Spiritual

Feeling Safe in the World

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

The world has seemed a whole lot less safe recently. This increased amount of fear has led to a good deal of anxiety. Lack of safety has at least been caused by the Covid pandemic for more than two years but also by the cultural challenges that the Black Lives Matter movement have brought to America, and the political dissention that has been an increasing element for the last 25 years. Add to these external elements causing fear and ultimately anxiety there are some even more significant internal elements that have only been exacerbated by the externally-caused fears. “Internal” elements are those fears and anxieties that are within ourselves. In this blog I want to discuss how most people deal with these feelings and how we might be able to do a bit better. I will discuss the nature of external factors, the nature of internal factors, the nature of fear, and the nature of anxiety, these elements followed by the ways people tend to cope with fear and a few suggestions as to how to reduce anxiety and fear to zero.

The nature of external fears

This is the easier part of this essay. External fears are like those I just discussed: cultural, political, and biological, Now, of course, we have the fears associated with Putin’s assault on Ukraine and his saber-rattling suggesting that he might use nuclear weapons causing untold destruction. In all of these external elements there is a feeling of helplessness. This feeling of helplessness is central to any kind of fear, but with these external factors, the fear is that something will happen to me over which I have no control whatsoever. What can I do about Putin? What can I do about the destruction of the Black Lives Matter? What can I do about the pandemic that may hit me despite the fact that I have been thrice vaccinated? What can I do about Trump and company if I am a Democrat or the alleged Marxist agenda of the Democrats if I am a Republican? It seems that there is not much I can do with any of these external elements that cause fear, but we will discuss how we can actually reduce fear to zero in these circumstances however impossible and outrageous that seems.

The nature of internal fears

These fears, usually coming in the form of anxiety, are much more difficult to examine. Unfortunately (in my opinion), there has been an increasing use of the term anxiety and its cognates worry and fretting over the recent years. People find some kind of solace in saying that they “have” anxiety, or for that matter “have” depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, a learning disability, alcoholism, or autism. This orientation towards “having” something makes people fear that “something” inside of them is not working and they have no control over this something. Thus, again we see the feeling of no control over something, but this something is not external but internal, which makes the fear and anxiety worse because it is coming from inside. However challenging it is to feel helpless with political intrigue, biological invasion, or physical damage, it is much worse to feel that people have no control over what is happening inside of them. You can completely conquer these internal fears and reduce them to zero.

The nature of fear

This is the crux of the problem with fear and anxiety. Just what is the nature of fear and how can we understand it if we are ever able to “reduce it to zero”: in our lives? Fear is absolutely the most basic emotion that we have as humans. I look at fear from a developmental perspective, namely how fear originates in the human organism, what its normal purpose, and how it should ideally become less and less important as life progresses. Sadly, sometimes as people get older, the exact opposite happens: they experience more anxiety. Importantly, fear is the basic emotion we have because it is in our psychological/neurological structures to keep us alive. There are four basic emotions: fear, joy, anger, and sadness, all of which come to us developmentally, i.e. as we move from infancy onward. Ideally, a child of six should have at his/her disposal all of these emotions as they are necessary, but this same (ideal) child should have much less fear that he/she has had in earlier years. Again ideally, a child should move more into joy, anger, and ultimately into sadness and slowly move away from fear. More often than not, this fails to happen. Let’s look at the natural development of emotions in a young child:

  • The first year of life is where the predominant emotion, often the only emotion, is fear. This natural experience of infancy keeps the infant alive. Infants cry in infancy because they are afraid. Why are they afraid? An infant is truly helpless. She can’t feed herself or change her diapers. So when she feels “something” inside that feels dangerous, she cries. This “something”: is probably hunger, but it could also be some kind of difficulty breathing. The key in understanding fear is to understand that fear keeps us alive, especially in infancy. We cry, we get some kind of attention that we feels is central to living. The infant doesn’t know that she is “hungry” because all she knows is that something is “not right” in her body and she feels helpless. While an infant of one year old may experiment with rudiments of joy, anger, and sadness, these are not the most of what an infant feels. Rather, she feels fear or no emotion at all.
  • The second year of life is when we learn of the second basic human emotion: joy. The 1-2 year old feels joy because of several reasons including being fed properly and being changed from a wet diaper. More importantly, this second year of life is a time when things have exploded because now the infant can walk and talk, and with those elements now beginning to have their place in his life, he can attach to things. These “things” include people, physical objects, and possibilities. He now sees it possible to crawl or walk across the floor. He can see that it is fun to pull out all the tissues from the tissue box. He can talk, he can scream, he can sing, and he can dance. What is the essence of all these things: experiencing joy. What is joy? It is the emotion associated with loving something. The infant enjoys speaking or yelling, crawling or walking, jumping or sitting, all of these in the form of experiencing the wider world. When an infant grows beyond the first year of life, his world has exploded 100-fold from the confines of a crib or a diaper-changing table. The joy that is central, or should be central, in this part of infancy, is the result of the child beginning the rudiments of love, whether of people, things, or perhaps just possibilities and dreams.
  • You have heard of the “terrible twos,” meaning that a two-year old is easily and frequently angered. Actually, the real “terrible” years are not so much the one-year old or two-year old but a child who is three, four, or five. These are the real challenging years both for parents and for the developing child. Why is the toddler (ages 2-5) so often angry? Because she had her first year of life when she had pretty much everything she wanted, then into the second year where she got most of what she wanted, perhaps with a few restrictions. There is nothing an infant in a cradle can really do that is dangerous, and there is not too much a one-year old can do that is dangerous. However, there is a lot that a 4-year old can do that is either dangerous or obstructive in life someway. So what happens? The 4-year old is limited…and limited and limited. And that same child is angry about it. “Why is the world so bad now when it was so good before,” a 4-year old might think not knowing that he now gets little of what he wants compared to the years when he got almost all of what he wanted (first year) or most of what he wanted (second year of life). So these years are very crucial because the task for this child and his parents is to find a way into understanding that you can’t get most of what you want, and ultimately understand that it is not good for you to have most of what you want. But a 4-year doesn’t have this perspective, so he is angry “all the time” because you are limiting him “all the time.” This time of life, however, is central for what we call character development, but this is beyond the scope of this essay.
  • If a child gets through these first three stages of life, she could have some grasp of the necessity of fear for survival, joy for having, and anger for not having. This brings the child to the most important emotion in the human being: sadness. Deb and I wrote The Positive Power of Sadness a few years ago, which explains and underscores our belief that this is the most important emotion we can have, namely because whatever we love, be it person, place, thing, or idea, we most surely will lost it. So, we need to be good at grieving, being sad, being disappointed, and hurt because such things come every day. Unfortunately, most people get stuck in one of the previous stages so they fail to know the centrality of sadness and go to fear, anger, or (artificial) joy.

The nature of anxiety

Anxiety is not exactly fear but it is fear-based. Anxiety is actually a brain function. Here, I distinguish between the brain and the mind, the brain being biological and the mind being…well, something else. There is a raging debate, as there has been for centuries, as to whether there is even something called the mind as some scientists believe there is no such thing, only a brain. I won’t debate that subject at this point except to suggest that brain and mind are substantially different, the mind using the brain for cognition, emotion, and physical activity. Importantly, the brain doesn’t know anything but survival and pleasure, so it’s entire function is to maintain safety and enhance pleasure. Anxiety is actually an increase in heartbeat and breathing, which is called vigilance, or sometimes hypervigilance. The brain churns up breathing and heartrate when the brain determines that you need to be vigilant for some reason, namely in the face of danger. That’s all fine and good except the brain does not distinguish the past, present, and future. So when you are remember some dangerous situation that occurred in your past or imagine some dangerous situation in the future, your brain kicks into gear the hormone cortisol, which increases breathing and blood flow as well as hypervigilance.  If that were all there was to it, we would rarely feel anxious, but the fears we have, especially about the future are interpreted by the brain as you being in some immediate danger. Think about an exam that might be a challenge, a flight that might be a challenge, a meeting with someone that might be a challenge. In all of these circumstances the brain kicks up cortisol and increases breathing and heart rate to protect you because the brain determines that there is immediate danger. If you could think of something in the future (or in some cases the past) without any kind of fear, you brain would help you figure out what you should do (or could have done). But if you have the slightest fear of failure or loss, the brain goes into hyper drive. Simply stated, anxiety is a brain problem. The brain is doing its job: protecting you and preparing you for the lion coming over the hill. The brain doesn’t know the difference between the figurative lion and the possible exam when you are experiencing some kind of fear. It just sees you in danger and seemingly in need of hypervigilance.

Ways people cope with fear

Consider that fear erupts in someone when the environment is felt to be unsafe, whether this is in the present or in the future (and also rarely in the past). Fear is not bad. Fear is meant to be a natural emotion that erupts when some unexpected event occurs that appears to be dangerous. If that is the case, the brain does its job by protecting you from the danger by creating vigilance (or hyper vigilance if the danger seems imminent.  I am not denigrating fear. I said at the start that it is the most basic emotion we have because if we didn’t have fear, we wouldn’t survive as adults, and we most certainly wouldn’t have survived as infants. The problem isn’t with real danger or immediate danger. The problem is with perceived danger, which is where all anxiety comes from. Recall that the brain does not distinguish future danger from present danger because it doesn’t know that the future exists: all is in the present as far as the brain is concerned.

Let me bring you back to infancy where fear is the only, or at least the primary emotion that we have. The three ingredients that we need in infancy are, in order of importance: safety, nurturance, and comfort. By far the most important aspect of infancy is safety. If I’m not safe, I will likely die. Then we need nurturance (food) and comfort (physical touch). We can survive without nurturance for a few hours or even days. And we can actually survive without any physical touch whatever, although such a situation does some significant damage to the brain. What sometimes happens in infancy is that the infant gets too much nurturance or too much comfort and not enough times of fear, however odd that sounds. Overprotective parents often render too much of these last two ingredients, nurturance and comfort. A normally developing infant actually needs to be scared for a while before s/he is nurtured or comforted so the infant can feel that the environment is safe…ultimately. In other words the infant gets the message, usually after many hours and days of crying, that s/he does get comfort and nurturance and other care, like diaper-changing, but s/he doesn’t get it at the instant s/he wants it. Give an infant too much comfort and s/he will go through the rest of life seeking undue comfort. Give the infant too much nurturance, and s/he will think that s/he has to be nurtured all the time. There, of course, the opposite side of the coin, namely when the infant actually doesn’t get enough safety, nurturance, or comfort. When an infant is deprived of basic safety, s/he will then do the very same thing: seek undue comfort and nurturance in some way. In sum, the origin of anxiety and undue fear comes from infancy originally, and often from too much or too little of one of the basic ingredients: safety, nurturance, and comfort. This leads to all sorts of unfortunate coping that people do in the real world.

In this paradigm the basic element for which people “cope” is fear of some sort. Listen carefully to people who are stressed, frustrated, challenged, or worried, and you will hear the fear element. E.g. “I’m afraid that he will…,” “I don’t know what I’m going to do with…,” “I’m so frustrated with….because she…,” “What in the world will happen if….” While people saying these things indicate that they are “frustrated,” the real emotion they feel is fear, and this fear is one of helplessness in the face of some impending something. There is “good coping” that we will discuss in a moment, but presently let’s look at typical coping that people do. In a nutshell, they pass over the basic fear that an infant feels and go right into seeking the second and third ingredients of good parenting of an infant: nurturance and comfort. This doesn’t seem so bad on the surface. It doesn’t seem so bad to seek some kind of “support” in the form of some kind of “food” or some kind of human comfort. But when nurturance and comfort are sought in place of facing, feeling, and finishing basic fear, comfort and nurturance only assuage the fear; these things do not finish the fear. People “feel better” when they nurture themselves or find comfort in the arms, physically, emotionally, or cognitively. But they aren’t “better.” They just feel better…for the moment. And then things can easily turn to coping to a fault. I used this expression with a patient recently and he asked me what it meant. “To a fault” means doing something that is intrinsically good in itself but this something is used too much, so much often that this something encroaches on the rest of life.

Seeking comfort and nurturance to a fault actually leads to addiction. Addiction is also a brain-based phenomenon. Recall that the brain only knows safety first and pleasure second. So, if your brain has found that you “feel better” with some kind of nurturance or comfort, you will then continue to seek one or both of these things because your brain is trying to make you feel better. Your brain doesn’t know that if you do anything “to a fault,” you are on a dangerous path. A basic element of addiction is that the substance or behavior is increasingly sought after while at the same time giving less and less satisfaction and security. So, nurturance of some kind and comfort of some kind are first good, then not so good, and then actually bad for you. What is happening in all these circumstances is that you are actually led by craving of some sort but receiving comfort and nurturance less and less. An interesting study done by a neuropsychologist of my acquaintance found that the “craving” that addicts have is chemical, while the liking that addicts have is electrical. The stronger of these two elements is the craving. Most addicts will say that their looking forward to their addictive substance or behavior is much more attractive than their actually liking of it. I defer this discussion at this point but I did a blog on liking and wanting that you might read.

We will discuss what can be done profitably when one fears something, but for the moment allow me to discuss the typical coping/addictive things that people do. Note that in all of these behaviors and substances, people have some kind of short-lived pleasure at the cost of a lot of long-term distress. Addictions fall into two categories: behavior and chemical. They include the following:

  • Behavioral addictions:
    • Gambling
    • Screen time (computer, gaming, TV, Internet searching)
    • Sexual (promiscuity, excessive masturbation and pornography, fetishes)
    • Cognitive (excessive dreaming, imagination)
    • Emotional (excessive emotional expression; no emotional expression)
    • Playing (too much, not enough)
    • Working (too much, nor enough)
    • Sleeping (too much, not enough)
  • Chemical additions
    • Eating (too much, too little)
    • Stimulants (caffeine, nicotine, cocaine)
    • Depressants (alcohol, sedatives, marijuana)
    • Hallucinogens (LSD, mushrooms, etc.)

Note that all of these things, whether chemical or behavioral, are good in themselves, and some of them are essential, like eating, working, emotional, and cognitive. Recall, an addiction is something to a fault, but more revealing, an addiction is something that I do that begins to be life itself rather than enhancing life. Clearly, there is nothing wrong with eating but people who eat excessively, or fail to eat sufficiently, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food, eating, or avoiding eating. Then eating is an addiction. Recall that the brain has just two operations, namely safety and pleasure, so when you engage in an activity to a fault, the brain doesn’t know that this excessive activity has adverse effects on the rest of your life and your future. Your brain doesn’t know the rest of your life, much less the future.

The key in all of these behaviors is fear, namely how fear has come to dominate the person. A person who is anorexic fear-based. He can actually become delusional thinking that certain foods, too much of a food, or food itself is dangerous. Then the brain kicks in and protects the anorexic person from food, actually causing physical damage…in the future but not in the present. Fear always starts an addiction but only after there has been a good bit of joy. On the other side of addictive eating we have excessive eating. In this case the second element of the brain is activated: pleasure. I might really enjoy eating a large pizza, but if I eat three large pizzas every day, my joy will lesson, and more importantly, the brain will begin to feel that you are depriving yourself of joy, or worse yet, began to think (loosely speaking) that you are in danger if you don’t eat pizzas every day. If your brain is fear-based and fear-activated, you may be caught in a cycle of quick joy and long lasting unhappiness that can only be assuaged by eating more pizzas.

I have discussed addictions as a way of coping, but are all people inclined towards addictions? In a word, yes. If we cope with our fear by falling into some kind of personally damaging behavior, we are then addicted to it, whether this behavior is eating, sleeping, thinking, emoting or any of the other things noted above. I don’t wish to suggest that everyone is addicted, like in the sense of being a chronic alcoholic, but rather I am suggesting that most coping that people do fails to assuage the fear and find a way through it. So, what can be done to correct this pattern that is fear-based?

Successful dealing with harmful coping

Be sad. This is the only cure for fear. Let me explain. Recall that fear is the most basic emotion we have and that the purpose of fear is to keep us alive. Also remember that an infant needs safety first, nurturance second, and comfort third. When that infant fails to get enough safety for whatever reason, he then will seek nurturance and/or comfort. The groundwork for overcoming fear and its cognates, anxiety and worry, is in understanding this concept of fear, first that it is basic to human existence, second that it is necessary to sustain life. It is never helpful to see fear as something wrong, nor is it helpful to think of such things as anxiety as “something wrong” inside of me. You need to move your life from being fear-based to love-based, but in order to do that you will need to feel sad. What does this mean? How does feeling sad assuage fear and replace it with love. Deb and I dealt with this concept primarily in our Good Grief book and secondarily in I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we discussed the fact that sadness is a “love problem,” meaning that if I am sad, I have lost something that I loved. Sadness is not depression or despair. It is the way your soul manages loss, and it is wholly a good thing. More importantly, it is not fear-based. In fact, you cannot be both afraid and sad, which is the key to understanding how to move your life forward from fear to love. Very importantly, fear does not end on its own. It stays the same, gets worse, or is repressed. Sadness ends. I may be sad for seconds or hours but sadness always ends if I allow myself to feel sad.

This is how sadness can replace fear: (1) Notice the fear that you have right now. Notice what you feel in your body that indicates that you are afraid (or anxious or worried). (2) Remind yourself that your brain is taking care of you because your brain believes that “there is a lion coming over the hill” or something just as dangerous. Your brain is doing its most basic job: keeping you alive. (3) Think of what you are afraid of losing. This might be girlfriend, job, tool, opportunity, or house. Consider how you might feel if you would lose this thing. Note that you will begin to feel sad. (4) Allow yourself to feel sad about what you might lose. Note that when you are thinking, just imagining that you might lose this something that you love in the future, you start to feel sad in the present. (5) Let this sadness run its course. (6) Notice that you feels less afraid or anxiety, perhaps not afraid at all. Instead, you feel sad. We call this anticipatory sorrow. Note further that you are now feeling the love you have for this something, whether girlfriend, job, property, or idea. You have replace fear with sadness. Fear is about danger. Sadness is about love. You’ll probably need a good therapist to guide you through this process. Later, you can do it on your own.

You can do the same procedure with something that you have lost in the past if you follow the same path: remember what you had, remember what you lost, and remember how difficult it was for you to having lost this something. Your fear of losing something in the future might well have to do with something in the past. A couple of days ago I dealt with a young man who came to see me because of chronic anxiety. He has been afraid all his life, namely that his father would die for some unknown reason. As we looked at his past life, which had been unduly attached to his father and afraid of losing his father, that he had not ever lived a day without this undue fear. The more we looked at this loss of 24 years of life in fear, the sadder he became. The more he felt sad about this profound loss, the less he felt fear and anxiety. I asked him how much fear he had. He said, “None”…while he was crying for having lost so much of life to fear. He found it helpful to stop using “anxiety” that he “has” but the feeling, “I do not feel safe in the world” added with the statement, “The world is safe”. Talking about his experience with anxiety this way moved him away from something that he has to something that he feels.

The Apostle Paul said, “Perfect love cast out fear” among other things having to do with loving more than fearing. Likewise, Buddha said similar things as have many philosophers over the years. But finding “perfect love” is a life challenge. It is better to seek perfect love, even though we know that we will never have it, than it is to worry about not having something that we love.

Fear less; love more. Along the way feel occasionally sad. Sadness always ends.

Love V: Love Problems

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is (probably) the last of the blogs on love. Previously, we looked at a bit of theory of love, “not being love right”, temperament-based love, and being “seen” so you could be loved.  This blog will be devoted to a very basic concept that we have developed about feelings, emotions, and love. If you have read our blogs or the books we have written, you will be familiar with the concept of “love problems,” but allow me to summarize.

Theory of feelings

We propose that “feelings” are a central ingredient of human existence, that they are an so important that they are undefinable, like time, space, and love, and that they are never wrong because they emanate from our souls, which are most certainly never wrong. That having been said, the expression of these feelings can be “wrong,” or at the very least, inadequate. We experience our feelings sequentially physically, emotionally, cognitively, and actively (which includes speaking). The physical and emotional aspects of our experience of feelings are both unconscious, while the cognitive and active experiences are conscious. Furthermore, we usually have a natural tendency to note the experience of feelings in one of these ways, and then we may have the same or a different means of expressing these feelings. Perhaps the most prominent element in the experience and expression of feelings is within the emotional range although many people are much more cognitive or active, and some are almost entirely physical.

Theory of emotions

You will note that we make an important distinction between feelings and emotions, with emotions being a subset of feelings. We propose that there are four basic emotions, and then combinations, cognates, and expressions of these emotions. Importantly, all of the emotions have to do with love in some way. These four basic emotions have to do with time, namely:

  • Joy is the experience in of loving something in the present
  • Sadness is the experience of losing something that I love in the present
  • Anger is the experience of feeling the loss of something in the past
  • Fear is the experience of feeling the possible loss of something in the future.

Note that all of the emotions relate in some way to something that I love. Note further that three of these four emotions have to do with loss: present loss leads to sadness, past loss leads to anger, and future loss leads to fear.

Love problems and emotions

So, why do we talk about “problems” with love? We do that because we have so much difficulty with the emotions surrounding sadness, anger, and fear. We somehow think that we should be joyful all the time. Two important facts are related to this theory of feelings and emotions: (1) love is at center of life and (2) we lose everything we love…eventually. We find that people have trouble losing something that they love, whether that loss is in the past, the present, or the future. We try to help people (1) trust that their feelings are never wrong, (2) that their feelings erupt towards loving something, and (3) this love always leads to some kind of joy.

What we love is very important to notice because we do not restrict the concept of love to the love people. Rather, we suggest that we can love anything with equal passion. Many people have a primary orientation towards love of people, but many more have just as deep a love for nature, property, ideas, history, science, or something else, whether physical or theoretical. I wrote a bit about this in the Love III blog, Temperamental Love. Expanding love beyond the love of people is very important if we are to understand each other. Thus, it is hard for people with what we call the “lover” temperament to understand “caretaker” people who love property more deeply than people. As you can see, this can lead to relational problems, but I am not speaking so much about relationships as I am speaking of just what happens when we love something. Importantly, whatever we love, we will eventually lose. That is the “love problem.”

Sadness: this is the natural emotion that erupts from losing something. When I am sad, I am in the present. I may be thinking of something that I loved and lost in the past, but if I am sad about that loss, I experience it in the present. We will examine potential loss in the future momentarily.

Anger: this is very important because anger is also a “love problem.” If I am angry, I have lost something in the past, the past being a few minutes ago or a few years ago. We refer to anger as delusional, namely being an emotion that erupts as a way of changing the past. Why do I throw the hammer and swear when I missed the nail? Because I (delusionally) think that this hammer-throwing expression of anger will change the fact that I missed the hammer.

Fear: this is equally important because if I am afraid that I will lose something in the future. This “something” could be a dollar on a bet, a good friendship, a job, or anything. Fear is also delusional because if I think/worry/fret about what I might lose in the future, this anxiety will somehow change the future.

As you can see, all losses have to do with love. So, how do we cope with loss?

Coping with loss is a love problem

We normally cope with loss with sadness, anger, or fear. We content that we need to be sadder and hence less angry and less afraid. But this is no easy task. The difficulty with facing loss, at least in America, is the fact that our culture is not particularly emotionally mature. We do not generally understand emotions and allow them to run their natural course. Particularly, we tend to get angry way too easily and stay angry longer, and likewise we get way too worried and stay with worry way too long. Both emotions are hard on one’s health, work, play, relationships, and life at large.

It is hard enough to allow to be sad, especially for us men because sadness is normally portrayed as weakness. Indeed, there are some people that come to sadness and tears so easily that it seems to be an escape from reality. But the larger number of people simply haven’t found a way to be sad, which means loving, losing, feeling sad, and getting over being sad. Getting over being sad? What does that mean? It means allowing sadness to run its course. The key of all of these emotions is that sadness ends. Anger doesn’t end. Fear doesn’t end. Sadness ends…if we allow it to run its course and finish. However, this is a challenge because I am truly sad, that moment of my existence is filled with the feeling (= intuition) that I will be sad forever. Simply put, I need to allow myself the freedom to be sad frequently enough to get familiar with the process:

  • Love something
  • Enjoy this something
  • Lose this something for some reason
  • Feel sad
  • Allow sadness to run its course
  • Finish being sad
  • Love again
  • Love better knowing that whatever I love, I will lose.

Dealing with anger and fear are more difficult but the “cure” for these emotions (the subtitle of our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, is to learn to be sad. It is easier with anger, but it is not easy. Whenever I am angry, I have a “love problem,” i.e. I have lost something that I loved, whether it is the nail I was hammering or my favorite friend. I got angry because I raced right past the sadness of losing my friend or hammer and got “delusionally” angry. Unfortunately, anger doesn’t end like sadness. It just metastasizes into my physical, cognitive, emotional, and relational systems and becomes an unfortunate and harmful part of those systems. The cure for anger is to realize that I love something and lost it. I have a love problem when I’m angry.

If anger is hard to move back to sadness, fear is much harder largely because when I am afraid, my brain gets into the action and “protects” me by churning up cortisol so that I can be prepared to fight. The brain doesn’t know that I am thinking/worrying about something in the future because the brain, as a machine, doesn’t understand the future. The brain is singularly in the present and has all it can do in order to keep you alive with blood flow and breathing. So, while fear is also a love problem, it is much harder to “cure”.

Curing anger and fear

I say what many patients think is an outrageous statement: “I am going to help you get to the place where you are never afraid and never angry. Just how will I propose to do that? I will help you feel the sadness that is under both fear and anger, and the love that is under the sadness.

It’s easier to “cure” anger than fear. If I am angry, I can point to a specific loss, like someone who hated me for some reason. I lost his/her approval. Curing the anger I feel towards him will simply be facing the fact that I loved him and loved our relationship, but now I have lost both. I have a love problem. If I stick with the love, I will eventually feel sad, my sadness will run a course, I will finish being sad, and then I can go on with my life. Perhaps, I will find a way to reinstate my friendship with my friend or establish another friendship. Or maybe I will just fix the garage up as a way of loving a fixed up garage. I will replace anger with sadness and when sadness, I will love something better, perhaps realizing that garages have a nasty tendency to deteriorate over time leading to…sadness.

It’s harder to cure fear, but this is how we try to help people do it. I ask the individual to picture the potential loss, attempt to replace the fear of loss with actual loss and allow the feeling of sadness to erupt. This is simple but very hard to do. It is hard because people (their brains) are so use to worrying that doing this anticipatory loss feeling of sadness is quite a challenge. Properly done, you will actually feel the potential loss and sadness and love in the present. This will cure your anxiety. A lot harder than it sounds because you are going against the brain, the culture, and the individual’s resistance to feeling anticipatory sadness.

Sadness is a lover problem. So are anger and fear. But sadness ends and makes you a better person and a more loving person because you know that you love but for a moment, however long that moment is. Anger and fear do no such thing.

Love IV: I See You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, love, marital, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Deb and I have many statements that occasionally comprise elements of our many conversations, some of which I noted in a previous blog called Racks and Cutters. Thinking and writing about love these days reminded me of a statement that we heard in a movie that has stuck with us. The movie is Avatar and the statement is “I see you.” The natives of the planet sometimes greeted each other with what amounts to a “hello” or “how are you” with a deeper statement: “I see you,” which meant that they “saw” (= understood, valued, and loved) the other person. Deb and I frequently “see” each other in this way, and I invite you to consider doing the same with the people you love. Perhaps you will “see” them better. So, how does one see people better, and how can I make myself seen better? And what does seeing have to do with loving? Perhaps this “seeing” thing is another undefinable thing, like feelings, time, and love. It seems so important in my trade, but even more important in daily life, especially around people who are important to us. “Seeing” is based on how you feel, what you see, how you react to what you see, what you do, and what you say. However, seeing someone also is dependent on whether that person is “seeable.” We will first discuss what you see and then discuss the being seen part of this process.

Seeing

What you feel

Again, I dare refer you to our little book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we suggested the heart of saying how you feel is to know that there is a “something” inside of you that you want to say or otherwise express. Likewise, in this business of seeing other people, the element of knowing how you feel is the first and most important ingredient of “seeing” someone. Deb and I often tell budding therapists that the most important thing that they have to do is know how they feel when they are with a patient. But what does it mean to “feel”?

When we wrote the feelings book, we spent a good deal of time thinking and eventually writing about what this feeling thing actually means. Briefly stated, feelings erupt first in the unconscious elements of physical sensations and emotions, and then move into the conscious elements of cognition. To know what you feel, note these four elements: physical, emotional, cognitive, and active (or verbal). You will note that you always have these four elements of feelings but likely you gravitate towards one of them, say cognition or emotion. When you feel “something,” this something is not wrong, but it may not be clear to you why you feel it. I often feel quite emotionally moved, often to tears, when I hear someone tell me about themselves in my office. This is because I “see” the individual in front of me, something that we will shortly discuss.

What you see

When you understand how you feel, the next item in “seeing” is really believing what you see with the other person. You may see one of the four elements of feeling: physical, emotional, cognitive, or active. You may see what the person does. You may “see” what the person says. You may “see” something that doesn’t fit into physical/emotional/cognitive/active: you may have a “sense” or an intuition about the other person. If you are interested in the whole matter of relationships, which are always founded on some kind of love, you may see something that you really love, whether it is your friends’ actions, words, or otherwise. This kind of intuitional seeing is perhaps the most important of all because ideally your intuition does not depend on what you see physically, think logically, or feel emotionally.

Intuitional seeing be quite brilliant. It tends to come at what we must call a “spiritual” level. People often say something like, “I just feel…” or “I just know…” when they see something in someone by intuition. I must advise you that there are two very important matters when you have an intuition of someone, one beautiful and valuable, one dangerous. If your intuitional seeing is truly spiritual, i.e. godly and true, it is not wrong. The words that you come up with in this kind of seeing may be wrong. Everything we ever say that is primarily emotional is wrong in the sense of an imperfect reflection of inner feeling. But be careful with this kind of seeing because you will have an inclination to think too much or feel emotional too much. If thinking and feeling are fused into an intuition, you cannot trust the intuition. Thinking and feeling are part of you and your inner self, not a part of the other person. It is very hard to focus on true seeing rather than seeing through your own lens, like emotion, cognition, or some other judgment. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have emotion and thought but rather a recognition that when you see someone, it is not about you at all. It is not about what you feel emotionally or think cognitively. It is about the other person.

What you do with what you see

This is very delicate because if you really see something in another person, something deeply spiritual has happened: you have seen the person’s soul. When you see someone’s soul, you see God, or perhaps a part of God or a reflection of God. You are in the holy of holies that is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a very sacred place and you need to see it as godly and sacred. It is also a very private place, not one that you enter without great respect and caution. Hopefully, you see that this kind of seeing is deeply spiritual and very real but not something that we very often do for many reasons, not the least of which is that most people do not allow themselves to be seen. So, if you really see your friend, hold your breath, hold your thoughts, hold your feelings, and just observe this wonder. It will be wonderful.

Wonderful as it is to see someone, this is not generally a time to say anything. Rather, it is a time to feel something. I use the term “feeling” in its four components (physical, emotional, cognitive, and active), so depending on your own tendency to experience and express your own feelings, you will “feel” one of these four things. Keep your feelings to yourself. This is not a recommendation to repress your feelings but rather to value them and govern them so you can keep your focus on “seeing” your friend.

If you trust your intuition and keep your own feelings at bay, you have the opportunity to see the person…if that person is “see-able” (we’ll get there in a minute). Now comes the remarkable thing about seeing someone: You will love the person you see. No doubt about it: if you see someone, really see the person, you will be compelled to love the person. I won’t attempt to define this basic human need/experience of love because it is simply to profound to be defined. Love can be felt, and it can be carefully expressed. But love has to first be felt before you can decide if and when you say something about it. If you see someone and come to have this godly experience of loving the person, this experience is good in and of itself. You don’t have to say it; you don’t have to do anything. You just need to feel it. People tend to do this kind of seeing and loving with infants and animals although people with what we call naturalistic intelligence can also do this kind of seeing and loving with nature. Other people have love for property, ideas, or activity. But our focus is not so much on non-personal elements of love but rather the love that comes naturally and unavoidably when you see someone. Grasp it. Name it. Feel it. If it is good for you to see and love, it is good for your friend to be seen and loved.

When you see and ultimately love your friend, you are being something like a therapist to that person. The English word “therapist” comes from the Greek word, therapeuo, which means healing. Good therapy is healing, and the best of therapy comes from seeing…and the natural addition of loving the person you see. This happens to me all the time, in fact so often that I feel truly privileged to see and love the people I see. Sometimes, granted, I get lost in my thoughts or emotions, but when I’m at my best I see and love without trying to do so. The best therapists have found ways to encourage a spirit of openness to being seen. Unfortunately, many therapists don’t know how to understand and value this seeing, much less manage it. This leads us to our next discussion: how can we be “seen”?

Being seen

I want to be seen

There is a real oddity about this whole business of being “seen” because it seems that sometimes we want to be seen and other times we don’t want to be seen. Let me try to make some sense of this conundrum because it really does make sense. Furthermore, there are people who want to be seen by everyone and there are people who want to be seen by only a few people. We call the former “external” people, otherwise known as extraverts, and we call the latter “internal” people, otherwise known as introverts. Furthermore, there are times when I want to be seen and there are times that I don’t want to be seen. And there are things about me that I want to keep private and others that I want to be public. Setting aside these differences in psychological type for a moment, I will assert that everyone wants to be seen, but at the same time don’t want to be seen. Finally, there is the further paradox of wanting to be seen but not wanting to be open enough to be able to be seen. This is what I see with most of the people I see. This is wanting it both ways, something that often plagues us as humans, like I want to have a job I like but I want to make a lot of money that doesn’t come with doing what I like. Or, I want to be safe at all times but I want the things that come from stepping out of my safety zone. Let’s examine this paradox.

I am afraid of being seen

A book written not long ago was entitled, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am (J. Power, 1969), but there have been many more books and articles written about why people are afraid to be open. In a nutshell, I am afraid to be seen because I have been hurt in the past when I was seen and I don’t want to be hurt again. Sometimes, people can remember why they are afraid to be open and some cannot, but more importantly, most people have been hurt many times over many years when they have been open, so it is natural that they would be reticent about being open again. I won’t elaborate on this experience of how people have been hurt in the past because it lies beyond the scope of our current discussion aside from stating that resistance to being open is always related to unfinished hurts. I must also defer you to previous writings about what the term “unfinished hurts” means.

So, if I am reticent to be open, how can I be seen, how can I be loved, and how can I be healed? I can’t be. I can’t be loved, really loved, healingly loved without being seen This is why people with so-called mental health problems (a term I almost never use because of its negative implications) rarely overcome these problems: they can’t be open, so they can’t be loved, so they can’t be healed. Good therapy makes an attempt to engage this process of seeing-come-loving-come healing. Good parenting, good friendships, good partnerships, and good marriages do the same. But even in the best of therapists’ offices, it is difficult for people to be open because they have just been too hurt over too many years and to go there is frightening. Just as often as people actively resist being open, they don’t actually know how to be open.

I don’t know how to allow someone to see me

Why is it that people don’t know how to be open? Basically and simply because they have been hurt too much when they have been open. The hurt that people have experienced has been in the form of criticism and judgment. They had times when they have been open but the person with whom they were open was not capable of loving them. More importantly, the other person didn’t really see them, much less love them. The other person saw something that they didn’t understand or didn’t like. But they didn’t actually see the person: they only saw something that was a reflection of that person, like what they wore, what they said, or what they did. Most failure to develop a spirit of openness comes from a myriad of times of having been open only to have been criticized and judged. You see, when someone criticizes you or judges you, they are not seeing you; they see something about you, like what you said or did, but they didn’t see your soul. In some cases, people have never been seen, which is the tragedy that often leads to what used to be called a character disorder, now called a personality disorder. These people are not truly disordered; rather, they are not developed. They have not developed because they have not been loved, and they have not been loved because they have not been seen. Whether in a therapist’s office, the living room with a family member, or in a park with a friend, they need to be seen. It is very hard for people to be open when they have long ago forgotten what it was like to be seen and loved, if that ever even happened. They have to learn to be open. And it will be painful.

Learning to be open

This is intrinsically difficult for most people, difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned personal history of having been criticized or judged, or worse yet never haven seen. What happens in these circumstances is that the brain takes over and protects you from further hurt and harm. By the way, the brain does not distinguish hurt and harm; it is all the same to the brain and it is to be avoided, quite naturally if you think about it. Furthermore, the brain does not know time, so everything that is potentially hurtful or harmful is felt by the brain to be in the present. This is the cause of all anxiety, which is fear of future hurt, while anger is the feeling of past hurt. But the brain does not distinguish past and future from the present. It is all in the present. So the fear of openness is a brain function that has to be challenged by the mind, and it is not easy to do. This brain/mind duality is the cause of your “being of two minds,” “feeling one thing and thinking another,” “thinking in two directions” and many more paradoxes of mind/brain functioning. Learning to be open is a challenge because your brain is protecting you from hurt/harm thinking that the danger is in the present. The brain has logged the hurt that you experienced when you were open and damaged as a result.

Learning to be open needs to come in stages. You have to learn when to be open (not when you’re drinking or at 2 o’clock in the morning), where to be open (not in the grocery store), what to say, if anything, when you’re open, and with whom to be open. Importantly, most people are intrinsically dangerous to you when you are open because most people simply don’t trust what they see, much the love that seeing might engender. Rather, they get overwhelmed with their own thoughts and feelings and possibly their own hurts. So, when I suggest you need to be open to be seen and loved, I offer this suggestion with great caution because you shouldn’t do it with most people at most times and in most places. Know your audience and you will be seen.

If you are going to try to be open, you might need to instruct the person in front of you how to see, how to keep criticism and suggestion out of the picture and just see. Try this once or twice and you will likely fail, or the listener might fail. Then try again, maybe with the same person, maybe with a different person, maybe in a different place. You need practice. What you will find is that you will be hurt many times, but then you will also be seen and love at other times. It is worth the risk. Then there is the possibility that you and your friend can see each other, know each other, and ultimately love each other…better. Remember the previous blog: Not Loved Right. Perhaps you can be loved right for the first time in a long time.

Being open with each other

This is the ideal, especially in intimate relationships and it can be done. For instance in my current and recent past I have seen many couples who do not see one another because each of the partners does not allow themselves to be open for fear of being hurt, which is itself based on some earlier life event that was very damaging. Then over time, each of these people hurt each other more leading them to come to my office for “marriage counseling.” They don’t need marriage counseling. They need therapy, they need to be healed, and most importantly, they need each other to heal each other. For example:

  • Couple A. She is a very successful professional person who lived with a very angry father. As a result she comes to anger too quickly skipping the hurt that always underlies anger. The man came from a very abusive and restrictive family with a stepparent who was clearly abusive. This led to him being afraid of being open and being hurt more.
  • Couple B. He is a very devote pastor who came from a sexually abusive family with all that goes with it, namely sexual dysfunction. She came from a family much like the previous man’s family where she could do no right and learned to be so careful with what she said or did that she essentially never says what she feels…again, for fear of being hurt again.
  • Couple C. She is very extraverted and outspoken having been raised in a largely good family but one in which he was given the permission to speak his thoughts and feelings, so much so that she has a tendency of expressing herself with little understanding, much less any regard for the impact of his speech. He is much more introverted and came into the family without much privilege to say how he feels. Unfortunately, he saw that his potential wife was a stable and fun person but most probably did not really love him. Rather she saw her as a good partner. Over time they both hurt each other, so much so that the man is divorcing his “good” wife with a great amount of hostility
  • Couple D. Both parties came into the marriage with wounds from their previous marriages and saw the goodness of each other but not the wounds. Unfortunately, these wounds not only failed to heal, the people in the marriage hurt each other for years without meaning to do so and with little awareness of how what they said or did was hurtful, adding flames to the fire of hurt from their previous marriages.

These are but a few examples (identifying information adjusted) of how people fail to be open and thus fail to be seen and eventually loved. In my work with all of these couples I am attempting to help them be open with each other so they can be seen, loved, and healed. I can’t do it myself.

I leave you with the admonition previously stated that you need to be loved as we all do. To be loved you need to be seen. To be seen, you need to be open. To be open, you will be vulnerable to hurt and love with about a 50-50 chance for either. It is worth the bet. You are older now, and even if you were terribly wounded as a child, as an adolescent, or in your previous relationship, you can weather the storm of hurt better. Moreover, you just might be loved…and healed