Uncategorized

Who’s in Control

Ron Johnson Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

I’ve heard a lot about “control,” most of it negative. Like, “He’s a control freak,” or “She just has to control everybody in her life.” And then there is the other side, which seems to affirm that you can’t control anything and shouldn’t try like, “What’s going to happen is just going to happen” or “Just let go and everything will work out.” I don’t think there is a good concept of what control is, what it isn’t, how it can be good, and how it can be bad. There are also a number of psychological diagnoses, like OCD, that suggest that there is some basic pathological tendencies in control. My interest in this treatise is largely about how people feel in control or controlled. Let me share my thoughts.

Locus of control

One of the very valuable tests we use in our office is something created by psychologist Julian Rotter in 1954 called the “Internal-External Scale”, usually referred to as the IE test. There are only 29 questions on this test which attempts to determine whether a person has an “internal locus of control” or an “external locus of control.” Rotter defined people with an internal locus of control as having control of their lives, compared to people with an external locus of control as having little or no control over their lives. Rotter found that people with an internal locus of control fared better in life, a finding that proved true in research. Many research studies, including my wife’s doctoral dissertation, included the IE to study people’s view of control. An important finding of the IE research showed that people with an external locus of control were more depressed and felt helpless in life. Helplessness, together with hopeless, and a number of other symptoms are symptoms of depression.

I have generally found that people with an internal locus of control do succeed in life, feel better about themselves and other people, and find ways to cope with life’s difficulties. The feel motivated to do something about their lives, both facing difficult challenges, and enhancing their strengths and utilizing passions. Another symptom of depressions is “anhedonia,” or the lack of motivation and interest. You can see how the arrow could go both ways if you have an external locus of control: (1) you feel helpless to do anything to make a life for yourself, and (2) not doing anything in life can cause you to feel helpless. I have seen both, and it tends to be a downward spiral: feeling helpless; acting helpless. But there is much more about this locus of control business.

Beliefs associated with an external locus of control

Bad luck, for one. People who feel controlled by the world often use this phrase when they fail at something. They even use it to prevent them trying to do something because they “are not lucky like some people.”

Other people. More often it is not bad luck, it is other people who seem to control one’s life. In other words people with an external locus of control feel “controlled” by the people in their lives. This felt external control can be with spouses, parents, children, friends, employers, employees, or government officials. So they feel, “They won’t let me…,” sometimes not even knowing who the “they” are.

Blaming. An adjunct to the “they” problem that these folks have is tendency to blame others in some way like, “the dog ate the homework,” “the teacher didn’t tell me how she wanted me to do the homework,” or simply, “It wasn’t my fault” statements we sometimes hear from children. Adults will blame their spouses, bosses, friends, children, or parents because these people “controlled” them in some way.

Accidents. A patient I saw for maybe seven years (quite unsuccessfully, I must add), told me several times that she (yes, one of the very few women I have seen as a patient in the last 30 years or so) felt that “if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong with me.” This same woman, by the way smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, slept 14 hours a day, watched TV the rest of the day, and now having gained back 100 pounds of the 300 she had lost in bariatric surgery some years beforehand. As I said, the arrow goes both ways: feeling helpless and acting helpless. Freud wrote about what he called parapraxes, which included accident proneness, which he theorized was caused by unconscious factors.

Body ailments. This is a big one. People with a myriad of physical and medical problems almost always have an external locus of control. They speak of their bodies as if these bodies were somehow external to themselves. I hear “my heart this…,” “my arms that…,” my legs that…,” “my eyes this…” and many other physical symptoms. This kind of external locus of control is the most insidious because while the so-called problem is actually within one’s body, the person feels that his or her body is somehow controlled by external factors beyond their control.

Beliefs associated with an internal locus of control

Self. This is the key ingredient with these people. They have a sense of what we psychologists call “self”. This is understandably a vague term without an exact definition but one that is very central to the heart of depth psychology. In its simplest form “self” is the feeling that I exist. Believe it or not, many people operate as if they don’t exist. They just go through life doing what is expected of them but not knowing why, and perhaps not even caring why. This sense of self, that I exist, breeds some other ingredients that lend to an internal locus of control.

Self-confidence. This is not to be confused with arrogance, which is the feeling that I am better than other people. Symptoms of self-confidence include the ability to make mistakes, feel sad for a moment or two and recover from this mistake. The root of the word confidence, by the way could be translated (from the Latin) as “with truth.” So self-confident people tend to be truthful.

Self-reliant. Simply put, they rely primarily on themselves. They share their thoughts, feelings, and doings with others but always at a bit of a distance because they tend to think that they can survive without anyone. This is tantamount to independence.

Disinclination to complain. They tend to take responsibility for their actions, sometimes to a fault or sometimes when it wasn’t actually their fault. But this tendency away from complaining makes them more likable. Do you know of someone who is always talking about what he/she/they/it did to them? You tend to stay away from such people.

A balanced life

No one is in complete control of his or her life. Externally controlled people may have a sense of how we all need each other, but they tend to lose that very important sense of self that is so central in life. We are all dependent on circumstances, other people, and perhaps that random good or bad luck from time to time. The task is to find that internal sense of control that helps you face the challenges and enhance the opportunities.

Further Reading
Brock, D. (2004). Comparisons of personality type, psychopathology, and church denomination in women. Available on Dissertation Abstracts
Johnson, R. (2018). The Other N Word blog and the Feelings blogs
Rotter, J (1954). Monologue on locus of control. Available on the Internet.

The Other N Word

Ron Johnson Connection, emotional maturity, Feelings, men's issues, relationships, Self-Awareness, Uncategorized

I have to be real careful with this blog. It could be very offensive. The “N word” that we all know…unfortunately…is all too rampant in America. Not so, by the way in most of the rest of world, and not even very prevalent in North America. I never heard the N word when I lived in Canada partly because when a man was Black, he didn’t first define himself as Black, but as Canadian, or more likely a Newfoundlander or a Torontonian. This came to as a pleasant surprise when I was at a party with people of various colors and national origins, as Canada tends to be much more than the U.S. Somehow I had a conversation with this Black guy, and it was normal for me to think of him first as a “Black guy.” But that wasn’t how he thought of himself. I learned that he was from Toronto, that he was an engineer of some kind, and that he has a passion for music. Far down the line he would say something like, “Oh, yes, I am Black but that isn’t how I think of myself.” Not so in America…sadly. My two sons–in-law are Black. They were both raised by White mothers, and for one of them, predominantly by mother, and neither was particularly raised in a Black subculture. Blackness is important to both of them, perhaps one more than the other, but it seems not to be at the top of the list.

The N word originated more than 200 years ago and has remained a part of the English language, again, especially in America. It is primarily a derogatory term, but it can be used as a term of endearment among Blacks themselves, or a friendly way of engaging a competitor. I can’t say how that feels because I am not Black, but even this most hateful word can be used lovingly, if carefully. I don’t know how my one my son-in-law really feels when his mother jokingly says to him, “That is mighty White of you.” I cringe, but know that she means this as a term of endearment. This whole discussion reminds me of my previous blogs of Feelings, and it is in that light that I want to talk about “the other N word.” The other N word is need.

Need
Having thought about, read about, and written about feeling words recently, I continue to find myself intrigued by this other N word. Some people use it frequently, some use it sparingly, and yet others never use it Need tends to be a word that is used more by women than by men, but that is only part of the story. People with a feeling-based personality type use it more than people with a thinking-based personality. People with a “lover” temperament use it more than people with an “analyst” temperament. (I’ll discuss these personalities in later blogs.) It amazes me how natural and easy it is for some people to use the word need compared to many people who never use it.

It is important to distinguish between wants and needs. People for whom the N word works well tend not to make the distinction between wants and needs. Their preferred word is need, and this preference suggests that their use of the term includes both wants and needs. This can be confusing for someone who never uses the word need. Given that I am disinclined to use the N word, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when someone uses the word easily and frequently. I am even more uncomfortable when he or she uses it in regards to what they want me to do. Notice how I immediately translated the word “need” to “want” without event thinking. So I have come to realize that this want/need distinction may be a bit artificial. There may be a spectrum of want on one side of the spectrum and need on the other. This may help a bit, but I think the matter is more complicated than that.

I think the word need needs to be used, if sparingly and carefully. There: I used the N word. But I used the N word in regards to what I thought you need. It is much harder for me to use the N word when I have some need. I use it rarely, and I am far from comfortable with using it for myself, much less feeling the felt need that underlies the word need. I am coming to believe that felt need is real important but like any feeling, it is not exactly definable. If you read by blogs on Feelings, you will remember that we know what feelings are but we can’t exactly define them. Such seems to be the case with the N word. There are some dangers in allowing the N word into one’s vocabulary as there are dangers in failing to distinguish between wants and needs. Nobody likes “needy” people.

Neediness
“Neediness” may not be as bad as the original N word, but it is close. Who wants to be around a “needy” person? A “needy” person is someone who gloms on to you and you can’t get away from. You know what I mean. The guy in the gas station who wants to tell you about his sister’s cancer; the relative who always has some kind of physical ailment; the guy you try to avoid because you know that he will want more of your time than you can give him. “Needy” people are dependent. That is the essence of so-called neediness. “Dependent” is not much better than “needy” but it at least strikes a chord in my psychological understanding of things. Not the best word, but somewhat accurate, at least in psychological parlance. Even a bit harsher is the formal diagnosis of “dependent personality disorder,” one of the many diagnoses that is like a death curse.

Instead of needy, dependent, or personality disordered, I suggest that people with this tendency are looking for something. They are looking for what they never received as children. It is natural for children to be needy, 100% in infancy, 90% in toddlerhood, about 50% the rest of childhood, and about 20% in adolescence. Adulthood…well, we’ll get to that in a minute. So-called needy people didn’t get their needs met in these early stages of life and as a result are continually looking for someone to lean on. Unfortunately, they often lean on anyone they can find, and the more they lean, the more that people avoid them or tolerate their neediness. It’s a sad story. They’re just trying to get what they didn’t get as children, but they never get it. Fritz Perls (therapist, largely in the 1960’s time) said it right: you get your childhood dependency needs met in childhood or you never get them met. Note one important phrase in this statement: childhood needs. You get your childhood needs met as a child or you never get them met. Wow. That sounds awful, but this is not the end of the story.

When I failed to get my childhood needs met in childhood, I no longer need them met. I don’t need to have my diapers changed. OK, I’m 75 and may need palliative care someday, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t need to be fed; I don’t need to have a lot of physical comfort; I don’t need to be governed; I don’t need someone near me all the time; and many more childhood needs. When “needy” people are talking on and on or wanting a hug every time we meet or want more than we have to give, they are looking for childhood needs. They don’t know it, but that is what they are actually seeking. And you can’t give them what they need. That is why they keep asking for it and demanding it. They need to give up ever getting their childhood needs met. Then what?

They can get everything they need as adults. Needy people don’t know that, but that is the case. They can be listened to, hugged, cared for, cried with, laughed with, and all that is in a normal adult life. They can get these things, but it is work. And the work begins by giving up on ever getting childhood (and infantile) needs. Needy people need to grieve the loss of childhood needs in order ever to get their adult needs met. I would dare suggest they need to read our The Power of Positive Sadness, or some better book about how to grieve the losses of early life. Then they can face normal adult needs.

Normal adult needs
What are “normal adult needs”? Not an easy question to answer, but an important one to examine. I will not indulge myself in offering a treatise on adult needs, but there are several obvious ones: physical needs, like food, clothing, and shelter. Some people have special needs, while others seem to have few needs. I will simply state that outside of the special needs and physical needs categories there are some psychological needs present in all of us. They roughly fall into the additional categories of need to be alone and the need to be with people. As a result of these two needs, which we might say fall on a continuum, there are many secondary needs, but allow me to speak simply about these two quite different needs: away from people and with people.

I will defer the important discussion of introverted people and extraverted people to a later time, and her focus on what I perceive as natural independence and natural dependence. People who are naturally dependent know that they need people; people who are naturally independent know that they need to be away from people. I’m not talking about extremes, like the hermit who never sees people and seemingly doesn’t want to or the woman who works 80 hours a week and never sees her family…or doesn’t have a family to see. I am talking about these two needs that are quite different and both important.

I tend to be in the “need to be alone” category, the independent person. My wife tends to be of the same ilk. As we speak she is in Utah somewhere climbing and hiking to her heart’s content, while I am doing other things…like writing this blog. Both of us are quite content. Since we are rarely apart and talk incessantly, we need to be away from each other from time to time. I have no idea where she is and what she is going, and for the most part, I don’t care. I just hope she is happy and well and that she comes home when she has had her fill of her beloved canyons. Likewise, she doesn’t really care what I am doing, whether writing, seeing patients, or playing basketball. She just hopes I will hold the fort here and not get hurt on the court. Otherwise, each of us is content to be left alone while we do what we want. But having sung the praises of this independence that we have, I must admit that I am not good at the other side of the spectrum: dependence.

I am slowly, painfully learning to use the “other N word” in my vocabulary, which is an outgrowth of my actually admitting that I have needs. It has been a challenging ride to admit that I “need” anyone, and it has been a good thing for me to do. The need, the true need, the natural need for someone else in my life is now something that I can see without seeing it as needy. God forbid, I don’t want to be needy. I just need. I need Deb in my life. I need my friends in my life. I need a few guys who put up with my less than good skills at basketball. I need my office manager, Cheri, God love her. Unfortunately, she is not in the office to correct my misspellings on this blog, nor is Deb to add and subtract, which is her real art in writing. So I have to do the independent thing and forego my need for someone better than me to assist me in what I don’t do well.

I see many people like me in my office, and they all have the same trouble with the N word. Some feel it; some think it; but very few of them actually say it. I know their difficulty with the N word. But it is a good word. If used carefully.

Further reading
Johnson, R. and Brock, B. (2017). The power of positive sadness. Santa Barbara: Praeger
Johnson, R. (2018). Previous blogs on feelings.
Reik, T. (date?). The need to be loved. (A difficult read)

Responsibility Reframed

Ron Johnson Uncategorized

Responsibility in life is central. I once heard a musician (Richie Havens) talk at his concert about responsibility being the “ability to respond.” There is some important truth to this simple understanding of the word. Importantly, people have different natural abilities, and hence different abilities to respond, and hence different kinds of responsibilities. In other words responsibility for one person might be quite different from another person. I find the different kinds of “response-abilities” to relate to different kinds of personality structures. Furthermore, responsibility is related to both opportunity and obligation.

An important distinction of personality traits is drawn from Carl Jung’s understanding of what he called “psychological types.” This understanding of differences in personality has been popularized over the past 40 or so years and has morphed into “personality types”. Among the differences in personality/psychological types is what Jung called “intuitive vs. sensing” types. This refers to how people actually see the world, not so much how they evaluate the world. Readers who are familiar with this psychological genre will know the popularized version of personality typing that uses various letters to identify people’s personalities. I wish to concentrate on two of the so-called intuitive/sensing dimension of perception and another dimension, but I will use my preferred nomenclature to do so. And then I want to propose a way of looking at responsibility from this lens.

The first dimension, namely of perception, I prefer to an “objective vs subjective” way of looking at the world. Objective people tend to see things as they are, and hence Jung’s use of the term “sensing,” by which he meant that such individuals used their five senses to see the world. The other side of this objective vs subjective way of looking at the world is very hard to actually put into words. I disagree with how Jung came to use the term “intuitive” although that term has some value. Rather, I suggest that so-called sensing people are “objective” in that they see what is real, physical, obvious, and concrete. So-called intuitive people, those I call “subjective” have a more self-oriented and to some degree self-generated perception of the world. Sometimes I think these “subjective” people have a kind of reflective mirror inside of themselves and look at the mirror rather than at the things their five senses perceive. See how complicated and obtuse this is? Bear with me here.

The second dimension that I think is important to note is not exactly Jungian in form but Jungian in origin. This is variously called a style or a preference for going about life, but I think of it as a boundary dimension. Specifically, people are “high boundary” or “low boundary” in orientation. Boundaries have to do with limits and rules. High boundary people value boundaries because they provide security and a certain sense of stability as well as a frame of reference. High boundary people plan for the future and execute these plans. Low boundary people are quite different. They see boundaries as all artificial. They also value freedom and spontaneity. They tend to feel unduly limited and constrained by too many boundaries. Importantly, the world is largely run by high boundary people; these would be people in charge of banks and other businesses, most teachers and certainly principles, and many supervisors and bosses. Low boundary people either put up with doing what they have to do with their high boundary teachers and bosses or do their own thing.

Now there are various combinations of these two dimensions as well as a myriad of combinations of the other Jungian dimensions, to say nothing of other ways of looking at people, for instance with what is called temperament analysis. But I want to focus on two combinations, namely:
— Objective and high boundary people and…
—  Subjective and low boundary people
 …whom I believe have very different “response-abilities”

Objective high boundary people are doers:
o They like to do things
o They produce things
o They rarely get bored
o They are often busy

Subjective low boundary people are dreamers:
o They like to dream about how things could be done
o They create ideas, and sometimes things
o They often get bored
o They are often lost in their dreams

Now in our society “doers” seem to be the way we all should be, and the term “dreamer” has the connotation of someone who doesn’t do anything. Our society is run primarily by doers. Dreamers, on the other hand are the people who, as the name would suggest, come up with things to do, new ways of doing things, and creating. Other societies, like much of Europe, value creating and dreaming more than doing and producing. So in America, and to some degree Canada, doing is seen as much more “responsible” than dreaming. If we think about it, however, it is the dreamers of the world who have come up with the really important ideas…although it was often the doers who produced these ideas. Simply stated, it is easier to be a doer in America than a dreamer. I speak as a doer, and in many ways I fit in quite well with this doing way of life.

In later life both doers and dreamers tend to become unhappy. This unhappiness has to do with what Carl Jung called the “shadow” of one’s personality, although I am stretching this term shadow beyond Jung’s original conception. We might think of it as the parts of our personality that are not developed. For dreamers, doing is not well developed, while for doers dreaming is not developed.

Now let’s get back to the idea of responsibility and I will put a period of this blog. I will put it succinctly:
— To be responsible dreamers need to do something, to produce something
—  To be responsible doers need to dream something, to create something
 …and these are very different kinds of responsibility.

I see mostly dreamers in my practice, which makes sense because the doers of the world are busy working and otherwise doing. They always want the 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock appointments because they are busy all the rest of the day, and often into the night. Dreamers seem to be able to come to my office at any time of the day because, well, they are not busy. At least they are not busy doing; they may be busy dreaming. I have been seeing a young (26 year old) man for some time who is certainly a dreamer. He is, as noted above subjective in how he evaluates the world and he is certainly low boundary. Unfortunately for John (let’s call him John) he spent the first 20 odd years of his life doing, like doing what was expected of him, and he made a pretty good life. But then about 9/10s through college he discovered that he didn’t care about doing anymore and fell into dreaming. Had he been truer to his dreamer nature, life now would have been easier for him, but it is certainly not easy. He sees all these things that he should do, like get a job, finish his college, find friends, and do something other than play video games 50 hours a week. But he can’t seem to bring himself to do any of these things although he is plagued by what he calls guilt (it is really shame) for not doing…much. I am attempting to help him become responsible.

Responsibility for John would be to do something. He doesn’t know it, or believe it, but doing anything would be better than dreaming and playing video games, but nothing that he could do seems interesting, much less creative. So John is caught in his dreaming life, and I expect it will be some time until he finds a way to become responsible. By the way, being responsible is being responsible to oneself, not to anyone else. He needs to find a way to be responsible to his life ahead. But right now it is way too difficult.

Doers, by the way, also need to become responsible, but for them it is a daunting task because most of them become increasingly fatigued in life for all the doing they have done, and often burdened by concrete responsibilities like going to work, caring for the house, the dog, and the family. So doers’ idea of responsibility is to do more, but as they age, they lose interest in doing because they have done it all before. It is a daunting task for a doer to find and accept the responsibility of dreaming and creating. Few manage the transition. It certainly has been hard for me.

There are many other ways of looking at what responsibility would mean depending on one’s personality. Extraverts need to become responsible in talking less and listening more, while introverted need to speak more. Women need to ask fewer questions of men, and men need to be more forthcoming with their feelings. Freedom-loving parents need to be more limiting with their children, while limit-setting parents need to loosen up.

In encouraged you to find your own responsibility because, however it is composed, responsibility to yourself will lead to being responsible in the world. It is our opportunity to improve the world, and it is our obligation.