Fourth read of “Running On Empty”

This holiday season I hit a new rock bottom in my life, and it reminded me to take a step back and re-read the book that started my journey.

It took me just over 3 hours to read. Surprisingly, quite a few things stood out to me and for the first time I started to see more value in what have been my least favorite parts of the book. Here are my notes on things that stood out to me. My ponderances are in italics.

Chapter 2:

A workaholic parent who outsources parenting to a nanny inevitably sends their child the message that they are not worth their time, no matter how well the nanny parents the child.

A healthy Achievement/Perfection parent supports their child to achieve what the child wants, rather than pressuring the child to achieve what the parent wants.

When a child is treated by her AP parents as if her feelings and emotional needs don’t matter, a deeply personal part of herself is being denied. Do I do this to myself when I self-parent? And the things that I didn’t receive from my parents, could it be that I still crave them from external sources like crazy even though I can provide these for myself?

Loving your child isn’t enough, you need to be in tune in order for them to develop healthily. For a parent to be in tune, they must be aware of and understand emotions in general. Maybe I don’t understand emotions well enough to do a complete job of self-parenting yet. Also, I think L (my ex) loved me but it wasn’t enough, because she wasn’t in tune with me. She didn’t understand my emotions at all.

Chapter 3: Common themes in neglected children as adults

• Counter-dependence: avoiding asking for help
• Unrealistic self-appraisal
  1. Little opportunity to develop one’s identity or get reliable feedback of strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Gone through life with no guide, no emotional general knowledge, no way to know where one exists in the world of being and life. Hard to catch back up on this as an adult man, when all the silly time people spend together is harder to get into or ask for.
  3. You give up quickly when things get challenging
  4. Hard to identify talents, tend to over-emphasize weaknesses
  5. Feel like a misfit
• Guilt and shame: Asking oneself the question “what is wrong with me?”
• Fatal Flaw (If people really know me they won’t like me):
  I don’t hide myself but I don’t show myself either, because it feels impossible to? And that no one would be interested?
• Difficulty nurturing self and others
  1. Like compassion, nurturance is an emotional glue that binds us together as people. It is the gas that fills our emotional tanks.
  2. People think you’re arrogant
• Poor self-discipline
  1. Difficulty forcing themselves to do things they don’t want to
  2. Think of themselves as scattered, lazy, unmotivated
  3. Emotionally neglected children, left to their own devices, learn self-indulgence instead
  4. You feel you are lazy, a procrastinator, have difficulty with deadlines, tend to overindulge
  5. Disorganized
  6. Avoid mundane tasks

Chapter 4: Common factors for genuine risk of self-harm

• Emptiness and numbness
• Suffering in silence
• Questioning the meaning and value of life
• Escape fantasy

Chapter 5: Things that get in the way of successful change

1. False expectations
   That change is linear
   That setbacks are failures
   That if you get off track, you may as well give up
2. Avoidance
   Of things that feel foreign, that are difficult, of hard work
   Challenge the moments where your avoidance kicks in
3. Discomfort
   Unfamiliarity, not knowing what will happen, feeling unsafe or fearful

Chapter 6

The smartest people are those who use their emotions to help them think and who use their thoughts to manage their emotions. Most successful people are driven by feeling.

Passion drives us to procreate, create and invent
Hurt pushes us to correct a situation
Sadness tells us we are losing something important
Curiosity drives us to explore and learn

There was a time in my life a few years ago where I was emotionally fluent enough to recognize my emotions happening close to real time. I don’t think I’m there anymore.

Exercise: review feelings 3 times a day

There are no bad emotions. Emotions are simply present and we can decide what to do about them.

Feelings don’t always make rational sense, but they always exist for a good reason.

Express your feelings assertively.

When a spouse feels something is missing in a relationship but can’t explain it, often what they’re asking for is a feeling of emotional connection, a feeling that their spouse can read them and that they can read their spouse, that they and their spouse naturally feel each other’s feelings. Couples who are truly emotionally connected let each other know when they are hurt, get angry, and fight things out when needed.

Vertical questioning: Start with a guess of their state, e.g.: You seem glum. Was everything OK with your mom?

Chapter 7

Self-nurture:

1. Putting yourself first
2. Eating
3. Exercise
4. Rest and relaxation

Asking for help: accept that other people don’t feel guilty or uncomfortable saying no. The majority of people have little angst asking for help and little angst saying no. As soon as you can join them, a new world will open up for you.

Put a higher priority on your own enjoyment.
What do I even enjoy on a weekly basis, besides dancing?

Self-discipline exercise:
Three things: every day do three things that you don’t want to do or stop yourself from doing three things you want to do but shouldn’t

Self-soothing: when IAAA isn’t enough and you need to self-soothe feelings that are persistent or difficult to manage. Build a list of strategies, because the worst time to try to figure out is when you need it the most. Ideas:

• Long shower
• Listening to music
• Gym
• Running/walking
• Playing music
• Massage
• Call family/friend
• Be in nature
• Meditate
• Self-talk

Self-compassion:

• Develop an inner loving-but-firm voice: learn from your mistakes by questioning your behavior in a non-judgmental way about what went wrong and how to prevent it in future
• Hold yourself accountable without judgment or blame

Chapter 8

Emotion is like water flowing. If you put a barrier or block it, it will reverse and flow back to the source in a negative way. Instead, let it flow and understand the source.

Recommended reading

Feelings word list, increase my vocabulary of feelings

My personal takeaways

1. Emotional attunement with self and others is really important. Don’t rely on friends who can’t empathize for emotional support. Don’t date someone who can’t be in tune with you at all.
2. My ability to self-soothe has been highly lacking this year. Gym, call a friend, IAAA, and walking should be my top options for self-soothing activities.
3. I need to work on my loving-but-firm voice, as I often brush off self-discipline mistakes without feeling bad while also not holding myself accountable to learning from them.

Action: I will commit to doing Three Things a day for the next month.

Finished reading Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis)

Three years ago when I was recovering from a crush, I gave someone the opportunity to recommend any two unrelated books and promised that I’d read one of the two. Today I finally made good on that promise by finishing reading Mere Christianity (book and lecture series or PDF), which is probably the most famous Christian apologetic book.

I will not express any philosophical opinions on this book yet, only sentimental ones. For starters, Mere Christianity is definitely not what I expected it to be. It is split into four “books”:

• The first book tries to argue that the reason why we have a general sense of morality that we expect others to abide by is because God placed this in us. His argument is a bit tedious, and the first time I read it (years ago, while still in my philosophical prime) I found several logical issues with it, though I cannot remember them from this recent re-read of it.
• The second book starts to breach the area of what Christians believe, but not in a very concrete sense.
• The third book describes his view about what moral beliefs Christians have in common, both in terms of non-religious topics and religious topics.
• It is only in the final book that he really states the essence of what Christianity is about, in terms of what Christians are meant to be and strive for.

Lewis’ style of writing is very idiosyncratic. (Well actually, it’s based off his radio talks.) I cannot say that I like it (it is quite unfamiliar to me), but I appreciate the way he uses imagery and analogy to convey exactly what it is he means about things that could easily be misinterpreted by presumptuous people. I also admire the way he dispels a lot of illogical nonsense that people seem to get caught up with. His style of flow and reasoning is fairly convincing in the moment, but I must admit that it makes it harder for me to remember the bigger picture, where it is easier to spot logical flaws. Although some of his references to culture are outdated or foreign, even when it’s a miss it doesn’t pose an obstacle for interpretation.

Lewis uses analogies to explain the most difficult concepts in Christianity. It’s a no-nonsense explanation for laymen, and I definitely learned a thing or two that no one else has managed to conveyed to me so far. He also has some intriguing and purely philosophical hypotheses that seem to be his personal beliefs. Overall I would definitely recommend Mere Christianity to other non-Christian readers to get a basic grasp of Christianity without all the stigma, misrepresentation, and nonsense that is typical of hearsay. However, a major disadvantage of Lewis’ approach using analogy for me is that I now have to verify whether what he says is indeed an accurate portrayal of what Christians believe, but since he didn’t use much Christian terminology I also have to independently distinguish opinion from statement and try to decipher his analogies accurately.