What do we do when there are rifts in our relationships with others?
When we are facing great pressure or some small problems in our spirit, how can we analyze ourselves and find a solution?
Alfred Adler, one of the 10 most important psychologists of 100 years, teaches you to gain insight into human nature, explore yourself, and repair yourself.
Adler, the founder of individual psychology and a pioneer of humanistic psychology, introduced the reader to the following in his book Insight into Human Nature:
What is human nature
The key to insight into human nature
Character formation and classification
How to regulate your personality in life
Everyone has their own understanding of the word human nature, especially when we experience changes in life, we tend to have a deeper understanding of human nature. So, what kind of thing is human nature? We can understand it as adult nature, which is hidden under every expression and every action of every person. If we master the correct method, we can see the hidden humanity of each person from the details of a person's behavior in daily life, and those behaviors that we could not understand before can also see the truth behind it through the analysis of human nature.
For example, work is a matter, we work hard to make money through work, this is our behavior. But why do we behave like this? Ostensibly to buy a house, buy a car, go out to travel, in order to make ourselves more comfortable, but behind this behavior, we are to get more happiness for ourselves, but also to obtain a sense of superiority that surpasses others and lives happier than others.
In the study of psychology, people's appeals are divided into superficial appeals and fundamental appeals. Superficial appeals often stay only in a simple interpretation of behavior, and the most fundamental appeal behind behavior can be called human nature.
A young man approached a counselor for help because of his emotional problems. This man is very handsome in appearance, thoughtful in personality, has a fairly good job, and is very feminine. It is said that such a person, who is not worried about having no income, and who is not worried about not being able to find a girlfriend, should be very happy. However, he said to the counselor that he was living a very painful life, and in his emotional life, he was always changing girlfriends, even if he already had a girl he liked very much, he still couldn't help but look for other girls. As soon as he has the opportunity, he will establish a relationship with other women and pedal several boats. This situation had been going on for many years, making him physically and mentally exhausted, he didn't know what was wrong with him, and he was very uneasy inside.
In fact, finding a girlfriend is only the superficial appeal of this man. When he was a child, he was locked up at home by his family alone, leaving him with a heavy psychological shadow, and this experience gave him a feeling of abandonment, and in order to escape this feeling, he had to constantly prove that he was valuable and needed in others. Therefore, behind the superficial appeal of finding a girlfriend, his fundamental appeal is to prove his existence to others and that he is needed by others.
The best key to understanding human nature is to observe a person's habits of behavior, because this is the way or method a person adopts in order to achieve his fundamental aspirations.
There is a case in which a female patient told her counselor that she always dreamed of some homicides and often had the hallucination of being killed, which seriously affected her life and made her feel very tired. In the eyes of ordinary people, this may just be caused by too much pressure in normal times, of course, some people may superstitiously think that this is an unlucky omen. After understanding and finding that the female patient had hallucinations or nightmares, her parents living in another city would call her to reassure her and even rush to visit her as soon as they knew. In a sense, it is precisely in order to get the care of her parents that this female patient will have such dreams or hallucinations. Because in her subconscious, dreaming that she was killed meant waking up to the care of her parents. So in this case, dreaming and hallucinating are a habit of behavior of this woman, and hidden behind this habit of behavior is the fundamental appeal of her desire to be cared for.
In real life, people's behavior habits are often very complicated, the reason why it is difficult for us to see a person's human nature in reality is because we are blinded by these complex behavior habits, everyone's growth experience is different, some people grow up in a smooth normal family, when he wants to get the care of his parents, he will take a more positive way to achieve. And the woman just mentioned, she must have encountered some obstacles in her growth process, which will make her express her fundamental demands different.
The purpose of understanding human nature, especially understanding one's own human nature, is to adjust one's personality and make one's personality more in line with social rules.
In our lives, we often mention the word personality, whether it is interviewing candidates, or meeting with blind dates, we will analyze each other's personality through each other's words and demeanor, and through this series of personality analysis, we will decide what kind of image that person will leave in our hearts. So, what exactly is character? In fact, personality is a series of behavioral habits of action mode, know what a person's personality is like, you can predict what kind of attitude this person will have towards friends and difficulties. Character formation is influenced by the complex environment of growth and social experiences, and has clear goals. The personality of people who have grown up smoothly and those who have experienced hardships will be very different, because although the goals of each person's personality are similar, the path to pursue the goal is different.
For example, all children have vanity, and neither we can mask the existence of vanity, whether we glorify it as a grand goal or a grand ambition. And how do you satisfy your vanity? The most straightforward way for children is to show off their toys in front of other children that they don't have. For children of wealthy families, rare toys can be easily obtained, while children from ordinary families are difficult to have. At this time, under the premise of the same goal, the child of the average family will not be able to satisfy his vanity, then he needs to comfort himself with various reasons, or tell himself that the toy is actually not fun at all, or tell himself that although there is no way to get it now, he can get such a toy through future efforts.
It is after such different experiences that the attitudes of the two types of children to deal with things will be obviously different, which is the process of establishing two different personalities. It is not difficult to observe that children with relatively wealthy families are usually very confident and prefer to face it with a straightforward attitude when completing a task. This is precisely because in their upbringing, it is easy to satisfy their vanity and do not need to take any detours. Children from ordinary families usually show a lack of self-confidence and are more adept at thinking when completing a task.
Adler divided human personality into two types: social personality and selfish personality. People with social personalities are usually more optimistic and less aggressive, they will help others as their lifelong goal, by helping others to meet their own needs, such people will generally be easy to ignore their own personal desires and demands. People with selfish personalities are usually more aggressive and vanity, and they generally have a series of personality characteristics such as jealousy, hatred, and greed. When people with selfish personalities encounter things, they will first consider their own interests and take whether they can make a profit as a criterion for judging. In Adler's view, there are no people with absolutely selfish personalities in the world, and there are also no people with absolute social personalities. Everyone is actually looking for a balance between selfish personality and social personality. A person who is too selfish will slowly become disconnected from reality and become isolated and morbid. And a person who is too selfless and too obedient will also take his life to extremes.
Take the topic of marriage as an example. A large part of the contradiction between husband and wife is caused by the so-called "personality incompatibility". Either one party is too selfish and never considers the other's feelings; or one party is too selfless and indirectly cultivates the other's selfishness. This imbalance in the personalities of both parties will make the husband and wife lack the most basic respect. Imagine if the wife had just wiped the floor clean, the husband not only did not express gratitude, but also stepped on the shoe prints everywhere, not respecting the fruits of the other party's labor at all, the wife would definitely be dissatisfied, in the long run, the wife's side of the resentment will become deeper and deeper, sooner or later one day will erupt. This is also the result of personality imbalance. Therefore, in the process of human interaction, we can only avoid contradictions and conflicts by keeping our personalities balanced, considering our own interests while taking into account the feelings and interests of others.
The reason why a person's personality will develop in an extreme direction is usually due to one or two unsatisfactory things, and after such unsatisfactory things occur, people's personality will easily lose its balance. If the unbalanced personality is not regulated, the person's life will become very painful.
A man stole a sum of money because his family was poor and was put in jail. If he not only does not reflect on the wrong act of stealing, but instead regards this punishment as an unfair treatment of him by Heaven, and then takes pride in this punishment, treating all people and everything in the world as hostile, as if everything in the world exists to harm him. Such people will slowly isolate themselves, become more and more selfish, no longer willing to associate with others, and this isolation will cause a person to fall into greater misfortune. Like Jean Valjean in les Misérables, he went to jail for stealing, and jail was the misfortune he suffered. When he comes out of prison, he is full of resentment against the whole world, and his personality becomes distorted, which is also a manifestation of personality imbalance.
How to deal with the relationship between their own social personality and selfish personality, Adler believes that people's emotional changes can directly reflect the direction of our personality, which means that we can judge a person's personality through the emotions they show. For example, if there is a person who likes to isolate himself and always adopts a hostile attitude toward the outside world, he will often show anger, anxiety and meanness. If we are going to balance our personalities, we need to know some basic techniques and methods for controlling emotions.
Take anger as an emotion, let's recall, in what kind of situations in life are prone to tantrums? When dinner was ready, we ordered our children not to continue watching TV, and instead of turning off the TV, the children turned up the volume to the maximum and ignored us. In this case, we can easily feel the emotion of anger, but how is this anger formed? Obviously, it is because our goal of turning off the TV that we want to turn off the tv is not achieved, and there is no other way to do it, which will produce anger. That is to say, our anger stems from a feeling of inferiority that we cannot do anything about it – we are incapable of making our children listen to us, and we can only vent our inner dissatisfaction through anger.
Like angry emotions, anxiety and meanness are also based on a sense of inferiority that cannot be done. In the above example, since we can't get a child to turn off the TV with a simple sentence, does this mean that we really have no other choice? In fact, if we are determined and patient enough, we can certainly learn from this setback and find other ways to solve the problem, rather than being caught up in powerless anger. In the future with children, through the accumulation of experience, we will become more and more adept at dealing with children, which is why we can improve our lives through insight into human nature, and obtain the meaning of life.
Adler believes that not only psychologists are qualified to study psychology, and that each of us can master a certain amount of psychological knowledge, which is not only responsible for ourselves, but also for society as a whole.
By introducing the method of insight into human nature, I hope to improve the reader's behavior habits, appropriate self-regulation when pressure arises, so that my personality is more in line with social rules, and become more optimistic, strong and peaceful.