Feel euphoric and experience pleasure

Next we considered the online environment of the internet, though I suggested that when it comes to friendship, its challenge is not quite so novel as some make out. - was responsible for controlling my appetite). Adding the words did I do my best added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process. After a few weeks using this checklist, I noticed an unintended consequence. Active questions themselves didn't merely elicit an answer. They created a different level of engagement with my goals. To give an accurate accounting of my effort, I couldn't simply answer yes or no or 30 minutes. I had to rethink how I phrased my answers. For one thing, I had to measure my effort. And to make it meaningful - that is, to see if I was trending positively, actually making progress - I had to measure on a relative scale, comparing the most recent day's effort with previous days. John continued. First of all, you've really idealized your parents in the telling. Second, and this is what really bugs me, you don't seem to understand your own strengths. He was on a roll now, and plowed ahead. Not only that, but the story changes from day to day. There is just simply a big gap between the person I see and who you seem to think you are. John could see that I was undone. Forgive me, Steve, but friends really have to tell each other these things. Hard as they are.

Then came the dizzy feeling upon which I've already commented. Sam and Willa were at least trying to find some clarity, and to behave in a more loving and collaborative way. Although they spent a lot of their time unable to understand where the other was coming from, under the right conditions they would have moments of meeting. When they had an experience of empathy for each other, they strengthened the hope that it was possible. As Sam began to perceive the rigid wall of martyred anger he'd erected in identification with his father, he could gradually allow himself to genuinely enjoy the warmth and beauty that Willa endeavored to bring into their family life. In line with the idea of maturity I discussed in article 3, Sam began responding to his own softer emotions, and in so doing he found more freedom to respond to hers. As he appreciated and dignified her love of beauty in this way, Willa was increasingly freed from her own shame around taking advantage of him. She could claim her aesthetics and warmth as strengths in her adult personality and more actively assert their value in creating a feeling of home for both of them. Several months into therapy, they had an interaction that heartened me. The week before, Willa had made a big effort with her appearance for a school fund-raising dinner. She had bought a new dress and highlighted her hair. There is undoubtedly lots of nastiness online, but then there's lots of nastiness in pubs and playgrounds. There is also lots of kindness, and the internet can be a lifeline for many seeking companionship and compassion. The full impact that the internet will make on our lives has yet to reach maturity, for the technology is still improving, though to date it seems that there are plenty of offline analogues by which to interpret the vicissitudes of friending online. Again, the philosophy of friendship has the resources to act as a wise guide. Inner cities are pockmarked by no-go areas. The gap between rich and poor has never been greater, and we've become very conscious of the threat of economic collapse as those at the top of the pile cause the financial system to become unbalanced, even as they cream off the profits. Friendship has a part to play in all this, and it might matter to us personally too. The quality of our attachments to those with whom we share our towns and cities will have a direct bearing upon how pleasant those places are to inhabit, on the one hand, and on the other, the quality of our personal relationships is, in no small part, shaped by the environments in which we try to forge them, as we've already seen in relationship to the workplace, to a sexualised culture, and to a society going online. There is a word for all this: politics.

Aristotle knew that friendship played a key part in any political philosophy. I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there's no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try. When I asked myself, Did I say or do something nice for Lyda? , I could call in a few minutes, say I love you, and declare victory. When I asked myself, Did I do my best to be a good husband? , I learned that I had set the bar much higher for myself. This active process will help anyone get better at almost anything. It only takes a couple of minutes a day. (This, by the way, is the very common experience of shame in being seen. Adam and Eve were seen naked in the garden of Eden--and, as the scriptures said, simply, they were ashamed. ) As it turns out, John had understood and unmasked for me a problem for which we now have a name--a wonderful, technical, clinical name. We now call this phenomenon autobiographical incoherence. Do you identify at all with the idea of autobiographical incoherence? I wonder: Does your own story add up? Is it freighted with idealization, or delusion, or fantasy? What do we know about autobiographical incoherence?

And what role does it play in our ability--or inability--to fully connect with ourselves and with other human beings? She came to the session complaining that Sam had not even noticed her, much less expressed pleasure or pride about her appearance. This struck me as a tailor-made incident to produce a breach in empathy. As a child, prettying herself was one of the few ways Willa had to break through the usual inattention. Parental oohing and aahing tended to be a pretty low-demand (on them), high-reward (for her) form of attention. As poignant as it was that she longed to please Sam, her expecting that spending money on her appearance would mean the same thing to him as it meant to her was a bit childish. She seemed unaware that Sam's first response to her expenditures was more likely to be anxiety that they weren't on the same article about money, and fretfulness over their next Visa bill. His mind was likely to travel to his mother's merrily greeting mail-order purchases piled at the doorstep without a thought to the burden it placed on the family finances. Luckily, they each managed to step back from the brink and notice what got going between them. The night of the dinner, Sam's thoughts included all the same criticisms he might have leveled in the past, but having progressed, he managed to suppress them. In our session, he said his first impulse had been to comment on the expense and their lack of agreement on money matters. He saw that the vibrancy of a city, and the feel of the place, grew out of the vitality shared by its inhabitants - the care that individuals, families and households have for each other. If you can get those microcosms of friendship right, then friendship might come to characterise the feel of the city as a whole - a mood or attitude towards others that once learnt at the hearth spreads out like the warmth of embers. Conversely, a thriving city is a good place to live because the energy it generates itself nurtures the friendships of those who live in it. In short, our personal friendships cannot be divorced from the politics of friendship, the way we live together. So here's a question: might we learn anything from the politics of the past, not by way of return, which would be impossible, but by way of expanding our own relational imaginations? The thought here is neither that there might have been periods in the past in which people enjoyed a depth of friendship that we can barely conceive: such a suggestion would be to indulge in a kind of illusory nostalgia. Nor is it to suggest that former times were friendlier because friendship somehow burst out all over. This is a possibility worth pursuing for what it might say about today. And at a cursory level there is prima facie evidence to support it.

For one thing, the great philosophers of friendship appear in distinctly historical clusters. But be warned: it is tough to face the reality of our own behavior - and our own level of effort - every day. Since then I've gone through many permutations of my Daily Questions. The list isn't working if it isn't changing along the way - if I'm not getting better on some issues and adding new ones to tackle. Here's my current list of twenty-two Did I do my best? questions that I review every day: As you can see, my first six questions are the Engaging Questions that I suggest for everyone. My next eight questions revolve around cornerstone concepts in The Wheel of Change, where I'm either creating, preserving, eliminating, or accepting. For example, learning something new or producing new editorial content is creating. Expressing gratitude is preserving. Avoiding angry comments is eliminating, and so is avoiding proving I'm right when it's not worth it. It will help at this point to think back to our examination, in article 2, of the scientific inquiry into the phenomenon of attachment--and attachment disorders--in the work of our friend Dr John Bowlby. Well, in the early 1980s, two brilliant colleagues of Dr Bowlby--Drs. Mary Main and Mary Ainsworth--made an exciting contribution to attachment research. They developed a questionnaire to administer to adults--a questionnaire that was meant to examine an adult's attachment history and style, and to reliably determine whether his style was secure, anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. This questionnaire and the process of administering it became known as the Adult Attachment Interview (or AAI), and it is now considered an essential tool in evaluating attachment styles and issues. Over the last thirty years, the AAI has been through considerable refinement. It is now highly validated and considered an excellent tool for understanding attachment. But here is what's most pertinent to our conversation: Even early on in their work with the AAI, Main and Ainsworth discovered something fascinating. Adults whose attachment history is insecure have remarkably incoherent autobiographical narratives.