"The promptings of the Holy Ghost will always be sufficient for our needs if we keep to the covenant path. Our path is uphill most days, but the help we receive for the climb is literally divine." --Elaine S. Dalton
I dunno - something along the lines of "emotional state doesn't interfere with ability to do common things like hold a job, stay in a marriage, volunteer at church, etc"?
I am serious, unless... of course that's unhealthy. :)
I think it's easy for people to point out unhealthy emotional responses, but exactly what is healthy emotions?
I wanna know who's a good rolemodel for healthy emotional responses. We all tangle with our emotions, heck, we have drugs that manipulate them, movies that exploit them. I wanna know exactly what's healthy in this regard...
--Ray
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I'm not slow; I'm special. (Don't take it personally, everyone finds me offensive. Yet somehow I manage to live with myself.)
Last night we read Moses 7 for FSS. After Enoch was shown all the depravity of mankind, and winessed the tears of the Lord and the mourning of the earth, he saw the end day and the final triumph of the righteous. In vs. 67, Enoch received a fulness of joy. I thought about how others have had similar experiences--Lehi and Nephi did. John did. Joseph Smith probably did. And I imagine our latter-day prophets have probably all experienced something similar. But they each express overwhelming hope and joy.
That's something I would say indicates an emotionally healthy person--someone who can receive, understand, and express hope and joy despite knowledge and experiences that could lead to despair.
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The ability to qualify for, receive, and act on personal revelation is the single most important skill that can be acquired in this life. - Julie Beck
Can you imagine someone asking your grandparents it they feel emotionally healthy, self actualized, or if they felt they had a high level of self esteem? No? Why then today do we seem obsessed with these things.
Because we have some understanding of those things now. The same could be said of the diseases we can identify and treat that a century ago would have gone unnoticed until it caused death--arteriosclerosis for instance. Same thing with technology.
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The ability to qualify for, receive, and act on personal revelation is the single most important skill that can be acquired in this life. - Julie Beck
My friend had some post-partum depression. We're both the youngest kids and have older moms. She asked her mom if she had ever had post-partum depression to which her mom replied, "Are you kidding? I didn't have time for that."
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Life is tough but it's tougher if you're stupid. -John Wayne
Emotionally healthy and self-actualized is all the guns I want, 5 years worth of ammo, 2 years of food storage, debts paid off, several million in the bank, a good marriage, a faithful dog, a 24 ounce rib eye on the grill to medium rare and several kabobs of grilled shrimp marinated in a curry sauce, and the ability to tell the world to go screw itself and flip it the bird and never have to apologize or care that you did. Oh, and a good truck.
A man can dream, a man can dream.
Reality, read the scriptures, pray, trust in God, the only things that keep me sane and focused.
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Lo, there I see my mother, my sisters, my brothers Lo, there I see the line of my people back to the beginning Lo, they call to me, they bid me take my place among them In the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live...forever
A good dream, Val. Except that the money should be in my own secret vault for when the banks fail, and at least half should be in a precious commodity that I can still use to barter with for when the federal reserve goes tango uniform
BTW, Secondhand Lions is one of my favorite shows of all time. A man can dream.
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The ability to qualify for, receive, and act on personal revelation is the single most important skill that can be acquired in this life. - Julie Beck
rayb wrote:I think it's easy for people to point out unhealthy emotional responses, but exactly what is healthy emotions?
I dunno - I tend to think about this in terms of useful and not useful. But if you're talking about healthy and not healthy, I suppose the bar would be pretty high.
An emotional response that harms your marriage, or endangers a desired friendship, or gets you fired, or makes you phisically ill, or drives you to drink/drugs - those would be examples of an 'unhealthy' emotional response. Keep in mind that the response has to be severe enough that you actually have no control over the result, no way to mitigate it. Emotional responses that just really make you wanna do one of these things doesn't count as unhealthy.
So, I suppose that most of what people talk about as an 'unhealthy emotional response' could be better explained as someone chosing to act like a jerk due to their unhelpful emotional response.
I was listening to Paul Harvey's news yesterday and he reported that the FDA has found that the most prescribed prescription drugs in the U.S. are anti depressants. More than high blood pressure meds, more than diabetes meds, more than anti inflamatories, etc. I was shocked. I know that science has been able to diagnose depression and it's relatives much more easilly than 100 years ago but it does seem excessive. It seems that most of the sisters in our ward are on some sort of happy pill these days. I only know a couple that aren't. I know there is legitimate need for this stuff out there but with the numbers we see today, I wonder what the heck is going on anymore.
Btw, A favorite book of mine in regards to this topic is "The Last Unicorn" by Peter S. Beagle... worth reading to your kids sometime, if you haven't... Sometimes I wonder if we all don't have a little King Haggard in us...
--Ray
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I'm not slow; I'm special. (Don't take it personally, everyone finds me offensive. Yet somehow I manage to live with myself.)
Read the book. King Haggard is the tragic protagonist in the book.
Spoiler
He is a very unhappy man, looking to find a way to be happy. He kinda sells his soul to the Red Bull for what he considers to be the one thing makes him happy...
...Unicorns...
--Ray
-- Edited by rayb at 14:11, 2007-07-11
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I'm not slow; I'm special. (Don't take it personally, everyone finds me offensive. Yet somehow I manage to live with myself.)
Absolutely great for kids. I love that one too. There's a movie too, which really stays right with the book, but I kinda like reading it first so the kids can form their own pictures.
I loved the movie Secondhand Lions, too!! Really, really loved it. Saw it with my two oldest.
I think a key here might be our ability to control our emotions. I heard it said, Once you can control your emotions, you can begin to control your thoughts. I always sort of looked at it the other way around, but I can see how this is true.
And yeah, val, come on. Money in the bank? Pshaw.
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Life is tough but it's tougher if you're stupid. -John Wayne
I was listening to Paul Harvey's news yesterday and he reported that the FDA has found that the most prescribed prescription drugs in the U.S. are anti depressants. More than high blood pressure meds, more than diabetes meds, more than anti inflamatories, etc. I was shocked. I know that science has been able to diagnose depression and it's relatives much more easilly than 100 years ago but it does seem excessive. It seems that most of the sisters in our ward are on some sort of happy pill these days. I only know a couple that aren't. I know there is legitimate need for this stuff out there but with the numbers we see today, I wonder what the heck is going on anymore.
Emotionally disabled parents raising emotionally disabled children who grow up to beget more emotionally disabled children....
And while I mostly agree with this
An emotional response that harms your marriage, or endangers a desired friendship, or gets you fired, or makes you phisically ill, or drives you to drink/drugs - those would be examples of an 'unhealthy' emotional response. Keep in mind that the response has to be severe enough that you actually have no control over the result, no way to mitigate it. Emotional responses that just really make you wanna do one of these things doesn't count as unhealthy.
I disagree with the blue portion. Something doesn't have to be a compulsion to qualify as unhealthy. An emotional response that makes me wanna do something unhealthy is still unhealthy, even if I manage to control myself in the moment. For example -- if I become unreasonably angry over normal childish behavior (such as interrupting me for the fifth time while I'm typing a post on Bountiful when the kid was sent to bed 20 minutes ago ) and I refrain from screaming at the kid but still carry around the anger, that isn't healthy. Even though I did the right thing at that moment, I still feel the wrong thing. And the anger will come out sooner or later... directed at some hapless individual who doesn't deserve it at all. Not very healthy, imo.
I used a relatively minor personal example, not because I feel like screaming at my child right now, but I used feel that way a lot, when I was less emotionally healthy than I am today. It isn't that I'm a psychology expert--far from it. I simply have the benefit of hindsight, and I know from personal experience what "boundary issues" are, because I used to have big ones, and had no idea until someone taught me that the way I interacted with others wasn't always healthy. I still have my issues, but I'm a lot healthier than I used to be, thank the Lord.
It really is a lot easier to see the mote in another person's eye once I've cast the beam out of my own.
