All human beings desire living happily with people they love and pursue happiness. Human mind also operates to pursue happiness of life. In the process, we not only pursue individual right and freedom but also acknowledge others' right and freedom maintaining harmony and order. Humans pursue self-actualization for meanings and values of life to achieve happiness in relationships. Women tend to focus more on meanings and men on values.
Values to be pursued in self-actualization can be categorized into relational values, social values, and economic values. You can decide on one of the values, set specific goals, and pursue achievement in the area. When one goal is achieved, you must set another goal and continue to pursue self-actualization for future happiness. When you stop pursuing values of life after you become successful, you are considered to have stopped the pursuit of values and be susceptible to developing psychological problems.
The pursuit of values makes humans happy less by getting the fruit of achievement but more by being engaged in the activities of pursuing. It makes you happy only when it is an ongoing process in your life. When you stop pursuing values of life because you have made a success or because you have failed in one endeavor, you cannot become happy. It is setting the goal and overcoming the difficulties to achieve the goal instead of staying in comfort or despair that produces and reinforces energy and passion. Continuing to pursue values for the whole life is success in a true sense.
When you set a goal and begin to pursue values of life, you become to keep only necessary human relationships since you must focus more on what you pursue. Engaging yourself in all kinds of diverse relationships and activities may be fun and pleasurable but becomes less valuable. Some people get confused between the pursuit of values and that of meanings or focus on the activities of fun and pleasure more than on self-actualization. Then, their self-actualization is likely to be distorted and eventually fail.
The same mechanism applies to the pursuit of meanings. You may meet as many people as you can until you find someone who is special in your life. Once you find your partner with whom you can pursue meanings of life, you will find yourself mingling with friends less than before. When a man and a woman get married and become husband and wife, the woman pursues meanings and the man pursues values more intensely. The wife transforms her feelings of love into meanings of life and the husband transforms his passion toward her into energy for pursuing values more and more.
When women form a relationship in which they can achieve meanings of life, they tend to get immersed into the relationship. Now that the wife has already achieved meanings of life in the relationship with the husband and children, she doesn't feel the desire to maintain or newly make other relationships. It is common for women to exclusively focus on the husband and children with happy mind. They don't have the desire to go out and see other people since they already have achieved love and happiness with meanings of life.
A married woman with children seeking fun and pleasure outside her family indicates that her husband and children are not her objects of meanings of life. Such women keep diverse human relationships and spend a lot of time outside home. Women's feelings do not change easily, but those women are considered to have gone through the change of emotions and to be seeking feelings of love and happiness in relationships with people other than their husband and children. They become to focus more and more on moods than on feelings.
Humans are designed to pursue meanings and values of life for self-actualization and happiness in relationships. Stress and wounds necessarily occur in this process. Happiness is achieved when you overcome stress and wounds in the process of pursuing self-actualization. A life with all emotions including joy, anger, pleasure, and sorrow is considered to be more fulfilling than a life with only comfort. Positive energy is produced when stress and wounds are properly managed as they occur, but problems occur in human relationships when stress and wounds are not adequately managed. Managing stress and wounds is crucial to pursue self-actualization in a healthy way.
People who do not pursue self-actualization in human relationships will someday reflect on their life and realize that their life has been quite empty. They have not experienced the full range of emotions with ups and downs in adventures of life. The saying, 'Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet' accords well with this concept.
When you pursue self-actualization in human relationships, all people involved have both right and responsibility. Therefore, balance with harmony and order in human relationships is required. One should not be overly self-centered or overly other-centered. People with overly other-centered psychology do not make efforts for self-actualization on their own. They try to pursue self-actualization through other people. They develop dependency on other people, so always rely on other people when problems occur. They lack the sense of self-respect and are easily taken advantage of by other people. Their life is likely to become a sand castle.
On the contrary, people with overly self-centered psychology strongly believe that their own ideas are always right and try to have their own way in everything. They cannot stand when others go against their will and overreact to stress. They cause relational conflicts and experience difficulty in self-actualization since they cannot get along with other people.
As the social structure becomes complex and competition fierce, many people get lost and despair in the process of self-actualization. It is recommended that you keep human relationships simple and limited so that you can focus on important matters in your life and achieve meanings and pursue values in a true sense.
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