Archive for Power
The basics of the pursuit of happiness – positive values with the loss of power
Posted by: | CommentsPowerlessness is generally thought to be a negative concept. But it is not always negative. Brief times of powerlessness may rejuvenate a person’s body mind, and spirit, much like a vacation does.
A period of hopelessness, about a job, a family member, or a living situation may lead to realistic appraisal and acceptance of a situation that cannot be changed. Mental and emotional energy can then be liberated for the development and pursuit of more satisfying and productive goals.
A time of self-doubt and overdependence can lead to analyzing one’s knowledge and value systems. This may result in a new level of intellectual and physical autonomy (as, for example, when deciding to break out of a brutalizing situation). Self-doubt could lead a person to seek education or help from others.
When guilt is experienced, the positive value may be choosing to make amends. From another perspective, a person may discover that many guilt feelings are neurotic and inappropriate. This discovery can lead to taking more initiative in life, instead of waiting for others to set the goals.
Feeling incompetent occasionally can also be useful. If social skills were not mastered between the ages of seven and twelve or even later, a person is likely to feel inferior or shy with others. Observing how other people initiate or respond in social situations can help one develop new skills that increase chances for happiness. Feeling incompetent academically is so common and widely recognized that men and women increasingly return to schools and universities. Learning something new, or getting a longed-for degree, usually increases competence and decreases feelings of inferiority.
The discomfort of reexperiencing adolescent identity confusion often activates the desire for psychotherapy or, at least, introspection about what it means to be a woman instead of a girl, or a man instead of a boy.
Occasionally feeling distant from people, or feeling cold and hateful instead of warm and loving, leads to a crisis. The crisis is a symptom of the need to choose intimacy over isolation and to actively search for people with whom this might be possible.
A change from indiscriminately taking on responsibilities may allow a person to become more appropriately involved with self-interests. Anew experience of self-care may lead to improved health and greater enjoyment, as well as a more accurate view of reality.
Despair, the opposite of hope, is counteracted by the ego integrity that leads to wisdom. Despair can lead to awareness that continuous integration is necessary, even in the later years of life. To integrate is to make whole. It is bringing the parts together, the parts of one’s personality and the parts of one’s total existence.
To be healthy is to recognize holiness as well as wholeness within oneself and the rest of the world. Recognizing holiness includes recognizing the rights all people have for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with freedom, justice and peace.
The basics of the power of wisdom in the road to pursuing happiness
Posted by: | CommentsEgo integrity versus despair is the crisis that faces people after they reach their sixties. The person who has not solved this crisis is often preoccupied with self, fearful of death, and convinced that life has no meaning. Persons who have met this crisis recognize the value of their chosen lifestyles and take responsibility for what they have done, or not done, with their lives. They have ego integrity, which leads them to wisdom.
Wisdom, the happy combination of knowledge and experience, includes the awareness that life is transitory and death a certainty. So the person of integrity continually searches for the meaning to be found in later years. Long-range achievement is no longer a high priority. Short-range achievable goals take precedence. Long vacations become less important than daily pleasures. With decline in bodily strength, the wise older person is able to utilize available psychological strengths to transcend some physical frailties. A sense of impermanence pervades life. Paradoxically, there is also a sense of permanence, with the awareness that the world will endure whether or not they are there to observe it.
In the process of developing ego integrity, wise elders still pursue liberty and happiness. They often discover a new spiritual dimension to life. They have accepted their parents and stopped blaming them. They’ve stopped blaming themselves for being who they are. With a sense of freedom, they may review developmental crises that were not resolved earlier and change what they can change while they have time. With new wisdom comes a more detached view of life. In the final years the challenge is to meet death with faith, dignity, and a new kind of freedom.
The basics of the power of hope makes you happy
Posted by: | CommentsThe first developmental crisis that confronts each infant between birth and one-and-a-half years old is trust versus mistrust of parents. If nurturing, warm, affectionate care is given, if the immediate environment and the parent figures are experienced as dependable, children learn to trust and consequently are optimistic. They become hopeful because their earliest significant parent figures are reliable and caring.
Hope is the virtue or power that develops from the successful resolution of the internal conflict about whether it is safe to trust parents. Hope is the belief that certain wishes are attainable in spite of everything. Once established as part of the personality of the child, hope can later sustain a person even when trust seems unrealistic. The capacity to hope is at the center of being human. It is a feeling or belief that solutions to most problems are possible and that dreams for a better future have a chance of being realized.
When people are without hope, they lose interest in the future and often lose the energy to face even simple daily tasks. Of course, some things cannot be changed no matter how high the hope. At a time like that, trusting persons, in spite of unhappiness, still hope to make the best of the situation.
Some of these people may be overly trusting. They see the world through rose-colored glasses. Life may have been “ideal” when they were children, so they trust everyone and continue to trust them when clear evidence shows some people are not trustworthy. Gullible and naive, unwilling to think critically about a person or situation, these people may collapse when they recognize the truth.
People who do not gain a basic sense of trust in infancy and thus develop the power of hope, may go through life feeling incomplete, empty, and distrustful of others. Those who do experience basic trust early in life may, in the process of growing up, lose it because of some tragedy or crisis. They may then live life feeling deeply lonely, wondering whether it is ever safe to trust again.
The inability to trust often leads to a pervading sense of depression that interferes with healthy development. Children, who are abandoned, whether by death or desertion, also may lack the strength to trust and hope unless they have loyal substitute parents. Children who are consistently ignored, seldom touched, brutalized, or starved may not develop at a normal rate.
In later life, such people may expect others to ignore them or be untrustworthy in some other way. Because of this underlying fear, they may choose as spouse or friend someone who is actually trustworthy and then act in such negative ways that the other person leaves the relationship out of desperation. Or, without ample degrees of trust and hope, they may cling to someone from an overly dependent position that restricts their own freedom to develop autonomy.
The basics of the power of competence in the pursuit of happiness
Posted by: | CommentsBetween the ages of seven and twelve, the crisis of mastery versus inferiority emerges. The need for mastery arises in two areas. There is a need to master academic challenges and a corresponding need to master social challenges.
Mastery in academics is possible during these years because children are developmentally ready for active learning and are able to focus their attention. They are also more capable of social success at this age. All-boy groups and all-girl groups are typical. There is more freedom from home control and more chance to learn how to interact with others.
Children who are not successful in their efforts to master the academic and social challenges usually experience a painful sense of inferiority when they are out in the world. They feel very awkward instead of competent. If they feel awkward, they may withdraw from interaction with peers and become loners, using their time as bookworms or TV addicts. Later in life, such a person may have few (or no) friends, may work at something that calls for being alone, and may continue to feel inferior to others and not know what to do about it.
Some children who feel inferior begin to act in aggressive or delinquent ways, cutting school or failing academically. Later, they may continue delinquent behavior. Children who succeed socially and fail academically may continually seek out others. They may feel incompetent at making choices and may only do so with others who are willing to lead while they follow.
Building a sense of competence can be very difficult. For example, the person who feels inferior in academics may need to develop sports abilities or interests in various hobbies. The person who feels inferior in interpersonal relations may need to join some kind of program that provides opportunities for a gradual emerging of social skills. People with very high intelligence sometimes decide to focus their interests in areas in which they are most competent. They may recognize, painfully, that the number of people they can relate to at an intense intellectual level is not as high as they wish.
The basics of the power of caring in pursuit of happiness
Posted by: | CommentsBetween the ages of thirty and sixty the critical decision is whether to give parental care to others of a younger generation or whether to stagnate in self-indulgence. The successful resolution to this crisis is the development of the power of caring.
Generativity is the word for active concern for the next generation. This is not the same as having children. Some people who have children have little concern for them or for the world in which they live; they consider their children to be like attractive jewels for them to show off, or beasts of burden to be put to work doing chores.
Parents like this do not think about the human species as a whole. They do not accept the importance of children in the growth of a community, the importance of children playing, or the importance of children being with peers so that they can develop more social competence. They do not care about the next generation. Their primary concern is for themselves.
Sometimes when children grow up, move out of the home, and do not need their parents to the degree they did as children, the parents sink into depression. They suffer from identity confusion because their identity has been too closely associated with taking care of the family.
You don’t have to give birth to children to offer the care that is characteristic of generativity. Working with young people, being a good role model, or taking an active interest in the lives of young friends are all efforts at caring for the next generation. And, of course, those who care for the future of our planet—environmentalists, for example—are showing concern for the next generation.
Care is an ever-widening concern for others, not just family members. It may or may not involve physical caring out of a sense of duty. It does involve action. Truly concerned people who care are powerful people. They put their caring into action. They become involved in issues of social change and acknowledge people’s rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They have a healthy need to be needed, and a need to leave the world a better place for having been a part of its growing and healing.
When people are not willing to be involved in generativity by showing care for the next generation, they often find others are not concerned about them. Not caring, they become stagnant like marsh water without movement. They are progressively less interested in others, locked into self-absorption, self-pity, or self-adoration. Frequently their only concern is for their own satisfaction, physical health, or financial wealth.
The Basics of Self-Esteem Tips For Boys: Avoid Wielding the Tools of Power
Posted by: | CommentsFred never stops talking about his father. It’s never good. His father was a bully, sarcastic, critical, was alternately friendly and hostile, played him off against his brother, wouldn’t accept any different point of view from his own. He did my friend no favors. He has now spent years trying to sort himself out, getting his confidence back, feeling comfortable with disagreement and learning how to be tolerant.
If you are a parent:
* It is best not to force an issue when either you or your child is tired. Let it go, in case it blows up in both your faces
* Try using the ‘soft no’; if he does not respond to your request straight away, instead of raising your voice and issuing threats, repeat it more quietly, making sure you and he are looking directly at each other
* Try trusting him to comply, giving one or two reasons, or using creative ways to get his compliance instead
If you are a teacher:
* Responding with instant punishments in an apparently arbitrary way is an abuse of power; be measured, fair and consistent to avoid resentment and maintain students’ cooperation
* Avoid using sarcasm and ridicule in the classroom; these are not appropriate tools for confident, positive teaching
* Don’t react to challenges personally; doing so will lead to communication breakdown
* People shout and throw rulers when their patience and skills have run out; suggest that you team-teach to refresh your skills if you lose control more than occasionally
The tools of power that adults use are hitting, hurting, damaging belongings, bribery, ridicule, threats, sarcasm, shouting, emotional withdrawal and withholding food and liberty. It may be tempting to use these sometimes, especially when you are running out of steam, but it will be counter-productive. Boys will certainly find ways to get their own back, to preserve what they see as their self-respect.
Our children deserve the best from us, not the worst.