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.
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.
