Positive psychology

Feeling Safe in the World

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

The world has seemed a whole lot less safe recently. This increased amount of fear has led to a good deal of anxiety. Lack of safety has at least been caused by the Covid pandemic for more than two years but also by the cultural challenges that the Black Lives Matter movement have brought to America, and the political dissention that has been an increasing element for the last 25 years. Add to these external elements causing fear and ultimately anxiety there are some even more significant internal elements that have only been exacerbated by the externally-caused fears. “Internal” elements are those fears and anxieties that are within ourselves. In this blog I want to discuss how most people deal with these feelings and how we might be able to do a bit better. I will discuss the nature of external factors, the nature of internal factors, the nature of fear, and the nature of anxiety, these elements followed by the ways people tend to cope with fear and a few suggestions as to how to reduce anxiety and fear to zero.

The nature of external fears

This is the easier part of this essay. External fears are like those I just discussed: cultural, political, and biological, Now, of course, we have the fears associated with Putin’s assault on Ukraine and his saber-rattling suggesting that he might use nuclear weapons causing untold destruction. In all of these external elements there is a feeling of helplessness. This feeling of helplessness is central to any kind of fear, but with these external factors, the fear is that something will happen to me over which I have no control whatsoever. What can I do about Putin? What can I do about the destruction of the Black Lives Matter? What can I do about the pandemic that may hit me despite the fact that I have been thrice vaccinated? What can I do about Trump and company if I am a Democrat or the alleged Marxist agenda of the Democrats if I am a Republican? It seems that there is not much I can do with any of these external elements that cause fear, but we will discuss how we can actually reduce fear to zero in these circumstances however impossible and outrageous that seems.

The nature of internal fears

These fears, usually coming in the form of anxiety, are much more difficult to examine. Unfortunately (in my opinion), there has been an increasing use of the term anxiety and its cognates worry and fretting over the recent years. People find some kind of solace in saying that they “have” anxiety, or for that matter “have” depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, a learning disability, alcoholism, or autism. This orientation towards “having” something makes people fear that “something” inside of them is not working and they have no control over this something. Thus, again we see the feeling of no control over something, but this something is not external but internal, which makes the fear and anxiety worse because it is coming from inside. However challenging it is to feel helpless with political intrigue, biological invasion, or physical damage, it is much worse to feel that people have no control over what is happening inside of them. You can completely conquer these internal fears and reduce them to zero.

The nature of fear

This is the crux of the problem with fear and anxiety. Just what is the nature of fear and how can we understand it if we are ever able to “reduce it to zero”: in our lives? Fear is absolutely the most basic emotion that we have as humans. I look at fear from a developmental perspective, namely how fear originates in the human organism, what its normal purpose, and how it should ideally become less and less important as life progresses. Sadly, sometimes as people get older, the exact opposite happens: they experience more anxiety. Importantly, fear is the basic emotion we have because it is in our psychological/neurological structures to keep us alive. There are four basic emotions: fear, joy, anger, and sadness, all of which come to us developmentally, i.e. as we move from infancy onward. Ideally, a child of six should have at his/her disposal all of these emotions as they are necessary, but this same (ideal) child should have much less fear that he/she has had in earlier years. Again ideally, a child should move more into joy, anger, and ultimately into sadness and slowly move away from fear. More often than not, this fails to happen. Let’s look at the natural development of emotions in a young child:

  • The first year of life is where the predominant emotion, often the only emotion, is fear. This natural experience of infancy keeps the infant alive. Infants cry in infancy because they are afraid. Why are they afraid? An infant is truly helpless. She can’t feed herself or change her diapers. So when she feels “something” inside that feels dangerous, she cries. This “something”: is probably hunger, but it could also be some kind of difficulty breathing. The key in understanding fear is to understand that fear keeps us alive, especially in infancy. We cry, we get some kind of attention that we feels is central to living. The infant doesn’t know that she is “hungry” because all she knows is that something is “not right” in her body and she feels helpless. While an infant of one year old may experiment with rudiments of joy, anger, and sadness, these are not the most of what an infant feels. Rather, she feels fear or no emotion at all.
  • The second year of life is when we learn of the second basic human emotion: joy. The 1-2 year old feels joy because of several reasons including being fed properly and being changed from a wet diaper. More importantly, this second year of life is a time when things have exploded because now the infant can walk and talk, and with those elements now beginning to have their place in his life, he can attach to things. These “things” include people, physical objects, and possibilities. He now sees it possible to crawl or walk across the floor. He can see that it is fun to pull out all the tissues from the tissue box. He can talk, he can scream, he can sing, and he can dance. What is the essence of all these things: experiencing joy. What is joy? It is the emotion associated with loving something. The infant enjoys speaking or yelling, crawling or walking, jumping or sitting, all of these in the form of experiencing the wider world. When an infant grows beyond the first year of life, his world has exploded 100-fold from the confines of a crib or a diaper-changing table. The joy that is central, or should be central, in this part of infancy, is the result of the child beginning the rudiments of love, whether of people, things, or perhaps just possibilities and dreams.
  • You have heard of the “terrible twos,” meaning that a two-year old is easily and frequently angered. Actually, the real “terrible” years are not so much the one-year old or two-year old but a child who is three, four, or five. These are the real challenging years both for parents and for the developing child. Why is the toddler (ages 2-5) so often angry? Because she had her first year of life when she had pretty much everything she wanted, then into the second year where she got most of what she wanted, perhaps with a few restrictions. There is nothing an infant in a cradle can really do that is dangerous, and there is not too much a one-year old can do that is dangerous. However, there is a lot that a 4-year old can do that is either dangerous or obstructive in life someway. So what happens? The 4-year old is limited…and limited and limited. And that same child is angry about it. “Why is the world so bad now when it was so good before,” a 4-year old might think not knowing that he now gets little of what he wants compared to the years when he got almost all of what he wanted (first year) or most of what he wanted (second year of life). So these years are very crucial because the task for this child and his parents is to find a way into understanding that you can’t get most of what you want, and ultimately understand that it is not good for you to have most of what you want. But a 4-year doesn’t have this perspective, so he is angry “all the time” because you are limiting him “all the time.” This time of life, however, is central for what we call character development, but this is beyond the scope of this essay.
  • If a child gets through these first three stages of life, she could have some grasp of the necessity of fear for survival, joy for having, and anger for not having. This brings the child to the most important emotion in the human being: sadness. Deb and I wrote The Positive Power of Sadness a few years ago, which explains and underscores our belief that this is the most important emotion we can have, namely because whatever we love, be it person, place, thing, or idea, we most surely will lost it. So, we need to be good at grieving, being sad, being disappointed, and hurt because such things come every day. Unfortunately, most people get stuck in one of the previous stages so they fail to know the centrality of sadness and go to fear, anger, or (artificial) joy.

The nature of anxiety

Anxiety is not exactly fear but it is fear-based. Anxiety is actually a brain function. Here, I distinguish between the brain and the mind, the brain being biological and the mind being…well, something else. There is a raging debate, as there has been for centuries, as to whether there is even something called the mind as some scientists believe there is no such thing, only a brain. I won’t debate that subject at this point except to suggest that brain and mind are substantially different, the mind using the brain for cognition, emotion, and physical activity. Importantly, the brain doesn’t know anything but survival and pleasure, so it’s entire function is to maintain safety and enhance pleasure. Anxiety is actually an increase in heartbeat and breathing, which is called vigilance, or sometimes hypervigilance. The brain churns up breathing and heartrate when the brain determines that you need to be vigilant for some reason, namely in the face of danger. That’s all fine and good except the brain does not distinguish the past, present, and future. So when you are remember some dangerous situation that occurred in your past or imagine some dangerous situation in the future, your brain kicks into gear the hormone cortisol, which increases breathing and blood flow as well as hypervigilance.  If that were all there was to it, we would rarely feel anxious, but the fears we have, especially about the future are interpreted by the brain as you being in some immediate danger. Think about an exam that might be a challenge, a flight that might be a challenge, a meeting with someone that might be a challenge. In all of these circumstances the brain kicks up cortisol and increases breathing and heart rate to protect you because the brain determines that there is immediate danger. If you could think of something in the future (or in some cases the past) without any kind of fear, you brain would help you figure out what you should do (or could have done). But if you have the slightest fear of failure or loss, the brain goes into hyper drive. Simply stated, anxiety is a brain problem. The brain is doing its job: protecting you and preparing you for the lion coming over the hill. The brain doesn’t know the difference between the figurative lion and the possible exam when you are experiencing some kind of fear. It just sees you in danger and seemingly in need of hypervigilance.

Ways people cope with fear

Consider that fear erupts in someone when the environment is felt to be unsafe, whether this is in the present or in the future (and also rarely in the past). Fear is not bad. Fear is meant to be a natural emotion that erupts when some unexpected event occurs that appears to be dangerous. If that is the case, the brain does its job by protecting you from the danger by creating vigilance (or hyper vigilance if the danger seems imminent.  I am not denigrating fear. I said at the start that it is the most basic emotion we have because if we didn’t have fear, we wouldn’t survive as adults, and we most certainly wouldn’t have survived as infants. The problem isn’t with real danger or immediate danger. The problem is with perceived danger, which is where all anxiety comes from. Recall that the brain does not distinguish future danger from present danger because it doesn’t know that the future exists: all is in the present as far as the brain is concerned.

Let me bring you back to infancy where fear is the only, or at least the primary emotion that we have. The three ingredients that we need in infancy are, in order of importance: safety, nurturance, and comfort. By far the most important aspect of infancy is safety. If I’m not safe, I will likely die. Then we need nurturance (food) and comfort (physical touch). We can survive without nurturance for a few hours or even days. And we can actually survive without any physical touch whatever, although such a situation does some significant damage to the brain. What sometimes happens in infancy is that the infant gets too much nurturance or too much comfort and not enough times of fear, however odd that sounds. Overprotective parents often render too much of these last two ingredients, nurturance and comfort. A normally developing infant actually needs to be scared for a while before s/he is nurtured or comforted so the infant can feel that the environment is safe…ultimately. In other words the infant gets the message, usually after many hours and days of crying, that s/he does get comfort and nurturance and other care, like diaper-changing, but s/he doesn’t get it at the instant s/he wants it. Give an infant too much comfort and s/he will go through the rest of life seeking undue comfort. Give the infant too much nurturance, and s/he will think that s/he has to be nurtured all the time. There, of course, the opposite side of the coin, namely when the infant actually doesn’t get enough safety, nurturance, or comfort. When an infant is deprived of basic safety, s/he will then do the very same thing: seek undue comfort and nurturance in some way. In sum, the origin of anxiety and undue fear comes from infancy originally, and often from too much or too little of one of the basic ingredients: safety, nurturance, and comfort. This leads to all sorts of unfortunate coping that people do in the real world.

In this paradigm the basic element for which people “cope” is fear of some sort. Listen carefully to people who are stressed, frustrated, challenged, or worried, and you will hear the fear element. E.g. “I’m afraid that he will…,” “I don’t know what I’m going to do with…,” “I’m so frustrated with….because she…,” “What in the world will happen if….” While people saying these things indicate that they are “frustrated,” the real emotion they feel is fear, and this fear is one of helplessness in the face of some impending something. There is “good coping” that we will discuss in a moment, but presently let’s look at typical coping that people do. In a nutshell, they pass over the basic fear that an infant feels and go right into seeking the second and third ingredients of good parenting of an infant: nurturance and comfort. This doesn’t seem so bad on the surface. It doesn’t seem so bad to seek some kind of “support” in the form of some kind of “food” or some kind of human comfort. But when nurturance and comfort are sought in place of facing, feeling, and finishing basic fear, comfort and nurturance only assuage the fear; these things do not finish the fear. People “feel better” when they nurture themselves or find comfort in the arms, physically, emotionally, or cognitively. But they aren’t “better.” They just feel better…for the moment. And then things can easily turn to coping to a fault. I used this expression with a patient recently and he asked me what it meant. “To a fault” means doing something that is intrinsically good in itself but this something is used too much, so much often that this something encroaches on the rest of life.

Seeking comfort and nurturance to a fault actually leads to addiction. Addiction is also a brain-based phenomenon. Recall that the brain only knows safety first and pleasure second. So, if your brain has found that you “feel better” with some kind of nurturance or comfort, you will then continue to seek one or both of these things because your brain is trying to make you feel better. Your brain doesn’t know that if you do anything “to a fault,” you are on a dangerous path. A basic element of addiction is that the substance or behavior is increasingly sought after while at the same time giving less and less satisfaction and security. So, nurturance of some kind and comfort of some kind are first good, then not so good, and then actually bad for you. What is happening in all these circumstances is that you are actually led by craving of some sort but receiving comfort and nurturance less and less. An interesting study done by a neuropsychologist of my acquaintance found that the “craving” that addicts have is chemical, while the liking that addicts have is electrical. The stronger of these two elements is the craving. Most addicts will say that their looking forward to their addictive substance or behavior is much more attractive than their actually liking of it. I defer this discussion at this point but I did a blog on liking and wanting that you might read.

We will discuss what can be done profitably when one fears something, but for the moment allow me to discuss the typical coping/addictive things that people do. Note that in all of these behaviors and substances, people have some kind of short-lived pleasure at the cost of a lot of long-term distress. Addictions fall into two categories: behavior and chemical. They include the following:

  • Behavioral addictions:
    • Gambling
    • Screen time (computer, gaming, TV, Internet searching)
    • Sexual (promiscuity, excessive masturbation and pornography, fetishes)
    • Cognitive (excessive dreaming, imagination)
    • Emotional (excessive emotional expression; no emotional expression)
    • Playing (too much, not enough)
    • Working (too much, nor enough)
    • Sleeping (too much, not enough)
  • Chemical additions
    • Eating (too much, too little)
    • Stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, cocaine)
    • Depressants (alcohol, sedatives, marijuana)
    • Hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.)

Note that all of these things, whether chemical or behavioral, are good in themselves, and some of them are essential, like eating, working, emotional, and cognitive. Recall, an addiction is something to a fault, but more revealing, an addiction is something that I do that begins to be life itself rather than enhancing life. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with eating but people who eat excessively, or fail to eat sufficiently, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food, eating, or avoiding eating. Then eating is an addiction. Recall that the brain has just two operations, namely safety and pleasure, so when you engage in an activity to a fault, the brain doesn’t know that this excessive activity has adverse effects on the rest of your life and your future. Your brain doesn’t know the rest of your life, much less the future.

The key in all of these behaviors is fear, namely how fear has come to dominate the person. A person who is anorexic fear-based. He can actually become delusional thinking that certain foods, too much of a food, or food itself is dangerous. Then the brain kicks in and protects the anorexic person from food, actually causing physical damage…in the future but not in the present. Fear always starts an addiction but only after there has been a good bit of joy. On the other side of addictive eating we have excessive eating. In this case the second element of the brain is activated: pleasure. I might really enjoy eating a large pizza, but if I eat three large pizzas every day, my joy will lesson, and more importantly, the brain will begin to feel that you are depriving yourself of joy, or worse yet, began to think (loosely speaking) that you are in danger if you don’t eat pizzas every day. If your brain is fear-based and fear-activated, you may be caught in a cycle of quick joy and long lasting unhappiness that can only be assuaged by eating more pizzas.

I have discussed addictions as a way of coping, but are all people inclined towards addictions? In a word, yes. If we cope with our fear by falling into some kind of personally damaging behavior, we are then addicted to it, whether this behavior is eating, sleeping, thinking, emoting or any of the other things noted above. I don’t wish to suggest that everyone is addicted, like in the sense of being a chronic alcoholic, but rather I am suggesting that most coping that people do fails to assuage the fear and find a way through it. So, what can be done to correct this pattern that is fear-based?

Successful dealing with harmful coping

Be sad. This is the only cure for fear. Let me explain. Recall that fear is the most basic emotion we have and that the purpose of fear is to keep us alive. Also remember that an infant needs safety first, nurturance second, and comfort third. When that infant fails to get enough safety for whatever reason, he then will seek nurturance and/or comfort. The groundwork for overcoming fear and its cognates, anxiety and worry, is in understanding this concept of fear, first that it is basic to human existence, second that it is necessary to sustain life. It is never helpful to see fear as something wrong, nor is it helpful to think of such things as anxiety as “something wrong” inside of me. You need to move your life from being fear-based to love-based, but in order to do that you will need to feel sad. What does this mean? How does feeling sad assuage fear and replace it with love. Deb and I dealt with this concept primarily in our Good Grief book and secondarily in I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we discussed the fact that sadness is a “love problem,” meaning that if I am sad, I have lost something that I loved. Sadness is not depression or despair. It is the way your soul manages loss, and it is wholly a good thing. More importantly, it is not fear-based. In fact, you cannot be both afraid and sad, which is the key to understanding how to move your life forward from fear to love. Very importantly, fear does not end on its own. It stays the same, gets worse, or is repressed. Sadness ends. I may be sad for seconds or hours but sadness always ends if I allow myself to feel sad.

This is how sadness can replace fear: (1) Notice the fear that you have right now. Notice what you feel in your body that indicates that you are afraid (or anxious or worried). (2) Remind yourself that your brain is taking care of you because your brain believes that “there is a lion coming over the hill” or something just as dangerous. Your brain is doing its most basic job: keeping you alive. (3) Think of what you are afraid of losing. This might be girlfriend, job, tool, opportunity, or house. Consider how you might feel if you would lose this thing. Note that you will begin to feel sad. (4) Allow yourself to feel sad about what you might lose. Note that when you are thinking, just imagining that you might lose this something that you love in the future, you start to feel sad in the present. (5) Let this sadness run its course. (6) Notice that you feels less afraid or anxiety, perhaps not afraid at all. Instead, you feel sad. We call this anticipatory sorrow. Note further that you are now feeling the love you have for this something, whether girlfriend, job, property, or idea. You have replace fear with sadness. Fear is about danger. Sadness is about love. You’ll probably need a good therapist to guide you through this process. Later, you can do it on your own.

You can do the same procedure with something that you have lost in the past if you follow the same path: remember what you had, remember what you lost, and remember how difficult it was for you to having lost this something. Your fear of losing something in the future might well have to do with something in the past. A couple of days ago I dealt with a young man who came to see me because of chronic anxiety. He has been afraid all his life, namely that his father would die for some unknown reason. As we looked at his past life, which had been unduly attached to his father and afraid of losing his father, that he had not ever lived a day without this undue fear. The more we looked at this loss of 24 years of life in fear, the sadder he became. The more he felt sad about this profound loss, the less he felt fear and anxiety. I asked him how much fear he had. He said, “None”…while he was crying for having lost so much of life to fear. He found it helpful to stop using “anxiety” that he “has” but the feeling, “I do not feel safe in the world” added with the statement, “The world is safe”. Talking about his experience with anxiety this way moved him away from something that he has to something that he feels.

The Apostle Paul said, “Perfect love cast out fear” among other things having to do with loving more than fearing. Likewise, Buddha said similar things as have many philosophers over the years. But finding “perfect love” is a life challenge. It is better to seek perfect love, even though we know that we will never have it, than it is to worry about not having something that we love.

Fear less; love more. Along the way feel occasionally sad. Sadness always ends.

Are All Men Selfish?

Ron Johnson appreciation, Children, communication, Connection, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, men's issues, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

What an outrageous question, right? This is just as outrageous as my previous blog about “women never admit that they’re wrong.” This equally outrageous statement about men is not made in jest because men are frequently accused of being selfish, particularly by the women in their lives. I think there is something very important in this question because there is a certain truth to the statement that all men are selfish, or at least look selfish. We will examine several things in this blog, not the least of which are related to my last blog about women seemingly having a difficult time admitting that they’re wrong. Let’s examine what “selfish” means, especially as it compares to narcissism. We will look at the positive aspect of selfishness, the negative aspect of it, and the very opposite of selfishness, selflessness, which can be good and not so good. Then let’s look at how men operate, at least for the most part, that makes them look selfish and act selfish.

What is selfishness?

This is an unfortunate word that has creeped into the English vocabulary over the recent decades, perhaps centuries. On the surface selfish means one is oriented towards oneself. So, at least at this level, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with being selfish if it means that he (or she; but let’s stay with “he” for now) is aware of himself and looks at the world as a person who is independent from everyone else. John Donne said, “Every man is an island to himself” 400 years ago, but Donne’s intent was to deal with the isolation that so many people feel. So, we could say that there is at least some value in being selfish while there is a danger. This will be the main point I wish to convey in this essay. In other words, you need to know who you are in order to do anything in the world.

This “knowing who you are” ideally coms early in life, starting about age two but blossoming during the years 2-5 or 6. These toddler and early childhood years when ideally the person has received the security, nurturance, and comfort one needs during the first year or two of life, and is now ready to engage in the social world. The heart of “self” as we discuss it in psychology is having a sense of security that can only come from a secure environment. So, if the infant has received these basic three elements (security, nurturance, and comfort), s/he will be able to then bridge safely and confidently into the world. And this is very important because the rest of the world will not provide these three basic elements. The individual needs to find a way to find his or her (now let’s just go with “his”) way in life by his own wits. This is the positive aspect of “selfishness,” i.e. knowing who you are and going through the rigors of the toddler/early childhood years when you still think that you should have everything you want. You don’t know that at age, say, four, your wants have accelerated 100-fold while your needs have stayed the same: security, nurturance, and comfort. During infancy your wants were quite simple as they were essentially needs, i.e. food and safety. So the positive essence of selfishness is having sense of self, where I provide most of my security, nurturance, and comfort. I look out to not fall off a cliff or run in front of a car, I feed myself, and I take care of myself for the most part. I should not need the same amount of comfort as a 4-year old that I needed as a one-year old. But what happens when I don’t get my infantile needs met? I remain “self-less.”

The two aspects of selflessness

Unfortunately, many people do not adequately receive these three basic elements in infancy and are not prepared to engage the world that does not care for them as their parents did…or should have done. When this happens, the individual (we’re talking mostly about men, so let’s use the masculine pronoun from here on) does not have the groundwork to enter the years 2-6 where he needs to find himself, be himself, and exert himself in order to make it in the world. If the person does not get a foundation in infancy, particularly of safety, nurturance, and comfort, he will not be ready for the journey that begins in these early childhood years and never ends. Such a person will then be seeking these basic infantile needs from other people, or perhaps by some kind of addictive substance or behavior to give him a sense of self. Chemical addictions give the man an artificial sense of self as he finds a chemical way to feel safe and productive. Behavioral addictions do the same thing because they give the man a sense of purpose: gamble (and hopefully make a million dollars) or work all the time, and hence give the man a sense of safety, eat excessively (and serve the need for nurturance), or engage in some form of sexual addiction (and give the man a sense of comfort). All of these addictions are attempts to find a sense of self because the man didn’t have an adequate sense of self when he was four.

The other aspect of selflessness is what we normally think of with the term: a tendency to take care of others and serve the world. People who do, indeed, focus their lives on service can be people who have a good sense of self, so good, in fact that they forget about themselves in their charitable work. People who are truly generous are people who have a good sense of self, so good that they are able to spend hours or dollars without needing or seeking any kind of reward beyond the satisfaction and pleasure of taking care of people or the world in some way. My first therapist and life’s mentor, Dr. Vernon Grounds, was such a person. He had a very solid sense of self, so solid that he didn’t have to prove himself to anyone and could spend 18 hours a day caring for people like me and other students and faculty in the seminary where he was president and professor.

These are two distinct kinds of selflessness but they can seem to appear together, which actually never happens. Many people who are apparently quite generous and positively selfless are seeking approval and attention. They have not found the intrinsic value of giving and the satisfaction of improving the world in some way. Many good men work too much and give too much because they are unable to say “no” to the needs of the world, often the seeming needs of people in their lives. True positive selflessness is demonstrated by the man who “let his nay be nay and his aye be aye.” In other words, the man who can say no just as easily as he can say yes. Many men struggle with this.

Selfishness and narcissism

Deb and I wrote a chapter in a book a few years back where we unpacked the word narcissism. Unfortunately, in contemporary society, this term has been used to a fault and without a real understanding of what the word narcissism means and what narcissism comes from. In our paper we proposed that there is a natural narcissism and an extensive of natural narcissism into adult life. On the surface narcissism seems to suggest that the individual is selfish, i.e. cares only about himself and thinks only about his own needs and wants. There is some truth to this with people who we might dare to call narcissistic, but there is great danger in using this word without knowing what natural narcissism is.

Natural narcissism, or childhood narcissism is what we have been discussing in the 2-6 year old time of life where I have the opportunity to develop a sense of self so that I can effectively engage the world. So, the 4-year old is “narcissistic” because he is looking to get his needs and wants met (even though he doesn’t really distinguish wants and needs). Then he meets some kind of resistance or limitation, puts up a fuss, and finds a way to get around the limitation, or hopefully adjust to the limits of life. This finding and fighting limits during these early childhood years is where most people fail in personal development. They either continue to fight so much that the world around them (usually parents) give into him, go their own way and trust no one, or they give up trying and find ways to accommodate to what everyone wants of them. Ideally, the boy finds a way to accept some limits and challenge others in such a way that he learns that he can have want he needs but not necessarily what he wants. What generates out of this crucial time of life is that the individual develops a sense of self from which he can engage the world successfully. When the boy has been indulged with getting too much of what he wants, he will continue to retain the natural narcissism of childhood into adulthood. If he has not been given enough freedom and encouragement together with appropriate limitations, he will also retain a narcissistic view of life but hold onto the belief that he needs to find the right place, people, and parental substitutes to give him what he wants. These are two different forms of narcissism in adult life, one “selfish” (I get what I want by demand), and one “selfless” (I’ll never get what I want so I have to depend on others to give it to me).

The bottom line is that adult narcissism is not selfishness so much as it is a lack of self, namely a self that knows that he can get what he needs, mostly by his own hands, but he can’t get most of what he wants because we all, quite simply, want more than we can have. These are the two holes that so many people fall into: I have a right to get what I want all the time or I have to find people to give me what I want. Most men tend to fall into the former group. Most women tend to fall into the second group. Both forms of narcissism are dead ends in life. But before we end this diatribe on selfishness, let’s look at another aspect of men’s apparent selfishness that has more to do with their independent nature…to a fault.

Independence to a fault

There is an interesting passage in Genesis, chapter 3 where God speaks to the metaphorical characters Adam and Eve after they have discovered the difference between good and evil when they ate the forbidden fruit from one tree. God said that the man would “work by the sweat of his brow,” in other words working hard. God said to the woman that she “would look to the man.” We dealt a bit with the “looking to the man” with women in our last blog. Notably, in this same chapter God said that he kept them from eating from the Tree of Life. We might conjecture that had Adam and Eve been more obedient to the limits (of childhood?), that they would have matured into Life more successfully. Regardless as to whether you believe this story as fact or myth, or disbelieve its value altogether, it does provide an interesting view of what a male needs to do in life: work. Carol Gilligan in a marvelous piece of psychological literature suggested that women are more naturally “communal” while men are more naturally “agenic.” This means that men might be more inclined to do their own thing while women being more inclined to do something with someone else, often with the man. Some biblical theologians have suggested that in Genesis 1, where Adam and Eve are created together, both worked side by side and both were communal, but in Chapter 3 these dimensions of humankind were separated. Let’s leave the Bible and go into how men actually operate with this work thing.

I propose that it is more natural for men to be independent and women to be more communal. Note that I do not suggest that women are the opposite of independent, i.e. dependent, but rather that they are more communal. We discussed the value and angers of communality in the previous blog, namely women tending to tell men what to do in an attempt to find communality. But the men’s side of the phenomenon here is their tendency to be independent to a fault, i.e. do what they want without regard for the other people in their lives, especially the women in their lives. Let me give you some examples.

Jack is an independent guy. He, like most of the men who come to my office, came with the figurative “female handprint in his back,” namely because his wife thought that he had some kind of problem. I talked about Jack’s wife in my last blog, but here I want to talk about Jack. He has been a successful tradesman and businessman for many years and has been in various businesses over time largely because he works hard and he works smart. Unfortunately for Julia, his wife, she has not always been a part of his business decisions and directions. He has, simply stated, gone on his merry way doing what he has thought is the right thing to do. And he has done quite well as he has looked at the business landscape. The difficulty with Jack, as he relates to Junie, is not his work or his decisions, but he going on with it on his own. Nothing wrong with doing things that seem right to you, but if you’re in a marriage where your wife wants to be a part of your life, you might want to converse with her about what you’re planning to do. This just doesn’t occur to Jack. Hence, his wife sees him as “selfish,” or worse yet narcissistic. There is a lot of truth her allegation but I have to be very careful with dealing with Jack’s independence because he has taken care of himself all of his life and has never really trusted anyone.

Sam is quite like Jack, i.e. independent to a fault. A physician, he has also chosen many directions in life, some having to do with his profession, some having to do with his philosophical and theological orientation to the world. He has spent thousands of dollars, much of it unwisely, investing in one thing or another but hasn’t consulted with his wife about these decisions. She sees him as selfish and narcissistic. Like Jack, he does not have a good sense of self and has, indeed, been independent because he needed to be that way to survive the shaming father in his life. Unfortunately, now he has also suffered the shaming of his wife who doesn’t know any way of dealing with the fact that he doesn’t consult her on his decisions.

Jack and Sam are representations of many men who have this biblical directive, “work by the sweat of your brow” without knowing that they are doing it. It just doesn’t occur to men who are exceedingly independent that there is a danger of going it alone. There is nothing wrong with independence, just as there is nothing wrong with communality, but there are dangers in both.

Dealing with men’s selfishness

  • Point one: value your orientation to life as an independent entity. You are good at doing your own thing and good at taking responsibility for your successes and failure
  • Realize that independence to a fault is selfishness, built on a lack of a clear sense of self. If you re in this category, you must find a way to get a better foundation of your self that is not only what you do and not only doing something on your own.
  • Admit to your significant other, or if you don’t have one, to a trusted friend, what you think, what you feel, and how you look at what you do in life. You will find that you don’t so much need advice as communality, i.e. a feeling of togetherness.
  • If you’re a person, say, a woman in this independent man’s life, tell him how you feel. Don’t tell how you feel about him. Tell him you miss him, enjoy his company, and enjoy hearing about what he does and where he’s going in life. He doesn’t know that he needs you, that he needs someone in life. Be careful to avoid telling him what he should do. Instead, tell him that you love him and want to be more a part of his thinking, feeling, and doing.  By the way, you got together with him in the first place because you liked his independence.

References

Gilligan, Carol. In a different voice.

Johnson and Brock, I want to tell you how I feel

Johnson, blog: “Why Good Men Lie”

Love III: Not Loved Right

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, love, mindfulness, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the third of several blogs on love. Previously, I introduced this series noting that love is so important that it is undefinable, like other undefinable basic elements of life such as “feelings” which is so central to human existence and relationships, as well as time, distance, and mass, which are also undefined but are the basic ingredients of the universe. Having admitted that love is undefinable, we proposed that we learn about love from experience, just as we learn about time and feelings from experience. In fact, the more we experience love, both in the giving and in the receiving, the more we understand it. In the immediately previous blog we studied different approaches to love that people of different temperaments have. In this blog I want to discuss how everyone is love to some degree but that no one is loved perfectly. And there are consequences of “not being loved right.”

Not loved right

No one is loved right, if by “right” we mean perfect. Love is simply too complex, too godly, and too unique to ever be rendered perfect. “Not loved right” doesn’t mean that the person wasn’t loved, nor does it mean there is something intrinsically wrong with the person who attempted to love the person, nor does it mean that the individual who was not loved right was somehow unlovable. So what does this “not loved right” actually mean? It means that there are always elements of the loving process that are missing however much the person was loved. I often tell patients that they were loved right, and I have found that they are able to accept this statement without disparaging their parents or other loved ones. Somehow, people intrinsically know that they were not loved right because they feel it in their souls. I find it important to help people find how they were not loved right and consequently identifiable the results of this phenomenon, to come to terms with this apparent fact, and find ways to adapt and accommodate to having a good life without forever looking for someone to love them perfectly.

There are many ways that people are not loved right. Some folks were, sadly, raised in families where they were not loved at all, while others were loved in families where they were cherished beyond all reason. Let’s look at some of these ways of not having been loved right.

Not loved at all

You may have heard of the tragedy that occurred in Romania 30-odd years ago when the dictator under the Soviet-based regime fostered a program of excessive births in the country. Sadly, many of these children were placed in orphanages, or just “left on the doorstep” of these orphanages that were already overcrowded with children who had been abandoned by parents who simply could not afford to raise them. The tragic result of this overcrowding was that many of these children were simply not loved for at all. They were fed and occasionally diapered, but they often went hours or days without any kind of human comforting touch. The result of this was that many of these children were neurologically impaired, meaning that their brains did not develop adequately. They may have developed some cognitive skills, but many of them did not even do that. The conclusion of researchers of these neglected children was that they simply and profoundly had missed the essential ingredient of physical touch that somehow stimulated the brain to grow normally. While we don’t quite understand the interaction of physical touch, we now know that without it, the infant will not mature normally, and this lack of maturity may be permanent. My daughter, Jenny, volunteered a couple of weeks in an orphanage in Romania simply caring for some of these children, something for what I will be forever grateful as she possibly saved one or more children from a life without much hope.

While few children in America suffer such a tragic fate aside from the occasional situations that we have all heard about where a child was chained in a basement or something for months or years. You might also have heard about the instance of a child having been raised in the wilderness by some animal group and was discovered naked and completely unaware of her (I believe the child was female) humanity, much less any kind of human speech. This poor child matured in human ways after she was captured but never achieved anything like a normal life. Aside from the oddities of terrible parents doing terrible parenting, we do not have many such tragedies although we might consider what it might be like to live in a primitive society or in a society with a primitive religious orientation that does not allow for normal infant care.

While there are a few of these tragedies in America and in the other developed countries, there are many examples of less severe shortage of love that occur. In fact, as I previously stated, none of us have been loved perfectly right despite our parents doing stellar jobs with us. Let’s look at some of the ways we have not been loved right.

Indulged

It is with great concern that I observe a plethora of inadequate loving that many parents afford their children in the form of indulgence. Having been privileged to have grown up somewhat in the 40’s and mostly in the 50’s, I went “out to play” for most of these years perhaps beginning as early as three. I lived in Clearfield, PA at the time on the edge of town not a stone’s throw from an old coal mine as well as a myriad of Pennsylvania hills and streams. My brother, a couple years my senior, and I would often be gone for hours just playing in the words, the hills, and yes, in the coal mine. Such things are unheard of today. I agree that there were dangers in such free play, as it is called, but also much freedom that I think formatted by basic groundwork of self-confidence having had to get myself out of dangerous places and all the rest of free play. I see few kids who “just go out and play today.” This freedom of movement, which was a kind of libertarian parenting, continued into my adolescent years and often led me to understand consequences more than punishment, reward, and restriction. There is great value of freedom in such parenting but also dangers. I had the freedom to debate with my parents, and while rarely arguing with them, I was allowed talk back to my parents as if I were their equal. This indulgence did not prepare me well for the real world where I had to slowly learn to keep my mouth shut. So, I was indulged with freedom.

Some kids are indulged in other ways, often with material things. I dare say that my daughter, Krissie, indulged both of her kids, particularly her older child, Gavin, who yet struggles to find out how the world is not his mother. He has yet to find a balance of work, play, listening and talking that is essential in the real world. Many parents protect their children, seemingly out of love, that these children do not learn to face the uncertainties, failures, criticism, and other disappointments because they have been too shielded from such things. Aside from the indulgence of freedom and of protection there is the obvious indulgence of toys. I am always surprised that the bulk of items at garage sales are the plastic toys that have been purchased, used briefly, and tossed in a corner before they ended up on the sidewalk. I talked to a young man who said that his mother had given him four drones, each costing more than the previous one, to the point that he was simply not interested in it drones anymore. This indulgence can last into adulthood came in the form of a 23-year old who admitted that he had spent thousands of dollars on sophisticated motorized play cars and trucks before his friends and he lost interest in them.

We don’t normally think of indulgence as “not being loved right,” but it is indeed the case. I admit that I indulged my daughter Krissie, largely because of her “player” nature without knowing I was doing that. I attempted to give her the libertarian freedom that I had, but the world of the 80’s was substantially different from the 50’s, and it didn’t work for her. I think she never recovered from my indulgence, something that may have contributed to her untimely death two years ago. We will discuss the effects of indulgence and ways to correct it at another time, but first we need to attend to some other forms of “not being loved right.”

Neglect

Quite different from indulgence is neglect. While there are (hopefully) few children who are truly not loved at all like the Romanian infants and the poor children who are housed by profoundly disturbed people, there are many children who are neglected. They may have a “roof over the head and necessary food” for survival, they are not loved to a degree that allows them to fully grow up. With few exceptions children who are raised in truly neglectful homes have little success in the world. Theirs is an attitude of surviving, not thriving. As a result of their neglect and the consequences of their seeing the world as a place to survive, they often end up with very damaging intimate relationships, unemployment, and quazi-criminal activities. While we need to find ways to help these people, unfortunately, the culture also needs to protect itself from people who are surviving because they are dangerous. They are dangerous not because they are intrinsically bad, but they are like an animal cornered in some way. Such an animal will be dangerous because the fight instinct dominates when the flight instinct cannot be accessed. People who have been significantly neglected rarely find a way to thrive in the world because of the secondary problems they have created in their lives. We will discuss how to deal with such people at another time because many of these people end up in some kind of incarceration, financial difficulties, or in counseling offices with little hope of finding a meaningful life.

While there are many people who have been neglected to a profound degree, there are many more who have been neglected for a period of time in their lives or have been neglected by otherwise very good parents. Sometimes well-meaning parents restrict their children to such a degree that these children fail to thrive in childhood and hence fail to thrive in adulthood.

Restriction

Restrictions and limitations are absolutely necessary in life. We discussed the danger of indulgence in some homes where children do not have sufficient boundaries to feel safe and to prepare themselves for adulthood. Many more children are restricted from some of the essential ingredients of a home that include the three basic ingredients of life: feeling, thinking, and doing.

The most emotionally damaging restriction is that where the child is not given sufficient time to feel. As we discussed in I Want You to Know How I Feel, “feelings” are more than emotion. We suggest that feelings themselves are never wrong, but when we use the word feelings we are talking about the basic core that everyone has. Feelings are the most basic expression of our inner selves. When feelings erupt, they do so in the sequence of physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. Children can be unduly limited in any of these ways. Some children are restricted physically by their not being able to go outside, listen to radio or TV, go to school, go with friends, or simply run. Parents who restrict the actual movement of children are keeping them from understanding how their bodies work.

More significant restrictions comes in the form of emotions. Many children are not allowed the normal expression of emotions, like joy, sadness, fear and anger. I have many people in my office who report that they were not allowed to cry, sometimes with the addendum, “If you start crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” meaning some kind of spanking. In some homes there is a danger of indulging children by allowing them to cry excessively, express anger excessively, or express fear excessively, or even express joy excessively however odd that sounds. More often, homes fail to allow their children a relatively free expression of emotions where they learn the value and the dangers of expressing emotions. Such homes are more than stoic. They are repressive, and the repression of emotions can leave a lifelong mark on an individual. I currently see a man who is in his 70’s and cannot think of a single time he has made a mistake despite the fact that he has grossly low self-esteem and is consequently afraid of doing anything that could be determined to be “wrong” by someone else, and for the most part can’t even say something that might seem to someone to be untoward.

The largest damage that is done by restriction comes with people who have not been given many opportunities to express a breadth of emotions, but some children are restricted from thinking in some ways or doing certain things. Many homes are so restrictive of what one says that it seems impossible to even think in a way that might be different from what the parents believe. The more visible restriction, however, is in what children are allowed to do. I was raised in a distinctively evangelical Christian home, but I did not receive the restrictions that other kids at our church had, namely no alcohol, smoking and swearing that might seem reasonable, but also no movies, dancing, playing cards, “mixed” (heterosexual) bathing, and in some cases no TV or radio.

Many of these restrictions are valuable and necessary but many are potentially damaging to people in their formative years. But most people have had at least a modicum of freedom in childhood, and yet everyone has had some experience of “not being loved right” that occurs from the best of people with the best of intentions. This failure of adequate loving comes largely from how different people love.

Limitations in loving due to temperament

A quick review of the way that people of different temperaments love in my previous blog might be in order. Roughly,

  • Lovers love by establishing and maintaining connection
  • Caretakers love by providing safety in their care of property
  • Analysts love by providing understanding and meaning
  • Players love by providing experience

All of these ways of loving are good and godly but none of them is perfect. Furthermore, people who love primarily, or perhaps even singularly in one of these ways of loving may, indeed, fail to love their children “right.” Let me give you some examples:

  • I know of many parents who have a lover temperament that are unable to understand why their player children, analyst children, or caretaker children seem not to want the kind of love that they offer. In fact, of all four of these temperaments I have the hardest time explaining to lovers that not all people want connection, and in some cases they might actively not want it. This comes as patently wrong to people whose primary goal in life is to connect and in so doing offer personal sacrifice to the people they love. In fact, children of lover parents who are, themselves, not lovers, can feel smothered by a lover parent who wants more physical and emotional contact than the child wants. How odd is it to say that many lover parents fail to love their children right.
  • Caretakers, like me are equally at fault for failing to love right. It’s easier for me see how caretaker love can lead to people around him/her not being loved right. We caretakers, remember, have a primary orientation to the care of property. I could even say that we love property the way lovers love people, but this would not be entirely true because our love of people is intrinsic in the taking care of property. Than having been said, it is easy for caretakers to get lost in the care of property and lose sight of the use of property for humankind, which includes family and friends. I made mistakes with both of my girls with my caretaking-based love: for Krissie, the older and the player, I gave her too much freedom and not enough keeping her nose to the grindstone. For Jenny, the younger, introverted and lover by nature often got left because of her extraverted more demanding sister. More importantly, however, I took advantage of her accepting, loving ways but undoubtedly didn’t love her the way lovers need to be loved.
  • Analysts also fail to love people right not out of some pernicious nature but rather due to their tendency to make the world a better place by looking for problems to solve and prevent. Analysts tend to speak much more about what is not right than what is right, not because they are intrinsically mean-spirited and critical, but because they always see how something…or someone…could be better. As I noted in my temperamental loving blog I noted how analysts tend to be the least liked of the four temperaments because of this tendency to comment on what is wrong, not right.
  • Players are so interested in experience and excitement that they can get lost in these two realms. Players are at their best in the matter of loving when they can help people play, experience, and find joy in life. That having been said, they can be the worst, or even dangerous, when they play because they tend to throw caution to the wind. I have seen players drag people into some activity that their friends had no interest in just because the player thought it would be fun. So, while players bring the most joy to people when they are at their best, they are often fail to love people right.

It should be implicit in how temperamental differences can lead people to love in the wrong ways, love to a fault, or even resist loving at all because they have been misunderstood in the past or hurt someone in the past. The key is to “know thyself,” namely to know who you are, how you love, and then add to that knowledge of knowing other people. A failure to love right is not a failure to love.

Some examples of not having been loved right include:

  • The caretaker raised by a lover who wanted his daughter to just sit and cuddle more than just do something
  • The man who never heard that his father loved him because his father had never heard such things from his father
  • The child who was raised in a restrictive environment and never learned how to value and express her feelings
  • The man who was so good at loving his wife that he gave in too much to her and ended up in bankruptcy at their senior years
  • The man who was not loved much at all because his mother was a drug addict
  • The woman who was loved so much that she never learned how to deal with people who didn’t love her
  • The lesbian woman who was raised in a “loving” and evangelical Christian family and couldn’t “come out” until she was 45 only to be rejected by this same family.
  • The man who learned to push all his feelings into alcohol just like his father did
  • The extraverted man who was raised in such a good accepting family that it never occurred to him that someone might actually not lake him
  • The analyst man who was raised by a caretaker father who couldn’t understand why his son would rather read than mow the lawn
  • The brilliant professional introverted analyst man who has never felt loved by his lover wife because neither understood their profound differences
  • The woman who ended up promiscuous because she didn’t have a meaningful relationship with her mother.
  • The child who was loved right by father but not by mother

All of these people, all of their spouses, and all of their parents were good people, not abusive, not indulgent, and not neglectful. All of them are real people although the particulars have been adjusted to protect their identities.

Live right. That is first rule. Love right. That is the second rule. Consider how you were loved but not loved right. We will tackle that next:

Next up: Love IV: I See You (being open to being loved)