grief

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

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

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

Things that might be “bad for you”

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

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

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

Quantification of “bad for you”

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

Bad for me                   /                     Good for me

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

____________________________________  /  ______________________________________

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

Lethal   Toxic   Dangerous                                          Aversive   Unpleasant   Uninteresting

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

____________________________________________________________________________ /

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

Recognizing when something is bad for you

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

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

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

The effects of something that is “bad for me”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Then take action

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

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

An example

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

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

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

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

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

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

Undefinable

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

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

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

__________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

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

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

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

Aversive     Unpleasant    Uninteresting                   /                   Interesting    Pleasant    Exciting

_____________________________________________________________________________

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

Lethal    Toxic    Dangerous               /                   Enlivening    Life-enhancing    Life-sustaining

____________________________________________________________________________

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

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

Quantification: a sign of emotional maturity

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

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

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

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

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

Sadness

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

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

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

 

 

The Joy/Sadness Dyad of Love

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, mindfulness, Spiritual

Do you ever feel “emotional”? Yes, just “emotional” without any real kind of definition to what this means. The symptoms of being emotional are often a tearing up in some way. You might feel something physically in another part of your body, probably depending on your personality type and temperament. You might have an immediate thought or take some course of action, but there is a predominance of emotion. I have come to think that this feeling “emotional” is a very important experience, one that needs to be noticed, allowed, understood, and possibly expressed because I’m quite sure that this experience has love written all over it.

Previously, I have written about how sadness is “a love problem,” which means exactly this: when I am sad, I am in a state of grief for having lost something that I love. This “thing” that I have lost usually will be a person, a piece of property, or an idea. There are other losses that lead to sadness, like loss of opportunity, loss of a game, loss of some physical ability, and perhaps other forms of losses, but the primary losses that stir our emotions are people, property, and ideas. Deb and I wrote extensively about losses and the centrality of sadness in any kind of loss in our The Positive Power of Sadness book published a couple years ago, yet we continue to find new and important things related to this whole sadness matter. In this blog would like to take apart this “love problem” thing that includes sadness but also includes joy because I think there are many times, often when we feel “emotional” that we feel both joy and sadness simultaneously.

As often happens in therapy, I often feel “emotional,” i.e. tearful when I am working with a patient. I have found that if I can carefully speak of my feeling emotional or tearful, the man in front of me says something like, “Yes, I feel the same thing.” People familiar with psychoanalysis will note that this kind of encounter has to do with transference and countertransference that are both frequent and probably essential ingredients of any good psychotherapy. Simply put, transference is the feeling the patient has for the therapist, while countertransference is the feeling the therapist has for the patient. These feelings can often turn into emotion (note the distinction, by the way between “feelings” and emotion, with emotion a subset of feelings). The emotion can be any of the four basic emotions of joy, sadness, anger, or fear, and these emotions, often triggered by physical sensations, can lead to some kind of thought or action. (Forgive the complexity of this matter as this sentence is a summary of two chapters in our forthcoming book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel.) There are many times of everyday life that are like this, namely when a person has an emotional moment (erupting out of one’s feelings, of course). Before we look at some examples of these important times of emotional experience, allow me to set the stage with a bit of theory.

The experience of love always has both joy and sorrow in it

Well, probably not always…but I could make a case for “usually.” My point is this: when I feel this emotional moment, I feel some kind of true love, be it person, property, or idea. Very often, this love is for a person, and perhaps people bring these emotional moments more than property or things. My point is that when I feel this emotion that brings tears, this experience is so basically loving that it is simultaneously joy and sadness. When people try to explain what they feel at these moments, they usually use the term emotional, or perhaps sadness, but rarely do they see that joy is equally a part of the experience. I have come to see that these emotional moments are quite important in life and need to be recognized and treasured. They may also need to be expressed, but any expression of the emotion (and the feeling under the emotion) might actually take away from the feeling because we are inclined to explain why we feel something more than just feeling it.

Just feeling something can be done quite easily once one realizes that an emotional moment is really a love moment. If you can do that, you will be able to tear up, cry, or perhaps even sob as you allow yourself these moments to be a part of you. Extraverts will be inclined to want to share these moments, while introverts will want to keep them private. Nothing wrong with either pose, but it is important for extraverts to know that there not everyone wants or needs to hear their feelings all the time, and it is equally important for introverts to know that they can too easily hide their feelings for fear of being misunderstood. My main point is: feel it first; value the feeling second, and then decide whether it is valuable for you and your audience to express this feeling.

 

Examples of feeling emotional

I am not an animal person as compared to almost everyone else in my family. You will never see me cuddle up to some dog or cat that happens to be in the vicinity, nor do I take any kind of great joy in seeing deer cross the road or geese flying overhead. My grandson sees all of God’s creatures, large and small; my sister has always had at least one dog, and for a time had a room full of birds…jut normal birds that somehow ended up in the house; my daughter, Krissie, loved dogs. Animal people can easily have an “emotional moment” when they see some animal. I watch as these folks seem to necessarily touch their chests while simultaneously coming out with a verbal or nonverbal expression of joy. Good for them. They are experiencing love, usually the joy side of love, but I have also seen the sadness side of love when they see an animal is in distress.

I see many examples of this sadness/joy experience with clients. Recently, I was with a man who is quite a “caretaker” by temperament and also a thinking-based person (INTJ for those of you who know the Myers-Briggs). Jim has been working diligently to suffer through and get through a serious depression, which he is doing marvelously, almost entirely by recognizing what he feels, predominantly the feeling of emotion. When was with him the other day while hearing his thoughts and surmising his feelings, I felt somewhat “emotional,” and after a moment, I told him so. This led to more than 30 minutes of his simply feeling “emotional” replete with a few teardrops. Throughout this period of time the mainstay of his experience was, in his words, “God’s comfort.” This led him to conclude that he needed to trust God more, and along the way, trust people more. Thus, Jim noticed what he felt physically, stayed with what he felt emotionally, thought what he felt cognitively, and then felt led to do something about this feeling. Thus, it was the emotion that was so important for him that led him into thinking and doing.

I have had many such times, often daily, where I feel this amorphous joy/sadness experience, sometimes alone, more often with someone, rarely with nature. Nature people, often simultaneously animal people, feel this joy/sadness/love experience quite frequently, whether sunset, sunrise, full moon (last night by the way), or even rough weather. I had a friend years ago who was hunter and a real naturalist who just loved it when his hunting weather (usually fowl) was “nasty” as he said it. It just moved him to tears.

While not a naturalist by any means, I can read about nature, or history, or theology, or psychology, and become quite moved, not always, but sometimes to tears. I just love to learn something in one of these genres. Making sense of some piece of history, theology, or psychology is truly a love moment for me. I never could see how kids thought history was boring. Why would a person, like me for instance, come to tears with some new insight about psychology, history, or theology? I doubt that I am the only one.

By far the most predominant emotional moments occur with other people. Not long ago when writing about the loss of our dear daughter, Krissie, now nearly nine months ago, I noted how the sharing of her loss in some circumstance led to various people coming to tears. What were these tears about, especially with most of these people had never met us before, much less Krissie? They were tears of love replete with both the emotions of joy and sorrow. There was the woman at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the woman in the shoe repair shop who had lost her boss, the woman at the headwaters of the Mississippi, and more than a half dozen people at various Starbucks’ counters where Deb prefers to get espresso. Note, all women, but it doesn’t end there. I had an encounter with a man in my office during my very first Intake Assessment with him where we were talking about feelings in the larger sense, and emotion in the smaller sense. I mentioned the loss I had had with Krissie as a point of reference to emotion, and this guy was fraught with uncertainty as to how to handle his emotion. I had to help him allow himself to cry because, as ye said afterward, he “didn’t want to appear emotional.” In fact, his felt emotion was an act of love: both joy and sorrow. What was the joy? He loved Krissie, and at that moment he loved me although he is not emotionally mature enough to feel the “L” word, much less allow himself to express it

I encourage you to notice these “emotional moments”, allow for one or two tears, or more if necessary, and then note the love you have just experienced shown in this odd admixture of joy and sorrow.