Spiritual

The Last Half of Life

Ron Johnson appreciation, Development, Discovery, Feelings, grief, happiness, men's issues, mindfulness, Opportunity, Self-Awareness, social esteem, Spiritual

I’m in the last half of life. Perhaps, I should put quotes around that statement because I am not speaking concretely and practically but abstractly and metaphorically. I just flew by my 77th birthday a bit ago and now I’m well into my 78th year of life. Who knows how long I will live: a day, a year, 10 years, or 30 years? Yes, I suppose I could live to 107 but that seems quite likely. I am actually at the average age where Americans people die, and actually a couple years beyond the average lifespan of men, which is 75, so it behooves me to examine such things. Let me get to the point of this “last half of life” business.

The last half of life

I have come to use the phrase, the last half of life, metaphorically, not as a chronological measure. Half of the typical life of an American is about 38 years. But many people never see their 38th birthday and many see years well beyond 76. I am using the last half of life to mean the period in a person’s life that s/he might make a lasting contribution to life, perhaps something substantially different from the “first half of life,” whatever that period of time might be. I am presently seeing many men who are in “the last half” of their lives, but their ages range from 35 to 78. I will be gathering some of these men together for a day of reflection, encounter, and forward-looking even though the challenges and dilemmas of these men are substantially different. What remains the same for them is finding meaning in the rest of their lives. These men are quite seriously looking at what the past, the present, and the future in order to go forward with self-confidence:

  • They are looking at what they have done right, what they have done wrong, what they could have done, what they should have done, and what they shouldn’t have done. These men are looking at the past with what we might call “the wisdom of age” or “the 20-20 vision of hindsight.”
  • They are looking at the present with a certain perspective, namely what they are now doing including what they should be doing, what they shouldn’t be doing, and what they want to be doing.
  • They are looking at the future as to what they could do, what they should do, and even what they feel they have to

Who is looking at the last half of life?

Let me tell you about some of these men. (And permit me to use the masculine pronoun from here on because I am just talking about men. There may be some great similarities with women or perhaps some profound differences, but that is another piece of literature that I am not qualified to write.). Of course, all the names are fictional as are some of the professions and situations in life so as to protect the privacy of these men. Nevertheless, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of these men are wholly factual.

  • Jack is the 78-year old, and my only patient who is actually older than I am. He has been a very successful person in his trade, which has been social work. He has continued to work until just recently when outlived his usefulness at the agency he worked for. Previous to that work he has had some very responsible and successful people and is a person deeply committed to his work, and also to his faith. Unfortunately, over the years, including the 50-some year of marriage, he has not managed his money very well and is in an almost dire financial situation. He is looking to the “last half” of his life free of this financial burden but also have a life with genuine meaning.
  • Sam is a 35-year old very successful businessman who owns a trade-based company. He has been quite disturbed by the recent election and the many changes in the culture and politics and wants to “make a difference” in the world in some way. He has considered selling his business and moving on but has no idea where, when, and how he would “move on.”
  • Peter has been successful in human resources for many years. He has made a significant amount of money, but now has been “downsized” as many companies now do. But he has taken the huge step of working on a master’s degree in psychology and hopes to enter the field. By the way, he is in a very unsatisfying marriage, has three adolescent kids one of whom is going to college this fall. So not only is he changing professions, he is also changing his parental role and possibly his marriage situation.
  • Tom of 63 but you wouldn’t know it because he so spy and active. He has had a couple of professions over the years, including a good stint in ministry, but he has been quite successful in sales. He, too, like Peter (and another man as well) is looking into the field of psychology or counseling. By the way, his marriage is also on the rocks to his great dismay because his wife left him having discovered that 33 years ago she shouldn’t have married him.
  • A man who may soon be inheriting a very successful professional business from his father, a business for which he is trained but not interested. His interests seem to lie more in teaching and coaching.
  • There are several others in situations not unlike these, where men have been making tons of money but not happy, have been in difficult marriages, and other challenges.

Perhaps one of the reasons this “last half” of life has interested me is the fact that I have seen many deaths over the past year, including many deaths of young people, who might not have found a way to truly engage the “last half” of their lives. These people include the children of several friends, my own daughter, the children of several men that are current patients, three cousins, three in-laws, and one patient who wrote three blogs about his life with me as his amanuensis. This man, 75 when he died, often said to me, “I don’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up.” Now he doesn’t have to worry, but I think he really wanted to find some meaning to the “last half” of his life but never did. These many deaths have only been aggravated by the “war” that I spoke of in a previous blog (biological, political, and cultural war) in the world together with the 550,000 people who have died of Covid and the millions who have been damaged in some way by the war. All of this has given me the opportunity to look at the “last half” of the lives of these men as well as the last half of my own life.  Truly looking at this last half takes an honest look at what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen in life.

Honestly looking at the future

The theme with all these men is this: what can I do in the future that will be meaningful? Perhaps, what can I do that will be of lasting value? Perhaps also, what can I do that will be of value to the world? Unfortunately, but understandably, these men want to bring all the past into the future. They want to bring along all the good of the past, leave all the bad, and have more good in the future. You can’t have all three, and this fact is difficult for every one of these men. Simply put, you can’t bring all the past into the future.

Examples:

  • One man wants to stay married even though his wife says that she doesn’t like him, never has, and she is seemingly very happy without him
  • One man wants to continue to make $100,000 but in a new profession that will barely give him half of that amount
  • One man wants to find a way to continue to love his former wife in the same way he always has even though his current female relationship is far superior to his former marriage
  • One man wants to stay living with his wife primarily so he can have an “intact family” even though he doesn’t love her, and possibly never has
  • One man wants to have some kind of magic that will eliminate the debt that he has acquired over many years
  • One man wants to get back with the woman who just might have the most important woman in his life even though she says that is impossible
  • One man wants to continue to engage in ideational figuring out new ways of looking at life although he never seems to be able to put anything to real practice.
  • One man wants to be able to drink as much as he always had even though his drinking has certainly damaged his marriage and possibly his life
  • Another man wants to continue to smoke pot as a primary means of coping with life
  • Many men want the people in their lives to understand the psychological principles that they have learned without these people going through the rigors of years of therapy that they have gone through

Slowly and painfully, men often have to learn to let go of much of the past, many sad and challenging things like mistakes of relationships, school, and work. Just as often men have to let go of the good things that were a part of the “first half of their lives” because these good things are no longer available. The poem Desiderata said it this way: take kindly the counsel of years gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” But what do we need to surrender? And what can I expect positively out of a good perspective of the second half of life?

Surrendering and expecting

If I am to truly face the future and seek to find meaning and make meaning in life, I have to give up so much of what “the first half” of life has been. Then I need to focus on what I can do, how I do it, and why I do it.

Primarily, what has to be surrendered is fear, namely:

  • Fear of mistakes
  • Fear of failure
  • Fear of rejection
  • Fear of correction
  • Fear of being alone
  • Fear of being ill or dying
  • Any other fear

Secondly, you have to surrender some expectations:

  • Of visible success
  • Of appreciation
  • Of recognition
  • Of money

But you can expect

  • An increasing realization that you are doing something for you, for other people, and for the world all at the same time
  • Being more truthful, first to yourself, and then to others
  • Continuing to get better at thinking, feeling, and doing
  • Finding people who share your interest in doing something meaningful
  • The freedom that a fear-free life gives you
  • Success in doing something meaningful
  • A lasting purpose in the days, years, or decades you have to live
  • Recognition of your work by some people

There are many people, at least so it seems, that do not need to look at the “last half” of life.

A good life in the past leading to a good life in the future

I know of several men who are quite pleased to be retired. One of them spends a good deal of time golfing, another a good deal of time water-skiing, with both of these activities being spent with other people. I can only surmise that there are many people who are snow birds in order to live their remaining lives in parts south, at least one in Costa Rica and many in Florida. I see Facebook posts by some of these men who are very content to philosophize, share pictures, tell stories, tell jokes, remind me of things in the 50’s, enjoy the spring flowers, and spend time with their grandchildren. I am happy for these men. Most of them have lived honorable, productive, and honest lives and now are using the fruits of their labor. While I appreciate their pleasant retirement, such is not my lot in life, so it seems. I look favorably at the past but look even more favorably at the present and the future.

Personal

So, what, you may ask, is my second half of life? The answer, quite simply, is teaching, namely teaching people what I have learned over these 77 years of life, and more specifically what I have learned over the 55 years of my professional career. The forms that this “teaching” seem to be taking is in writing, conducting seminars, and doing meaningful therapy. I have finished with several elements of therapy that constituted as much as half of my working years, namely psychotherapy with children, seeing people who are chronically ill, whether with mental illness or physical illness, doing evaluations to determine if someone is “disabled,” and very possibly severely limiting evaluations in general. My focus now, aside from reading, writing, and teaching, is to work with people in therapy who are truly ready to enter the second half of their lives. There are many people who think about such things, feel about such things, and dream about such things, but I think I can be of more value to the world helping people who are willing to step out of the past, into the present, and towards the future. This is somewhat of a painful change that I have been making in my own “second half” of life, but it yet seems right to do.

Life’s Issues and Challenges: It’s All about Trauma

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, Opportunity, Spiritual

A colleague, Jackie, recently told me about an experience she had had with an attorney. This colleague does quite a bit of family therapy and has a long history of having been involved in families that are usually quite dysfunctional. “Dysfunctional” is not one of my favorite words, but it means that the adults in the family were not mature: not mature emotionally and hence not mature socially. Jackie said that she indicated that there had been a good deal of trauma in the family, particularly with the father in the family. The lawyer who was litigating the case, which had to do with custody and care of the children, asked Jackie “how much training she had had in trauma.” I don’t know exactly how Jackie answered the question, but she said a most profound statement to me at that moment: “It’s all about trauma, isn’t it, Ron?” I agreed. It’s all about trauma.  To talk about trauma one is usually led to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder.

What is trauma? And what is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

There is some debate about what “trauma” means, and rightly so because the word trauma has been increasingly used in the culture, not only by therapists but by many other professionals and by many people who just live ordinary lives. There is general agreement among mental health practitioners that trauma is the following:

  • An unexpected negative event in a person’s life
  • An event that had some kind of negative impact on the person
  • An event that had a substantial amount of emotion connected with it, primarily the emotion of fear, and then secondarily of anger and sadness

Note that this definition of trauma is not the definition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that we hear about so frequently. PTSD is a condition that includes the elements noted above plus two other elements:

  • A failure to express the emotions associated with the negative event.
  • We refer to these emotions as being “repressed” although importantly, there is not a conscious decision by the person to repress these emotions.
  • A reaction that is one or more of the normal reactions to a negative event:
    • Fight
    • Flight
    • Freeze
  • There is a significant neurological (brain) change due to the trauma and the repression of emotions associated with the original negative event
  • These emotions, not expressed at the time of the negative event, return to the person’s life at a later time, hours or years later.
  • There are often “re-traumatizing” events that occur later in the person’s life.

Trauma and PTSD are very real and very important. Unfortunately, there are at least three errors made in regard to PTSD:

  • The person fail to recognize that s/he has been traumatized and suffers PTSD
  • The person actually does not suffer from PTSD but finds the “diagnosis” a kind of justification for some kind of self-damaging behavior
  • The genuine PTSD or false PTSD causes social damage.
    • Damage from genuine PTSD comes because the real PTSD continues to affect the individual’s social life.
    • Damage from the artificial PTSD comes as the person artificially blames his/her past alleged trauma for harmful social behavior.

So the situation of trauma and PTSD is murky because of these complexities. Here, I will focus on genuine trauma and the PTSD that results from it. Anything can be traumatic. Any trauma can lead to PTSD. Furthermore, different people deal differently with the traumas in their lives. Something that is traumatic to one person is not necessarily traumatic to another person.

Examples of traumas

We normally think of traumas and PTSD in the realm of war trauma and sexual trauma. Specifically, people who have suffered trauma while in a theater of war very often suffer PTSD (while most soldiers do not suffer PTSD). People who have suffered genuine sexual abuse very often suffer PTSD (almost all sexual abuse victims do suffer PTSD). I will discuss these issues momentarily, but I have seen traumas and resulting PTSD from at least the following traumas:

  • A child was traumatized in utero for some reason including
    • A chemical damage, such as the mother taking damaging drugs
    • A hormonal imbalance due to mother’s biology
    • A fetus in utero damaged by the emotional imbalance of mother or the emotional disturbance of the parents
    • A long-term painful pregnancy
    • A difficult birth, e.g. an extended time of labor
    • The child was not planned
    • The child was not wanted
  • Early infancy difficulties:’
    • Birth is traumatic. Freud talked about “birth trauma.” Think about it: the fetus doesn’t need to eat, breathe, or eliminate, much less talk or walk. Then, rather suddenly, s/he has to breathe, taking in air into the lungs that have never had air before.
    • Feeding difficulties
    • Sleeping difficulties
    • Emotional disturbance in the family
    • Change of geography of the family
    • The addition of another child to the family within the first year or two, which requires the parents to limit the time they can spend with the older child
  • Toddler years difficulties:
    • Neglect
    • Abuse
    • Indulgence
    • Shame
    • All of above
  • Childhood
    • All of the foregoing toddler difficulties
    • Bullying at school
    • Academic challenges at school due to some form of learning disability
    • Physical/medical difficulties that restrict the child’s activity
    • Some kind of social rejection
    • Difficult teacher
    • Difficult adult (relative, significant person in the family)
  • Adolescence
    • All of above
    • Alcohol or drug use
    • Failure to identify a vocational direction
    • Social relationships that lead to some form of antisocial activity
  • Adulthood
    • All of above
    • Any adult trauma, such as a loss of person, place, or thing as well as separations and changes in jobs, geography, loved ones, and friendships.
    • There may also be traumas associated with parenting and other responsibilities that come along with adulthood.
    • There are also what Freud called “repetitive compulsions,” namely traumas that are created by individuals in a vain attempt to resolve early childhood traumas; e.g. marrying an abusive or neglectful individual hoping to have the early trauma magically resolved.
  • Intergenerational trauma
    • This is a bit hard to understand, but there is clearly trauma that occurred to our relatives that trickled down to us in the form of emotional or cognitive images of danger.
    • More interesting yet is the more recent finding that traumas that occurred to our great grandparents or earlier actually changed their DNA structure, and hence affected generations to come. The Black community seemingly still suffers from slavery, possibly both culturally and biologically.

Now, let’s look at what can be done about old traumas and PTSD:

Resolving traumas and PTSD

Importantly, all traumas are resolved, however difficult that may be to believe. There is strong evidence that it is not necessary to continue to suffer PTSD if a traumatized individual is able to find resolution to the original trauma(s). What does “resolution” mean? It means “completing the emotional process that was stunted when the original trauma occurred. Simply put, it means finding, feeling, and “finishing” the emotions that occurred…but were repressed…when the individual was traumatized. I have written about “finishing unfinished emotions” in previous blogs, but in a nutshell, it means feeling the original fear, anger, and sadness that are always associated with any trauma, particularly fear, which is our most basic emotion, one that keeps us alive. Finishing fear is most difficult because the brain gets in the way of finishing fear. You might check out my previous blog on finishing fear, noting that anxiety in any form (worry, panic, nervousness, or fear itself) is very resilient to change because of our most primitive brain function: stay alive at any cost, including the cost of staying anxious.

Anxiety, fear, worry, and the like are all forms of PTSD and can be felt and finished, e.g.:

  • Generational trauma, like slavery
  • War or sexual traumas
  • Social traumas
  • Physical/medical traumas
  • Loss of any kind

If you find a competent therapist to help you “finish” the traumas in your life and be free…yes completely free…of anxiety, you will need to face each and every trauma and loss you have had in your life where you did not allow yourself (or were not allowed) to feel the feelings of fear, sadness, anger, and sadness. If you do this, you will discover that sadness replaces both fear and anger (as Deb and I wrote in our earlier book and unpacked further in our recent book). So you must be prepared to feel more sadness, possibly a great deal of sadness when you start facing, feeling, and finishing the fear that caused your anxiety. Sadness always ends…if you allow it to run its course. Fear and anxiety do not naturally end; they just cause physical and social difficulties.

Many other things occur when you are no longer anxious, like increased confidence, increased humility, and decreased concern about yourself, and increased commitment to do something for the world with all the energy you now have at your disposal. Furthermore, when you are not thinking about and worrying about yourself, what might happen to you, and what people might think of you.

Yes, it is all about trauma, but more importantly, it is all about love: love of things, love of people, and love of ideas. More importantly, love of yourself, which always leads to self-confidence, humility and graciousness

Intention and Production

Ron Johnson communication, Personality, political, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

It is important to produce. It is equally important to intend to produce. But these two ways of engaging the world are profoundly different, a difference we might call spiritual. I conceive of these elements of psychological life on a spectrum with purpose in the center of the spectrum, something like this:

Intention…………..……….……Purpose…………………………..Production

______________________________________________________________________________

This might seem unduly abstract and theoretical, but all ow me to suggest how this paradigm might be helpful in understanding how you engage the world, and perhaps better understand how other people engage the world. In fact, unless you are one of the rare people who reside somewhere in the middle, you are probably largely on one side of this spectrum. Furthermore, you probably have some trouble with people who are on the other side of the spectrum. Roughly, people who favor intention need to have a direction to where they go compared to people who favor production who just go. Both “intenders” and “producers” have a purpose in what they are doing and where they are going, but their perspectives of how to get to this purpose are quite different.

Deb and I are on different sides of this spectrum, Deb being distinctly on the intention side whereas I am distinctly on the productive side of the spectrum. We share many elements of psychology and agree on most things that have to do with thinking and feeling, but where we differ is in the third element of life: how we go about engaging life with a purpose. I am sure this is yet too abstract for many of you, perhaps especially people who tend to be “producers.” Furthermore, even the terminology that I am using is less than distinct and less easily useful. Deb has brought this matter of “intention” to me recently as we look into this year and the days or years that we might have yet to live. We have found ourselves frequently musing, often talking, sometimes reading, and sometimes writing about what the future might bring. Talk about intension has intensified with Deb recently as she has made some changes in her work schedule and work place. Let me first discuss the nature of the American world in specific and the world at large in general in regards to the intention-production phenomenon. Then I will suggest ways in which you might understand how you go about life, and hopefully do a bit better engaging the other people in your life who might share your perspective or have a different perspective.

America is primarily productive

This is an important place to start because the very basic flavor of America is and has always been production, much more than intention, this despite the fact that the founders of the United States were actually people of intention. A careful look at the Constitution, but much more so, the Declaration of Independence, will show you that it was the intention of the founders to establish a democratic republic much more than their having an idea of how that intention would work out in producing a democratic republic. Washington, Jefferson, Adams (both of them), Hamilton, and Franklin were certainly intenders more than producers. Many later Presidents, particularly Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant were more producers. In between we find Lincoln, who most certainly was an intender but eventually became perhaps the most important producer President we have ever had. I will leave this thought for your reading and musing and turn to the functional nature of America as it unfolded.

Despite the fact that the founders were largely intenders, almost to the person, the country was young, incredibly capable of expansion with resources beyond comprehension, became a country dominated by production and all that goes with it. I will not belabor the point, but the very fabric of America is doing, producing, and having things.  It is not why we do, produce and have. It is not much about how we might effectively use such things. Look at what is said from most of our political leaders, and you will hear of doing, producing and having. You will not hear of intention except by inference. It seems to me that our current President is thoroughly a producer, not an intender. We will discuss the challenges that Trump has and other people like him have later.

Compare America to any other developed country in the world, particularly China and Japan in the East and most of Europe in the West. We could also look at native cultures in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, but we must delay that discussion. It is likely that the relative youth of America and the relative longer life of China, Japan, and Europe might be part of the reason America is so production oriented compared to the philosophies of China, Japan, and Europe to say nothing of the philosophies of the Middle East (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).

So, if you’re more of a producer, like I am, life has probably been easier for you in America than your spouse, friend, daughter, or father who might be intenders. In my own family my brother was very significantly an intender, as was my mother while my father was almost completely a producer with my sister somewhere in between. My brother struggled heartily in this family dominated by my father’s production-orientation, and truly never recovered from the debates he had with our father, nor did he succeed in the world of work that is heavily production-based. It was much easier for me. I just did things. Bill considered doing things. This made life more challenging for Bill than it was for me, but we producers also have our challenges

The challenges of intention and production

Part of the challenge of understanding this intention-production paradigm is in the very words that we use. Words, at least normally used words, tend to fall into the producing side of the spectrum of paradigm of purpose. In fact, a case could be made for suggesting that words themselves are more inclined to value production over intention. This is one of the challenges that intenders have when they engage the (American) world: there isn’t a (normal English) vocabulary for intenders Consider what you might hear from someone you talk to someone:

  • What’s happening?
  • What’s going on in your life?
  • What are you doing?
  • What’s new in your life?
  • How has the problem being solved?

The operative words here are how and what. These are not particularly words of intention. They are words of doing or producing. You would rarely hear from your friend questions that are more of intention, like:

  • What have you been thinking lately?
  • What have you been feeling lately?
  • What have you been musing about lately?
  • What is your intention for the day?
  • Much less:
    • What is your intention for life?
    • What is your purpose in life?
    • What is important to you?
    • Why did you do this or that?

People just don’t talk this way for the most part. Note the difference between the “what” questions for intenders compared to the “what” questions for the producers. What questions for intenders are those of thought or feeling, not so much of actual doing.

Challenges are not so basic for producers living in America, but there are challenges nevertheless. Their challenges have to do with the result of being tired of all the things they do, doing something in a hurry to just get it done, doing something so perfectly that it never seems to get done, and other difficulties that come with a person who is always doing. The value system here is ultimately the same for intenders and producers, namely purpose, but the ways of getting there are substantially different. When I go about a purpose, like writing this blog, I “just start” with no particular intention other than to write something that might be of value to one or two people who might read this blog. I don’t sit back and see how I might go about writing, consider it more, write a bit, muse about it, correct it, and then perhaps set it aside until my passion builds to go back to writing. I just write. You might see the occasional unfortunate results of my “just writing,” namely in the spelling errors that I so often make. People who write from an intentional persuasion often think ten times more than they write, and many fine writers never finish anything because they get lost in the intention but fail to produce. I have a cousin who has been writing a screenplay for 10 or 15 years, and he seems quite satisfied with this way of going about writing, but his sister, much the producers of the family, can’t see the value of his intending to write the screenplay of the century. I think that it doesn’t matter to him whether he will every finish the screenplay because his intention is to write it, not to produce it.

I will leave you to consider that President Trump is very much the doer/producer. You simply don’t hear anything about intention. It bemuses me to read commentators trying to understand what his intention is in what he says or does. I would suggest that he has no intention. He just does things. Much different is President Obama who was clearly much more the intender than the doer. Admitting to the extreme nature of the following, I might say that Obama had great intention but didn’t really do much. Trump has done all kinds of things, most of them wrong. Choose your poison. I think, but I’m not sure, that Biden might be somewhere in between.

So, roughly, the challenge of the intenders of the world is to actually do something, produce something, create something, whereas the challenge for producers is to stand back and see what might be the intention of what they want to do and then move slowly towards accomplishing it. Doing is good, but not good enough; you need to do something of value, perhaps lasting value. Dreaming is good but also not good enough; you need to do something that might also have lasting value. Good luck intending and producing.