social esteem

The “End of Things” I: Theory

Ron Johnson Children, Development, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, social esteem

This is the first in what I hope will be a series of blogs on what I am calling “the end of” certain things. In all of these blogs we will examine the various things, sometimes behavior, sometimes feelings, sometimes experiences, that plague humanity psychologically including:

  • Anger
  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Addictions (behavioral and chemical)
  • Confusion
  • Physical distress
  • Relational distress
  • Loneliness
  • Vocational dissatisfaction
  • Lack of sufficient money
  • And others (?)

I use the expression “end of” carefully because to have an end of something suggests that there is something wrong. I am primarily interested in suggesting ways that these various maladies that occur with us might come to an end. I will be making a case that these challenges, whether they fit nicely into a formal psychiatric diagnosis or not, are caused largely psychologically and can be successfully dealt with psychologically. My overall perspective of all these various challenges is that they have similar derivations and hence similar ways that they can come to an end. The following is my overall perspective about these various challenges in life:

  • There is a lack of development in all of these situations. This means that some portion of one’s nature did not develop sufficiently.
  • Most of the time this lack of development was due to inadequate parenting in some way.
  • As a result of inadequate parenting and the subsequent lack of development, certain things in life did not work as they were designed to work
  • The brain got involved and created a means of facing life without adequate tools to engage the world
  • The brain found alternate ways and means of engaging in life as a way of compensating for the lack of development in some area.
  • The brain continued to direct the person into alternate means of engaging life despite the fact that these alternatives had deleterious effects
  • In most cases the person tried to correct or change these alternatives without success in that endeavor
  • The alternatives in life began to dominate the person’s life and ultimately became life-damaging, if not life-threatening
  • It appeared that there was no cure for the ailment, i.e. no way for it to end, which became a dominate factor in the person’s life. It also appeared to be unchangeable because the person had lived with the alternative to adequate development all one’s life: anger and/or all the other phenomena that happen to people in this situation

The developmental understanding of distressing and disturbing things

The purpose of these several blogs is to identify the causes of the difficulties we have in life…because we all have them. These difficulties do not come from some kind of vague biological origin, some cultural pattern, or the so-called “choices” we made early in life that set a pattern for some kind of unhappiness. This having been said, know that I am going against the current orientation in psychology, certainly borrowed from psychiatry, which states that the problems we have in life are of primarily biological origins and secondarily from cultural origins. Simply stated (and there is much more that I could say about this), there are both biological and cultural origins for the difficulties we have in life, whether the poverty that many underprivileged people have suffered to the inherited tendencies that we all have toward some kind of functioning the world, and ultimately to both the physical anomalies and the psychological anomalies that we all have. I will not discuss this matter further, mostly because it is out of the arena of what I want to say, but also because it is a very complex matter, namely the interaction of things biological, cultural, and personal.

As we look at the developmental origins of what ails us, we need to look carefully at what is normal, or perhaps ideal, development. Consider the following in the development of children:

  • The first year of life is one where the child needs three things: safety, comfort, and nurturance, probably in that order.
    • The predominant emotion that an infant feels is fear or the absence of fear. The infant does not feel joy, sadness, or anger. The crying that an infant does is generally without tears, as crying is because of fear, something like, “If you don’t take care of me, I will die.”
  • The second year of life is a time of exploration where a child needs a wide berth in her life in order to explore, both the exploration of words and walking and the exploration of the physical world.
    • The predominant emotion that a toddler feels is joy. She feels joy because she experiences the rudiments of love: love things, love parents, love exploration. This is also a time where an infant begins to have a rudimentary feeling of “self” and rather enjoys being herself. She talks of the blanket or puppy being “mine” and frequently says “no” as another way of establish herself as a separate being.
  • The next three or four years of life are times of experimenting with life as well as wanting, having, and losing. Now the child can walk, talk, run, grab, and perhaps break. During these crucial years of early childhood, the child has ideally had the safety of the first year inside of him, and the experience of having something. Now the child experiences wanting, and he wants much more than he wanted during the first two years of life, which were predominantly safety and experience.
    • The predominant emotion that a pre-school child has is anger. He gets angry because he doesn’t get most of what he wants not knowing that his wants have multiplied by 100 because he can walk, talk, and grab things. He wants more, so he gets less of what he wants. Of course, he doesn’t know that he wants more; he just knows that he doesn’t get much of what he wants.
  • The next six years of life (and to some degree for the rest of life) are times of experimentation in the world. This means achievement in something, like academics, music, art, athletics, or dance. It also means relationship development, which requires a whole bunch of things that were not necessary during the first six years of life. This is also a time for understanding the acquisition, use, and care of physical property whereas previously parental figures took care of such things, whether changing diapers or providing toys to play with.
    • The predominant emotion during these years of life (sometimes called “latency”) is sadness. The child is frequently sad because he/she doesn’t know how to manage the ways of the world, whether in activity, relationships, or property. A child in this time of life loves a lot, whether people, places, or things, and loses a lot. A child who gets through this stage of life learns that all things end, anything that is love is ultimately lost.

When a child does not get to through these stages effectively

It must be obvious that no one gets through theses stages of early childhood unscathed, which means that no child is perfectly loved, cared for, encouraged, challenged, limited, and nurtured. Parents do their best…they always do their best…despite the fact that some parenting is awful. Again, I will not elaborate on this matter as it is out of the purview of the current discussion. More important that the awful parenting that some children get is the good parenting that most people get that is yet inadequate. My primary interest is to look at good parenting that is not good enough and the consequences of such deficiencies:

  • Infancy: when a child fails to get the safety, comfort, and nurturance that he needs, this child will retain fear as the predominant emotion in his life.
    • Then all the rest of life is based on fear, which includes the other emotions of joy, sadness, and anger. But beyond the emotions, the child who has not overcome the fear of dying will see death at every doorstep, namely with every person, every opportunity, and every experience.
    • The result is some form of anxiety
  • Toddlerhood: when a child is deprived or indulged in the arenas of exploration and opportunity, this child will retain do one of two things: she will continue to want everything, or she will fail to want anything.
    • If she is not given enough of the rudiments of wanting, having, and losing, all the rest of life will where she feels there is no way she can have what she wants.
    • If she is given too much of what she wants, she will continue in life expecting that she should be the center of attention as she was when she was a toddler.
  • Pre-school: frankly, this is where most disturbances come with most children, and ultimately with most adults. This should be a time, as we noted, where I want a lot, don’t get much of what I want, and get angry at that fact. There are two dangers:
    • Not getting enough and not being allowed to be angry (and sad) about not getting what the child wants
    • Getting too much of what she wants and failing to realize that in life you want too much, and that fact is simply difficult to accept
  • Latency: As noted, with these years that should be devoted to exploration and experimentation that naturally lead to a lot of disappointment, hurt, and sadness. If the child doesn’t get enough experience and experimentation, he will forever want it and not be satisfied. More importantly, he will not have the important ingredient of feeling sad because he wants something but doesn’t get it, and the accompanying experience that he can want something else and have it. The potential problems during this state of life include:
    • Not having enough freedom to experience and experiment, which then results in the child not having sufficient experience of wanting, having, and losing
    • Having too much freedom, largely without restraint, where the child does not come to value the essential nature of limitations.

As we explore some of the challenges of life as noted above, like anger and addiction, it will be my task to suggest the causes of such maladies, identifying particularly the lack of clarity that people have in their feelings and emotions, and finally suggest courses of action that might be taken to remedy these difficulties and allow them to end.  Be it know, however, that allowing such things to come to an end is extremely hard work, something that most people do not want to do. The best example is of a person who says he “wants to lose weight.” I would content that he does not want to lose weight. Rather, he wants to have lost weight because losing weight is extremely hard to do and no one likes the work it takes to do it.

See you soon.

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.

Self, Selfish, and Selfless

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

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 that I have written (as have many others) that the most important concepts in psychology are undefined, like feelings, love, wisdom, and perhaps other ones as well. Additionally, the three basic ingredients of the known universe are all undefined: distance, mass, and time. All other physics concepts are based on these three undefined concepts. We can measure time, distance, and mass, and we can combine them, like distance/time = velocity, but we don’t define them. Neither do we define “self.”

Not all psychologists use the term “self,” preferring “core self,” “soul,” “spirit,” “inner self,” and other such concepts that all refer to this essence of being human that is not only undefinable, but also fraught with implications according to how people use such terms. I will not debate the values and dangers of these terms but simply state that my preference is “core self” for the most part, but for this blog I will be using “self.”

What is self?

When you have an important concept like self, or time, distance, and love for that matter, you can understand the concept not by a definition but by three ways: (1) observing the absence of the concept, (2) observing more complex concepts that are comprised of self in combination with self, and (3) observing the effects of the concept. Note that the operative word is observing. Let’s look at these three ways of observing self.

The absence of self

We can understand self to some degree when we see what we call an “absence of self.” This terminology is not the best, I grant you, but it does communicate something of what apparently happens with some people: they have failed to develop a clear concept of who they are, that they are important in some way, or even that they exist. A related phenomenon exists with some severely impaired autistic people, or perhaps more accurately, they don’t have a concept of their actual existence.

But this is not what we are talking about with people who have an absence of self, or more accurately don’t have a good sense of self. The primary symptom of such people is an undue attachment to something other than oneself. There is some truth to the theory that people who become addicted to something, whether person, property, substance, or behavior, might not have a good sense of self. So they find a kind of attachment to one of these things (or behavior), which then gives them a sense of existence. This is tantamount to a person feeling such an attachment to, for instance, gambling, that s/he feels a real sense of self when s/he gambles. More often, however, the attachment is less to a behavior, person, property or whatever, as it is to the endorphins that are churned up when the individual is attached to this thing. It is like the person feels, “I feel real when I…(gamble, drink, or fuse with someone else, etc.).”

Most people have at least some sense of self, and hence “absence of self” is not quite right, but when someone has failed to develop a sense of his basic existence apart from anything, we do have this lack of a good sense of self.

Self combined with other elements

People who fuse with something so much that this thing, whether person, property or whatever, becomes what the person is rather than attached to the thing. There is a much healthier and profitable experience than fusion and consequent lack of identity: attachment. There is a literature on several kinds of attachment, but for our purposes here, we are talking about secure attachment. This is typified by the person who can separate him/herself from the behavior or product but finds that the use of something makes him/her a better person. Thus, a person who has a good senses of self can develop a passion for swimming and see swimming as a reflection of one’s self rather than swimming being the essence of oneself. In fact, the best competitors, whether in swimming or playing chess, are people who can attach to the sport and then detach from it without discomfort. To some degree, you can observe a person with a good sense of self engaged in some activity, do well with it at one time, do poorly with it at another time, and have other activities that assist the person to display his/her “self” in the activity. People who have to win at everything do not have a good sense of self, neither do people who simply do not try or give up too easily.

Aside from attaching and detaching from a sport, people with a secure sense of self can truly enjoy something like reading, writing poetry, painting, working, playing, singing, and many other elements of life. Common among people with a good sense of self is their being able to attach and detach from several things, which also suggests that the individual is able to love more broadly, say love swimming, love being alone, love being with people, love playing checkers, and love reading.

The effects of having a good sense of self

In all of these ways of attaching and dethatching to things, the person with a good sense of self is appreciative of the many aspects of life. The primary effect of having a good sense of self is that the individual appreciates life and has a sense of gratitude for living. People with less of a good sense of self do not feel such gratitude. Rather, sadly, they feel that they have not had enough and need more. This effect of having a good sense of self yields a deeper and deeper appreciation for what the world provides them, sometimes as simple as air to breathe and water to drink, but also property, people, and position in life.

In addition to feeling a sense of gratitude the second effect of someone with a good sense of self is that s/he has a passion to do something for humanity. You don’t have to be a philanthropist or a tree hugger to do something for humanity. You can be that cheery cashier or the honest attorney who both feel a passion to do something good for other people. When these things happen, namely feeling grateful and feeling a passion to give to the world, an interesting thing happens: you forget about yourself.

Forgetting about yourself

Now this must seem quite contradictory to what I originally wrote, namely that ideally a person has a good sense of self. So what do I mean suggesting that one “forget about him/herself?” I mean that when one’s sense of self is truly solid, s/he doesn’t worry, doesn’t fear, rarely gets angry, and spends a great deal of time thinking of how to serve the world. Such people are not defensive because they know their limits and their flaws. They are not critical because they know that everyone is doing their best to survive in life. They do not worry what other people think of them because they know that most people don’t care about them whatsoever, while there are probably an equal number of people who do like them and don’t like them. In their doing, they make mistakes and quickly come out with a “my bad” expression. They listen to criticism, whether right or wrong; they know they are hurt, but they don’t let their hurt lead them into anger or fear. Most importantly, they are more interested in other people than they are in themselves. They don’t live through other people, but rather have a life orientation of service. You can’t serve, give, and sacrifice if you are constantly thinking of what you want, which is so common among people with an inadequate sense of self.

Be yourself. It is the best thing you have. When you really know that, you will be able to “forget about yourself” without losing yourself. It is like having such a good foundation that the upper stories can collapse but never damage the foundation.