This is the fourth in a series of “Good for Me; Bad for me”, which is a study of how things, people, and situations can, quite simply, good for you or bad for you. In previous blogs I have proposed a system of discernment about things that are good for you or bad for you; in other words, a way to quantify just how good or bad something is on a spectrum:
_____________________________________/________________________________________
Bad for me Good for me
(very bad) (not so bad) (pretty good) (very good)
I further suggested that the “bad for me” and the “good for me” sides of the spectrum could be sub-categorized as follows:
- The bad for me spectrum ranges from mild to profound:
Uninteresting Unpleasant Aversive Dangerous Toxic Lethal
(mild) to (profound)
- The good for me spectrum also ranges from mild to profound:
Interesting Pleasant Exciting Enlivening Life-enhancing Life-sustaining
(mild) to (profound)
In this blog we will discuss the range of things that can be bad for me exclusively leaving the examination of things that are good for me for the next blog. There are other complexities and possibilities of the good for me and bad for discussion that will become more obvious as we go along. Let’s begin the present discussion with the challenge of discerning the degree something is good for me or bad for me.
Discernment of the degrees of “good for me” or “bad for me”
I must grant the obvious: this is a challenge and the words I have chosen are all murky at best. It may not be terribly important for you to make a distinction between these words. I offer them as examples of how you can discern just how good or bad something is. While I admit to this challenge, I still find it valuable to have an approximate awareness of the intensity of the things that are good for you or bad for you. If you understand how good something is or how bad it is, you have a lot more power in your life. You empower your life with more good things and fewer bad things. But you can’t make appropriate decisions about adding or subtracting things in your life without a good understanding of just how good something is or how bad it is for you.
Once you have determined how good something is, you can then find ways to enhance it in your life or perhaps find other things that are similarly good to enhance your life. Similarly, if you find something that is bad for you, you can find ways of reducing such things in your life and preventing similar bad things from entering your life. Let’s start by looking at things that might be mildly bad for you and move on to things that are more profoundly bad for you. We will discuss degrees of “good for you” in our next blog. As we discuss the range of things that can be bad for you, you might find it profitable to consider a similar range in your own life.
Things that are on the “bad for me” side of the spectrum:
Recall that I have suggested three terms that describe the intensity of something that could be mildly or moderately bad for you and three terms that could be more profoundly bad for you. Thus, something could be:
Uninteresting: I have always liked sports. I currently play basketball three times a week and occasionally play golf, waterski, and cross-country ski. While I very much enjoy engaging in these sports, I am not particularly interested in talking about sports. Much of what I hear from my sports-minded friends talk about is uninteresting to me, like what some NBA player did in last night’s game, current statistics of some quarterback, or who might win the next NCAA basketball title in. I might attend to wins and losses of the Wisconsin Badgers because I went to Wisconsin and currently live in the state, but I care little about who did what in some game in Los Angeles. While sports talk is uninteresting to me for the most part, I don’t think it has ever been even unpleasant for me to hear a friend talk about his favorite team or player, or his hopes for his team’s success in the next season.
My dear wife has a true passion for things green. She has several gardens around our home, reads garden books and magazines voraciously, and has a small green house on our property. Among other things she loves the greenhouse planting and seeding that she does in the winter, and thoroughly enjoys watching the fruits of her labor in the spring, both with vegetables and flowers. Since we have been together for 40-odd years, I have learned to appreciate her passion for such things, much because I have grown in my love for her and enjoy her while she is talking about her gardens. I enjoy her but I do not always enjoy hearing what she is talking about. I must admit that I am largely uninterested in gardens, growing and green. While I am occasionally interested in such things, most of the time I am not. I can patiently listen while she tells me about the various kinds of coreopsis but I am not really interested. My disinterest in gardening used to be quite hurtful to Deb partly because I didn’t know how to listen and she didn’t know how to talk to me as well as we do these days. We will deal with the “good for you but not good for me” in a future blog.
While I might not be interested in what people talk about, like gardens and sports, I am never actually uninterested in people themselves. Due to my natural personality and to my profession I can listen to things that are uninteresting to me without being uninterested in the person talking. This can be a challenge when someone is talking about actors and recent TV comedy shows for which I have no interest and no knowledge, but I am always fascinated by people’s interests because they say so much about the person.
Consider things that are simply uninteresting to you, things that you tend to bore you, or things that you just don’t care about. You will find that the people are not boring even if what they talk about is. Boring or uninteresting is generally a short-lived experience, but a step beyond uninteresting is when something is unpleasant.
Unpleasant. When something is just uninteresting, you do not have any significant physical or emotional reaction to it. you are just uninterested. However, when something becomes unpleasant, you begin to feel a kind of agitation that can come as a mild feeling of being unsettled, a desire to change the situation or the subject, or even a mild irritation.
It is often unpleasant to hear about people talk about their physical and medical problems. I admit that Deb and I are outliers on the use of medicine and medical professionals. We came into the field of psychology through what we might call the back door, namely from “existential therapy,” which roughly means that everything is psychological and most everything is personal. Hence, we think many physical anomalies are psychogenic and all of them are aggravated by psychological factors. So, when people talk about their aches and pains, the cocktails of medicines there on or the myriad of surgeries they have had, I tolerate such conversation but I am never interested and often feel a kind of agitation that I call unpleasant. I know that medical matters are dreadfully interesting to some people, including people who suffer physical maladies and the medical professionals who seek to help them, so I would never challenge someone who speaks about such things. I just experience such conversation as unpleasant, and not terribly “bad for me.” Sports talk and garden talk is uninteresting to me for the most part and it is relatively easy for me to listen with only a mild interest in such things. But when people talk about their medical procedures, I have a visceral reaction to such talk and often an emotional or cognitive reaction as well.
Even though I might not be interested in surgeries and medications, you might think that I would be interested in psychiatric diagnoses given that I am a professional healthcare as a psychologist. Yet, I often find such talk to be beyond uninteresting and into the unpleasant category of “bad for me.” There are professional, ethical, and personal reasons for my antipathy to psychiatric diagnoses, but these reasons are not so important in this discussion as are my visceral reaction to such things. Interestingly, I rather enjoy identifying various personality characteristics that people might have because such an analysis might help me understand a person rather than finding a diagnosis that might tell me what is wrong with him.
It is not only people’s conversation that can be unpleasant. There are places and situations, and sometimes even property that can be unpleasant. Consider a time when you walked into a room, a house, a store, or an office and had a “bad feeling” about this place. I would call such experiences unpleasant, and certainly beyond uninteresting. Likewise, you may have been in some town, countryside, city, state, or country that made you feel uncomfortable when you were there. You couldn’t put your finger on it, but there “was something about the place that didn’t feel right.” You may also have had the experience of not feeling right about a car or a sweater that you had considered buying. Even more interesting are times when an experience is less than good for you for some unknown reason. I don’t particularly like riding on Ferris wheels, much less a tilt-a-whirl that might be exhilarating to someone else. You might have the same reaction to reading, doing homework, riding in a car, or swimming. To note something is unpleasant is to note that the person, place, property, or experience is not to your liking and leaves a residue of unpleasantness when you are around such things. Beyond uninteresting and unpleasant but yet in the mild/moderate range of “bad for me” could be someone or something that is actually aversive.
Aversive. Uninteresting lasts for seconds, or minutes at most and then dissipates, usually because things or people who are uninteresting are easy to endure for a short time. Unpleasant tends to leave the figurative aftertaste in your mouth, or the churning in your stomach that stays with you even after you have left the things that has caused the unpleasant experience. Aversive things, while still in the mild/moderate range of things that are bad for you, are beyond unpleasant; they are things, people, places, or experiences that require you to endure beyond your desire to do so. The verb from which the word aversive derives is avert, which means to avoid or to get away from. Avert derives from the Latin word that means move. So, when something is aversive, you feel the need to move away from something. When something is uninteresting or unpleasant, you might want to find something more interesting or pleasant, but for the most part you are able to endure such things without you inner spirit saying that you have to move away from this aversive thing. When you’re around something aversive, it is hard to endure and takes a certain amount of energy for you to endure it. Aversive, as a “bad for you” element of life, is not as bad as something that is dangerous, which is the next level of “bad for you” things. When something is aversive, you can feel the possibility of some kind of potential danger but not in the present.
You have been in many situations in life where you felt the feeling that you needed to get away from something. More than likely, you had a feeling in the pit of your stomach that felt like “yuck,” or you have had another physical symptom that is more natural to you when you encounter something that is aversive. Things that affect one or more of our physical senses can be aversive, like an odor that begins as simply unpleasant and then becomes aversive the longer you remain in the vicinity. In addition to smells that may be aversive, you might find aversive loud sounds or silence, bright lights or darkness, physical touch or the absence of physical touch, unfamiliar taste or no taste at all.
Aversive reactions to things affect our physical senses are easier to understand, but you can also have aversive reactions to people, places, or experiences. Consider the times when you’ve had an aversive reaction to an individual, perhaps a person you have seen many times or one you have seen only once. You felt like you wanted to get away from this person. The experience of sports, art, music, reading, writing, or talking can all be aversive to people for reasons that may not be clear. When I was teaching my grandson Algebra not long ago, I noticed a distinct aversive reaction that he had to Algebra, which then might have bled into his having an aversive reaction to me. It is notable that I began to have an aversive reaction to my grandson due to his aversive reaction, but this is a discussion that we will delay at this time. It is very likely that certain places cause an aversive reaction to you, like any blue room or any room with a wood floor because your dad used to use his whip on you when you were young, always in your wood floor blue bedroom. However such things might be unpleasant to you, however aversive, such things are not felt to be dangerous. But anything can be dangerous, and the definition of “danger” is largely personal.
Dangerous. Dangerous, along with toxic and lethal are terms I have chosen to describe things that are more profoundly bad for you. These three levels of “bad for you” things in life cause some kind of damage, may cause damage, or nearly cause damage to you. Thus, there is a distinct difference between things that are mildly or moderately bad for you and something that leaves some kind of permanent effect on you. It is also important to note that there tends to be a slippery slope from dangerous through toxic to lethal, a slope that is not always obvious except for the deleterious effects this “bad for you” thing has had on you. As we speak of things that are dangerous, be reminded that we have moved from something that is aversive that you want to get away from to a place where you realize that you can easily or quickly be damaged by something and need to get away from.
Most obviously dangerous, at least for people who tend to be acrophobic, is a cliff or an otherwise unprotected precipice. Such a place is well beyond aversive because it speaks of your impending death. Any of the elements noted under aversive could become dangerous. An aversive smell, like the smell of gas in a house, could be dangerous. A loud sound could be the thunder that accompanies a broken tree in your yard, and a bad taste could suggest poison. These sense-based times of felt danger are easier to deal with because they require immediate action, but places, people, and experiences present a more difficult challenge. You may be “stuck” in a relationship that is dangerous…or worse…and you are looking for a way to get out. You may actually be in the midst of a wedding ceremony and have an important feeling that this impending marriage is dangerous. You may be in a work setting that is more than uninteresting, unpleasant, or aversive because you feel the deleterious effects in your body that speak of danger. You may be under the influence of another authority figure, parent, superior, or political figure whom you sense is putting you in danger. You can tolerate danger or potential danger for a period of time, but you have to keep your eyes and ears open because the potentially dangerous thing could some suddenly or slowly resulting in damage to you in some way, whether physically, relationally, or physically.
As I write these words the world experiencing the Covid-19 pandemic, which suggests that anyone, anything, and any experience can be potentially toxic, but for 99% of people, at least at this writing, the situation that we have is dangerous, not toxic. Toxic is substantially different.
Toxic. Dangerous is potential; toxic is real. Dangerous is something that might come in a minute, a year, or somewhere in between. Toxic is something very much in the present and causing you damage. While you may feel something in your gut that tells you that something (or someone) is aversive or dangerous, the physical feeling that you feel and the emotional feeling that you feel suggests that you are being damaged. When the feeling is physical, you have more than a churning in your stomach: you have an upset stomach. Live long in a toxic environment and could very easily develop ulcers as your body tries to compensate for the toxic thing in your life by creating acid. Your stomach does this in a highly stressful or toxic environment because your brain tells your stomach that you have ingested something dangerous. Neither your brain nor your stomach, however, realizes that the toxicity is probably not poison per se, but something poisonous in another way. You have “ingested” a person, place, experience, or thing that is causing you real damage. Beyond the physical damage that something toxic can bring is emotional, cognitive, and relational damage.
There are no people, places, experiences, or things that are toxic for all people. Too often people describe something or someone as “toxic” believing that that person or thing is, itself toxic. Not so. What is true, however, is that anything can be toxic to anyone depending on the individual’s experiences. We will discuss the “good for you; bad for me” and “bad for me; good for you” in a later blog. A person can be toxic who is a very kind, perhaps intelligent, perhaps well-meaning person who engages you in a way that is toxic. Introverts often find extraverts toxic after a period of time because extraverts tend to talk a lot, often about themselves. Likewise, extraverts can find introverts toxic because they don’t talk or they don’t talk about themselves. I recently had an experience of some duration with an introverted individual who was seemingly unable to express his thoughts or feelings in any way whatsoever. After a period of time with this woman, I felt a certain toxicity in my physical/emotional system, while my introverted wife did not have that serious a reaction, probably due to Deb’s introverted nature. More importantly, people can be toxic who are in your regular environment for a period of time, like years of an unsatisfactory marriage, job, or other relationship. We will defer comments about how to deal with things toxic, as well as dangerous and lethal, to a later blog.
Beyond people who are toxic there exist places, experiences, and physical things that cause damage to your physical/emotional, relational existence. The Covid-19 pandemic is dangerous for all people, but it is toxic for a very small part of the population. There are places for all people, however, that are toxic by their very nature, and this toxicity may not have to do with the physical place but the history an individual has with the situation. I suggested above, that an individual could have an aversive reaction to a blue room. It is also possible for a person to become toxified by living in a blue room for a period of time. Sports can be toxic for someone physically, but it can also be toxic emotionally. Consider the person who is not a natural athlete and feels “dumb” when she is on the basketball court, the person who can’t read well who feels “stupid” because she can’t read out loud in class, or even the farmer’s son who would rather read or play basketball than milk cows and drive a tractor. Forced into situations that are this “bad for you” can easily become toxic and take the physical and emotional blood out of you.
Lethal. There are not many situations, places, experiences, people, and things that are truly lethal, at least for most of us who live in western society. Many people are seriously damaged or permanently damaged because they are somehow compelled to live in a truly lethal situation. We will delay a more in depth discussion of such circumstances because we must deal with real abuse, alleged abuse, felt abuse, or other lethal situations in life. I will defer this discussion at this time because
Next to come:
- Discernment of the levels of “good for me”
- Good for me; bad for you, bad for me; good for you, and other possibilities
- Things that are truly lethal: people, places, experiences, and things
- Complexities: there are many possibilities
- How to discern your feelings about something that is good for or bad for you
- How to think about such things
- What to do and when to do it
See you soon