Self-Awareness

The H’end of the Road

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, happiness, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is actually an interlude from my previous and forthcoming blogs on “the end of” series. There is a similarity to the “end of” to this blog, but it is a different twist.I’m going to have a little fun before I get to the meat of this blog, the essence of which I think is quite important for many people, perhaps all people at some time in their lives. But I want to indulge myself in one of the things that I live best: language. I am by far not nearly the skilled linguist that many people are although it would be a fond wish to be able to speak Russian, French, Swedish, Spanish or German fluently after having studied each of these languages enough to say, “hello” or “where’s the bathroom?” I also studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in school and still am able to parse out a word that might have such origins. You might wonder what the “h’end” of the road might mean, so let me tell you. Deb and I lived in Newfoundland, Canada for four years, a most glorious experience and our only long-term cross-cultural experience, not of the depth of someone living in Zambia, grant you, but Newfoundland was a good place for us to be and we yet treasure this very unique province and retain good friends there. Due to its Irish heritage, much of which shows in its music and subculture, there was a tendency of many Newfoundlanders to add and subtract the letter “H” to words seemingly at random, but of course for Newfoundlanders it was not random. For instance, the letter “H” was often added to words that began with a vowel and just as often deleted from words that began with an H. We heard a person speaking about her “h’anger”, not “anger.” Likewise, I heard a woman talk about her child who was very “’yper,” not “hyper.” I came quite certain that there is rhyme and reason to the shifting of the letter H, but I never got the hang of it. However, I remember one very distinct instance when we were visiting an “outport” Newfoundland town and asked a lady where a particular bed and breakfast might be located. Without missing a beat, she said, “Sure, I know where it is. It is at the ‘h’end of the road just past the h’apple stand. I ‘ope that I was ‘elpful.” A young person in our car repeated her exact words with the emphasis on “the h’end of the road.”

Enough of my linguistic jostling. Now I want to talk about the real issue: when people come to the “end of the road,” whimsically called “the h’end of the road.”

The End of the Road

My thoughts about the end of the road (or the h’end of the road) began just a couple days ago in a conversation with a patient who said that he seemingly had come to “the end of the road.” We talked about this vision that he had, and then examined this phenomenon, namely with the contexts of the future, the present and the past. I have since shared this picture with several other people in my office who I thought might profit from this picture, which we might call a metaphor or even a vision of what lies ahead for them in life. Over the recent three days I have found myself using this end of the road picture quite relevant to several of the people (all men, of course) I have seen. Importantly, almost all of these people have all been in their 60’s including:

  • A man, 67, whose wife left him for another man and now that that man has left the “new man,” he wants to come back home
  • A man, 63, whose wife has also left him, but not for another man, but rather because she admits that she never should have married him, and has been relationally unhappy for 30-odd years
  • A man, 65, who is single and never married, who is looking at the rest of his life, which includes who he might be with, what he might do for a profession, and where he might live
  • A man, 62, who has had a good and sustainable relationship for several years with a woman who has been a very good friend and conversationalist, but now it seems that their differences might suggest that the relationship might not be sustainable any longer. He is also looking heartily about his profession and the place where he might live.
  • A man, closer to 50, who has just lost his very successful job, has lived unhappily for many years in a marriage, and all things seem up in the air for him.
  • A man, 58, who has been typically and frequently angry all his life and is only now looking at his deeper feelings and how to communicate them
  • A man, not even close to 50’s or 60’s, who is looking at a life that includes possible drastic changes in his vocation, his family relationships, religious orientation, and even a more significant element of his very nature
  • A man in his late 50’s with a good marriage, good professional life, good house, and generally a good life who has fallen into a significant depression because, despite the fact that he has been a good person all his life, he hasn’t attended to his feelings.

All of these men seem to be facing what I come to a place in their lives where things in the future seem to be quite uncertain and vague, but more importantly, an opportunity for a good life, if perhaps quite different from what their lives have been over the past decades. The surface questions include:

  • Should I be married or otherwise with this person in my life?
  • Should I continue in my current profession, find another one, or should I not be working at all in any kind of formal job?
  • What kind of financial security do I need for this new life that I might have?
  • What might I lose if I move into this new life?
  • Is there any urgency for me to make a decision?
  • What are the external factors that I might face in this new life?

These are the objective and practical questions that they are asking, but I believe that there are also subtly asking subjective questions, like:

  • Can I hang on to the security what I have had up to this point, like the security of house, family, marriage, profession, or gender identity?
  • What dangers are there in this “new life” and am I prepared to face these dangers?
  • What abilities and experiences can I take along with me that might be useful?
  • What relationships, property, feelings, and beliefs do I need to leave behind?
  • Can I have the best of both worlds, meaning the past and the future?

Wanting it both ways

The answer to the last question, “Can I have the best of the past and the future?” the answer is “yes.” Yes, you can have the best of the past, but you can’t have the experiences of the past, the relationships as they were in the past, the property of the past, the money of the past, and the job/profession of the past. You can have the best of the past but not the things of the past. What is the best of the past? It is what you have loved, what you have lost, and what you have learned. You can’t have the kind of relationship you had before. You can’t have the property you had in the past. You can’t have the ideas you had in the past. You can’t have the family you had in the past. In other words, you can’t have it the way it was…but you can take the best of the past into the future. The best of the past is what you loved, how you loved, and the memories you have of such things. You might stay in a marriage, a relationship, a job, a profession, a house, or a city, but your new life will not be the same. You will have a new perspective of life and life around you built on what you have done, said, felt, and thought. This is the best of the past, but it is not the past carried into the future. You don’t forget about the past, nor do you allow yourself to simply live in nostalgia of the past. Rather, you will be looking at the present and the future with the knowledge, skills, experiences, successes, failures, and mistakes that you made in the past.

The people whom I made reference to above said to me something like:

  • I don’t want to lose what I have with my wife, so I am afraid of challenging the situation that I find myself. This is scary.
  • I can’t see clearly where I should live so I will just stay here because it is safe. Anywhere else is scary.
  • I love my partner for sure but maybe if I wait for a bit longer, she will change or I will change so we don’t argue all the time. Anything else is scary.
  • I don’t think I can make it without the money I was making in my previous job. I’m scared of living in some kind of poverty
  • I want to keep on telling my wife that I love her hoping that this “will get through to her.” I’m afraid that if I don’t, she will never come home.

Note the operative word? Scared. They are scared of doing anything, saying anything, or even daring to feel anything because they don’t want to lose what they have had. I think in all of these cases that they have already lost what they want, most likely will never get it back, and they are putting their heads in the sand hoping for some miracle. They are all at the “h’end” of the road, the road of their lives up to this point. And they can’t have it both ways: they can’t have what they have had and what they might have if they really move forward. But how to they do this? how do they “move forward” into their new lives?

Moving into the new life

I think of all of these people, people of any age, who have come to the end of the road in some way (or a combination of ways), need to face the fact that the new life needs to be substantially different spiritually than in their previous lives. I could also use the term “emotionally” because emotion is a significant part of moving into anything new, but this new life certainly has an important emotional ingredient: No fear. I also call this the “second half of life,” however old the person is, because this “second half of life” is substantially different from the first “half.”

  1. You can’t enter a new life with any kind of fear, none whatsoever. Sound impossible? It is. I state this “no fear” element because fear cannot be the dominant factor in their lives. Recall the fears noted in all of these people:
    1. Fear of losing wife
    2. Fear of being discovered
    3. Fear on not enough money
    4. Fear of what people think of me
    5. Fear of failure
    6. Fear of criticism

All of this has to go, or at the very least, be at a minimum level

  1. You can’t take “the best” of the past. This is the love you have, the successes you have had, the mistakes you made, the things that happened to you. In a nutshell, you take into the future what you have learned in the past.
  2. You will most certainly have some of what you had in the first part of your life, like relationship, property, friends, and the like. But you will not be hanging on to these things, which has kept you impotent in life.
  3. You will love more, love better, lose better, and love again. It may be the same person, place, or property, but it will not be loving with a closed hand because you now know that you will most certainly lose everything that you love at some time, which means people, place, property, and ideas.
  4. You will make a difference in the world. That will be a place where you are no longer interested in acquisition or approval, but rather the opportunity to be of service.
  5. But first you will have to “collect” the past so you can use the best of the past.

Collecting the past

  1. I am not a particular fan of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) while I acknowledge that AA has helped countless millions of people. I do like what they call the 4th step: making a moral inventory of oneself. I would not so much limit this important “step” to morality but to life in general, specifically, at successes and failures
    1. Examine your life and see all the love you have had, all the successes you have had, all the losses you have had, all the good people in your life, and most importantly, how you have been of value to the world
    2. Examine your life and see the regrets you have had. The things you should have done but didn’t; the things you should have done but did; the things you said that you shouldn’t have said but did; the things you didn’t say that you should have said but didn’t.
    3. Draw from these good, and not-so-good experiences what you have learned
    4. Keep these things in your mind, not so much to remember what was said or done, but what you learned from all of it
  2. Store these things in your heart. You may tell someone, or you may not, but have no fear of telling or not telling. It is not approval or disapproval that is important, but rather having the knowledge and wisdom you have had.
  3. Now you are ready to look forward but be careful to avoid falling into “wanting it both ways,” like dragging all the money, property, and people into the future. Whatever you retain for the future will be in a new light because now you can love knowing that whatever you love, you will lose.

Now, are you ready to use the end of the road as a good starting place?

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 VI: Complexities

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, morality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the sixth in a series of “good for me; bad for me,” namely things that are, quite simply good for me or bad for me. The pronoun “me” could be “you”, but the point is the many things are those that enhance one’s life while other things depreciate one’s life. Importantly, I have also suggested that the “things” that are good or bad can be people, places, physical things, or events in one’s life. I have further proposed that there is a spectrum that might reflect the intensity of something being good or bad, namely:

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

Furthermore, I have suggested that we can quantify just how good something is by the following words:

  • Mildly or moderately good for me: interesting, pleasant, exciting
  • Profoundly good for me: enlivening, life-enhancing, life-sustaining

Likewise, we could quantify things that are bad for me with the following:

  • Mildly or moderately bad for me: uninteresting, unpleasant, aversive
  • Profoundly bad for me: dangerous, toxic, lethal

I have suggested that it might be profitable for you to quantify the things in your life that may be good, very good, bad, or very bad. You may wish to examine the origin of this discussion in the previous blogs.

My purpose in the present blog is to deal with the complexities of something being good or bad for you because life is not so simple as just good or just bad. We will discuss some of these complexities, e.g.:

  • Good for me at one time; bad for me at another time
  • Good for me but I don’t like it
  • Bad for me be I do like it
  • Seemingly neither good nor bad; just not very important

Good for me at one time; bad for me at another

As I just stated, “life is not so simple” as to suggest that something is universally bad for me or universally good for me. Times change. I change. Circumstances change. People change. Consider something (someone, some place, some thing, some situation) that was good for you but not is not good for you.

There was a time that it was very good for me to speak my thoughts and feelings freely. Having been brought up in a very outspoken and expressive family, I was subtly taught that a person should simply say whatever s/he felt or thought regardless of the environment or the consequences. Thus, my family’s philosophy was based on the unspoken belief that we all have the right to our thoughts, opinions, and feelings, and furthermore have the right to express ourselves at any time with anyone. As you might imagine, and as I certainly know, it is not always wise or kind to speak oneself openly. I slowly earned that I needed to add wisdom and kindness to my expressiveness in what I said, something that we might call discretion. I should add that I learned this lesson painfully. Part of the pain was the fact that I unnecessarily hurt other people, always without intention, but I also learned that they hurt me in return, as the book title Hurt People Hurt People so succinctly suggests. (Don’t buy the book; just remember the title and its meaning.) When I was so quickly outspoken, I was just as quickly judged, often negatively. People made judgments of me, probably largely out of their having been hurt by me. I slowly learned that while my heart and head might have been in the right place, namely to be “honest and forthright,” I was not cognizant of my audience, particularly their feelings. Whereas speaking my mind at all times and with all people was originally good for me, it is no longer so. It is also not good for other people, but we will discuss this matter in a future blog.

At the present time in my life I rarely speak my mind and heart. Now, having given this example of something that was good for me but not good for me now, I often feel sad that I most certainly should not express myself in many circumstances. Most pointedly, I have learned that I can say precious little of my thinking and feeling while I am doing psychotherapy although I am almost constantly both thinking and feeling. I have a kind of nostalgia for my younger days when I just said what I wanted to say, and sometimes think, “Wouldn’t we all be much better if we just did that?” But then I come to my senses and admit that it might not be so good after all. As Desiderata so poignantly says, one must “gracefully yield the things of youth.” The cost of giving up such things is first sadness, then contentment, and then wisdom. I am still learning.

There are many other examples of things that have been good for me at one time, and then later bad for me. Almost all of these things are in the arena of wanting the freedom that we can only have in childhood. I rarely do waterskiing, something that was very central to my life as a teenager, although I do have good memories. I almost never eat any fast food, and interestingly have little desire for such stuff. I used to work 12 hours a day and thoroughly enjoy it, but have found that 12-hour days are no longer good for me, and sometimes in need a 4-hour day, God forbid. During the current political squabble that we are in here in America, I can no longer read the newspaper with earnest interest because the Trump factor stares me in the face, as does the current Covid factor, and even the Black Lives Matter movement. I remain avidly interested in political and cultural matters but find it “bad for me” to see our country so inflamed.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

It used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut. I have learned otherwise partly because I have learned that introverted people are naturally inclined to keep their feelings to themselves. It was bad for me to keep quiet but it is no longer bad for me. Certainly, this change is a matter of personal growth, but I now value keeping my thoughts and feelings to myself, sometimes writing them as I am presently doing, and sometimes simply enjoying “going placidly among the noise and haste of the world knowing what peace there is in silence” (also Desiderata). In my psychotherapy work I probably say about 10% of what I think and 1% of what I feel although my thoughts and feelings can occasionally be quite helpful. More often in the past I have caused more harm by expression than by silence. If you had asked me some 40 years ago what I thought about being outspoken, I probably would have said something like, “everyone should just say what they think all the time.” By the way, my coming into psychology through the “back door” of existential therapy, there were many very good masters of existential therapy who did, indeed, suggest that you should just say anything to anyone at any time. While the hearts of these people were in the right place, their heads were not, and they were reacting against psychoanalysis, which suggested that the analyst said little or nothing, hence abstain from any expression of his/her own thoughts and feelings as well as Carl Rogers’ unconditional positive regard.

By the way, I could turn this story around and suggest that it was formerly bad for me to be so outspoken, but that begs the question. Yes, it was not exactly good for me to say everything I thought and felt, but it was something I needed to do because that is who I was, namely an outgoing, expressive person. I do not look at those years of being outspoken as being wrong, just lacking in wisdom and understanding. But there is the real opposite:

Formerly good for me, now bad for me

All “good for me; bad for me” categories can be of people, places, property, or experience. Allow me to briefly say that you can have a friend who is good for you and later bad for you even if s/he doesn’t change. Perhaps you just outgrow the person, or the person finds someone else who is better for him than you are. While painful, it is important to allow friendships…and family relationships…to be good at one time and then not be good at another time. The discovery that a person, even a very good person, someone who might have been a good friend or a valued family member, is no longer good for you…is hard to feel, hard to accept, and hard to know how to handle. I see many such situations in my office, two today where people moved family members into their homes and now resent these family members. At other times, a marriage has been very good but is not very bad, or perhaps somewhere in between.

Aside from people being good…and then being “bad for you” there can also be places, property, or experiences. Maybe the house you live in is no longer good for you, maybe the car you have loved for many years is no longer good for you, or the books you treasure. Experiences that used to be good but no longer are might simply be those of youth that no longer profit you as an adult, or that some experience in life has superseded one that used to be top on the list.

If you  find something that was good but no longer is good, you need to admit to that fact, then accept that fact, feel through the possible change in your life, and then feel the sadness of loss that always occurs when you choose to give something up that has nostalgic value, whether people, places, property, or experiences. Allow yourself to feel, accept your feelings, feel your feelings, and then take action. Most people fail in one of these elements. Frequently, people fail to take action because they don’t want to lose somethings (person, place, thing, or experience) that used to be good for them. Just as frequently, people can take action too quickly not having truly thought through and felt through the change of “good for me” to “bad for me.”

Maybe getting drunk was good for you, or being promiscuous, or even lying. Yes, all seem bad, but that is not the case. I could make a good case that all of these experiences could actually be good for people at one time, but I will defer that discussion while noting that many people have found such things to no longer be good for them. You might note, however, that I am subtly suggesting that there is very little that is intrinsically bad, but again, this is beyond the scope of the present discussion.

Formerly bad for me, now good for me

Let’s talk onions: used to hate them; now I love them. Used to love the Gophers when I lived in MN as a kid; now I live in WI and love the Badgers. Used to be bad for me to keep my mouth shut; now I find it a pleasant experience. There are lots of things, many of them childhood dislikes, that now are things that we like. But all of these are in the relatively mild/moderate “bad for me” that are now in the mild/moderate “good for me” category. It’s not terribly important for me to eat onions and enjoy the Badgers. The dial on the spectrum of good for me/bad for me has just shifted from one side to the other. You might think of things, often trivial, that used to be bad for you that are now good for you.

More important than onions and football teams could be people, places, and experiences. Consider someone in your past, perhaps a family member, maybe even an extended family member, a classmate or a workmate whom you really didn’t like. It might not matter why you didn’t like this person, but it is important that such a person was not good for you, or even was quite bad for you. You might think that your previous feelings about this person were “wrong” or that you were immature or something. I suggest that you simply admit that somebody in your past life was “just not good for you” and leave it at that while sequentially seeing that you now value this person and see that s/he is largely good for you.

In addition to things like onions and sports teams on the one hand, and people on the other, you might see that certain places or experiences might have moved from the “bad for me” side of the spectrum to the “good for me” side. I have replaced my three-times a week basketball playing, now eliminated due to the Covid phenomenon, with running. There was a time that running was mildly good for me, and then basketball replaced it to such a degree that I never ran. Even when I tried to run, I didn’t like it: it was mildly bad for me. Now, I run two or three times a week and find that running has barely crossed over to the “good for me” side of the spectrum. Our grandson lived with us recently for three months and pretty much hated the hiking and walking that Deb and I do pretty regularly. The needle moved quite a bit towards “good for me” evidenced by his walking on his own several times during his last few weeks with us.

Liking and not liking

I want to make a subtle distinction between “liking” and things that are good for me or bad for me. Such “things” could be person, place, experience, or something physical. There are roughly two categories in this discussion:

  • Things that I don’t like that are actually good for me
  • Things that I do like that are actually bad for me.

You probably immediately see the similarity to something that was once good for me but now bad for me, or something that was once bad for me but now good for me. I choose to distinguish the “liking” from “good for me” in order to make sense of many things in life that cannot wholly be described as good or bad.

There are, most importantly, some people that I don’t particularly like but see that they are actually good for me. Consider someone who you really don’t like, perhaps a political figure, a family member, or a friend who also is a good person in some way. Such a person might even be helpful to you in some way. But you just don’t like her. I think it is important to admit to you feelings of not liking this person while paradoxically seeing that this person is good for you in some way. Dentists come to mind. Who in their right mind “likes” a guy who digs into your mouth with nasty tools? The dentist chair could also be a “place” that you don’t like, and certainly don’t like the experience of a root canal while also seeing that the dentist, the chair, the tools, and the experience is good for you.

Consider the people in your life whom you respect, even love, but don’t like. They might be good for you, but you just don’t like them. Likewise, there may be experiences, places, or physical objects that you don’t like but see as essentially good for you. Who likes taxes? But they are eventually good for us, right? At least for the most part.

The other side of this discussion is something (person, place, experience, or thing) that you like but is bad for you. Certainly, all addictions fall into this category, whether addictions that are chemical or behavioral. It is hard for me to understand why people like sitting in front of a slot machine putting pennies or dollars into the machine for hours at a time while simultaneously knowing that they will most certainly lose more than they win. Gamblers just like gambling. I like sugar, God forgive me. I eat some kind of really-bad-for-you sugar just about every day despite knowing that sugar, at least refined sugar is bad for me. Additionally, I know that if I am ever to give up my sugar addiction, I have to start by admitting that I like sugar.

Not important

Certainly, you have wondered if there are things (people, places, experiences, or physical things) that don’t exactly fit on either side of the spectrum. I call these things “not important.” Consider things that are not important in your life. I hear from most people that the current political disaster in our country causes them much grief, and consequently, these people find that politics are very important. I also find people who simply don’t care about politics for some reason. I care deeply. There is nothing wrong with someone not caring. I care about psychology, theology, history, and culture, but many people don’t care about such things. A mother who is caring for a challenging child doesn’t even have the time to read, much less care about politics, nor does the nuclear scientist who works 12 hours a day looking for a way to control fusion.

In your regular life, there are many things that fall into the “don’t care” category. Certainly, this is true. I would simply caution you to know that if you are with a person, in a situation, in a place, or otherwise with something that is not important, you might stay too long there and find that the “don’t care” moved into the “not good for me” category.

Next week (?): Good for Me; Bad for You. And Bad for Me; Good for You.” These are real challenges and the heart of successful (and unsuccessful) relationships.