social esteem
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Good for Me; Bad for Me VII: Good for Me; Bad for You
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…
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Self, Selfish, and Selfless
There is much talk in the psychological community about “self,” and rightly so because the idea of self is central to understanding the very basis of psychology. Unfortunately, “self” is not defined, nor should it be, because it is one of those concepts that is so important that it can’t be defined. You might recall…
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Deep Holes
Ya’ gotta look out for deep holes when you’re walking in unfamiliar territory. Deb and I do a fair bit of hiking, and in fact, she does twice as much as I do, often in our preferred Wisconsin state park, Devil’s Lake, but anywhere we are, whether in the U.S. or Europe. Since we are…
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Feeling, Thinking, Doing
This is what psychology is about, and as a result, this is what life is about for people, particularly as they engage the world of things, ideas, and people. We tend to be good at one of these, fair at another, but almost always less than good at the third. Let me explain the paradigm…
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Grace and Gratitude
Deb and I have a special procedure the very first moment of our entering out cabin “up north” as we say in Wisconsin: whoever is first in the cabin walks over to the light above a sign that simply reads “gratitude.” Gratitude We are grateful to have the cabin, grateful to come and to…
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Temperament VII: Lovers: Challenges and Opportunities
This is the seventh of a series of nine blogs on “temperament.” Previously, I have discussed the four temperaments that we have used to understand people for the past nearly 50 years. As we have defined these four temperaments, we identify players, lovers, analysts, and caretakers. Briefly stated, players seek experience, lovers seek connection, analysts…
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Feelings X: Let Me Tell You About My Feelings
Remember Far Side cartoons created by Gary Larsen? They were often with animals having some sense of human feelings, often a deeper sense than many humans actually have. Or, Larsen would have a group of people allegedly thinking or doing something that was an exaggeration of some human tendency. I miss Far Side. The cartoons…
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Mind Over Matter III: Mind Over Brain
This is the third blog in the Mind over Matter series. Previously, we discussed the theory involved in understanding the different functions of the mind and the brain. We discussed in Mind over Matter II how the brain creates anger, anxiety, and depression in order to provide safety for people. In this discussion we want…
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Mind Over Matter II: Practice
In our first blog on Mind Over Matter we discussed the theory of “mind over matter,” namely the idea of getting full use of both mind and brain. We discussed several things that distinguish the operations of the mind and the brain: What is the brain? The brain is a machine, a wonderful machine at…
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Feelings V: Disappointment
This is the fifth in a series on feelings. We have previously noted that this whole matter of “feelings” is murky and prone to misunderstanding. We have looked at emotions (fear, anger, joy, and sadness) to start with and then have proceeded to discuss the whole difficult business of communicating feelings, which is fraught with…