Why Be Thankful?

 

    As you are aware, Thanksgiving is soon upon us. This means a lot of different things at different times. It involves planning for obscene amounts of food and copious amounts of football-watching. It means deciding on whether or not to endure the crowds at the mall (I recommend not to). It may mean digging out the Christmas decorations. Finally, for many of us, it means to pause and give thanks for what we have.

    But this isn't always easy and I'm going to tell you why. Our brains are hard-wired to look for danger. Imagine Zog and Zeke are cave-persons living thousands of years ago. They look outside and see a fuzzy shape. Zog asks, "Is that a bear or a blueberry bush?" Zeke replies, "I don't know, looks kinda like a bear to me." Zog, being the more adventurous dashes off. A few hours later, he returns, belly full, proclaiming, "Those were the best blueberries ever. You really missed out." Zeke goes to bed that night hungry, wishing he had some blueberries. Imagine this scenario playing out dozens of times. But one night, Zog never returns. Zeke checks out his corner of the cave and he's not there. Zeke gathers up Zog's stuff and takes his mate. The moral of the story is: it's better to miss lunch than to be lunch. Zeke and his new mate produced several offspring and their genes survived, being passed down to us.

    Since we rarely have to worry about life-and-death in our culture, our brains still revert back to what they're designed to do, so we look for other forms of "danger." Think for a moment about all the things you're worried about. How long will this winter last? How high will the heating bill be? Will my favorite team win another game this year or do they really stink as bad as they looked last week? Are we ever going to get out of these wars? How many of our brothers and sisters will go hungry and/or cold this winter? Can I even do anything about it?

    All this worrying, which in ages past kept us alive, now robs us of life's joy. The bad news is that it is very difficult to worry and at the same time be grateful. That's also the good news. There is an emerging field in my profession called Positive Psychology. Although it is "new," those of us who know Scripture know that the benefits of being thankful go back thousands of years. Positive psychology focuses on helping people develop skills to actually be happy.

    We're going to spend the next few minutes examining how being thankful – actually engaging in the act and attitude of gratefulness – is good for us. In fact, if there is a key to happiness, the way to turn that key is by actively being thankful. Let me repeat that. We turn the key to happiness by being thankful.

    So what are the emotional benefits of being thankful? Thankfully (yes I use that word on purpose), there are many. Being thankful puts a person into a positive frame of mind. Remember what we saw earlier – it is very difficult, if not impossible, to actively be thankful while at the same time being unhappy. People in positive mind-frames are more productive, more creative, easier to get along with, and tend to have more satisfying relationships. They're healthier, especially taking into account diseases caused or made worse by stress, such as high blood pressure, ulcers, and heart problems. An interesting paradox is that although our problems might cause us to worry, we will solve them more effectively if we approach them with a positive mind-set.

    Lynn Johnson, Ph.D., is a psychologist who has proposed the following exercise in his workbook The Healing Power of Gratitude (Johnson, 2006). He suggests that there are very few problems, tragedies, or misfortunes that are not a mixed blessing. For example, you've heard the adage, "I felt sorry for myself because I didn't have any shoes until I met a person who had no feet." Even the absence of something we need can provide an opportunity to be thankful. Dr. Johnson suggests that we examine something that is wrong in our lives and try to find the blessing within it. Many of you know that we went through a couple of pretty lean years in our practice, even though we were working very hard. Now, we've built up a relatively consistent case-load, which can cause Dr. Paul to get tired and, if you ask his wife, irritable. When I reflect on this "problem," I immediately become thankful that I have this problem instead of the one we had a couple of years ago when I wasn't sure how we'd be able to pay our bills. As my dad says, "That's a good problem to have."

    Another cool thing about how our brains work is captured in this exercise I'll lead you through. Take a look around the room and make a mental list of everything you see that's blue. Now, close your eyes and try to identify everything you saw that was green. When I do this exercise in my office, I often get the response, "Dr. Paul, you cheated." Yes, I did. The moral of this exercise is that our brains are very good at looking for what we expect to see. Remember our cave-dwelling ancestors. If they expected to see a bear, even when there weren't any around, their hyper-vigilance kept them alive to pass their genes along to us.

    To take this a step further, let's say that the blue things represent what's bad and the green represent what's good. If we focus on one or the other, it doesn't make either of them go away. BUT, we tend to feel better if we focus on what's good and for that we can give thanks. One way to help us dwell on what is noble is by keeping a gratitude journal. We're passing out one to get you started. There are some studies that report that doing it 3 times/day is beneficial, while others say that doing it once a week keeps it from being too rote of an exercise. Either way, it's very important to be specific and get into the emotions of what you're thankful for. If you list your kids, then really dwell on the joy they bring into your life and into the world. I'm thankful for our church gardeners. It makes me proud to be associated with a group of people who not only give lip service to providing for the poor, but who actually get their hands dirty doing it. That, brothers and sisters, is joyful. Announcing in church how many pounds of food they delivered to the Food Bank is an example of verbally expressing gratitude, both for the toil they put in and the bounty provided by God.

    Another amazing ability humans have is the ability to assign meaning to things and events. You often hear that the difference between optimism and pessimism is whether you look at the glass half full or half empty. I'm going to offer you another option. If your glass was previously empty, and now it's half full, there's reason to give thanks. If your glass was previously full, but you were thirsty and you drank half of it, there's reason to give thanks. I'll argue that the action of giving thanks is what makes it positive, not on the level of your favorite refreshment in the glass.

    I believe that this ability to create meaning in life is another thing to be grateful for. Victor Frankl was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who was Jewish. He wrote the best-seller, Man's Search for Meaning. He and his entire family were sent to concentration camps during WW II. He and another man had devised a plan to escape, but since he was the camp's doctor, he decided to make one last round. He visited a man who was clearly not long for this world. The man, knowing of the escape plan, said to Frankl, "So you're getting out, too." Victor decided to stay in the camp and serve his fellow prisoners. He learned and taught us that even unimaginable suffering can be survived if there is meaning to life. Perhaps the most important reason to be thankful.

    So, before you sit down to gorge yourself on your favorite Thanksgiving meal, be thankful! Remember, it turns the key to happiness! Happy Thanksgiving!

If I feel it, it must be true!

Pop psychology and psycho-babble has done us a real disservice. In the 1970s and 80s, the height of the "Me Generation" (although the 2000s make those decades pale in comparison) people began to get enough psychological information to be dangerous, but not enough to be helpful. The proliferation of "reality" TV shows emphasizes this ad nauseum. Everyone is an amateur shrink, has supposedly incredible insights, and if only everyone believed what she said, then they'd "grow" so much.

There's this disorder that I've discovered called, If I Feel It, It Must Be True. Recently, I conducted a cognitive assessment on a 12-year-old girl who did NOT want to go through with it. Usually, I can reason well enough to get kids to cooperate, but she was having none of it. She has an extensive abuse background and has tremendous trouble controlling her emotions. In fact, she's learned to use her emotions to get out of things she doesn't like to do. This was her plan that day. She worked herself up, yelling that she didn't want to be here and she just wanted to go home. She ended up at the point where she concluded that He's EVIL!

Conclusions are not feelings.

"He's evil" is not a feeling. It's a conclusion. It's a value-judgment (not a very nice one). When you catch yourself confusing a conclusion for a feeling, ask yourself whether you're using feeling words. Yes, I know it sounds corny, but there's a lot of wisdom there. Feeling words are words like hurt, sad, pain, confused, angry, mad, frustrated, and many others. Conclusions are thoughts, not feelings. Feelings are not "I feel that you're an idiot." The word "that" leads to a conclusion, not a feeling. I see this all the time with the couples I work with.

"He's home late again. He must either not like me or think I'm important," concludes the wife. "Man, she's got a sour look on her face. Here I am exhausted after a long day and she can barely say hi to me," he thinks to himself. She's probably feeling lonely and put-off and she reaches conclusions that are very negative about her husband. He does the same thing.

Feelings are extremely important clues. They can tell us when something is wrong, when something needs to change. Feelings are probably universal. When I tell you that I'm sad, you know what it's like to feel sad. Feelings can help us feel connected. I believe that connectedness is one of the basic human emotional needs. They help us understand each other.

When we communicate feelings to each other, although it can be vulnerable, it is extremely powerful. Sharing with each other our sadness, our tears, our fears, our joys, makes us so human, and I'd argue is also a spiritual exercise. Doing so helps us connect at a heart level.

On the other hand, when we only communicate thoughts, conclusions or judgments, we can get quite defensive. One of my absolute favorite authors, psychologists, and researchers, is John Gottman, Ph.D. He writes and speaks extensively about the effects of defensiveness. It keeps us disconnected, contributes to anger and resentment, and when it gets really bad, leads to contempt. Dr. Gottman explains it well when talking about how contempt affects us. Contempt is when you truly think that the other person is a bad person. If you're married or in a close relationship with this person you deem worthy of all this contempt, first of all it prevents you from seeing him or her in their full human-ness. Secondly, if this person is really such the loser that you may believe she or he is, then what does that say about you? What kind of person are you that you're with such a worthless specimen of the human species? Dr. Gottman calls contempt the worst of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. See his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work for not only an excellent explanation, but some very helpful ways to deal with defensiveness.

This will sound weird coming from a psychologist, but feelings are not the end-all and be-all of the human existence. Yes, they're extremely important information. Understanding what you feel and, at times, where those feelings come from, can give you tremendous power in determining how you want to behave and move through the world. But feelings do not determine reality, and often don't even reflect reality very well.

Emotional Intelligence, sometimes referred to as EQ, is quite helpful in determining success in life. Daniel Goleman, made the term popular in Emotional Intelligence, his book published in 1995. High emotional intelligence is probably a better predictor of success in the real world than cognitive intelligence (IQ). Emotional Intelligence is basically the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions and those of others. Knowledge and the ability to think well are definitely good qualities to have. So are the ability to throw a 100 mph fastball or slam dunk a basketball. Being able to sing (or lip-sync), dance, and shake everything that God and/or the plastic surgeon gave you can also be quite lucrative qualities. But for the vast majority of us, having a decent EQ has a major impact on one's personal, relational, and professional success.

High EQ allows the human organism to recognize and deal with his own emotions as well as those around him. Instead of "I feel it so it must be true," the person with good EQ knows how to take her emotions as important information. She can determine where the emotions are coming from, what they mean (and don't mean), and how to manage them.

I love the word "manage" when it comes to emotions. We certainly can't control what we feel. Feelings just are. They just happen. We can't control where they come from, but we can control what we do with them. We manage them. They give us important information. If I hurt, there's a reason for it. If I know or can learn what that reason is (or reasons are), it gives me power I can use to move through life.

If I feel hurt, there can be a multitude of reasons. It may be that the person who hurt me is just being mean, being intentionally hurtful. It could mean that I have some experiences that have left open wounds. Certain words or experiences poke those wounds, making me hurt. I may need to do some work to heal those wounds or protect them. Knowing these things gives me power and gives me strength. My feelings become sources of important information rather than something I have to be enslaved to. I can choose to act or not act on my feelings, rather than just react in a knee-jerk sense. In my opinion, we should act based on what we know and what we value, not just on what we feel.

Remember, feelings do not dictate reality or truth. And we can all be quite thankful for that.

It’s All in Your Head

    Much psychological theory has been developed based on the idea that many of the problems we have live in our minds. People develop amazing sets of beliefs about themselves as they grow up. Unfortunately, many of the people I work with believe some pretty negative and sometimes nasty things about themselves. These beliefs often keep people pretty stuck.

    My favorite example is of this red-headed freckle-faced kid I knew when I was growing up. He, like all good kids, played Little League baseball. He started off in right field, aka the Place of Banishment, but with a couple years experience and some practice, moved his way into the infield playing first and second base. This lad, let's call him Sparky, could put the ball all over the field when he was taking batting practice. His very first at-bat of his career, he faced the fastest pitcher in the league. Not only that, this guy threw side-armed, creating a natural curve ball. Sparky, not knowing any better, swung at the second pitch and lo and behold, out into the gap in right-center it went for a bases-clearing double. The crowd went wild! Sparky never got another hit in the next 3 years that he played.

    Sparky developed some mistaken beliefs. First of all, he was deathly afraid of striking out. This, in his mind, was the worst form of failure. Pitching in Little League isn't that good, so to get 3 strikes before you get 4 balls is somewhat rare. Secondly, he just wanted to get on base. What's the best way to get on base? Right! Get a walk. Which he did, quite often. The coach and the crowd would yell "Good eye! Good eye!" It wasn't a good eye. He was scared. Scared of "failing" by striking out.

    Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs. This is his claim to fame. He also struck out 1330 times. This was fueled on beer and hot dogs, not steroids. My interpretation is that the Babe swung for the fences. He wasn't afraid of "failing" in the same way our little Sparky was.

    Here's what Sparky needed. He needed a coach to sit him down, look him straight in the eye and say, with a little spittle on the corner of his lip, "Son, I'm tired of you walking all the damn time. [Before the age of political correctness, coaches could cuss.] I want you to go up there and swing the bat. I don't care if you strike out. The important thing is to swing. If you don't swing at a good pitch, you're running laps." You may think this is a bit harsh, but remember, Sparky knocked the ball all over the place in practice. The problem was definitely in his head.

    The solution, however, was in his body. He wasn't going to think or analyze this problem until it was solved. The only way was to take a swing. His fear kept him from having fun. It also kept the faulty beliefs intact. "I can't hit the ball in a real game."

    In my office, we explore problems from lots of different angles. There are a number of different types of questions that help in this exploration. "When did you first start believing that or behaving that way? What was the purpose? What do you think caused this belief?"

    Although the answers can be illuminating, they often do not lead to changes. Why? Pop psychology has tricked us into believing that if we can just come up with answers to some of these questions or get the right insight, the problems are solved. Now before you turn me into the Psychology Police, I am not minimizing the usefulness of insight. Without it, it can be hard to change. However, insight only gets you so far. If you want to get moving, the rubber has to meet the road, and begin rolling.

    Most of us learn much more by doing than by thinking. Now don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of thinking. What I'm talking about is getting stuck in your head. While the human mind is an amazing thing, it can be a scary place. Stuff can bounce around inside of there and take on a life of its own. It can get warped the more it bounces. Instead, we need real experiences to develop our skills, beliefs, values, and abilities. While it's helpful for me to imagine myself being a great free-throw shooter, until I get into the driveway and shoot a bunch of them, I won't get much better.

    I believe that our minds work in similar ways. It is good to think about things and to plan, but until the plans and thoughts become action, we are limiting ourselves in what we can learn. So, while the problem may be in your head, the solution is in action. To quote a person I worked with who definitely got this concept, you have to "Do the Doing."