the God-given mechanism of feeling sad when you lose something. (Read more on sadness elsewhere in blogs or the book.)

When you really feel shame, you will feel awful at first, but the more you admit to the feeling, the sadder you will feel. You will feel sad about all the dishonesty you have engaged in, like with yourself and with others. You will feel sad about all the humiliation you suffered when you were a child. You will feel sad about all the shaming you get from the people in your current life. Most important of all, you will feel sad about all the hours and years you have wasted feeling ashamed of yourself. These are hours and years that can never be recovered because they are in the past forever, but you can feel sad about the losses. The beauty of sadness is that it ends. Shame and its origin, fear, and its result, anger, do not end. They go on forever. But when you become familiar with feeling sad, you will begin to be freed of your shame. Shame is never helpful. Guilt, which is feeling sad about what you said or did, is valuable. Shame leads to hiding. Guilt and sadness lead to love.