The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com

This is the third time this year you've been sent to the office. We need to find a better outlet.

Maybe I could even let me go out for sports, honey.

You know why we can't do that?

I promise. I'll slow up. I'll only be the best by a tiny bit. You are an incredibly competitive boy and a bit of a show-off. You always say, do your best, but you don't really mean it. Why can't I do the best that I can do? Dad always said, our powers are nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made us special. Everyone's special. Dash, which is another way of saying, no one is.

And I think Dash is great. That's from The Incredibles. If you haven't seen it, it's a treat. What about this idea of granting the undeserved and the unearned? Everybody's equal. No one's better than anyone else. Excuse me. Yet, if you look at your own siblings, you might put in more effort than your siblings at something, and you deserve credit for that—they had the same opportunity and they didn’t take advantage of it. You may be better at work, or you may be worse at work than someone else, and that other person deserves the merit pay. Not everybody. What drives that type of behavior where everyone is special, everyone's got something unique, we're all good? Believe it or not, it's envy. People are envious of excellence, and they try to pull you down by making people who are not your equivalent look like your equivalent. And there is some legitimacy when you say that. You know blonde hair and brown hair, it’s all what's the difference? But when you get into the area of the chosen, not the non-chosen hair... Well, I guess hair color these days is chosen too, but the non-chosen things that I mean, the chosen things that you face alternatives with—you know, whether you develop a career or not, or whether you have a good relationship and take care of it and go get help if you need it or not just rest or stagnate or let the relationship deteriorate—you deserve credit for the good things that you do in your life, and so you instead of being motivated by envy, you want to be motivated by excellence. You want people to excel because they're your beacons. They're the people that you look at that you model yourself after. They're your heroes in your life. So hopefully The Incredibles did some good work in turning around that “everyone is equal, we’re all the same, and all the siblings are the same, and everyone in this class is the same,” and it gets rid of some of that nonsense.

Here's a little more from Dr. Kenner. My boyfriend and I have had a bird for eight months. It was a little cockatiel. About seven weeks ago, it got loose and it flew away. Since then, my boyfriend has been very, very depressed.

She says I'm being insensitive about the whole deal, but it seems like his depression is excessive. Since this has been going on seven weeks, I would very much like to have the doctor's opinion, if I may.

Okay. So your boyfriend, the two of you, got a bird together, and sadly, the bird flew away. Now, that could mess somebody up for a day or two, when you might have some thoughts about it later on. It's not quite like a person dying, but what would be the cause of it being so significant to your boyfriend? Two things come to my mind. One is that it dovetails with some personal issues in his life, very deeply. It’s not the bird, but it's the file folder in his mind that the bird opened when he lost the bird. It’s reminiscent of other big, much more major losses in his life, maybe the loss of a parent at a very young age, maybe the loss of a best friend, if he had to move across country suddenly. But there’s some content that it’s dovetailing with, and he may not feel ready, or may not even be fully aware of what it is that's bothering him, because sometimes it just hits you emotionally. But he needs to do the introspective work. You can't force him to do that, but he needs to sit down and to say, “What is bothering me, and why? What does it remind me of? Why is this so sad?” So that's one line that he can follow: What is the subconscious meaning, what stuff in his past? What does it remind him of? Maybe he's thinking that, “Well, if I could lose the bird, I could lose my own life, or I could lose a child that we have, maybe I’d never be good as a dad,” and it makes him very sad.

The second issue is maybe it has nothing to do with that. Maybe it has to do with relationship issues. If he got very sad initially that the bird was gone and you said, “Don't be a baby. I'll buy you a new one. You can get over it.” Guess what will happen to his mood? He will get even more sad. But the sadness is no longer the bird, even though that might be the surface meaning of it; the sadness is that he feels that his love, the woman who may become his wife, his girlfriend for many years, doesn't understand him, won't listen to him. And then the more that he deepens in his depression, the more you might harp on him and just start to say, “You're really acting like a baby. Come on, grow up. You know, this is ridiculous. I'm not going to put up with this. You think I'm going to live with this? You know, if this bothers you, I can imagine what else is going to bother you.” And he doesn't want to hear the harangues. If you had instead said—and I'm not saying you did say this, but imagining that you did—if you had instead said, “You know, honey, it's really sad to lose the bird, and it may take a week or so to get over it, and maybe even longer, and let's just work together on this,” he would have felt visible and loved by you, and the loss of the bird may not have been anywhere as near as traumatic. So it could be either dovetailing with the loss or the relationship issue, or both. What he needs to do is to introspect and ask himself what he's saying to himself. If he's saying, “I can't deal with another loss,” then it's a loss issue, and it may even be the relationship loss. If he's saying, “I can't deal with her,” meaning you, then it's really an issue between you and your boyfriend, and I hope that helps.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com, and please listen to this.

And here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author, Dr. Edwin Locke.

Here are some financial issues couples planning on marriage need to discuss ahead of time, rather than ending up with painful or bitter conflicts later on. What are your financial assets, liabilities, and debt situation? What are your career aspirations? Do both parties plan to work? What if you have children? What would you like to do with the money you earn? Is a prenuptial agreement needed to protect both of your interests? How would financial responsibilities be divided between you, and if one spouse makes more money than the other, how will spending decisions be managed?

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy The Selfish Path to Romance at Amazon.com.