Self-Awareness

The Things That We Love

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

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

The loves of the different temperaments

Caretakers:

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

Analysts:

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

Players:

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

Lovers:

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

Other kinds of love

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

Examples:

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

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

 

I Don’t Like My Kid

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

“I don’t like my kid.” This statement must sound outrageous. It certainly isn’t something that should be said frivolously or even teasingly. It most certainly shouldn’t be said to any child. It might, however, be a statement that could be said to a confidant who could be of some help understanding and dealing with not liking a child. We hear these statements rather frequently from people who come to us seeking some guidance with dealing with their children. More regularly, however, we hear statements of dislike for some member of one’s family, be it child, spouse, or extended family member. Let me give you some examples of the reasons people feel these things and feel safety saying them to us in confidence. Secondly, I would like to provide some reasons for why people don’t actually like people in their families, how liking and loving are often quite disparate, and thirdly, how people might handle such feelings.

Before we get to examples, causes, and cures, I should mention that people don’t readily make such statements about their family members. Rather, they tend to simply complain about them. With a few exceptions most people come to therapists with complaints about people in their lives, very often their spouses, parents, or children, and sometimes their bosses or colleagues at work. It is always a challenge to help people understand their feelings of dislike, which is usually based on some kind of loss and concomitant hurt, but it can take months or years, if ever, for people to see their own feelings. It is hardest for people to admit that they don’t like their children, which is where we will start.

Disliking children

Consider the following stories of children that we have heard (all identifying information adjusted retaining the essence of the complaint:

  • Child has molested several other children. The church the family used to attend has not allowed them to return to church, at least with this child. School has been on the alert because of the possibility of his molesting other children. He has been tested as intellectually functioning several years below his physical age
  • Child of nine tends to throw a fit when he doesn’t get his way, yelling and screaming, often breaking things, and rolling on the floor. He is actually quite bright and has been tested as being intellectually far ahead of his physical years
  • Child is almost completely nonverbal with anything he thinks and feels. He can be satisfactorily in his room playing on his computer for hours. He does not respond to questions or statements.
  • Child steals food, so much so that her parents have had to put a lock on the fridge door and pantry to keep her from stealing food.
  • Child frequently stops up the toilet with his feces and refused to deal with it. Often, he has left the toilet bowl full without telling anyone. Once, he tried to plunge the toilet without success and then used several towels to clean up the mess before hiding the dirty towels in a closet only to be found several days later by a parent.
  • Child is routinely dishonest, even about very small things, so much so that she can be trusted in any way. She might lie about what she did in school, what she likes, where she went, or what she feels.

None of these children is intrinsically likable although understandably, it is hard for a parent to admit they don’t like these children despite their tendency to yell at them, demean them, punish them, and complain to us about them. We have found it helpful to help parents of difficult children to admit that they “don’t like them.” Then, this disliking tends to decrease in intensity and duration and be replaced with not liking something about the kid, perhaps most things. This can lead to appropriate encouraging and challenging children who need both. Importantly, we do not suggest saying, “I love you but I don’t like what you do” because a child cannot really distinguish between what s/he does and what s/he is.

Dislike other family members

  • Man and wife couple. I regularly do an intake assessment on a couple in which I initially meet with the couple to hear what their concern is, then meet with each partner separately to gather a social history and make clinical observations, this followed by extensive psychological testing and then an interpretative session with both of them present. The couple in my mind is one where during my session with the wife, she demanded that she spend an hour talking singularly about what she determined was wrong about her husband, and wanted to continue for a second hour.
  • Other couples. With few exceptions all couples complain about one another taking the forms of feeling neglected or registering complaints about the spouse
  • Extended family members. This is very common, like the mother-in-law who isn’t liked, the father-in-law who intrudes on the family all time, the alcoholic family member, or perhaps just the family member who has a substantially different political or religious persuasion. These days, many people separate from extended family because one member loves Trump or hates Trump together with all that goes with these loves and hates.
  • A sister who alleged that her brother molested her when she was a child. This woman later admitted that it was their father who molested her, not the brother, but she hasn’t had the wisdom and courage to apologize for her allegation
  • A woman who has totally separated herself from her biological family bringing a good deal of hurt and misunderstanding to her family members. Many people have been in the same situation where one child is molested and damaged while another child is favored in the family making two people being raised in “completely different families.”

You didn’t have any choice to what family you were born. You do have a choice with whom you make friends., Certain family members may not be ones you choose as friends. Then you might find a way to keep a safe distance from family member you don’t particularly like. It is never helpful to tell family members that you don’t them, and even worse to act out your dislike of them by choosing to be with them more than you want to.

So, what are the things that have caused a person to dislike a family member, and what can be done about it? Let’s first look at the causes of disliking a family member.

Causes of disliking a family member

  • Simple, if also profound differences in persuasion, values, and beliefs
  • Projection of other people you dislike who are of a similar persuasion
  • Long-term dislike that has not been seen and expressed, much less resolved
  • Outrageous behavior that you have tolerated but not effectively tolerated
  • A genuine impediment in the other person, such as intellectual, physical, or emotional that has implications for how the person engages the social world
  • Envy of the other person, perhaps that s/he has something or has had opportunities that you haven’t had
  • You love the person, perhaps deeply, even though you don’t like him/her. This is something that Deb and I deal with all the time. Love is blind, so the saying goes, but liking or disliking is not blind. So, we end up with blind spots that are related to the people we love.

Dealing with not liking someone in your family

  • Admit to it: first to yourself and find a way to accept the fact that you may, indeed, love someone, perhaps very deeply, whom you don’t like.
  • Differentiate what you like from what you don’t like. You may discover that there is a lot more that you like than what you dislike but you have fallen prey to thinking that you have to like everything about someone.
  • Admit to at least one other person that you don’t like, not the person him/herself; perhaps a close confident or a therapist
  • Find a way to carefully distance yourself from this person. You may never need to deal with the disliking, but you can keep a safe distance so the dislike doesn’t turn into hate or disgust, much less your saying something untoward
  • Keep a safe distance, which may in terms of geography, frequency of contacts, and intensity of contacts. You may never really be able to particularly like certain family members but you can love them…at a safe distance.
  • Not liking spouse is a case in its own because ideally one’s spouse or life’s partner should be a friend first, a lover second, and a partner third. Many romantic relationships begin with love and sex first and then partnership but never friendship. Making friends with a spouse is a real challenge, especially if you have been unhappy with him/her for a long time and have been tolerating them.

The more you admit to not liking someone, the less the not liking will dominate your feeling and the more you might just be able to love the person more as the not liking shrinks.

 

 

 

Good Men to Great Men

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, men's issues, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

In my work with men I have found myself telling men that they are “good men” but not great men. I have been pleasantly surprised how this phraseology has resonated with men. Somehow, they seem to understand that, however good they are, they can be great. In this blog I will attempt to discuss “goodness” in men, potential “greatness”, what these words mean, and how men some men achieve greatness, and how men have achieved greatness. I apologize for my attention to men in this regard of goodness and greatness as I mean no disservice to women but rather to honor my understanding of men. I leave it to others to examine this matter for women. Please allow me to use the masculine pronoun most of the time.

What is “goodness” in men

The word goodness, like so many other important words in the psychological dictionary, is undefined. Don’t be concerned. In my mind, the most important aspects of psychology are undefined, like the terms love, truth, and even God. Furthermore, the basic ingredients of physics, time, distance, and mass, are also undefined. We understand something that is undefined by observing it the way we observe time or love, not in a rigid definition of such things. Goodness is like that: we know it when we feel it and we know it when we see it.

Having said that goodness is undefined, we can look at some ingredients and results of goodness. The basic ingredient of being goodness in a person is the result of that person having a good sense of self. Oops, we’ve used another undefined term, but hopefully you can ride with me on this one because the concept of self is pretty basic to psychological functioning. While it is undefined, self refers to the essence of a person, which might be called spirit or soul. Importantly, a person with basic goodness has a sense of his/her “self” (or soul, or spirit). Importantly, if I have a sense of self, I will have a sense that there is something good inside of me. This goodness is something like feeling a kind of perfection in me. This feeling of goodness or self is not the same as perfect speech or activity, both of which are often imperfect, just as the words I am writing this very moment are imperfect. A person with a sense of goodness knows, perhaps without words, that inside of him/her there is a kind of perfect something. We call it self.

Beyond feeling this goodness, good people do good things and say good things. In other words, their goodness is reflected in what they say or do. The saying or doing good things is not the core of goodness but rather the result of goodness. In fact, the more a person feels his/her inner goodness, the more they will say and do good things.

I often speak to men about their basic goodness, or they’re being “a good person” or sometimes “a very good person.” Having said that, I often suggest to the man that however good they are, they can be great. What does that mean?

Greatness

Greatness is another undefined term that you can understand and use by seeing the result of greatness. Basically, and importantly, greatness is achieved when a person (a good person to start) has got beyond himself. This is tricky to explain because I suggested that goodness is achieved when a person knows himself and accepts himself. Greatness can only be achieved after a man (or person) has this sense of the goodness of his soul and the understanding that his self (soul, spirit) is perfect in its basic construction. When a person has this feeling of goodness and inner perfection, he is then finds a way to move beyond self. Moving beyond self does not mean that you abandon yourself, but rather that you use your self/soul/spirit in some kind of way that I define as great.

Greatness is usually demonstrated by some kind of activity that helps humankind in some way. This can be creating a masterful piece of art, solving the problem of nuclear fusion, writing a book, or finding a way to make trash collecting more efficient and productive, both for the workers and for the customers who choose to recycle. There are many other forms of greatness that might now actually show on the surface. A great person may devote his life entirely to parenting an impaired child or in some kind of volunteer work. The key in all of this is what I call a feeling, “This is not about me. It is about serving the world in some way.”

Understandably, the result do greatness may be fame and fortune but for the truly great person neither of these is important. Very important, however, is for the good-to-great person to overcome anger and fear. A good example of a great person is that he is not worried at all about what people think of him because his focus is on being great and doing something great. This is very hard to achieve as most men are too quick to anger and many hold a deep-seated fear that shows itself directly in anxiety or indirectly in addiction and avoidance.

Some examples

These are real men but their names and stations in life have been altered to protect their privacy.

  • Jack is a semi-retired broker who is probably a millionaire or more. He has always been hard-working, honest, and faithful to his wife. He has had an inclination to anger and a kind of sexual addiction that showed itself in undue sexual pressure with his wife. Greatness for Jack, as I told him, would be to overcome anger entirely, treat his wife with respect. He appears to be quite demanding as he has been in charge of all of his life, his wife, his kids, and his work all his life. And, oh, by the way, not to give in to her.
  • Sam is a pastor, a truly good man who has served in the ministry for 50 plus years, quite successfully. He has had a financial problem that has plagued him all his wife shown most specifically in his having been unable to say “no” to his wife. He also has suffered low self-esteem that no one knows but me (and now his wife), which led to his intense fear of hurting his wife and having her disappointed in him. Greatness for Sam would be to be true to himself, honest, and slowly erase the feeling that something is wrong with him.
  • Peter is a retired police officer who served his community for decades, lastly as chief of police. He has fallen into a tendency to be irritable and not particularly honest about his medical/physical life. Greatness for Peter is to be honest, first with himself and then with his wife. Then he would be able to transfer some his former greatness into his new life, which is not family, kids, grandkids, and perhaps other activities.
  • Brad is a successful businessman but had a lifelong tendency to be angry after trying hard to achieve harmony. In fact, when he can’t find harmony, he explodes, a phenomenon that is quite common among harmony-based people. Greatness for him is to reduce anger entirely, develop a better self-esteem and acceptance of his limitations and mistakes. Then he would need to deal effectively with his wife who, sadly, like many wives, is often critical of him.
  • Tom is quite bright, achieved a master’s degree in his chosen profession but has been unsuccessful in his profession and in all of his relationships. His goodness is composed of intelligence, integrity, truth, and good work. His downfall is the feeling that he has to be perfect so he is harder on himself than anyone else. He has been fired several times because of his intransigence. First, he has to find his basic goodness, that followed by finding a way to enter his profession and succeed so that he can better the world.

Find your goodness. Find your inner perfection. Get some help to do that. Then you will be able to feel so good about yourself that you forget about yourself. Then you are a great man.