Sharing joy or bragging
Am I sharing my joy or bragging? This thought came to me after a conversation with my 11-year-old daughter. We were driving in the car after school, she was talking about her successes and how she shared her joy with her classmates. And I thought – how can I understand that she is sharing her joy and not bragging? Where is the boundary between these two concepts? Does the angle of perception of what I am saying matter to other people? Simply put – when I share my joy, can other people perceive it as bragging? I decided to figure it out.
To begin with, perhaps it is worth paying attention to the definition of these two states (emotions) – sharing joy and bragging.
What does the Internet say about joy?
“Joy is a positive emotion, a feeling of pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness. It can be expressed as an internal state or an external manifestation. Joy is often associated with a cheerful mood and can be caused by pleasant events, achievements, or simply being in a good mood.”
What does the internet say about bragging?
“Boasting is an excessively proud and self-satisfied account of one’s accomplishments, possessions, or abilities. It often involves exaggerating one’s qualities in order to impress or gain the admiration of others, sometimes to the point of making them envious.”
So I can tell my friends – I bought a new spacious apartment! How will my friends perceive this achievement of mine? As my joy for what I managed to do. Or as me bragging? I am sure that opinions may differ. And then – where is the line?
Personally, I see that the line between joy and bragging is very thin. Barely noticeable. Moreover, bragging is essentially a rather manipulative emotion. Bragging is designed to cause envy in others. Joy – to reciprocate joy. The desire to share joy in healthy adequate relationships will cause the same joy for the other, but bragging will cause envy in return.
Personal point of perception is very important
So who determines whether I share joy or brag? I am sure that this process is mutually directed – on the one hand, a lot depends on what note we share the news with – more with a note of joy or bragging? What is our ultimate goal? For the other person to rejoice or envy? Do we want to share or manipulate the other person next to us? What do we get when we share joy, making joy possible for another? What do we get when another person envies us? It would be good to sort out these questions in yourself.
On the other hand, much depends on the prism of perception of our emotions by other people. I can sincerely share joy in the hope of joy in return. But I can receive envy instead of joy. And no matter how I try to place my joy in contact with another person as ecologically as possible, if on the other side the perception of my emotions goes through the prism of previous experience, when they manipulated and twisted, then my joy is doomed to be perceived as bragging.
My mother often said that her friends envied her in everything. However, in my opinion, my mother had nothing to envy. My mother was not a better or more significant person than her friends, and my mother’s life was not particularly outstanding compared to her friends. And now I understand that perhaps my mother could simply confuse envy with joy. I admit that my friends could be happy for my mother, but due to some of her perceptions, my mother saw envy, not joy.
And then the question becomes important – do we know how to be happy for others? This is the key point. In situations when it would be good to be happy for someone else, such a defense mechanism as projection is activated – when we, often not knowing how to be happy for other people’s successes, envy. Often we do not even know how to be happy for ourselves. Joy is often forbidden for us. Often we can substitute concepts, using envy as a more legitimate feeling than joy.
Sharing joy or bragging – what’s the difference?
Но все-таки, как отличить желание человека разделить свою радость с другими от желания похвастаться? Заглянуть в душу другого человека сложно, но я могу поделиться тем, что откопала в своей)
How do I brag? And why? The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, my desire to assert myself. To achieve this, I will definitely find a “victim” – a person who will definitely be lower in status, poorer, in a word, worse in many respects. I will never go and brag to someone who has more and better than me, will I? I simply will not get what I want – a feeling of envy. After all, it is for the sake of envy that I start all this. And why do I need someone else’s feeling of envy? Most likely, to assert myself, to feel my significance, need, importance, competence, and so on. Here it would be good to turn to a psychotherapist to figure out why I can only feel significant in such a perverted way?
Or another side. Following the definition of bragging I gave above, the tone or even the form of what I am trying to convey to the other person is very important. It is difficult to confuse genuine joy with smug bragging (unless you have the goal of mistaking bragging for joy). The expectation that the other person will be happy about your achievements is also important.
What can I say in the end? For me, sharing joy is a two-way street. And bragging is a one-way street, where the other person (people) do not matter, but are exclusively objects or even functions that are needed to be used. And sharing joy is about subjective relations, where all parties are taken into account – both the one who shares and the one who shares.
