Personality

The Things That We Love

Ron Johnson appreciation, Connection, Development, family, Feelings, love, mindfulness, Personality, Self-Awareness

We all love different things. Our most recent book, What’s Your Temperament, discusses how our temperaments determine what we like, and more importantly, what we love. We made a distinct point that one of the defining characteristics that we have is our temperament, and implicit in each temperament is a distinct tendency to love something. Analysts love truth (and seek to solve problems; caretakers love property (and seek to protect it); players love experience (and value physical engagement), and lovers love people (and seek connections). You can read more about these identified temperaments in some previous blogs or catch a bit of it free at Amazon if you like. Instead of plowing the same ground with temperament, I want to suggest that we do, indeed, love different things although it may not always seem like love. While there is never anything wrong with loving something, this actual loving can lead people into difficult situations, sometimes personal, sometimes interpersonal, sometimes physical, and sometimes emotional or intellectual. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy lately and found it interesting that the actual word philosophy from the Greek words for love (philos) and wisdom (sophia), which is a reference to the goddess Sophia, the goddess of wisdom. With the danger of too much repetition allow me to summarize the “loves” of the different temperaments, the values of this loving, and the dangers of this loving. Then we will progress into other, perhaps more mundane and day-to-day loves that are good at heart and sometimes difficult in practice:

The loves of the different temperaments

Caretakers:

  • Basic love: property
  • Value of this kind of loving: providing safety for the world
  • Danger of this kind of loving: materialism, busyness

Analysts:

  • Basic love: truth
  • Value of this kind of loving: finding truth and bring it to the world
  • Danger of this kind of loving: independence; too often finding too much fault

Players:

  • Basic love: experience
  • Value of this kind of loving: fun and learning from experience
  • Danger of this kind of loving: intrusion into others’ lives

Lovers:

  • Basic love: people
  • Value of this kind of loving: connections, sacrifice
  • Danger of this kind of loving: giving in, dependence, and ultimate resentment

Other kinds of love

  • Play:
    • Value: relief and restoration
    • Danger: physical and emotional danger to others
  • Alcohol:
    • Value: enhancement of life
    • Danger: alcohol dependence
  • Talking:
    • Value: communication
    • Danger: failure to listen
  • Listening:
    • Value: hearing other people
    • Danger: failing to reveal one’s own feelings
  • Working:
    • Value: production
    • Danger: fatigue, physical danger
  • Saving:
    • Value: protection
    • Danger: miserliness
  • Spending:
    • Value: joy and fun
    • Danger: irresponsible spending
  • Ideas:
    • Value: possible solutions to problems
    • Danger: not ever doing anything significant
  • Family:
    • Value: care for one’s own
    • Danger: getting lost in family problems
  • Quality:
    • Value: doing something right
    • Danger: never satisfied with good enough
  • Quantity:
    • Value: having lots of things
    • Danger: having too much, lack of quality
  • Reading:
    • Value: learning
    • Danger: always learning, never practicing
  • Sports:
    • Value: joy, physical improvement, comradery
    • Danger: lost in sports trivia
  • Working out:
    • Value: physical improvement
    • Danger: physical becomes dominant in one’s life

Examples:

  1. Jack is a real hard worker, often working 80 or 90 hours a week in his trade of accounting and related work. He is a millionaire several times over largely due to his hard work. Jack has lost his wife and at least one, if not two, of his children in the process because he has been so busy all the time
  2. Janice is a real loving person. She loves to love and does it with vigor. She sacrifices herself easily and freely. She really loves her family. There is no one who is more sacrificial. Unfortunately, she has indulged her children to such an extent that they can’t think for themselves, much less do for themselves.
  3. Sam is quite bright, perhaps one of the brightest people I know. He did quite well in his profession for a number of years. Sam also loves sports and came to love drinking quite a bit, usually getting drunk daily, passing out, and then waking up to watch TV. He has no one significant in his life because he couldn’t find a way to translate his brilliance into a relationship, much less govern the use of alcohol.
  4. Peter really loves women. He is quite handsome and becoming and has been quite successful in attracting women, often bedding them, with ease over his years of life. He has not, unfortunately, been able to establish for himself a lasting, meaningful female relationship. He is good at getting, and not so good at maintaining and improving.
  5. Frank is a pastor and has done quite well in his work over his 50 odd years of professional life. Unfortunately, he hasn’t really developed much else in his life, like a good hobby, good long-term relationships, and abilities beyond preaching and teaching. Now in his semi-retirement years he feels quite lost and has finally come to realize that he hasn’t been the best of husband because his focus was so much on being a pastor.

Consider what you love, the goodness of your love, and the fact that you may actually love something or someone better than most people. Then consider that you might be “loving to a fault” and might need to broader your loving to things beyond what has become easy and natural for you.

 

The Independent Personality and Relationships

Ron Johnson communication, Connection, happiness, love, marital, men's issues, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

I see a lot of men in my office who are independent by nature, and I know a few more in my acquaintances and friendships. Independence is a truly remarkable personality trait that I admire and respect. Usually, independent men (and women, of course) cut their own lines in the earth, live by their own drummers, so to say, and are responsible. More often than not, these men work for themselves often creating some business from nothing and find success in the world of work if not without challenges, setbacks, and mistakes. In fact, one of the distinct characteristics of independent people is that they are not heartbroken by such twists in the road and find ways to pick up the pieces and start again. In this blog I want to unpack these characteristics and other traits that independent people have, compare independence to dependence that is a hallmark of many other people, examine some of the challenges that they face I life, and then focus on the particular challenges that they have in maintaining relationships.

Characteristics of independent people

  • Hard-working. These folks often work way beyond the standard 40-hour week. Companies love these them because they work late, take work home, and work efficiently. I know of few who work anything less than 60 hours a week and I know of one CPA who worked 80 to 90 hours during tax season.
  • Driven. Since most of them have their own businesses, they work even harder than other folks do. They don’t need someone pushing them; they push themselves.
  • Successful. While success may come late to some of these men, usually they find it early in life and continue finding new challenges, new failures, and new successes
  • Self–critical. They tend to be hard on themselves for not doing the right thing all the time, having wasted time on a failed project, or just not meeting their own expectations.
  • Quality or quantity. Most independent people are quality-based while some are quantity-based. These are different ways some men go about life. Usually, they work to perfect their product, whatever that might be. The quantity-based guys are better at accepting less-than-perfect for their value of getting lots of things done, perhaps not all with quality.
  • Outspoken. They speak their minds and are not deterred by rejection, or so it seems. They have opinions and are not afraid to share them. Indeed, there are introverted independent guys but even these guys tend to speak their minds more than the introverted who is caught by fear of disapproval.
  • Work alone. They prefer to go about their lives, work, play, and relationships on their own for the most part. Indeed, some independent fellows have one or two people working for them, or even a score or more, but even in these situations, they prefer to work alone, whether on the jobsite or in their office
  • Interested. These guys are usually looking ahead at something that they can do. They can get bored easily and avoid boredom by thinking of new and different things that they can do. Again, this could be with work, play, or relationships.

Examples of independent men

  • N.B.: identifying characteristics of these guys have been altered while trying to stay true to the essence of what they do in their lives.
  • Sam. Sam is now retired after a very successful position in the field of recreation training. Previously, he had been in a helping profession, and now he has a developing profession that is only marginally related to what he did before. He has never been married but has had several unsuccessful relationships including one early in his life that may have been the love of his life.
  • Ben. Ben is an independent businessman in the trades although he is also a general contractor, buys and sells property, and is always on the lookout for a new deal. I see him with his wife of some years with all the challenges of relational life (see below).
  • Peter. Like Ben, Peter has been unsuccessful in his relationships but is still working on it. He worked hard to get through college and immediately started his own business, which now is quite successful, something few men achieve by age 35.
  • Bill. Bill was actually brilliant but brilliance didn’t lend itself to doing the necessary in school because he was interested in learning, not producing. He tried sales, working for his father, and drove a cab until he found a way to develop a counseling business despite that fact that he only had a B.A. and certainly not licensed. Bill also had several failed relationships and finally ended up married to a pretty psychologically impaired woman.
  • Butler. Early in life Butler decided that he wasn’t going to take any crap from anyone having taken a lot of it from his alcoholic father. He never worked for himself but found a way into a profession for the paycheck. He came into my office with the proverbial female hand in his back and seemed to profit from coming here, but eventually his wife could no longer tolerate his tendency to get angry so easily.
  • Pat. You wouldn’t know that Pat is independent because he has learned to accommodate to everyone around him. Yet at his deepest heart Pat is a person who would really want to do what he does without any interference. Now a doctoral student in a challenging field and at a challenging university, he is finding his way to be truer to himself, which means learning and ultimately writing in his profession.
  • Craig. Craig is a Buddhist chaplain after having been a successful musician and previously an enlisted man in the military. He came to me because of some questions in his marriage, which ultimately blew up in his face a few months later. While brilliant and certainly independent, he is finding his way in a new relationship but with trepidation because of previous failures.
  • Perry. Perry is an engineer whom I first met when he lost his best friend, mentor, and boss at the company he worked for. This led to a couple of other failed work relationships, not because of his lack of skill and work but he couldn’t seem to fit in. He has been unsuccessfully married for many years, a marriage that was not well-conceived and hence not well-developed.
  • Kelsy. He is a young man who just barely passed high school despite his evident brilliance. He just stopped doing what everyone wanted him to do, mostly in school, but found that he didn’t know what he wanted to do because he was so good at pleasing. He will be taking a year off to find himself.
  • Jacob. Jacob in a physician now but started out as an engineer. His private practice is barely making it despite his intelligence, drive, integrity, and general capability in his profession. He is in the process of getting divorced, perhaps largely because his investments were made without consent of his wife, and often without her knowledge.
  • Paul. Paul has actually never worked for himself but he might have done better had he do so because he has worked in many settings, all in his profession, and none of them has ever worked out for him. He is perhaps one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and is also very likable because of his connection-based nature. Yet, he has also failed to develop and sustain a female relationship

Challenges for independent men

  • Going it alone to a fault. While it is in the nature of independent people to do their own thing, work alone, and work hard, it is not in their nature to cooperative, compromise, and collaborate. Usually, they have been so successful in their work lives (although not all as noted above), they do not have the ability to truly listen to others and find a path forward that is good for all.
  • Failed relationships. This is almost a given with every independent man I have ever known. The love, often deeply, but their love is quite personal, not so much interpersonal. They can give but usually find themselves giving in because the wheels of giving and taking are not well oiled. Some get angry, some become addicted, some just avoid, but few of these men really know how to do the stuff that it takes to live with someone who doesn’t have the same perspective that they do.
  • Anger and its cognates. This could be “frustration,” irritability, complaining about people, or just plain unhappiness.
  • Lost opportunities. Several of the men I identified above have failed to go with the right job, the right school, or the right woman, and paid a dear price for that failure. Often, they were looking for the perfect school, job, or woman; otherwise, they just couldn’t pull the lever because they weren’t sure of the choice. They were looking for perfection
  • Not trusting their intuition. The jobs, school, and relationships that men got into that weren’t good for them is because they didn’t trust that this thing was not good for them even though I hear years later that they “really knew” that this job, woman, or school was wrong.

Not everyone is independent

While not the purpose of this blog, there are people who are very good at depending on others, cooperating, compromising, and giving in. As you might expect, however, these people tend to give in more than they give and up in some kind of job, relationship, or elsewhere not wanting to be there but not knowing how to get out. A lot has been written about the so-called “codependent” person, a term that is not in my vocabulary, because the individual who is allegedly codependent is usually dependent on a person who is addicted to something, and so the both of them are dependent on different things.

Suggestions for independent people

  • Affirm your independence, realizing that this is a wholly good thing, a godly thing, and a gift that you have been given and/or developed on your own. Most people don’t have what you have. You are not afraid of disapproval, at least on the surface, which gives you a leg up on most people.
  • Look to develop appropriate dependence. This means finding what I call the “N word”, not the one you’re thinking of, but “need.” You don’t “need” people, which is good, but you really do need people, just not the way you think of it. You need people to add to your nature, with whom to cooperate and compromise. This is not easy for you to do, and it does not mean giving in.
  • Avoid the tendency to give in. Because you can do almost anything, you can too easily do what you shouldn’t dl: give in. Give all you want, all you have, your left arm, or your life. But don’t give in. Giving is godly; giving in is not. You will pay a heavy price.
  • You will not find an independent person just like you. You will find independent people who are like you in wanting to do their own thing, but you won’t find someone, whether lover, friend, or coworker, who sees the world the way you see it. Give up on finding this perfect person. You might be lucky enough to find a woman who is independent, but likely she is just as stubborn as you are in the way she sees things.
  • Ultimately, you have to add to your independent nature, but you aren’t good at this. You might just muse about how you are lonely, unhappy, or looking for the perfect person (job, play), and give up on that idea and look for a good person, a good job, or a good place to live. Then you can make it better…and great

The Value of a Heart Attack

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, family, mindfulness, Personality, Self-Awareness

I had a heart attack a couple of months ago, and it has been a very good thing for me. Let me explain. I’m not saying that I’m “glad” that I had a heart attack, and of course I wish I hadn’t had this event, but as I look at the larger picture, I see that this has been a good thing for me in several ways.

Briefly, I had been having some tachycardia for some time, perhaps a year or two. More specifically, I had been having occasional chest “pressure” (not so much pain) off and on when I was walking, running, or playing basketball. So, now I am pretty sure that the blockage in an artery that led to the heart attack had been happening for a couple of years, and very likely to some degree for many years. The night I ended up going to the hospital was challenging. First, I’ve never been in a hospital, never been on any medication, and never have had surgery of any kind since I had a tonsillectomy when I was six. So, I was not particularly prepared for the symptoms of consistent chest pains that eventually led me to go to the ER and then by ambulance to the hospital and quickly in surgery for angioplasty. From start (midnight Monday morning) until noon Tuesday, being a total of 36 hours, I was all of what I didn’t want. Through many adjustments, however, this is an event that is past and I can reflect on the many positive things that occurred at that time and have occurred since then. Let me elaborate:

Life saving

I would be remiss if I didn’t recognize that the various medical professionals who assessed me and ultimately performed the angiogram performed well to the person. It is impossible to know if this heart attack might have healed itself had I chosen not to go to the hospital. But it is possible to think that I might have died. I am thankful for professional people who know what they are doing, and I am thankful to be alive.

New learning for old thoughts

There are two important things that I “learned” during this whole process: I will die; I need to live. Previous to this incident “knew” that I would die, but now having possibly been minutes away from dying, the fact that I will sometime most surely die is a lot more real. Previously, I had an academic understanding of dying, but now I have what appears to be a more personal understanding that I will die.

The more important thing that I learned during this process is substantially more significant. Previously, I “knew” that I wanted to live but I didn’t put much thought, much less feeling, into it. I just enjoyed living. After the incident, I discovered something substantially different from wanting to live. I learned that I need to live. I realized that I am alive to serve people and that these people seemingly need me. Most specifically, I need to live for the people I see in my office, often because I am the only person who really knows them, and in some ways the only person who loves the whole of them. This is no small thing, and I have always taken this privilege of knowing people seriously and with great appreciation that people put their lives in my hands. Now, however, I see this task as even more intense. I have had several patients say something like, “Please don’t die Ron,” which seems to affirm the apparent fact that I need to be alive. In God-talk, I think that God yet wants me to be of service to people. This includes most specifically the people in my office, but also in the writing that I do and want to do. Interestingly, these days I find my therapy with people to be focused on how people can be of some service to humanity. I have always focused on people understanding themselves, being themselves, and communicating themselves, but therapy is not ultimately about oneself but rather how one can serve humankind out of a foundation of self.

My needing to be alive is also for my family and friends, of course, but frankly these folks could do with my dying better than people for whom I am the only person in their lives that knows them. I don’t know if I will live for hours or decades but I want these hours or decades to be useful to humankind.

New family

My family has solidified since this cardiac event, and to some degree it has been reframed. Deb and I had the privilege of having a foreign exchange student from Sweden live with us for his senior year in high school along with Jenny and with Krissie who was also a senior. We had occasional contact with Andreas (“Andy”) over the intervening years but he contacted us not long after Krissie died two and a half years ago and flew over here to be with us and refresh our relationship. He refers to us as “Mom and Dad” and to his mother as his “Swedish Mom” (his dad died 10 years ago), and it is a pleasure to have a “son”, almost as if he had replace the loss of Krissie. When Andy heard about my heart attack, he immediately bought a ticket to fly here because he “didn’t want me to die” before he could renew our relationship. So we planned a journey with Andy from our home in Wisconsin through Omaha where we picked up Jenny and then the four of us proceeded to visit with our good friend, Tim, in his Mountain-side home just outside of Denver. While the five of us were sitting around the dinner table, I realized that this group of five is my “family” even though I am biologically related only to Jenny.

Since that time I have come to see that people have different families in different constellations. Very often people see “family” as only those biologically related to one another, but this doesn’t always work, especially when one or more people in the biological family are toxic, or perhaps just not personally developed. People can do well to discover what their new family is, or what they want it to be as they grow in life. My own “family” has changed many times over my years from my family of origin with originally 4 members, then 5 when my sister came along 9 years later, then my fraternity family, then my first wife and I, then my seminary family, then my graduate school family, then my wife and two daughters, then my daughters and I after the divorce, and then Deb, Krissie, and I when Krissie came to live with us, then the 4 of us, then back to Deb and me with Jenny on the side. And now this new family of 5. I see people often struggling with biological family and coming to a way of seeing what their new family can be. I am reminded of what Jesus said when he was on the cross and was informed, “Your brothers and mother are here for you.” He said, “Who is my family but the ones I have love and have loved me.”

New body awareness and care

I talked to the cardiologist who supervised my brief hospital stay and noted that I usually work out three times a week, run three times and week, play basketball regularly, and have a pretty good diet. His answer, “Well, if you hadn’t been doing these things, you might have had a heart attack at 58 instead of 78,” noting that my genes are the primary reason for the heart attack (LDLs, “bad cholesterol primarily). So, my diet and exercise need to be substantially improved. We have now been two months on a largely Mediterranean diet replete with lots of veggies and fruit. I have found it interesting that my tastes have changed a bit, that I feel satisfied, and that I snack a whole lot less, and certainly a lot less sugar and other “cheap” carbohydrates that are gluten-based. I am interested to see how this diet change holds up over time.

The second thing that I have done for my body is to be more consistent with my workout routine, now daily with running (winter on the treadmill), lifting, and planking. I used to struggle to maintain a marginal workout and now I find that I can increase all of these activities. Likely, my heart is responding to the diet and exercise.

There is a third element that I must admit which is loosely related to what I must call anxiety, albeit with a bit of chagrin because I am loathe to admit to having any psychological disorder. Indeed, I come from a family all of whom have suffered from some form of anxiety, so whether I acquired it genetically or socially, I am inclined to think too much about things, namely things I do. I think most of this has to do with my “caretaker” temperament, namely a person who is property oriented and a “doer” in life. I have always been inclined to think about what I need to do in a day’s time or a week’s time, something that is good at the start but not in the end because such thinking can lead to a kind of anxiety because I always have things on my mind to do. To a fault. So, I found a mantra that has helped me deal with my caretaking/doer nature without changing who I am: In Due Time. Note the play on words with “do” instead of “due” but of course, it could also be “In Due Time” as well. It has been helpful as I lie in bed for a few moments in the morning with my espresso and think of what I might do in the day.

The value and limitations of professional people

First, I am not inclined to rely upon “professional” people for the most part. This is a part of my independent nature, something like, “do it, do it wrong, do it over, do it right” orientation to life. Furthermore, I am suspicious of many professionals who tend to stretch beyond their actual level of competence and often see their profession as central in life. Well, I certainly do the same because I think that everything is psychogenic, i.e. psychologically caused, like my heart attack for instance. So, over the last two months or so I have consulted with various professionals who rendered advice, or in some cases a regimen of “treatment” for my heart. Some of them have been helpful, some harmful, but all of them have been people of intelligence and integrity. Likewise, all of them have been limited in understanding things beyond their own profession and they have not always seen me as a unique person not always fitting into the mold of everyone else.

The cardiologist, for instance, very bright and certainly capable, a guy who does heart transplants and the like as well as the simpler angioplasty that he did on me. He put me on several medications, namely statins, blood thinners, and a beta blocker. I suppose most people whom he sees in his practice profit from his diagnosis, advice, and treatment. But most people are not me. So, I am on these three medications for a few days until my body erupted against these meds, in fact to such an extent that I actually fainted for a few seconds. As a result of my body reaction to these meds, I just stopped taking them and seemingly have survived well without medication. It is important to note that I have never been on any medication ever so my body is not prepared for medication of any kind. So, I look on this brilliant cardiologist as doing his job well and serving hundreds of people, but he didn’t serve me. I hold no grudges.

In addition to the cardiologist I saw a naturopath, actually starting a couple of weeks before my heart event. This individual, someone with three doctoral degrees, put me on a series of “supplements” to assist in my heart. I saw her originally before the heart event and she did a brief interview and then had me take some blood tests and then the supplements. Long story short, the supplements were really bad for my body, which erupted in a nearly whole body rash. I got off the supplements immediately (with her advice) but it took seven weeks for me to get over the rash. With this individual, too, it is likely that she did what works for most people, but not for me. I am a bit displeased that she didn’t see the heart attack as a possibility because I mentioned that I had been having some tachycardia and other heart-based symptoms, but again, perhaps most people would have profited from her hole regimen of meds, just not me. I hold no grudges.

I consulted with a trainer whom I happen to play basketball with about my workout routine. Cory was very helpful with some recommendations for diet (drink 8 glasses of water every day and confirming the Mediterranean diet), but more importantly recommending an increased workout routine, which I have followed. He too is limited in his overall understanding of who I am and certainly not aware of the psychogenic element or my lack of desire to be body buff. But he was helpful.

I have learned that no one knows everything, and certainly no one knows everything about me. Nor should they. I just need to “consult” and then fit that consultation into my own system and experiment with my body and soul to go what ultimately feels right and helps me.

All in all, my heart attack was good for me in all of these ways. I feel better than I have felt for some time, perhaps a year or so. Certainly, my being better has to do with all that people have done for me and what I have done for myself.