Do Self-Actualizing People Ever Have Bad Days?

• — Okay, suppose we actualize our best self, what will that be like?
• — What are self-actualizing people like in terms of their moods and emotions?
• — Does a self-actualizing person ever get angry, feel fear, worry, or become anxious?
• — When we live at the level of self-actualization, do we experience “negative” emotions?

The marvelous answer to all of these questions is, “Yes, of course!” After all, self-actualizing people are just that — people, human beings, fallible human beings still making their way through the world. So just because we move beyond the lower needs and have moved into the truly human needs (e.g., the higher needs) doesn’t mean that we lose our humanness. Actually, the opposite is the case. We become more fully human than ever before and more open and receptive to the fallibility and vulnerabilities of our humanity.

On this I’m delighted to say that Abraham Maslow and I agree, or perhaps more accurately, I find myself on the same page as Abraham Maslow. In his work on Management (1970), Maslow described the fact that self-actualizing people experience the so-called “negative” emotions.

“In self-actualizing people: they experience hostility, hatred, violence, malice, destructive aggression much less often than average people. They do not lose their anger or aggression, but its quality tends to be changed into indignation, to self-affirmation, to resistance against being exploited, to anger against injustice. Healthier people are must less afraid of their own angers and aggressions. Able to express them more wholeheartedly when they do express them at all. Violence has two opposites: less violence or control of violence, and healthy violence. (p. 127)

Thirty pages later, Maslow wrote,

“Closely related to self-acceptance and to acceptance of others is lack of defensiveness, protective, pose. Since they can live comfortably even with their own shortcomings at all, but simply as neutral personal characteristics.” (p. 156)

What lies at the heart of self-actualization? Acceptance. An acceptance of our basic humanity and fallibility so that we’re not shocked or surprised or disillusioned or disappointed or sad or angry or fear or anxious to discover mistakes or shortcomings. After all, what did we expect? What did we think? There’s an embracing of reality for what it is which then allows those who are self-actualizing to live comfortably with the fact and experience f being fully human.

So does the experience of self-actualizing absolutely exclude or totally eliminate bad days or moody feelings? No. We continue to be vulnerable to the ups-and-downs of life. Yet in the self-actualizing process, we now experience a new ease in living with the up-and-down nature of our emotions and the unpredictability of life. Being fallible and experiencing our inherent vulnerability to such is now not only accepted, but appreciated for making us more human.

Now our moods and emotions are just emotional states that do not define us or even tell us what to do. Now we can ride the emotional ups-and-downs knowing that they reflect the difference between what we have mapped about the world and our current experience of the world. This enables us to stop over-loading our emotions with unwarranted meaning.

Now our emotional states offer us an invitation to explore our inner matrix of frames to fully realize the mappings that are guiding us. In this, there are now no “negative” emotions, only those that inhibit and those that excite. Thinking about emotions in this way fits the structure of our neurology with our inhibitory nerve impulses and our excitatory nerve impulses.

In other words, our emotions as such are not our enemies. And so we don’t need to forbid, banish, or slay them. At most, we may need to transform our emotions so that we use them an informational signals and somatic energies.

So yes, self-actualizing people do sometimes have “bad” days when things don’t go well for them, when plans are not executed as designed, when disturbing interruptions occur. And when these upsets occur, self-actualizing people use them and the emotions they arise to update their maps and/or upgrade theis skills in handling things.

When “bad” days do occur, they are more easily endured and handled with more mastery so that they do not undermine the self-actualizer’s highest intentions and passions.