happiness

Thriving and Surviving

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

Some years ago I asked to talk to an African American man who had written a number of pieces in the local paper. In my email I said that although I had two Black sons in law and had Black men occasionally come to my office, I often felt that I was missing something important about the Black subculture, namely how Blacks actually engage in conversation, friendship, and intimacy. Intimacy is the heart of any good therapeutic alliance between therapist and patient. I was to meet him in a local café. I had been interested in some of the things he had said about his work, which was essentially with primarily Black kids. When I entered the café, he waved at me and invited me to come to the table where he was sitting with a friend/colleague (who happened to be White) with whom he had been working for a few years. As I approached the table and had not yet sat down, he volunteered something that has stuck with me since our meeting although I have not had contact with this man since. He said something like, “I want to start by saying that you look confident and a man who is thriving in life. If you want to know that your very appearance suggests thriving and it is off-putting. I have lived in an environment that has been one of surviving, not thriving.” I was not offended by his comment, but I did take a figurative step back from the conversation because I had never heard of the difference between thriving and surviving, and I immediately knew that I had not been raised in a survival context. This matter of surviving has continued to be an important aspect of my understanding people, to some degree the subcultures of America like the African American culture, but in a larger context of how many people engage life: they are surviving. Let’s look at the whole business of thriving and surviving that people do. There are many people who survive terrible ordeals, like physical illness or even war, but my focus will be primarily on people who survive through emotional challenges.

People who are surviving

  • People with physical limitations
    • Blindness
    • Debilitating illnesses like cancer and heart disease
    • Physical disabilities
  • People with household difficulties
    • Financial limitations or challenges’
    • Deteriorating living quarters
    • No living quarters
  • People who interpersonal difficulties
    • One partner is seriously physically limited
    • One partner wants out of the relationship
    • One partner is unfaithful
    • One partner is addicted to some behavior or chemical
    • Partners have substantially different religious/philosophical orientations
    • Partners have a cognitively impaired child, which causes them to frequently be at odds with each other
    • Partner one does not like the biological family of partner two. Makes Christmas celebrations difficult
  • And many other difficulties that people need to manage by surviving

People who are surviving personal matters

  • Jack is unable to conquer his addition to one of the following: alcohol, drugs, food, promiscuity, gambling, video game playing, other screen time, working, playing, toxic relationships, or sleeping (too much or not enough)
  • Marge is generally not happy with herself. She thinks she is stupid.
  • Peter is not happy with himself. He thinks he is smarter than everyone
  • Both Marge and Peter are lonely
  • Stan continues to pine for the woman he thinks he should have married, a feeling that makes life difficult for him and secondarily and unconsciously for his wife
  • Dad doesn’t really like his son. Thinks that he is too much like his wife
  • Mom really favors daughter # 1 over daughter #2 because she is more like #1

The ways people survive these difficulties

In a nutshell, they avoid them. The essence of avoiding these difficulties means that they avoid the feelings associated with these difficulties. When they don’t finish the feelings associated the challenges, these feelings stay with them. These feelings then become repressed. It wouldn’t be so bad if these feelings stayed repressed but that is not what happens. The feeling show themselves in things they say or do. When they are speaking or doing something that is a result of not having felt through these feelings, they are accommodating. Very likely, they are not aware that they are accommodating. What happens is that the things they say or things they do are coming indirectly from the repressed feelings without their conscious knowledge. It just “feels right” to say something or do something that may seem quite odd or offense to other people. What are the things that they do to accommodate?

Accommodation

Depending on the individual, the subculture that they live in, the people they live with, the work they do, they play they do, or the any environment where they live, there are many possibilities of accommodation including:

  • Being distrustful of everyone
  • Being dishonest, or at least easily dishonest when they run into some kind of challenge
  • Fall into some addiction, chemical or behavioral
  • Become isolated. Introverted people tend to isolate
  • Become very active. Extraverted people tend to talk a lot
  • Fall into depression
  • Fall into a generalized anxiety
  • Take some kind of radical action
  • Take some kind of radical philosophical or religious orientation

To avoid these unfortunate accommodations, what can people do to move from surviving to thriving?

Positive coping mechanisms

  • Without a doubt, the most important thing for a person to do when he or she has faced with the trauma that caused the person to survive is to face the trauma and understand that they were in a dangerous or untenable situation and they did what they needed to do to survive. This takes away the false guilt of being a bad person.
  • Grieve the loss of what happened. This is easier said than done. It is hard enough to face the violence of sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse. It is much harder to face traumata that occurred over a longer period of time or traumata that occurred to one’s family or one’s heritage. How will Palestinians cope with the trauma of being assaulted? How Israelis cope with their traumata? How will Black people face the trauma of slavery that occurred for 300 years and the aftermath of racism for another 100 years?
  • Most people need a confident, which could be a good friend, family member, therapist, or clergy person to do this kind of grief work.
  • Slowly replace surviving words and activities with thriving activities.
    • Being more honest
    • Being more trusting
    • Taking a chance with some activity like work school, friends
    • Facing and overcoming addictions whatever they may be
    • Finding a community of people who have moved from surviving to thriving

I wish you a time when you can achieve a life of thriving, which of course, will be imperfect. It will also be more honest, graceful, and peaceful. But it will also be sadder as you see that you lose things every day and have disappointments every day.

And I wish you a wonderful holiday season.

The Centrality of Disappointment

Ron Johnson appreciation, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

One of the most important terms to use daily is “disappointment.” Think about it: how many times during a single day are you actually disappointed. If you’re careful to note your feelings and thoughts, you will notice that disappointment is an experience that occurs several times a day. I want to discuss what disappointment is, how to handle it, when to express it, and how to use it profitably on a daily basis. Simply stated, if you can observe, feel, and selectively express your disappointment, you will ultimately reduce anger and fear substantially, you will improve your relationships, and you will find life much more enjoyable. How weird does that sound? Feel more disappointment and feel better about life? Yes.

What is disappointment?

Disappointment is, quite simply, the feeling of sadness that occurs when you have lost something. We might also add that there is often a feeling of hurt that almost always accompanies the feeling sadness. In fact, these three terms are largely equivalent, but I think the term “disappointment” is the most palatable and understandable of the three. I often help people to feel disappointment in their daily lives and hence forestall anger, fear, and agitation. Deb and I have seen the centrality of the feeling of sadness in life for decades and published our first book, The Positive Power of Sadness: Good Grief, and on this experience as well as good portions of our second book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel.

Disappointment (and sadness and hurt) come when I lose something, usually something that I did not expect to lose. Most of our daily disappointments are of simple, often trivial, matters:

  • I spill my cup of coffee
  • I take wrong turn on the highway
  • I forgot to drink enough water in the day
  • I didn’t get a call from my daughter
  • My friend was late to our pizza date
  • My computer took forever to boot up in the morning
  • I pressed the wrong key on my computer and ended up with a note from Ethiopia
  • I bit into an apple and realized I just bit into a worm hole

There are more significant disappointments that often occur frequently, of not usually daily:

  • I lost a game of golf on an important tournament
  • My book didn’t get published as I expected it would
  • I lost my job
  • My spouse left me for another person
  • A good friend or relative died
  • I had a heart attack

While the simple and profound disappointments are both essentially sad and often hurtful, the degree of sadness and hurt is obviously greater. In our Good Grief book we wrote a lot about “little sads,” which are spilling my coffee and such, as perhaps the most important ways to learn of the centrality of sadness and find good ways to cope with these disappointments. If I can learn that I have many disappointments in a normal day, I will be better equipped to deal with the larger losses and consequent disappointments that will most certainly occur in my life.

Why do I have so many disappointments?

Because you love a lot. Love a lot? What does that mean? We talk about people have various “love problems,” which means that they love a lot of things and are disappointed a lot. Let me explain. Let’s review the small disappointments, the “small sads” as we call them, and see how each one of them has a love factor imbedded in it:

  • I spill my cup of coffee: I love to have a good cuppa and a clean floor.
  • I take wrong turn on the highway: I love to drive on the right road.
  • I forgot to drink enough water in the day: I love to engage in healthy endeavors.
  • I didn’t get a call from my daughter: I love hearing from my daughter.
  • My friend was late to our pizza date: I love having people be on time.
  • My computer took forever to boot up in the morning: I love jumping right into my computer work.
  • I pressed the wrong key on my computer and ended up with a note from Ethiopia: I love to be efficient on my computer.
  • I bit into an apple and realized I just bit into a worm hole: I love good apples.

Now, you might not normally use the term “love” for all of these activities, but I think it is actually the best word. You could use “value” or “what’s important to me” but these terms are equivalent to love, albeit we have different amount of love for all of them.

You can see how the more significant losses are also love-based, like losing a love one, losing a job, or losing your health. If you can conceive that every time you are disappointed, you have a “love problem,” you will begin to see how central love is in your life. You might prefer the term “value” to love but I think it is better to use the term “love” because it brings us closer to how we can handle these regular and unavoidable disappointments that come from some kind of loss.

How exactly do we process disappointments?

Simply stated, by being sad. This is simple but immensely hard, perhaps especially for us Americans who are generally not particularly good at feeling sad. One of the greatest things about America is the pioneering spirit that has made this country so great and successful. This pioneering spirit drives us to move forward, to get through, to forge ahead, and to not stop when we have found some kind of impediment in our way. I read Lewis and Clark’s journal of their trek west from St. Louis to the Portland, OR area and back again. They forged through and opened up the west for America. We might notice, however, that this opening up of the west for “Americans” also set the stage for the displacement of Native Americans, a thought that deserves some attention in our discussion with our tendency to move forward when we meet some challenge or disappointment,

The process of disappointment is simple but hard, meaning that the process is a clear road but the road is a tough one. What makes the road tough is the emotion of sadness that is always at the heart of disappointment. Simply stated, it is hard to be sad, at least it is hard for most people, certainly most Americans, and generally harder for men than for women. The beauty of feeling naturally disappointed, and eventually sad, is that sadness ends. Thus, disappointment ends. We tend to interrupt the process of sadness by some other means, usually with anger, fear, resentment, cognition, or action. In other words, instead of simply feeling sad, we tend to run away from it into anger or fear, action, or thought. I just had a session with a man who has lost his job, talked about having lost his marriage some years ago, and how is afraid of continuing in a female relationship. All of this has to do with the fact that he hasn’t felt disappointed and eventually sad, felt the sadness through, and then being able to think clearly and take clear action. The process of (natural) disappointment is all about love:

  • I love something
  • I am assaulted (I may “assault” myself by doing some untoward)
  • I lose something
  • I feel disappointed
  • I feel sad
  • I continue to feel sad until I no longer feel sad
  • I now can think clearly with the impediment of fear, anger, or fear
  • I feel some hope of resolution or adjustment if that is necessary
  • I take action
  • I review my action…which may be good or less than good
  • I adjust my action of necessary.

Notice that the core of this whole array is the emotion of sadness caused by being disappointed. It is not anger, it is not anxiety, it is not resentment, it is not getting even, it is not avoidance, and it is not denial. So what is it? It is the realization that when I am disappointed, I am helpless, at least for the moment. I cannot change the past (with anger) and I cannot change the future (with retribution). I cannot change the present. Rather, I need to simply (but with difficulty) feel sad and let sadness run its course. What does “run its course” mean? It means finishing sadness.

How do I “finish” feeling sad?

We say this about sadness: “Find it, feel it, feel it, feel it…, finish it.” This means that I have to notice the disappointments that I have every day. I have to admit that I feel disappointment. Then I have to simply be sad about the loss that I suffered, which might actually be something that I caused. Then I have to bear the burden of feeling sad and seeing that whatever I lost, I can never have back again. I might have something as good or even better, but I can’t retrieve what I lost. I can’t go back in time and take the right road. I can’t unspill my coffee. I can’t bring my friend back to life. I have to be sad, sad, sad…until I no longer am sad.

But how can I ever get over being sad about losing my child, like Deb and I did when we lost our dear daughter, Krissie, three years ago? When I think about Krissie these days, I often feel nostalgic: nostalgic about the good and the not so good; about what I did right and what I did wrong. And as I do this, my love for Krissie rises in my heart and I feel tearful. These are tears of love and mostly joyful tears and perhaps a few sadness tears. But largely, my sadness of Krissie dying is largely gone these days. But, of course, Deb and I did a good deal of grieving, crying, and sharing our grief in order to no longer be sad about this tragic loss. If I can get through the sadness of losing a child, you can get through the sadness of spilling your coffee or hitting yourself with the hammer by accident…without being angry. Just feel the disappointment and ultimately the sadness, and it will finish.

An important aspect of finishing sadness is that you now become a better person. You are a better person because you realize that you are a person of love. You have loved and lost, and now you know that you will love and lose again…and again…and again. You will get better and better at the loving-and-losing process. You will be a more loving person…because you are now a person who knows how to love and lose, so you will actually be better at loving. You will not hang on to things, people, property, and ideas when they have been lost. You will remember what you have lost, remember the love you had…and have…for what you lost.

So, Love much, Lose much, Love again, and Love better.

Looking for Magic

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

Everybody loves magic. I always admire someone who is skilled at doing magic, whether someone who is professional on a stage like a colleague of mine (Dr. Dan Feaster), or someone who is just good at some card trick. I always enjoy doing some kind of simple magic with young kids where I make a penny “disappear” and then “reappear” on the kid’s ear, but I’m not really good at any kind of magic and leave it mostly to professionals and folks who are just good at some kind of parlor trick.

A few years back I wrote a blog entitled, “The Magic of Psychotherapy” in which I suggested that people look at psychotherapy as being some kind of magic, namely (1) a magical diagnosis, (2) a magical treatment, and (3) a magical cure. There is no magic to psychotherapy, whether in a so-called diagnosis, treatment, or cure. Rather, therapy is a delicate operation that is conducted by two people trying to make sense of what is working and what is not working in life and finding ways to make life work. It is hard work for both the therapist and the patient, not work that most therapists know how to do, and not the kind of work that patients really want to do. Yet, somehow, many therapist and many patients find ways to do good work and find ways to make life creative, productive, and ultimately meaningful.

Believing in magic

There is another kind of magic that I hear from many of the people in my office. This kind of magic involves an individual’s belief that something will fall from the sky and cure all that ails them. I have heard the following:

  • A very successful clergy person who is over 75 years old made some kind but unwise choices in his personal life, namely spending too much money pleasing his wife leaving them now in serious debt with no visible way out. Because of their moral/ethical stance they are unwilling to file for bankruptcy. Mack’s magic is that “someone, something, or God Himself” will somehow drop $200K into his bank account.
  • A man of good character, self-made, successful, kind, honest, formerly professional and now retired has been unsuccessful in establishing, maturing, and enhancing any female relationship. His magic is that there will magically be someone who will knock on his door or respond to his internet postings.
  • Many people with some kind of anxiety-based life have a magical desire about their lifelong struggle with anxiety. They think that if they just do everything right, everyone will like them, they will never make a mistake and never be criticized.
  • A very outgoing and friendly man who has also been quite successful in life was divorced by his wife recently, something that he didn’t see coming and was not prepared for. Two of his three adult children have essentially abandoned him together with only a tangential relationship with his third child. He “prays for his wife” specifically that she will “come back to the Lord” despite the fact that she apparently never has loved him, does not like him, and has sought no contact with him during and now after the divorce. Prayer is not based on what we think someone else should do, nor what God should do for that person
  • Several people who are addicted to something, whether it is chemical like alcohol and drugs or behavioral like video game-playing and gambling, look for some magic to get out of their addiction. A real addiction originates in some kind of pleasure, then becomes a largely pleasurable habit and then mutates into an escape. So, eventually and addiction is where the brain demands that you can “feel better” if you only return to the addictive substance or behavior. It is magical to think the addiction will just go away on its own.
  • Another man of good character and someone who has always been a good and faithful worker unfortunately acquired multiple sclerosis some years ago and has lived for the recent years in residential care because now he has no use of his appendages and is slowly losing his ability to speak. Unfortunately, this assault of the M.S. kept him from continuing to work. He had taken out a second mortgage on his house to do some repairs while he was still working and had a standard amount of credit card debt, but when he was no longer able to work, his wife was not stuck with an immune am fount of debt that she had no way of paying. Jack said that he “just needed someone to give him $100K” and everything would be OK. He died not long ago never having seen this magic.
  • A young man who made a rather silly insignificant choice in college that was judged to be plagiarism. It took him several years to finally finish his degree. He really wants “to do something for other people” but can’t seem to maintain a job. He wants his employer to fund his failure to work diligently.
  • Many people who have sought “disability” status because they think they have PTSD, ADHD, bipolar disorder or some other psychiatric disorder even though they are quite bright and capable.
  • A gay man who wants to “get married and have children” and then perhaps have some gay sex on the side. He can’t seem to find a woman who plugs into this magic. Many other gay men who want to be something other than gay
  • Another very bright person who is very ideational and imaginative but has never really succeeded in life despite his master’s degree and previous success in his profession. I have known him for many years and watched him go from job to job, usually within his chosen profession, which by the way, for which he is quite ill-suited. He goes from dream to dream, from idea to idea, for “aha” to “aha” but never really does what it would take to find a way in life that is meaningful.

All of these people tend to be intelligent and many of them are people of good character and often of deep spiritual commitment and engagement. Yet they retain the idea, or should we call it a “feeling” that something magical will come into their lives to make life better for them. These are not bad people, not unintelligent people, and not people with insufficient character. But they have all fallen into believing in magic of some sort. Along the way, each of them has become quite depressed and occasionally despairing of life in some way. Most of them say what I often hear from men: “I don’t want to live” even though they don’t want to die and are not suicidal. They just don’t want to live in the lives they have because, aside from a magical intervention, they can’t see their way out.

So what can they do, or what can I do as therapist to help these folks give up magical thinking and find some meaningful way to face the reality of life and the necessity of appropriate decisions?

Overcoming magical thinking

…is very very hard. When people get into magical thinking, it is much easier to believe in magic than face the reality of life. So what is “the reality of life”? Hurt, doing something, hard work, time, mistakes, failures, others’ criticism, and imperfection. Successful living outside of magic is facing all of these things courageously, finding some understanding of these elements of life, and ultimately finding true joy, success, and happiness sin life.

Facing Hurt

There have been many people, many of them quite intelligent and philosophical significant, who have said that life IS pain. Buddha suggested something like this although there is much more to Buddhism than this idea of pain. Contemporary statements about like, “Life sucks and then you die.” I think this is a very unfortunate way of looking at life. Indeed, there are people for whom life is painful all the time and some of these people never find much joy in life, but for most people life is not purely and primarily painful.

Hurt, emotional hurt, is an extremity important element in life that needs to be faced. It is so important that I have come to think that successful life starts with the experience of hurt, the understanding of hurt, the careful expression of hurt, finding ways of overcoming hurt, and ultimately becoming used to hurt in hits many guises. Hurt (emotional hurt) is always love-based. This means that I am hurt because I have lost something. I encourage you to read previous blogs on hurt and/or our book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel. The heart of emotional maturity, social maturity, and general life maturity is based on understanding and resolving hurt in life.

It is much easier to believe in magic, like I will never be hurt again, hurt will just go away, I will never hurt anyone, or God forbid, I just have to live with being hurt until I die.

Facing the need to do something and hard work that goes along with it

Doing something is easy for some people, like me, and difficult for other people who tend to be more ideational. There are dangers for doers, like me, and idea people. I tend to jump right in and do something and usually make a lot of mistakes along the way. People who are more ideational than productive very often fail to do enough to find what they need to do in life. While there is some magical thinking with us doers, there tends to be a lot more with people who are idea people. I think I am speaking mostly to people for whom doing comes hard when I suggest that you have to do something. A few of the men I described above are doers who have done a lot but not thought through what they were doing.

Doing something is not just doing anything. Doing something needs some thought behind it, which suits the idea people for whom magical thinking is so easy. Doing something for idea people is hard because they tend to be more exacting and quality oriented people than us doers. They want to do it right the first time and often get lost in thinking of what they might do, considering all the options, and trying to make the doing something that is perfect the first time. Nothing is perfect the first time. Furthermore, nothing is perfect. Period.

The hard work of doing includes mistakes, failures, and criticisms, which we will discuss briefly, but more importantly, it means doing a lot of what you don’t want to do in order so that you can do what you do want. This means a kind of discipline. I have had to discipline myself to do much more running and working out, as well as eating much better, since my heart attack. And, I never like it. I discipline myself to do these things because I want the product: being alive.

Facing mistakes, failures, and others’ criticisms

This, I think is the reason most people fall into magical thinking and believing in what is magical: they mistakenly think that if they do something, it will be right the first time. If they wait until the right moment, something magical will happen so life will unfold wonderfully. If they have all their ducks in a row, they will do it perfectly. None of this is true. Rather, if you find a way out of magical thinking, you WILL make mistakes, you will have failures, and you will most certainly have other people’s criticisms of you.

I think it is the facing of mistakes that is most devastating to a successful life in all its arenas, namely vocationally, interpersonally, intimately, and personally. People who believe in magic are often plagued by their former mistakes and hence the fear of more mistakes. Additionally, there are many people who have a feeling that something is deeply flawed in them, that they are somehow plagued by a dark spirit or something, and hence are unable to reach forward, do something, and find meaning in life. These amount to old wounds, usually originating in early childhood and perhaps stretching into adolescence, only to be aggravated by things that happened afterward.

Magic people may also be people who have actually not made enough mistakes in life. Perhaps they came from a perfectionistic family where they couldn’t make mistakes, or a family where they were criticized all the time, or a family where they were indulged so much that they never faced the mistakes that are so necessary in life.

Mistakes are essential in order to do something significant and meaningful. They may be mistakes of marriage or failing to marry the right person, mistakes of schooling that brought you to a profession that does not suit you, mistakes of spending too much and getting in too much debt. You might read my blog on Regrets where I identify some of the mistakes I have made in life, and hence regrets that I have. As a doer I have made more mistakes than most people.

While old mistakes, old history of an inadequate childhood, or the unreasonable fear of future mistakes, much of our fears of mistakes and avoidance of mistakes are related to what we imagine other people might say negatively about us. It is easier to be magical thinking that I will never be criticized than face the absolute necessity of criticism if I actually do something.

Facing imperfection

This is the hardest battle for people who believe in magic. Nothing is perfect. No action is perfect. No person is perfect. This is easy for me to say but to face imperfection, especially for magical thinkers, is extremely painful, which brings us back to the centrality of pain. Magical thinking is essentially believing that I can live a life without pain if something magical happens. Maybe this one hundred thou drops out of the sky, or that perfect woman will knock on my door, or I will find the perfect profession and job. None of these things is real. Rather, there might just be a really good woman…who is imperfect, or a perfect profession/job…that is imperfect, or a slow painful decision regarding money…that is imperfect. Perfectionism is quality thinking that has gone crazy. Magical thinkers think…magically…that something is perfect…if they can only find it. They will never find it, but they can find success and happiness in life if they dare face pain, mistakes, criticism, and imperfection