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.
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.
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.
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?
T
here'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.
