Becoming you

I just finished a class on lifespan development, and one of the most interesting bits for me (aside from more gruesome details on aging, just the thing to perk up a 50-year-old) was a previously unfamiliar model for how adolescents/young adults go through the process of separating from their parents and forming their own identity.

Psychologist James Marcia laid out four basic states in this process:

• In foreclosure, a young person has happily accepted the big choices -- career, ideological viewpoint -- that were promoted by parents and other adult authority figures. No identity crisis, little self-reflection required, high levels of commitment.
• With diffusion, the key difference is motivation -- there isn't much. The young person avoids an identity crisis and the obligation of making any firm commitments in favor of immediate gratification and a "whatever comes along" approach to life.
• The moratorium stage means the person is still working on defining himself. The process may take a long time, and may be put off until circumstances are more favorable for self-exploration.
• Identity achievement is the hoped-for result of such work. The person lives by an independently formulated moral code that guides future choices. Identity crisis and self-searching are the only way to get here, so the first two stages rule this out as an option.

With even minimal reflection, I can identify people in each of these stages and seem to be more or less fine with it. I know some who've taken the life that was essentially laid out for them and seemed to be quite satisfied with the results. I know chronic goofs who've never seemed to be too bothered by the idea of purpose in life. I know 50-somethings who are still hard at work finding themselves and would seem to run out of steam if they ever got there. Still others have had a solid sense of themselves for ages and stuck with it.

For me, I identify a lot with the moratorium phase. I firmly put off any work on figuring out who I was until I left home for college and then started experimenting furiously to make up for lost time.

The funny thing is that each model seems to offer a chance for a satisfying life (or misery and toil, for that matter.) Psychologists would tell you that people who get to the identity achievement stage have the more mature, fully formed personalities. But try to convince the slackers and hometown heroes at your next high school reunion that they're not really happy because they haven't endured enough inner turmoil and self-doubt. 

Book report: "Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America"

The San Francisco State program I'm working through to become a life coach is based heavily on the growing field of positive psychology, which focuses on the functional rather than the dysfunctional side of the mental spectrum.


So it seems only fair to spend some time with the principled opposition, especially if it comes in as appealing a form as Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer of tremendous power and conviction who's done much to awaken America to the plight of its growing underclass.


With "Bright-sided," Ehrenreich takes aim at the many-tentacled self-industry, including positive psychology and its founder, Martin Seligman.


Ehrenreich clearly starts off with a personal beef surrounding her recent treatment for breast cancer and the relentless positive thinking promotion that made her feel infantalized and negated. From there, she goes on to build a bigger case that the myriad sources promoting positive thinking in American life are:

• Undermining our intelligence.
• Blinding us to injustice and inequality.
• Promoting the kind of magical thinking that helped set the stage for the mortgage crisis and other catastrophes.

There's a lot of thought here and some solid reasoning, but Ehrenreich paints with an awfully large brush. Lumping Seligman, "The Secret" author Rhonda Byrne and Christian Science originator Mary Baker Eddy into an amorphous philosophical blob really does justice to none of them.


Byrne, for instance, takes a basic fact of life -- instant karma's gonna get you -- and flattens it into a "dream it, get it" message that ignores the hard work part of the equation. Christian Science -- well, let's not even go there.

Positive psychology, on the other hand, looks at optimism/pessimism from the basic standpoint that underlies most mental health: Which better serves the individual?


From that view, it's not hard to make the case for optimism. It's more likely to lead the person to act, and "anything + work" is a better formula for success than "anything - work."


"Optimism" here means consistently erring somewhat on the positive side when predicting future outcomes -- always erring on the positive side, despite any evidence to the contrary, is called "delusion." Ehrenreich has some trouble distinguishing between the two, and ignores the obvious adaptive advantage of well-measured optimism. A bit of wishful thinking tends to be quite helpful for getting one's ass out bed in the morning. In fact, there's a name for people who make the most accurate predictions about future events: "clinically depressed."


So cheers to Ehrenreich for doing a bit to expose the charlatans selling a message of success without effort. (The corrosive amorality of such schemes was a favorite theme of author Wallace Stegner.) But next book, it would be good to do a little more work on knowing your opponent.

Book report: "Battling the Inner Dummy"

I wanted to like this layman's guide to psychological structure, subtitled "The Craziness of Apparently Normal People." Its foundational premise -- that most of the big psychological/mental challenges of life come from the primitive emotional center of the brain outshouting the newer (evolutionarily speaking) rational part -- is quite similar to my basic take on the matter.

What's more, for somewhat selfish reasons, I wholeheartedly support the idea of educated laymen trying to present psychological concepts to a mass audience, where PhD's and titles shouldn't matter as much as the ability to accurately synthesize, condense and translate academic information.


But to be honest, I had trouble getting through author David Weiner's freewheeling update on Freudian thought and beyond. (In fact, I've temporarily dropped it in favor of a book on a subject of more urgent interest -- rats. Don't ask.) His structural gimmick of a reanimated Freud reshaping his concepts with the help of modern marketing is irritating but easily enough avoided by skipping alternate chapters.


The real problem is the title and the premise behind it. "Inner Dummy" is Weiner's elaboration on Freud's idea of the id, expanded to cover the entire limbic system, the primitive part of the brain that governs emotional responses and remains better suited to the hunting and gathering lifestyle in which it developed.

Now I'm no huge fan of the limbic system, but I think it's a mistake to insult it by devaluing its intelligence. For starters, emotional drives are powerful stuff, and you really don't want to get them angry at you. I see the goal more as making friends between the limbic system and that big ol' prefrontal cortex. Get them to know and respect each other, so they can have productive conversations. The cortex gently and respectfully refutes the lizard brain's misunderstandings. The lizard brain points out information the rational mind may gloss over.


Because emotion is a kind of intelligence. It certainly isn't a complete source of intelligence, but it does provide all sorts of valuable clues about stuff in the environment that may be too subtle, troubling or whatever for the rational mind to recognize. Call that side of your mental life "dummy," and you risk shutting yourself off from valuable information. Not to mention the experience of feeling...well, alive,

Fear as a tool

While we're more or less on the subject of fear, recent anti-immigrant hysteria has me thinking about all manner of historical precedents that show how effectively a crowd can be made to panic about something that has nothing to do with the actual threats to them.


Last year I traipsed through "The Party of Fear," a penetrating history of nativist/anti-immigrant crusades in America and their ties to wider right-wing movements. Seems that certain of our countrymen have been trying to bar the doors against more recent arrivals ever since Plymouth Rock changed hands. It's truly astounding to see how flexible and self-serving the definition of "real American" has been.


It's also illuminating to note that periods of anti-immigrant bias tend to coincide with economic downturns. People are anxious, angry and looking for someone to blame for their predicament, and swarthy people who talk all funny turn out to be an awfully convenient (and organizationally powerless) target.


I was also struck recently while watching "The History of the Devil," a fine little British documentary recently aired on public TV (and which Amazon lists as "starring Zoroaster," a casting coup if there ever was one) how depressingly familiar the descriptions of various anti-heretic crusades and witch purges sounded. Secret trials, pre-established guilt, ethnic stereotyping -- stop me if you've heard this one before.


The upshot, at least for me, is that it's a really useful practice, if someone is trying to make you afraid of something, to ponder a bit about what they might have to gain from this. An Anglican cleric in the devil documentary tartly makes the point that accusing one of being a Cathar, Templar or other variety of heretic was usually the medieval church's way of saying "What a nice estate you have."


In the case of anti-immigrant movements -- well, it is rather convenient for those in charge, especially the element that favors privileged treatment for the super-wealthy, to have a target for public anger other than the political and legal structures that have allowed such uneven distribution of wealth.


Critical thinking -- such a crazy idea it just might work. 

Tell us a story, Mr. Brain

We're all no doubt familiar with the sensation of fear undercutting rational thinking and response. Some stimulus triggers the willies, and suddenly your reactions become exaggerated well beyond what you'd consider normal for somebody else.

Psychologist Martha Stout, who helped make sense of a particular kind of senselessness with her alarming book "The Sociopath Next Door," gives a fascinating biological account of how fear short-circuits reason in her more recent "The Paranoia Switch."


Under normal circumstances, the hippocampus part of the brain acts as an efficient and wise traffic cop, integrating sensation with emotional input and assigning ordered reactions accordingly. The result is that after a normal-to-pleasant event, you can mentally reconstruct not just the event but the emotions associated with it. You can build a story, allowing the event to inform and enrich future interactions with the world.


If an event sets off your fear response, however, your hippocampus quickly gets overwhelmed with the urgent emotional messages being broadcast by your limbic system. Memories of the event come together haphazardly and in fragments. "They remain in the brain as incoherent memory traces and sensations, constituting a cruel little hair trigger, a paranoia switch."

When something happens that reminds of you of that traumatic event, you have no coherent story to guide your emotional reactions. Instead, you're stuck in that greatest of fear factories, the unknown, re-experiencing that original limbic tornado.


Fortunately, our brains don't stop at the hippocampus. We have that big ol' cortex, which allows us -- with a lot of practice, attention and effort -- to build reasonable, useful stories even around the nasty stuff.

The past is past

One of the things I particularly like about the life coaching program at UCSF (which I'm a few courses from finishing) is that they put a lot of emphasis on positive psychology, a new movement within the healing arts that's gaining a lot of attention.


One of the most striking tenets, particularly for anyone with some background in traditional psychology, is that it's generally not all that helpful to dig around for the root causes of an unwanted behavior.


For anyone invested in the old paradigm, this is darn near heretical. Not spend hours digging into one's childhood, trying to resurrect hidden traumas and mis-learnings? How can you even call that psychology?


But the Freudian notion that uncovering the roots of a neurosis is akin to curing it has steadily lost credibility.  Awareness is one thing. But getting rid of bothersome behaviors also requires diligent work to construct healthier replacement behaviors. Insight into the roots of the old behaviors isn't necessarily going to help in that endeavor, and it may hinder a person by keeping him trapped in the past.


"The promissory note that Freud and his followers wrote about childhood events determining the course of adult lives is worthless," Martin Seligman, the godfather of positive psychology, writes in his groundbreaking book "Authentic Happiness."


Seligman's prescription for improved mental hygiene is to focus on building positive behaviors and habits -- gratitude, optimism, savoring pleasures -- rather than devoting a lot of attention to the behaviors you want to lessen. You'll enjoy it more, and your healthy new behaviors will steal time from the old ones. In short, starve your neuroses rather than hunting them down and trying to club them to death.


Again, this may seem heretical to anyone who's had much to do with traditional psychology, but there's a lot to recommend the approach. For starters, it seems that a lot more people might be willing to give positive psychology a try than the old model. "Relive past traumas in full, gory detail!" is a hard idea to sell. "Practice being happy" would seem to have much better legs, marketing-wise.


And it seems one would be much more likely to stick with a process that focuses on exploiting and developing one's strengths, as positive psychology promotes, rather calling attention to deficiencies.


Further, most of the arguments against positive psychology boil down to naive and puritanical variations on "No pain, no gain." Fine, maybe, for a masochist. But, notwithstanding my Lutheran upbringing, I'm a firm believer that there's no inherent virtue in doing something the hard way. Sometimes, hard is just hard.
  

Just words?

One of the key ideas/techniques in most cognitive work is learning how to identify unhelpful and inaccurate thoughts and replace them with statements that work better for you and happen to also accord better with reality.


"It's hopeless," for example, is an unhelpful (it discourages you from doing anything) and incorrect (making absolute predictions about the future), albeit familiar, thought/feeling. Thinking about it, one might decide that "Things are tough now, but I've dealt OK with similar crises before and I have a lot of resources" serves one better.

One of my favorite parts of Albert Ellis' "A New Guide to Rational Living," one of the foundations of cognitive psychology, is where Ellis anticipates a common objection to such mental work. "But it's just semantics," the skeptic might argue. "You're just playing with words."


Exactly, Ellis responds. But please drop the "just."


Because words are everything. As uniquely verbal creatures, we think in words. Our thoughts guide our emotions. So if you want to use your thoughts to changes your emotions, semantics is the tool set you're going to have to work with. "By the time we reach adulthood, (we) seem to do most of our important thinking, and consequently our emoting, in terms of self-talk or internalized sentences," Ellis writes.


So how better to reshape a one's emotional life than start playing with those sentences? 


Perhaps this is a position that appeals to my biases as someone who's spent 30 years tangling with words for a living. But I still can't think of a better way to get the big brain talking with the lizard brain.

Consider the source

For many years, my computer monitor has been adorned with one of my favorite quotes relating to emotional life, mental well-being, etc:

"Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions."

All along, that line has been attributed to Hafiz, the mystic poet of 14th century Iran who wrote movingly about love, God and wine.


Recently, however, it has come to my attention that the phrase actually has little, if anything, to do with Hafiz. It is from Daniel Ladinsky, by most reckoning a minor British poet who had the marketing sense to hitch his fortunes to Hafiz and a growing interest in Sufi mysticism.


The cover of "The Gift," in which the line I so like appears, labels the work as "Poems by Hafiz, the great Sufi master. Translations by Daniel Ladinsky."


The writer is coyer in the introduction, saying his poems are "renderings" of Hafiz works meant to capture the spirit of the originals for modern readers. Further inquiry reveals Ladinsky neither speaks nor reads Persian, making his qualifications dubious for any normal conception of "translator."


Further reading of more scholarly interpretations of Hafiz's work reveal a tight formal structure that bears no resemblance to the free verse of "The Gift."


Which leaves me in a quandary. I still love that quote. But it's one thing to pass along the wisdom of Hafiz and quite another to quote "this British guy who kind of..."


Should that matter to me? Or should one accept wisdom wherever one finds it?

Book report: "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us)"

There's a lot about engineering in Tom Vanderbilt's fascinating explanation of why driving sucks, but the most intriguing ideas are of a psychological/sociological nature.


Condensed version: Driving a car is a hugely complex task we're forced to accomplish with a vital piece equipment (your brain) designed for far more basic functions.


Vanderbilt covers topics such as distraction, the inherent narcissism in being a motorist (you're always the best driver on the road) and the phenomenon of risk compensation: Make a system safer, and people with use it in a riskier way that eventually cancels out any advantage.


For my money, the most captivating idea comes as Vanderbilt tries to explain our exaggerated emotional reactions to whatever happens on the highway. If someone cuts you off or makes an inopportune U-turn (quickly emerging as the top new thrill sport in San Francisco), you're likely to get mad and defensive all out of proportion to the actual risk posed by the behavior. Likewise, if another driver does you a courtesy, you'll feel good out of proportion to the significance of what in reality will be a very minor event in your day.


Vanderbilt's explanation is that our brains are wired to handle maybe 100 or so human relationships in a lifetime, reflecting the conditions when our ancestors lived in hunter-gatherer tribes. Back then, any encounter with another person had potential life-changing significance. "Thag scowl at me. Thag no like me. Thag burn down hut!"


Evolution being what it is, that's the basic brain we're still working with. Yes, your higher cortical functions can suss out the relative significance of events if you give it time. But in the moment, your reactions are dictated by a part of the brain that does not recognize the concept of a casual, meaningless social encounter.

Your jury-rigged brain

I was enjoying yet another lecture on neurology and brain function recently when I was struck by the plastic brain model used to illustrate the lesson.


I don't know if it was the construction, the way different brain segments were colored or what, but a somewhat familiar thought occurred to me with wholly new force: This is not a new brain. This is a basic mammal brain with a bunch of cortex glopped on top.

Now, any engineer will tell you that an old machine retrofitted to serve a new function never works as well as a machine designed specifically for that function. The re-jiggered machine will be big and clumsy, have redundant or useless parts, require complicated rewiring, etc..


Which is precisely what nature has gifted us with, noggin-wise. Yes, we have this big, nifty new cortex that can perform complicated math calculations, compose symphonies and cure polio. But we also have the old brain that evaluates everything strictly in threat/not threat terms, assumes ill intent just to be safe and treats every condition as permanent and irreversible.


And, given the way the parts are situated, the old brain always bats first. Yes, your cortex understands that the TV screen is showing a representation of a lion jumping at something, perfectly safe, notice the coloration on the tail. But in the time it has made those conclusions, the old brain has already made you jump and sweat with its message of "WE"RE GONNA DIE!"


A parable: When I was 10, I lobbied heavily for a new bicycle to replace the coaster-brake clunker I was outgrowing. Three-speed bikes were the norm at that point, and 10-speeds were gaining traction, so I made it clear to my Dad that I needed at least a three-speed model.

My Dad couldn't bear to get rid of anything that still worked, however, especially if it meant spending money for a replacement. Instead of a new bike, he found a Sears kit that supposedly turned a single-speed bike into a three-speed. Installed on my old bike with a few additional adjustments, he tried to sell me on the idea that I now had a brand new three-speeder.


But one ride around the block made the truth obvious to me: I had the same crappy bike, now with this ugly plastic tumor on the crank that played around with chain tension in a half-assed attempt to imitate an actual selection of gears.


And that, metaphorically, is what makes our mental lives so full and challenging. We're trying to navigate the complex, hilly terrain of a modern life full of symbols and ambiguities with the mental equivalent of a single-speed bike inherited from our ancestors.


Yes, we have all sort of dandy new systems bolted on to the old one. But sometimes the proof is in the ride.