grief

Dealing Effectively with Challenges: The Four A’s

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

 

We can effectively meet the challenges of the day, of the year, or of one’s life. Likewise, there are four ineffective ways of facing the challenges of life, which are

  • Avoidance
  • Anxiety
  • Anger
  • Accommodation

 

I will briefly describe each of these ways that people frequently deal with the challenges they face in their daily lives and then offer another alternative to facing such things. Before I engage in this process, allow me to remind you of what I previously called “the war” that is occurring in America and all of the rest of the world.

The challenges of “The War”

We are all in the midst of the “war” as I called it in a previous blog, namely the biological, political, and cultural challenges that together have made life quite difficult. My life certainly is a whole lot better than it is for most people, but I have found it “challenging” to deal with:

  • Finding a balance of reason and necessity with Covid, i.e. mask-wearing, social distancing, and the strong differences of opinion about such things
  • Hearing a daily report of a dear cousin who was functionally dying in a hospital in Minneapolis where she lives. Indeed, she was in the ICU for 38 days along with her husband, and then for a period of time, also her son. Her daughter-in-law also contracted Covid. The “dying” has put her five children in a difficult place for sure, although there was a joyful end to this saga, if we can use this term, when Sue and her husband died within minutes of each other “holding hands as they went to heaven” given that the hospital graciously put then in the same room as they faded.
  • So, Deb and I took another Covid test with the results of my being negative (again, having taken a test a month ago), but Deb being “positive.” It seems likely that I got Covid, gave it to her, and then got better, now being negative. (We both have now tested “negative” twice since this initial positive test for Deb.
  • The many challenges of the people I see hourly in my office, all of whom are suffering from severe emotional distress now being complicated by “the war.” This requires me to give my best knowing that my best is often insufficient.
  • Staying vigilant with my own physical and emotional health without paranoia or distress

Challenges that I meet

You can see that these challenges are not so severe nor life-threatening or terribly distressing compared to many other people whom I see in my office who suffer:

  • Spouse unpredictably asking for a divorce (one after 7 years and one after 30 years)
  • Man who has never grown up, now feeling like a 3-year old in a 38-year old body
  • Man, while a person of fine character, intelligence, and deep faith suffering from a severe depression that won’t seem to abate (despite my best efforts…and his)
  • Child who lives in a truly dysfunctional (not a word that I cherish, but there is no better word) family composed, again, of parents who are bright and good people. How do I help a 14-year old find her way in life when she, seemingly, is the most adult-like in the family of four?
  • The many people who come to me for neuropsychological evaluations seeking some kind of “answer” to their life’s dilemmas, often looking for a “diagnosis” that will make sense of why life does not make sense to them.

The challenges that people face may include personal (like depression), interpersonal (like deteriorating marriages), vocational (being unemployed, underemployed, or mal-employed), financial, or medical. And there are the challenges of meeting one’s daily needs, perhaps caring for an old house, looking for a new house, or getting the TV, Internet, or cable fixed. There is no end to the kind of challenges people meet, usually daily, sometimes multiple times a day. I meet people every day of my working day who functionally say, “I wish I weren’t alive” in various forms, like, “I wish the Lord would just take me home;” “I can’t bear this anymore,” “I don’t see the point of living,” or perhaps just, “I have no interest in anything.” When people have challenges, however difficult they are, they often turn to one of the following:

Avoidance

This is something like, “If I just ignore it, it will go away,” or perhaps, “If I ignore the problem, I won’t feel the burden of facing it.” Avoidance, like all malfunctional ways of dealing with difficulties is learned early in childhood and then reinforced throughout adolescence and into adulthood. People learn to avoid. Indeed, some challenges actually need to be avoided, if by avoiding we mean understanding the challenge but knowing that the challenge has to be endured for a bit. More often, however, avoidance lasts for days or years, which only makes doing something increasingly impossible.

Anxiety

Deb and I wrote about anxiety extensively in our Good Grief book noting, “Anxiety is delusional.” Let me explain. When I worry about something, I set up a dynamic between my mind, which thinks and feels, and my brain, which does neither of these things. Anxiety, and its cognates of worry, fretting, and nervousness, is delusional because it does absolutely nothing for the future. There is never any need for any kind of anxiety. For that matter, there is almost never any need for any kind of fear. When the brain “hears” your concern about some potential danger in the future, the brain immediately goes into preventive mode by raising your level of awareness, which we call hypervigilance. The brain thinks “the lion is coming over the hill and you need to be aware of the potential lion threat. The brain does this because the brain doesn’t have a sense of future. Any kind of “worry” that you might have translates into the brain’s belief about the lion coming. As you certainly know, “the war” has created massive amounts of anxiety, which is only aggravated by politicians who stir up unnecessary hypervigilance by outlandish claims or threats. By the way, anxiety tends to be a young woman’s tendency, and an older man’s tendency.

Anger

Anger is also delusional. As anxiety is delusional because it is a function that seemingly can change the future, anger is delusional because you think you can change the past. Of course, you can’t change the past, but the brain doesn’t know that the past exists any more than it knows about the future. The brain churns up anger because, again, the brain thinks (figuratively) that “the lion is coming over the hill” so you need to get prepared to fight. The brain doesn’t know that you are angry at something that happened to you, something that someone did to you, or something that you did to yourself. Anger is common for young men and for older women.

Accommodation

Accommodations are those things that we do that make us feel better. Nothing wrong with feeling better, but when we accommodate to a challenge, we tend to avoid facing the challenge head on. Accommodations are all potentially addictive. Addictions, again, are a brain function, not so much a mind action. The brain has two operations (I spoke of this in a blog some time ago): pleasure and safety. So when you are not happy in some way, perhaps thinking of something that is happening, has happen, or might happen, your brain acts like this thing is happening in the present. Then the brain sort of “remembers” something that makes you feel good, and “tells” you to go to this thing. (I wrote a blog on the “go to” tendencies we all have.) These tendencies are not bad in themselves, but the brain doesn’t know the damage some kind of excess can do to one’s body, social life, or emotional life. We identify accommodations (or addictions) as chemical or behavioral. Chemical additions are primarily eating, alcohol, or drugs, while behavioral addictions include gambling, sexual activity, buying, hoarding, working, and playing. Note that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of these accommodations, and in fact, we have to do some of these things, like eating and buying. Some activity (chemical or behavioral) as a relieving or enhancing activity, becomes a habit, and then may move into being more of an accommodation.

So what can be done to avoid the tendencies towards avoidance, anxiety, anger, and accommodation? There are four other “A’s” that might work: Awareness, Acceptance, Adaptation, and Adjustment.

Awareness

Grand therapist, Fritz Perls, once said, “Awareness is curative.” We don’t think awareness is curative for two reasons, the first being that we don’t seek to “cure” people from what ails them, but help them mature emotionally, intellectually, ethically, and practically. Secondly, we think that awareness is the first step, but not sufficient for achieving personal maturity.

Awareness is quite simply and quite basically being aware of what one feels. Our “feeling book” makes this point foundationally, namely that people need to know what the feel before they do anything else, noting that “feelings” are so profound, so spiritual, so deep within our souls that we can’t define them. It is first necessary to be aware of the challenge you are facing, but it is then much more important to know your emotional reaction to the challenge, and in doing so avoid the tendencies to go to anxiety or anger. However, being aware is not enough.  We must accept.

Acceptance

This might be the hardest thing to do emotionally because it is always hard to accept “feelings” that may seem wrong, silly, irrational, or unnecessary. To accept the existence of a challenge is not to like it, not to approve of it. You don’t approve of someone firing you from your job, but you can accept it as a fact. Equally importantly, one needs to accept how one feels, which is not to agree with these feelings, much less the feeling words we speak. Acceptance of one’s feelings is not approval, quoting from another wise therapist (Dick Olney), but rather seeing what is. The difficulty with acceptance is to start with the physical feeling that is always first in feeling awareness, allow this feeling to migrate into emotions (the second process of experiencing feelings, thinking clearly (once the emotions have past), and then taking action. Most people have trouble with the words that are attached to feelings, which are always approximate and sometimes quite outrageous. To accept is to be, not to agree with, not to speak, not to think, and most truly not to act. It is only when people have been able to accept what they feel that they can move on to adaptation.

Adaptation

Adaptation is a Jungian term that I learned from yet another grand therapist (colleague, Boris Matthews). To adapt is to find a way to see what is and find a way to adapt to it. We have had to adapt to Covid most recently, which has been a challenge. I find it even harder to adapt to the political wrangling that have been going on over this past six months. To adapt is essentially to be sad, first, and then allow the sadness to run its course so that one can find a way to move beyond awareness and acceptance to a place where one is not bothered, much less stressed, by whatever challenge is in one’s life. To adapt to losing the use of his entire lower body, like a friend of mine has had to do, is not to like it, not to change it, but to be sad so that he can find a way to have a life ahead. Failure to adapt to challenges is usually where some kind of accommodation and addiction occurs, which are always ways to avoid being aware, accepting, and adapting to some tragedy or situation that you don’t like. However important adaptation is in life, it is not enough because you have to do something. You have to adjust your life in some way.

Adjustment

When I am with my friend who has lost the use of most of his body, if often think of the many people who have lost some or most of the use of their bodies and yet have found ways to have meaningful lives. He has not yet found a way to adapt to the lack of the use of most of his body, particularly challenging because he is a tradesman by profession. Most people, however, don’t have to adjust to such profound losses or other such terrible losses like the 12 people I know who have lost children. The challenging situations that most people meet are very often simpler, like finding a way to deal with the slow driver in front of you on the beltline, the misstatement you made or was made to you, the mistake you made or someone made with you. Adjustment to such challenges requires that you something, which is particularly hard when it is much easier to accommodate in some way. Some people “just do something,” which is often premature, but not truly an adjustment, while other people avoid doing anything at all because doing something seems so hard and so imperfect. Doers do things in a hurry to avoid the loss while dreamers avoiding doing to avoid potential loss.

Summary

Adjustments can be made in the following situations:

  • Loss, whether of person, place, or product:
  • Challenge by an external source, say spouse, friend, or employer
  • Mistake or misstep you have taken
  • Personal unhappiness with one’s life
  • Unhappiness with one’s social or intimate life
  • The current political assaults that we hear every day
  • The deaths and dangers of Covid that we hear every day
  • The seemingly overwhelming task of getting things done
  • The lack of anything to do that is meaningful

Adjustments to these and others is always the same: Awareness (of feelings), Acceptance (of feelings), Adaptation (to something that requires change), and Adjustment (by changing something)

Different Kinds of “I’m Sorry”

Ron Johnson appreciation, communication, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

“I’m sorry:” a very important statement. Very, very important. Most people should be able to express these words at least once a day, and possibly several times a day. But what does “I’m sorry” mean, or more accurately what can it mean? For some reason “I’m sorry” has fallen into disuse in America, and perhaps it was never part of our character the way it seems to be in most every other culture. There are many aspects of “I’m sorry” that I would like to tackle in this humble piece, but let’s start with different kinds of “I’m Sorry.”

Different Kinds of “I’m Sorry”

I have continued to put “I’m sorry” in quotation marks because “I’m sorry” does not entirely equate with apology, nor should it. There are at least the following meanings of the expression “I’m sorry:”

  • Apology. When I apologize for something, this is a personal acknowledgement that I have failed in some action, although this apology could also be for some inaction on my part, namely something I have said, something I have done, something I have failed to say, or something I have failed to do.
  • Shared grief. This is an occurrence where I express this statement to someone with whom I share the grief that the person is experiencing. I may have caused this grief or the grief may have come from another source.
  • Disingenuous statement. This occurs when someone says “I’m sorry” with an important caveat…BUT. Hence, this is the frequently occurring, “I’m sorry but…,” then to be filled with some kind of justification or disregard.

Apologies

It is an extremely important element in human-to-human interaction, to be able to apologize when one has erred in what s/he did or said (or as noted, when one has erred in failing to say or do something). For example, it is important to say “I’m sorry” when you might have:

  • Stepped in front of someone in line, probably by accident
  • Failed to remember an occasion that was important to the other person, while it might not have been important to you. Likewise, you might be late for a dinner engagement even though you are not a person known for being prompt.
  • Making a statement that was offensive to someone, perhaps by using a swear word that is common to you and to your community but not common to your friend.
  • Bumping into the car in front of you.
  • Raising your voice in a discussion that led to an argument rather than a debate
  • Failing to express yourself when you had an important opinion that might have served the community but caused you to be disliked by someone
  • Disregarding someone’s preferred way of table manners because you didn’t think that such things were important.

Most of the time I have offended, hurt, or harmed someone, I have done this unintentionally.

I didn’t mean to do it

Of course, you didn’t mean to do it. You offended someone in some way, such as the ways I have noted above unintentionally, which is a very important fact. Once you get this concept in your mind, namely that you didn’t mean to hurt someone, you will have achieved the first and most important element in being able to apologize.

I often note that the Hebrew Scriptures’ book of Leviticus is comprised of about 450 “rules” of life. Notably, every one of these rules has to do with “sin,” but more importantly for our purposes, every one of these rules begins with, “If you sin by…. (fill in the blank) unintentionally, you must make amends for this sin by….” For instance, if you sin by sleeping with your neighbor’s wife, you must make amends in some way….  The essence of this matter of sin and the result is twofold: you have caused some harm to someone, and you need to make amends for this harm in some way. Most importantly, however, these “sins” (we do not have time to unpack this interesting biblical word) are all unintentional…with the exception of one “sin”: intentional sin. For all these 400-some sins, Leviticus (Actually God speaking in Leviticus) suggests that there are ways for atonement or reparation. I believe all of these “sins” are ones what involve offense brought to another person in some way. But there is one “sin” that is quite different: “If anyone sins intentionally…,” the situation is quite different. Such a person is to be thrown out of the community. Now, while I might not quite understand or even agree with throwing someone out of the community, whatever community that might be, it is interesting to me that all but one of these 400-some sins are unintentional. I believe this is the case for most things we do that offend, hurt, or harm other people: we unintentionally bring harm to someone. Sadly, I can recall scores, if not hundreds, of times when I have brought offense to people over my nearly 77 years of life. You might read my blog of a few years ago on my regrets for some examples of my errors in life, which are many.

The times when people intentionally hurt one another are almost always in reaction to having been hurt. I wrote a blog entitled, “Hurt People Hurt People,” borrowing the title for a book published 30 years ago. When someone intentionally says or does something to hurt or harm the other person, these are times when one has been hurt her/himself and has had a kneejerk reaction to “hurt back,” usually not knowing that the original person who inflicted hurt on you did not hurt you intentionally. So I won’t waste much time with this intentional kind of hurt, which should result in an apology with the words, “I’m sorry.” When we hurt someone who has hurt us, this is a reaction of anger coming from having been hurt, much of our (unintentionally) hurting someone comes from fear. These are tough situations that we all find ourselves in our human relationships. It behooves us to realize that when we hurt someone intentionally, it is almost always in reaction to having been hurt. Much more frequently, however, we have hurt someone out of naiveté or ignorance.

Hurt inflicted out of naiveté or ignorance

The mistakes of our youth should largely be classified as those of naiveté (or ignorance), feeling, “I just didn’t know that if I said a certain thing, I would hurt or offend someone.” Growing up should include maturity in understanding the effect of what I say or do. Extraverts like me can look at the things we said that were hurtful that we shouldn’t have said, whereas introverts more likely will see things that they should have said that could have been helpful. Doers like me will see things that we shouldn’t have done, whereas dreamers will see things that they should have done. I shouldn’t have got married (the first time). Several people I know would say that they should have got married. These failures of youth are understandable and forgivable but some such mistakes have lifelong results. I know a lot more people who shouldn’t have got married than I do people who should have got married.

It’s not only young people who say or do things that hurt someone else. We do that all the time. Deb and I devoted an entire chapter in our recent book to the central concept of hurt. If we really knew how often we hurt people, we would all be a lot more careful if what we say or do, but then we wouldn’t be human if we watched everything that carefully. As noted above, introverts tend to watch so carefully what they say, that their errors are usually in not saying what they feel. This whole matter of our hurting one another frequently and being hurt just as frequently is not to be taken too lightly. We just need to be able to see that we have unintentionally hurt someone and be ready to say so. This does not mean we go around being apologetic all the time, but rather being able to simply see what something that was said or done (or failed to be said or failed to be done) out of naiveté needs to be seen, understood, and apologized for. But it is hard to do so.

Why is it hard to apologize?                                                                     

I didn’t mean to do it. This is the whole matter of hurt being unintentional for the most part. I often say to patients, “Of course, you didn’t mean to hurt her, but you did, and you need to apologize.” Not many men take kindly to this advice.

She shouldn’t be hurt by what I said. Again, you didn’t mean to hurt her, but you did, and the most important emotional element is not what you said, meant to say, or thought you said, but what she felt.

I feel ashamed of having hurt someone. This is the largest part of the difficulty in apologizing and it exists in every person I have ever met. The shame level that exists in most people in tragic, and it comes out when we are “caught” in some way, very often caught in having hurt someone. I don’t have time to deal with the shame element more here, but you might look up the blog on shame and guilt.

I am afraid. The essence of shame is being afraid, namely being afraid of being wrong or being criticized. Unfortunately, there is a terrible fear in most people of being wrong, of making mistakes, or being criticized. True maturity, especially emotional maturity, is displayed with someone being unafraid of mistakes or criticism. I don’t know anyone who has reached this level of emotional maturity…including myself.

The other person doesn’t deal well with it. While some people graciously accept an apology, there is an odd phenomenon that occurs with the offended party when the offender offers an apology: they then say all the other things that the offender has done. So, if you apologize to someone, be prepared for an onslaught of criticism of all your other mistakes in life.

You said or did the right thing. This is real important. There are times when you actually say or do the right thing, but this right thing still hurts your friend. This phenomenon is clear with children whom we chastise, limit, or punish but then feel sad because we know that our child is suffering. This having done or said the right thing that hurts someone is not limited to children. Good leaders, whether professional, familial, or professional, need to challenge, hence criticize from time to time. It behooves a good leader to know that however true the challenge is, the person hearing the challenge will be hurt. And if you’re a leader, you need to say “I’m sorry” to them. This brings me to the second kind of “I’m sorry:” shared grief.

“I’m sorry” as an expression of shared grief

This may be the most important of all “I’m sorry” statements, but it is the hardest to grasp, especially in some circumstances. It is sometimes easy to share grief, sometimes difficult, and sometimes very paradoxical. If done honorably, honestly, and clearly, it can be one of the most profound interpersonal experiences that we can have.

Sometimes easy: in a previous blog I related the several experiences of having someone share the grief that Deb and I experienced after the death of our daughter. Some of these experiences were simple, like the Starbuck’s barista hearing from Deb of our loss immediately coming the counter and giving a Deb a hug…along with a free espresso, or the many simple expressions of grief that people have shared with me over the past 15 months, sometimes after these 15 months have passed because I hadn’t had the chance of seeing someone for that period of time. Other expressions of shared grief have been quite profound like the woman we met by chance at the headwaters of the Mississippi in northern Minnesota, the woman we met by chance at the top of the learning tower of Pisa in Italy, or the woman we met by chance not far from our up north cabin on a hike that Krissie, her kids, and we used to take. In all of these circumstances, when we made a simple comment about our loss, these previously unknown women cried, hugged us, and said those precious words, “I’m so sorry.” I hope you have experienced this kind of shared grief, whether on the giving or the receiving side. It is easy to give and it is easy to receive…but not always.

Sometimes difficult.

It is often difficult for people to share grief because they simply do not know what to say. Some people say too much while others say nothing. Our “up north” neighbor heard of our loss while we happened to pass each other on the lake we share. This woman must have said, “I don’t know what to say” a dozen times within minutes of hearing of our loss. Interestingly, she shared how she had lost a young child 40 years previously. Another person whom I know quite well is yet unable to say much of anything because he also lost a son, not six months before Krissie died. His grief is so great that he has a hard time even mentioning our daughter by name, much less the name of his son. It was difficult for a new patient I saw just a few months ago, and he said nothing when I made reference to “loss” in the context of my hearing of his losses in life. Later, he told me that he “didn’t know what to say” because he didn’t want to sound disingenuous. He later said, quite simply, that he has never been particularly good at expressing any emotion aside from anger, a plague that many men suffer. The difficulty that people have with saying “I’m sorry,” whether for someone’s loss like our recent loss, or because they have causes some hurt, is often due to a combination of not having emotional words at their disposal, but more often due to their own lack of personal emotional groundedness. Personal groundedness is hallmarked primarily by knowing how you feel, expressing these feelings when appropriate to do so, and frequently knowing the feelings but wisely keeping the feelings to oneself out of propriety. Simply put, one can express shared grief if one knows and values what he/she feels. If this is the case, one can share the love of shared grief without hesitation. Sadly, many people do not have this personal security.

Sharing grief that is paradoxical

This is one of the most important times that we can share grief but it is rarely experienced because of its very paradoxical nature and because it takes an immense amount of personal security. Sharing grief with someone who has suffered some kind of loss is easy if you can easily find some kind of human connectedness, but it very difficult to share grief with someone who has suffered a loss that you think is a good thing. It is hard to share the grief that I child has when you discipline him or her. I just talked to the parents of a child for whom I did a psychological evaluation. One of my suggestions was to replace the shame-inducing rhetorical questions, like “what’s wrong with you” with statements of being disappointed. One of these parents then said, but our child gets so hurt and sad when you say that you are disappointed. Better that you and your child feel “disappointed,” which is tantamount to feeling sad, then you’re being angry and your child feeling ashamed.

Hard as it is to share grief with a child that is necessary, it is ten times harder to share grief with an adult who has suffered some kind of loss that you think is good for him or her. This is hard to explain so allow me to give you an example. Just yesterday I heard from a good friend of mine with whom I share just three years of life, namely those of being in the same fraternity house in college. I didn’t see Jack for more than 40 years until he somehow found me on LinkedIn about 10 years ago, leading to occasional get-togethers and a rare time playing golf. It was easy to reconnect with Jack because we share much the same faith (while not exactly) and are both outgoing and expressive. It was hard for Jack to hear that I intended to vote for Hillary four years ago and even harder for him to hear that I intended to vote for Biden this year. Jack is part of the 70 some percent of evangelical Christians who vote for Republicans regardless of anything else aside from their political persuasion. Jack and I have had some forthright, but challenging email connections over the past few months due to the huge emotionality in the country over the recent election. His most recent email expressed his dismay over Trump’s loss. I found it a challenge, but also honest for me to tell him that I was “sorry” for his loss and shared his grief. I must admit I had some consternation over saying “I’m sorry” to Jack because I was so relieved that Trump did not get reelected, but I acknowledged my own joy at this defeat privately to myself while also feeling a genuine love for Jack and feeling compelled to share his grief. When I told Deb what I had written to Jack, she was a bit concerned how that might seem that I was sad that Biden won, which I most certainly was not. I suggested that this was an example of paradoxical sharing of grief. I could feel joyful that Biden won on the one hand, while on the other feel great sorrow with my good friend for his having to put up a forthcoming Biden presidency.

I do not always act or speak so generously, but why would I not do so? Only if I was unable to free myself from my own self-interest and be more interested in my friend. Consider this most difficult situation, this paradoxical situation, where you are glad that something happened, but feel a shared sorrow for someone who feels quite distressed about the same event. This can seem ingenuous, but it is not. There is, however, a truly ingenuous “I’m sorry.”

Ingenuous “I’m sorry.”

The key identifying words to ingenuous apologies are “Well” and “but.” Let me explain. An ingenuous expression of “I’m sorry” begins with one word soon to be followed by the other, e.g., “Well, I’m sorry, but….” Do you know what I mean? This is the expression that many people, you included, I included, have said when we are not sorry at all. Rather, we use “I’m sorry” meaning quite the opposite. Had I been ingenuous with Jack, I could have said, “Well, Jack, I’m sorry but Trump is an idiot.” I have said such things, but happily many years ago, and now I am ashamed for that must egregious indiscretion and lack of love. I won’t now to choose to spend much time with ingenuous expressions except to note that they also originate from one’s lack of genuine self-esteem and certainly a lack of an ability to reach beyond one’s own feelings to understand the other person. With my experience with Jack, I can reach into my recovering Republican nature and see much good in conservative politics, but more importantly, my love for Jack is more important than my feeling of joy with Biden’s victory.

I leave you with the suggestion that you consider saying “I’m sorry” in the more positive ways and feel the joy that comes from honest apologies and shared griefs. By the way, you don’t actually have to say these exact words, I’m sorry. You might prefer “my bad,” which is all the more contemporary, the mea culpa that is classic, or other cognates of the feelings that occur when someone is hurt, mistaken, or criticized,

The “End of Things” I: Theory

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

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

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

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

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

The developmental understanding of distressing and disturbing things

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

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

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

When a child does not get to through these stages effectively

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

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

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

See you soon.