relationships

Good for Me; Bad for Me VII: Good for Me; Bad for You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, family, Feelings, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

My wife likes masks. I don’t. So what does this have to do with “good for me; bad for me”? Lots. Let me explain, but first let me review what I’ve been writing about in recent blogs.

I have proposed that there is a spectrum of things that are, quite simply, “good for me” or “bad for me.” Furthermore, the spectrum ranges from mildly good for to very good for me on one side and then mildly bad for me to significantly bad for me. The spectrum in its simplest form is:

Something that is good for me                               /                             Something that is bad for me

I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be subcategorized as follows:

  • The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive                /                      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                                      to                                                     (profound)

  • The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting            /           Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                        to                                                                    (profound)

We most recently discussed “complexities” of such things, like when you don’t like something that is good for you, like green vegetables that my grandson hates, or working out that I hate. The present discussion is also complex but the complexities are different because they include times when something is:

  • Good for you but not good for someone else
  • Good for someone else but not good for you
  • Good for you and someone else
  • Bad for you and someone else

I want to help you find ways to deal with all these possibilities because this is the heart of the what makes a good relationship, where a brief encounter at the grocery store or  a long-term marital relationship. Furthermore, there are challenges that occur in relationships when there is agreement as well as when there is disparity in what is “good for you” and “bad for you.” In the following categories I am collapsing “liking” and “good for you” for purposes of brevity.

Good for me; Bad for you

This is the most common challenge in relationships, again noting that “relationships” can be intimate or brief. In this category we have at least the following:

  • I like Trump; you don’t; and vise versa
  • I enjoy green vegetables; you don’t
  • Alcohol is good for me; not for you
  • I need to talk; you need silence
  • I watch TV; you don’t
  • I like to read; you don’t
  • It’s good for me to wear a mask; it’s not good for you
  • I trust doctors; you don’t
  • I am a theist; you are an atheist
  • I like debates; you don’t
  • I favor the Black Lives Matter movement; you think it’s awful

Let’s consider one or two of these. The current health, political, and cultural matters so dominate America, whether it is Black Lives, wearing masks, or Trump. How difficult is it for you to go into a store where you “have to wear a mask”, or is it difficult for you to go into a store and see other people without masks? This is an example of the highly emotional element that is always involved in something that is “good for you” or “bad for you.” When emotion runs high, there is a danger of a certain kind of emotionally-caused blindness, superiority, or anger. Consider how you react to the mandate for masks or the lack of people following the mandate for masks, and you will find emotion. Now consider that this emotion erupts from your inner self or soul. Deb and I have just finished our final review of I Want to Tell You How I Feel in which we discuss how “feelings” erupt from a central core self and go sequentially through physical, emotional, cognitive, and active expressions. While we all have all four of these expressions, some people tend to recognize and express themselves in one of these expressions predominantly. Furthermore, emotion is the least developed feeling expression in America and hence the most dominant. So instead of simply noting that you feel sad because you are mandated to wear a mask, you get afraid and angry. Likewise, you do the same jump from sadness to anger and fear if you see other people failing to wear masks. I would propose that it would be helpful for all to recognize that masks are “good for you” and “bad for others” as a start. But this asks a lot of people: it asks them to be sad rather than angry. In my mind this is emotional maturity, i.e. staying with the disappointment, hurt, or sadness rather than letting allowing anger and fear to take over. This is the heart of what Deb and I wrote about in Good Grief.

Back to my original statement: Deb likes masks; I don’t. Well, it’s not true that I “don’t like masks.” What is true is that I choose to wear a mask in my office, which I deem as private, only when requested to do so by a patient. Deb, on the other hand, wears a mask with every patient and requires her patients to wear masks unless it is particularly inconvenient for them to do so. We have found some commonality in the mask-wearing matter but only as we have identified the “core self” matter, which I will discuss forthwith.

We could take any of the other examples noted above and examine them from the perspective of how some things make me sad, a sadness that I might tend to race right by preferring to be self-righteously angry or unduly afraid. There is more to the story but allow me to delay this discussion for a moment and examine the case when something is…

Good for you; Bad for me

We could consider all the political and cultural themes noted above. Let’s look at the Black Lives Matter discussion. This is a very good example of how many people feel deeply passionate about this movement, whereas as other people feel terribly offended. Supporters of Black Lives suggest that Blacks have been disenfranchised in America and feel deeply that there should be some political and cultural change to rectify this inequality. People who are not in favor of this movement speak of “what lives matter also” speaking of Caucasians, or “blue lives matter” speaking of police. On both sides of this discussion, however, lies a tremendous amount of passion with an even stronger element of anger. We have good people who are passionately demonstrating for equality sometimes becoming so engrossed in their emotions that they throw rocks into windows out of anger. We have equally good people who value “land order” and see window-breaking as “wrong”, so they fight back at people who are seeing that America’s cultural state is “not good for them” while their opponents see the movement as “not good for them.”

Let’s consider a somewhat more benign situation that is not so hotly emotional, like it being “good for you” to believe in God compared to people who find such belief “bad for them.” How can this happen? How can people feel that believing in God is bad for them? Being a theist myself, I have to stretch on this one, but I conjecture that atheists find so much wrong with religion that to even speak of a god is to speak a kind of evil. And it is important to note that both theists and atheists talk about “facts” and “science” and “logic” in defending their positions, which are more accurately feeling-based. So what is “feeling-based” mean? How do things become good for me or bad for me out of my “feelings”?

Feeling-based convictions

Since I have just finished the final review of the feeling book that Deb and I have written, this matter is very much on my mind, and it gives me a perspective of this “good for me” and “bad for me” matter. Feelings, as I see them, are an eruption out of our core selves, but I must quickly note that “feelings” and “core selves” are terms that are not defined, nor more so, by the way than time, distance, and mass are defined in physics, life is not defined in biology, or love is not defined in the human condition. To say something is “feeling-based” is tantamount to say that this something erupts from my core self, which in my mind is perfect, or perhaps the better word is pure. Hence, I would contend that the core self of someone who loves Trump is speaking of this purity/perfection just as the Trump hater is speaking of this purity-perfection. Then these two people express their core selves in a way we call “feeling.” So far, so good, as we then have two people speaking from the purity of core self expressing their core selves in feelings. But this is where things go array because people tend to race right through the physical manifestation of feelings and the emotional element of feelings right into the cognitive expression not knowing that they have missed the point. The point is that they have a core self value that is pure but this core value is not easily communicated in words and action without first recognizing the emotional element along the way. If we could agree that the core self always is love-based, we would know that any expression of feeling is love-based. Then we might be able to talk about what we love rather than what we hate; we could talk about what is important to us rather what is anathema; we could talk about what is good for us rather than what is bad for us. This is a tough task and not many people do it.

Good for you; Good for me

This is rather simple category what simply suggests that something, whether Trump or masks, we can find some commonality with something being good for both you and me. Hence, we have political parties, athletic teams, musical themes, and academic pursuits that are good for you as they are good for me. There are actually a lot of them, and it behooves us to remember how many of these things there are.

By the way, something that seem good for me and good for you might not, actually be so good. It might not be ultimately good for Black Lives protesters to feel good about throwing rocks, and it might not be good for the folks on the other side to throw rocks at the demonstrators.

Obviously, the same goes for something that seems bad for you and bad for me. It takes an emotionally mature person to realize that when something seems bad for me, it might also be ultimately good for me. All of this suggests that it important to note the “good for me” and “bad for me” first, then the same for other people before trying to find the common ground, the common ground always being the purity of core self. Oh, that we could communicate our core selves to one another.

The challenge

The challenge is to actually see that our surface “good for me” or “bad for me” erupts from our core selves, which are as close to God (or godliness for you atheists) that we can get. Starting with this we can see that love is at the basis of all good and all that seem bad. Would that our cultural, religious, and political leaders could have this kind of conversation.

In the meantime it will be necessary to simply note, “this is good for me” or “this is bad for me” before we enter into any kind of discussion.

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 IV: Discernment of “Bad for Me”

Ron Johnson Discovery, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the fourth 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 for you or bad for you; in other words, a way to quantify just how good or bad something is on a spectrum:

_____________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

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

 

I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be sub-categorized as follows:

  • The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive                                      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                                      to                                                     (profound)

  • The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting                       Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                        to                                                                    (profound)

In this blog we will discuss the range of things that can be bad for me exclusively leaving the examination of things that are good for me for the next blog. There are other complexities and possibilities of the good for me and bad for discussion that will become more obvious as we go along. Let’s begin the present discussion with the challenge of discerning the degree something is good for me or bad for me.

Discernment of the degrees of “good for me” or “bad for me”

I must grant the obvious: this is a challenge and the words I have chosen are all murky at best. It may not be terribly important for you to make a distinction between these words. I offer them as examples of how you can discern just how good or bad something is. While I admit to this challenge, I still find it valuable to have an approximate awareness of the intensity of the things that are good for you or bad for you. If you understand how good something is or how bad it is, you have a lot more power in your life. You empower your life with more good things and fewer bad things. But you can’t make appropriate decisions about adding or subtracting things in your life without a good understanding of just how good something is or how bad it is for you.

Once you have determined how good something is, you can then find ways to enhance it in your life or perhaps find other things that are similarly good to enhance your life. Similarly, if you find something that is bad for you, you can find ways of reducing such things in your life and preventing similar bad things from entering your life. Let’s start by looking at things that might be mildly bad for you and move on to things that are more profoundly bad for you. We will discuss degrees of “good for you” in our next blog. As we discuss the range of things that can be bad for you, you might find it profitable to consider a similar range in your own life.

Things that are on the “bad for me” side of the spectrum:

Recall that I have suggested three terms that describe the intensity of something that could be mildly or moderately bad for you and three terms that could be more profoundly bad for you. Thus, something could be:

Uninteresting: I have always liked sports. I currently play basketball three times a week and occasionally play golf, waterski, and cross-country ski. While I very much enjoy engaging in these sports, I am not particularly interested in talking about sports. Much of what I hear from my sports-minded friends talk about is uninteresting to me, like what some NBA player did in last night’s game, current statistics of some quarterback, or who might win the next NCAA basketball title in. I might attend to wins and losses of the Wisconsin Badgers because I went to Wisconsin and currently live in the state, but I care little about who did what in some game in Los Angeles. While sports talk is uninteresting to me for the most part, I don’t think it has ever been even unpleasant for me to hear a friend talk about his favorite team or player, or his hopes for his team’s success in the next season.

My dear wife has a true passion for things green. She has several gardens around our home, reads garden books and magazines voraciously, and has a small green house on our property. Among other things she loves the greenhouse planting and seeding that she does in the winter, and thoroughly enjoys watching the fruits of her labor in the spring, both with vegetables and flowers. Since we have been together for 40-odd years, I have learned to appreciate her passion for such things, much because I have grown in my love for her and enjoy her while she is talking about her gardens. I enjoy her but I do not always enjoy hearing what she is talking about. I must admit that I am largely uninterested in gardens, growing and green. While I am occasionally interested in such things, most of the time I am not. I can patiently listen while she tells me about the various kinds of coreopsis but I am not really interested. My disinterest in gardening used to be quite hurtful to Deb partly because I didn’t know how to listen and she didn’t know how to talk to me as well as we do these days. We will deal with the “good for you but not good for me” in a future blog.

While I might not be interested in what people talk about, like gardens and sports, I am never actually uninterested in people themselves. Due to my natural personality and to my profession I can listen to things that are uninteresting to me without being uninterested in the person talking. This can be a challenge when someone is talking about actors and recent TV comedy shows for which I have no interest and no knowledge, but I am always fascinated by people’s interests because they say so much about the person.

Consider things that are simply uninteresting to you, things that you tend to bore you, or things that you just don’t care about. You will find that the people are not boring even if what they talk about is. Boring or uninteresting is generally a short-lived experience, but a step beyond uninteresting is when something is unpleasant.

Unpleasant. When something is just uninteresting, you do not have any significant physical or emotional reaction to it. you are just uninterested. However, when something becomes unpleasant, you begin to feel a kind of agitation that can come as a mild feeling of being unsettled, a desire to change the situation or the subject, or even a mild irritation.

It is often unpleasant to hear about people talk about their physical and medical problems. I admit that Deb and I are outliers on the use of medicine and medical professionals. We came into the field of psychology through what we might call the back door, namely from “existential therapy,” which roughly means that everything is psychological and most everything is personal. Hence, we think many physical anomalies are psychogenic and all of them are aggravated by psychological factors. So, when people talk about their aches and pains, the cocktails of medicines there on or the myriad of surgeries they have had, I tolerate such conversation but I am never interested and often feel a kind of agitation that I call unpleasant. I know that medical matters are dreadfully interesting to some people, including people who suffer physical maladies and the medical professionals who seek to help them, so I would never challenge someone who speaks about such things. I just experience such conversation as unpleasant, and not terribly “bad for me.” Sports talk and garden talk is uninteresting to me for the most part and it is relatively easy for me to listen with only a mild interest in such things. But when people talk about their medical procedures, I have a visceral reaction to such talk and often an emotional or cognitive reaction as well.

Even though I might not be interested in surgeries and medications, you might think that I would be interested in psychiatric diagnoses given that I am a professional healthcare as a psychologist. Yet, I often find such talk to be beyond uninteresting and into the unpleasant category of “bad for me.” There are professional, ethical, and personal reasons for my antipathy to psychiatric diagnoses, but these reasons are not so important in this discussion as are my visceral reaction to such things. Interestingly, I rather enjoy identifying various personality characteristics that people might have because such an analysis might help me understand a person rather than finding a diagnosis that might tell me what is wrong with him.

It is not only people’s conversation that can be unpleasant. There are places and situations, and sometimes even property that can be unpleasant. Consider a time when you walked into a room, a house, a store, or an office and had a “bad feeling” about this place. I would call such experiences unpleasant, and certainly beyond uninteresting. Likewise, you may have been in some town, countryside, city, state, or country that made you feel uncomfortable when you were there. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but there “was something about the place that didn’t feel right.” You may also have had the experience of not feeling right about a car or a sweater that you had considered buying. Even more interesting are times when an experience is less than good for you for some unknown reason. I don’t particularly like riding on Ferris wheels, much less a tilt-a-whirl that might be exhilarating to someone else. You might have the same reaction to reading, doing homework, riding in a car, or swimming. To note something is unpleasant is to note that the person, place, property, or experience is not to your liking and leaves a residue of unpleasantness when you are around such things. Beyond uninteresting and unpleasant but yet in the mild/moderate range of “bad for me” could be someone or something that is actually aversive.

Aversive. Uninteresting lasts for seconds, or minutes at most and then dissipates, usually because things or people who are uninteresting are easy to endure for a short time. Unpleasant tends to leave the figurative aftertaste in your mouth, or the churning in your stomach that stays with you even after you have left the things that has caused the unpleasant experience. Aversive things, while still in the mild/moderate range of things that are bad for you, are beyond unpleasant; they are things, people, places, or experiences that require you to endure beyond your desire to do so. The verb from which the word aversive derives is avert, which means to avoid or to get away from. Avert derives from the Latin word that means move. So, when something is aversive, you feel the need to move away from something. When something is uninteresting or unpleasant, you might want to find something more interesting or pleasant, but for the most part you are able to endure such things without you inner spirit saying that you have to move away from this aversive thing. When you’re around something aversive, it is hard to endure and takes a certain amount of energy for you to endure it. Aversive, as a “bad for you” element of life, is not as bad as something that is dangerous, which is the next level of “bad for you” things. When something is aversive, you can feel the possibility of some kind of potential danger but not in the present.

You have been in many situations in life where you felt the feeling that you needed to get away from something. More than likely, you had a feeling in the pit of your stomach that felt like “yuck,” or you have had another physical symptom that is more natural to you when you encounter something that is aversive. Things that affect one or more of our physical senses can be aversive, like an odor that begins as simply unpleasant and then becomes aversive the longer you remain in the vicinity. In addition to smells that may be aversive, you might find aversive loud sounds or silence, bright lights or darkness, physical touch or the absence of physical touch, unfamiliar taste or no taste at all.

Aversive reactions to things affect our physical senses are easier to understand, but you can also have aversive reactions to people, places, or experiences. Consider the times when you’ve had an aversive reaction to an individual, perhaps a person you have seen many times or one you have seen only once. You felt like you wanted to get away from this person. The experience of sports, art, music, reading, writing, or talking can all be aversive to people for reasons that may not be clear. When I was teaching my grandson Algebra not long ago, I noticed a distinct aversive reaction that he had to Algebra, which then might have bled into his having an aversive reaction to me. It is notable that I began to have an aversive reaction to my grandson due to his aversive reaction, but this is a discussion that we will delay at this time. It is very likely that certain places cause an aversive reaction to you, like any blue room or any room with a wood floor because your dad used to use his whip on you when you were young, always in your wood floor blue bedroom. However such things might be unpleasant to you, however aversive, such things are not felt to be dangerous. But anything can be dangerous, and the definition of “danger” is largely personal.

Dangerous. Dangerous, along with toxic and lethal are terms I have chosen to describe things that are more profoundly bad for you. These three levels of “bad for you” things in life cause some kind of damage, may cause damage, or nearly cause damage to you. Thus, there is a distinct difference between things that are mildly or moderately bad for you and something that leaves some kind of permanent effect on you. It is also important to note that there tends to be a slippery slope from dangerous through toxic to lethal, a slope that is not always obvious except for the deleterious effects this “bad for you” thing has had on you. As we speak of things that are dangerous, be reminded that we have moved from something that is aversive that you want to get away from to a place where you realize that you can easily or quickly be damaged by something and need to get away from.

Most obviously dangerous, at least for people who tend to be acrophobic, is a cliff or an otherwise unprotected precipice. Such a place is well beyond aversive because it speaks of your impending death. Any of the elements noted under aversive could become dangerous. An aversive smell, like the smell of gas in a house, could be dangerous. A loud sound could be the thunder that accompanies a broken tree in your yard, and a bad taste could suggest poison. These sense-based times of felt danger are easier to deal with because they require immediate action, but places, people, and experiences present a more difficult challenge. You may be “stuck” in a relationship that is dangerous…or worse…and you are looking for a way to get out. You may actually be in the midst of a wedding ceremony and have an important feeling that this impending marriage is dangerous. You may be in a work setting that is more than uninteresting, unpleasant, or aversive because you feel the deleterious effects in your body that speak of danger. You may be under the influence of another authority figure, parent, superior, or political figure whom you sense is putting you in danger. You can tolerate danger or potential danger for a period of time, but you have to keep your eyes and ears open because the potentially dangerous thing could some suddenly or slowly resulting in damage to you in some way, whether physically, relationally, or physically.

As I write these words the world experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, which suggests that anyone, anything, and any experience can be potentially toxic, but for 99% of people, at least at this writing, the situation that we have is dangerous, not toxic. Toxic is substantially different.

Toxic. Dangerous is potential; toxic is real. Dangerous is something that might come in a minute, a year, or somewhere in between. Toxic is something very much in the present and causing you damage. While you may feel something in your gut that tells you that something (or someone) is aversive or dangerous, the physical feeling that you feel and the emotional feeling that you feel suggests that you are being damaged. When the feeling is physical, you have more than a churning in your stomach: you have an upset stomach. Live long in a toxic environment and could very easily develop ulcers as your body tries to compensate for the toxic thing in your life by creating acid. Your stomach does this in a highly stressful or toxic environment because your brain tells your stomach that you have ingested something dangerous. Neither your brain nor your stomach, however, realizes that the toxicity is probably not poison per se, but something poisonous in another way. You have “ingested” a person, place, experience, or thing that is causing you real damage. Beyond the physical damage that something toxic can bring is emotional, cognitive, and relational damage.

There are no people, places, experiences, or things that are toxic for all people. Too often people describe something or someone as “toxic” believing that that person or thing is, itself toxic. Not so. What is true, however, is that anything can be toxic to anyone depending on the individual’s experiences. We will discuss the “good for you; bad for me” and “bad for me; good for you” in a later blog. A person can be toxic who is a very kind, perhaps intelligent, perhaps well-meaning person who engages you in a way that is toxic. Introverts often find extraverts toxic after a period of time because extraverts tend to talk a lot, often about themselves. Likewise, extraverts can find introverts toxic because they don’t talk or they don’t talk about themselves. I recently had an experience of some duration with an introverted individual who was seemingly unable to express his thoughts or feelings in any way whatsoever. After a period of time with this woman, I felt a certain toxicity in my physical/emotional system, while my introverted wife did not have that serious a reaction, probably due to Deb’s introverted nature. More importantly, people can be toxic who are in your regular environment for a period of time, like years of an unsatisfactory marriage, job, or other relationship. We will defer comments about how to deal with things toxic, as well as dangerous and lethal, to a later blog.

Beyond people who are toxic there exist places, experiences, and physical things that cause damage to your physical/emotional, relational existence. The Covid-19 pandemic is dangerous for all people, but it is toxic for a very small part of the population. There are places for all people, however, that are toxic by their very nature, and this toxicity may not have to do with the physical place but the history an individual has with the situation. I suggested above, that an individual could have an aversive reaction to a blue room. It is also possible for a person to become toxified by living in a blue room for a period of time. Sports can be toxic for someone physically, but it can also be toxic emotionally. Consider the person who is not a natural athlete and feels “dumb” when she is on the basketball court, the person who can’t read well who feels “stupid” because she can’t read out loud in class, or even the farmer’s son who would rather read or play basketball than milk cows and drive a tractor. Forced into situations that are this “bad for you” can easily become toxic and take the physical and emotional blood out of you.

Lethal. There are not many situations, places, experiences, people, and things that are truly lethal, at least for most of us who live in western society. Many people are seriously damaged or permanently damaged because they are somehow compelled to live in a truly lethal situation. We will delay a more in depth discussion of such circumstances because we must deal with real abuse, alleged abuse, felt abuse, or other lethal situations in life. I will defer this discussion at this time because

Next to come:

  • Discernment of the levels of “good for me”
  • Good for me; bad for you, bad for me; good for you, and other possibilities
  • Things that are truly lethal: people, places, experiences, and things
  • Complexities: there are many possibilities
  • How to discern your feelings about something that is good for or bad for you
  • How to think about such things
  • What to do and when to do it

See you soon