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.