happiness

Good for Me; Bad for Me V: Discerning Good for Me

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the fifth of a series of blogs on things that are, simply put, “good for me” or “bad for me.” We have previously made a case for the value of using the terms “good for me” and “bad for me” but with discernment as to how much something is either good or bad for me. The immediately prior blog focused on discerning how bad something is ranging from mild to profound. In this blog we will be discussing also examine how things can be mildly good for me or profoundly good for me. We begin by studying how to discern how good something is, and ultimately how I can enhance good things, particularly if they are profoundly good for me.

Discerning how good something suggests a spectrum of “goodness” just as we studied a similar spectrum of “badness” in the previous blog. You may want to review the whole spectrum ranging from very bad for me to very good for me. In this blog we will study how good something can be using one of the following terms that occur in two divisions of the “good for me” dimension:

Mild to moderate “good for me” things:

  • Interesting
  • Pleasant
  • Exciting

Serious to profound “good for me” things:

  • Enlivening
  • Life-enhancing
  • Life-sustaining

So, the range of “good for me” things is from mild, like interesting, to profound, like. The mild/moderate things that are good for me are things that are temporary in life, while the more profound things that are good for me are more long-lasting in life and may be permanent.

  • Such things could be some sports talk that I discussed in previous blogs. Interesting things tend to grab the attention of one of your physical senses, like something you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Something that remains interesting tends to remain in one or more of these senses but does not cause much thought. Interesting also includes watching a movie or video that catches your interest for a few minutes or an hour’s a book or a magazine that attracts your attention briefly. Interesting could also be a spider weaving her web, a discussion that you hear or a conversation that you are involved with. Something that is interesting tends to be for seconds, or minutes at the most. If something remains interesting for longer than minutes, it may fall roughly into the category of:
  • Something that is pleasant has a physical effect on you. Things that are just interesting affect your five senses, but pleasant things move you to a deeper physical sensation, which could be a sense of physical calm, a deepened alertness, and/or a certain attraction to something. Pleasant things cause some initial positive emotional reaction like joy or sadness. Note that both joy and sadness are born of love, so both of these emotions are “positive” although, unfortunately, many people think of sadness as negative. Whether physical or emotional, these things tend to last longer than something that is just interesting. Pleasant things could be any of the things we’ve noted as interesting, like an aroma that seems to call you toward it, perhaps smelling the flowers as you walk past your neighbor’s house, or a sunrise that calls more than your momentary attention. While people can be briefly interesting, they can also be quite pleasant, like the server at breakfast who just made the meal better because of her demeanor. Discussions and conversations rarely from interesting to pleasant, but when they do, you feel compelled to engage in listening or talking. Beyond the common, “How’s it going” you hear from a stranger could be the deeper question that we hear more often these days of the pandemic, “Are you well?” or the parting comment, “Stay well.” Beyond interesting and pleasant lies the arena I call:
  • Exciting. It may be exciting to have a conversation with someone, but this is rare. More often, something that is exciting charges you up. It may be exciting to anticipate a visit from an old friend or an unexpected visit of such a friend, especially of you have not seen or heard from your friend for some time. Excitement can last more than minutes, but rarely last for hours. A good basketball game can be exciting, whether as a participant

If I move beyond things that are interesting, pleasant, or exciting, I then am in a category of things that are positively life-changing in some way: enlivening, life-enhancing, or life-sustaining. Such things make some kind of indelible positive mark on my life: I am changed for the better in some semi-permanent way.

  • You feel “enlivened” when you something physical happens your body that makes you feel more alive and excited although this “something” is more than the excitement you feel on a Ferris wheel or buying a new car. Enlivening, the first of the three positive life-altering “good for me” experiences, is an experience whereby you feel your inner essence improved in a way that remains primarily physical. Recall that there are four expressions of “feelings” that we have written about, both in these blogs and in our new book. We always experience “feelings” first physically, then emotionally, then cognitively, and eventually with something we say or do. The enlivening experience remains primarily physical. People say that they “feel more alive” and sometimes say that they “feel more engaged” with themselves, an obvious reference to their feeling a greater sense of “self” physically.
  • Life-enhancing. A step beyond enlivening is “life-enhancing.” By this I refer to a time in your life where you are significantly changed, and probably permanently changed. In our previous blog we looked at the permanent negative changes that can occur when profound “bad for me” adversely affect us. Life-enhancing events, places, or people are those that make me a stronger person, a more confident person, and a better person. These elements, whether personal, impersonal, or spiritual help me become more secure with who I am, and in so doing make me more confident in myself. These events do not change me but they make me more aware of myself, particularly my gifts and abilities and see that I have something to give to the world. To be enhanced in my life does not make me more interested in myself; enhancement makes me better able to feel confident in my basic goodness to such an extent that I can forget about myself.
  • Life–sustaining. When something that is “good for me” to such an extent that it keeps me alive, it is life-sustaining. Think of food, drink, and air in the obvious category as these things are essential for me to keep living. But I am not talking about the physical things that keep me alive physically; rather the psychological things that keep me alive. In fact, when people miss some of the basic psychological things in life, they may indeed, die of “psychological starvation” or take their lives. I frequently assist my patients to admit that they “don’t want to live” but certainly want to die, much less take their own lives. Consider the elements in your life that are psychologically essential: perhaps freedom, relationships, play, or work; perhaps certain elements of property; perhaps a place that is sacred and essential for your well-being.

Discerning how good the “good for me” is

It’s not so important that you discern every one of these words. Obviously, things blend together, sometimes just interesting, sometimes more important. My desire is to give you a rough paradigm to work with so you can see what is good for you with more clarity. My hope, of course, is that you find ways to increase the number of good things and increase the frequency in your life.

There is a danger of “pushing” the good for me to far to the right, meaning too far towards the life-sustaining. Some very good things, some things that you really like, and some things that seem in the moment to be life-sustaining might actually be more in the mid/moderate range rather than in the profound range. We will discuss this matter of discernment in a later blog.

Take some time in the discerning process. Feel through it. “Feel through it” means just that: feel. Feelings, as I have previously written is not singularly emotional; feeling through something is physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. If you are an “active-feeler”, you will need to notice just how important something is when you act on it. Or, if you’re an “emotional-feeler,” you will need to know how something feels emotionally.

You will discover that the “things” that are good for you fall into the categories I have suggested (and perhaps more that I haven’t thought of), namely people, places, experiences, and physical objects. Let me give you some personal examples

Personal reflections on “good for me”:

I could discuss physical, experiential, or geographical things that are good for me, but allow me to just speak of the people in my life who are “good for me:

  • My primary mentor, Dr. Vernon Grounds, made an indelible positive effect on me, something that is with me as we speak. Perhaps not life-sustaining, but certainly life-enhancing. I might have found someone else to enhance my life the way he did, as I have met many find people, but as I think of Dr. Grounds, I am moved to appreciation.
  • The only person I would put in the life-sustaining category is my wife, Deb. Yes, I certainly could live and survive with her, perhaps even thrive, but as I think about what she is in my life at the present, she sustains my life
  • I have several friends, perhaps a total of 12 who are in the enlivening category, and perhaps two or three of them are in the life-enhancing category
  • Moving back to the “left” on the spectrum and into the mild/moderate good for me category, I find my basketball friends to be in this realm. Not able to play basketball these days because of the pandemic, I miss the ball and I miss them. Basketball and all that it means to me is exciting, certainly beyond just pleasurable
  • People who are in the pleasant category are those I meet in the office building, the folks that I visit with at the counter of the Kwik Trip, and the other occasional meetings. I could do without these chance meetings, but they are pleasant.
  • There are people who are just “interesting” and mildly good for me. These would usually be folks that I just see but don’t talk to, or perhaps someone I read about in the newspaper or see on the Internet. Interesting that this gal did this or that, or the kid who gave away his allowance to a good cause.

I suggest that you look at the things, people, experiences, and place in your life and see if you can find something that is somewhere along the positive side spectrum, preferably something human, something living, something nonliving, and some experiential.

Next up: complexities, like:

  • Like it, not good for me
  • Don’t like it, good for me
  • Good for you, bad for me; visa versa
  • Good for me now; bad for me then

See you soon

Good for Me; Bad for Me III

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, mindfulness, morality, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is the third in a series of “Good for Me; Bad for me”, which is a study of how things, people, and situations can, quite simply, good for you or bad for you. In previous blogs I have proposed a system of discernment about things that are good or bad for you, in other words, a way to quantify just how good or bad something is.

Review

To begin with I proposed that there is a spectrum that ranges from good to bad or very good to very bad

_____________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

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

I further suggested that could label things more specifically on both sides of this spectrum. Specifically, I suggested that we could subcategorize the “good for me” side of the spectrum into things that were mildly or moderately good for me from things that were more significantly good for me, i.e.:

In the previous blog we studied the “bad for me” spectrum suggesting that there are mild/moderate things that could be uninteresting through unpleasing to aversive. Things that were more seriously bad would range from dangerous through toxic to lethal. Thus the “bad for me” side of the spectrum ranging from mild to serious would look like:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                 to                                             (profound)

In this blog we will be discussing the “good for me” side of the spectrum, namely the range from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting      Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                  to                                             (profound)

As we did in the previous blog, we will discuss how to deal with the various things that are good for us, namely how to engage the things that are good for us to some degree with an emphasis on how to observe, accept, and enhance such things.

Observing something that is good for you

Here I will replicate what I said in Blog II, namely suggest that observing something, whether good or bad is a feeling process. As we noted in the previous blog, this human feeling is so important that it is undefinable, just like the important things of physics (time, distance, and mass) and the important things in psychological functioning like love and wisdom. Admitting that feeling is undefinable, we can however, note how central it is to human functioning and that feelings are the first (undefinable) expression of one’s central core (another undefinable element, by the way). Feelings evolve quite specifically through a four-step process, namely first physical, then emotional, then cognitive, and then active. So when I experience something that is good for me I will first feel something physical and then experience the other three expressions of feelings subsequently. Notably, however, people tend to “feel” their feelings in one predominant modality or perhaps two even though everyone feels all four expressions. It might be valuable for you to identify which one or ones of these expression is your primary means of feeling expression. Or you might read our book, I Need to Tell You How I Feel.

Feeling something physically usually means that a certain part of your body will “talk to you” as body therapists talk about. You will feel something in one of your extremities, somewhere in or on your head, in your chest, or in your stomach area although there are other areas on the body that people experience feelings, and sometimes it will not be possible for you to actually discern what part of your body feels something because you have a kind of whole-body feeling experience. Regardless of what you feel and how you feel something physically, the feeling will be pleasant to some degree.

Following your physical experience of feeling something good for you, you will have an emotional expression of feeling. This will generally be a joyful feeling. You will notice the joy in some physical expression like a spontaneous smile, but this joy could also show itself in some body movement, like jumping, dancing, or swinging your arms. To the degree that something is good for you, you will feel some kind of excitement. It is also possible that your emotional experience could be milder, something that might be described on the “good for me” spectrum as simply “interesting” or you might experience a more profound sense of pleasure that leads to some outlandish vocal expression. Truly joyous experiences can also lead to tears of joy.

If you are less inclined to feeling expressions that are physical and emotional, you might notice that you are thinking, and that you are thinking about the object, situation, or person that has brought you to a pleasant experience. People who are inclined to this kind of feeling expression are generally less inclined to vocal expressions of joy or excitement, but rather tend to think about how something that is good for them came about and how it has developed.

Finally, there is an expression of feeling of action, or sometimes words that reflects a feeling of “good for me.” If you are inclined towards action, you will feel compelled to do something to enhance this positive experience. If you are more inclined to words, you will tend to talk about what could be done or might be done to enhance the experience.

Once you have experienced these four expressions of feelings, usually primarily preferring one or two of them, you will be at an important time in your day, or perhaps in your life: you will need to accept the “good for me” experience.

Accepting something that is good for you

You might think that this would be natural, i.e. to accept something that is good for you, but that is not always the case. In fact, the better something is for you, the harder it is to allow the process of feelings to move from physical to active. Recall a time, for instance, when you thought something was “just too good to be true.” But before we explore this “too good” phenomenon, let’s look at things that are in the milder range, i.e. something that is just interesting, pleasant, or exciting. Such things tend to occur in the immediate present, short-lived, and not particularly necessary in life. If you’re a sports fan, you might have one of these milder forms of pleasure when you team wins, or perhaps within the game a moment of pleasure when someone scores a goal or achieves some kind of success. If you’re more artistic by nature, you might experience something mildly pleasurable when you visit an art museum, hear a particular piece of music, or enjoy some form of nature. Accepting these simple joys is not very difficult and makes life, well, more pleasurable and joyful. It is easy to accept something that is mildly or moderately good for you because you know that such experiences are generally short-lived however fun they are.

It might not be so easy to accept something that is on the more profound side of the “good for you” spectrum. Note that the three terms I have chosen for these pleasurable experiences all have to do with some lasting effect they have on your life, from enlivening, through life-enhancing, to life-sustaining. Note the centrality of the element of life. Things that might alter your life in some way would include such impossible things of winning the lottery, being hired for that perfect job after a grueling series of interviews, or seeing your new infant taker her first breath. There are many other life-changing events and experiences. A person, or less likely, a group of people, might change your life for the better. We will discuss the great variety of things that are good for you, as well as things that are bad for you, in our next blog.

Before we leave this section of accepting things that are good for you, it behooves me to discuss grace. Grace is defined as “unmerited favor,” or something that you didn’t deserve. Many of the things that are life-changing come to us without our bidding, and often without our having earned the privilege of having such a person, thing, or event. I will not belabor the point, but it is important to note that grace is very hard to accept because of the very element of “not deserving” such a thing. We do not deserve the love that people have for us, this regardless of how important it is to be loved. We do not deserve the other joys of life that come without warning. And we certainly do not deserve to win the lottery, which of course, is much more by luck than by someone’s grace. When these very special…gracious…things come our way, we often come to tears. We might even feel “embarrassed,” which by the way, is repressed joy. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to accept the truly great things that come our way because we do not earn such things nor can we pay for them. They come by grace. Accepting and enhancing good things can be quite hard for people who seem to be in most need some grace from the world, largely because such people may have fallen into a life of felt neediness too long, that they have developed an unfortunate feeling of entitlement.

Whether something is on the mild/moderate side of the “good for me” spectrum or on the more profound side of the spectrum, it is important to move beyond observing and accepting these things to a place where we enhance such things. Before we engage in that discussion, however, let’s look at some of the things, experiences, and people who are good for us:

Things that are good for me

Things:

  • Money
  • Property
  • Nature
  • Art
  • Music
  • Color

Experiences:

  • Nature
  • Play
  • Work
  • Rest
  • Health
  • Forgiveness

People:

  • Parental figure
  • Mentor
  • Good friend
  • Accepting group
  • Reuniting

I invite you to note one or two elements in each category what might have come your way. You will immediately see that many such things have come unexpectedly. You might also note that you did not necessarily truly observe or accept such things as they came. More importantly, you might not have taken the time to find ways to enjoy the moment of the mild/moderate “good for me” experiences or found ways to enhance the more profound things in your life.

Enhancing things that are good for me

The first ingredient in being able to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life is to observe them and accept them as well as taking time in each of these steps, each of these processes. There is the simple, “Take time to smell the roses” in life, but enhancement of things that are good for me are not always obvious, like the sight or smell of roses. The group of things that are in the mild/moderate side of the good for me spectrum come usually unbidden and unexpected, and can go unnoticed. It is easier to notice the good things that I have earned, perhaps by some effort. This does take time, but more than time, it takes observation and acceptance. As noted above, it can be much harder to accept things that we have not earned and are truly coming from some part of the gracious universe. You will find that the more you observe and accept the simple pleasures of life, the more your life will be enhanced.

It might seem easy to enhance the joyous and pleasurable things in life, but many people struggle with being able to do so. There are many impediments to accepting and then enhancing things that are good for me:

  • I might be afraid that I will lose this thing that is good for me. Note the key word here: fear. Fear is by far the greatest impediment to enhancement of joy and pleasure.
  • I want more of what I received and thus fall into the trap of thinking that I have earned something that is good for me. You can never earn someone’s love. Neither can you keep it forever, just as the Israelites could not keep manna from heaven from one day to the next
  • You don’t know how to enhance something that is good for you, or it might be costly for you to do so. You might have to give something up in order to enhance your life with something that is truly good for you.

If you choose the path of enhancement of joyous and pleasurable things, you will notice that these things last longer than you expected, that they almost always end sometime, and that they have left an indelible mark on you. This mark is humility: you have recognized that you didn’t earn many of the good things you have, that you can’t pay someone back for the grace they have shown you, and that you can only “pay it forward” to others. So, you might:

  • Simply thank the person who gave you something, whether property, time, or comfort
  • Enjoy the moment however that moment might last, seconds or years. The moment will most surely end but there’s no value in worrying about it ending.
  • Remember what you have enjoyed, what was good for you
  • Make some note of how you can inculcate this “good for you” thing in your life
  • Pay it forward

Next up: Complexities in the Good for Me; Bad for me:

  • Good for Me: Bad for You.
  • Good for You; Bad for Me.
  • Good for Me but I don’t like it.
  • Bad for me but I do like it

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