Self-Awareness

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

Good for Me; Bad for Me III

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

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

Review

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

_____________________________________/________________________________________

Bad for me                                                                   Good for me

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

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

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

Uninteresting      Unpleasant      Aversive      Dangerous      Toxic      Lethal

(mild)                                                 to                                             (profound)

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

Interesting      Pleasant      Exciting      Enlivening     Life-enhancing     Life-sustaining

(mild)                                                  to                                             (profound)

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

Observing something that is good for you

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accepting something that is good for you

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

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

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

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

Things that are good for me

Things:

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

Experiences:

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

People:

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

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

Enhancing things that are good for me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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