MY DREAM, MY BOOK

 THEME: DREAM ON

Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?

“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”

Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.

“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”

Time for a new writing teacher.

Back to my dream: the book would trace the various inborn traits and early experiences that we use to invent our sense of self and the story that comes out of it.  Everyone who read it would create a coherent version of their life story. They would make connections between where they came from, what experiences life threw at them and how they survived, or didn’t. It would be a selfhelp book that actually helped.

The book would be the capstone of my therapy career. For all those years I sat in a chair in a room, helping my clients wrestle meaning out of the crises of their lives. I had to have learned something and this was the way to offer it to a much wider audience than the one at a time one I was used to.

The point is not mere navel-gazing. Once you know your story you can change it, which is what therapy is all about. Researcher James Pennebaker has demonstrated that writing about trauma bolsters both physical and mental well-being. So I asked my clients to journal in between sessions. I would sometimes receive a thoughtful and cogent account of how the current stresses fit in with the flow of life.

More often I would get pages that rambled through raw emotion, blame, self-help slogans, and self-recrimination. I’d hand it back and ask for a second step: highlight the 5 most important sentences, bracket any wild and irrational statements so we could set them aside, and start to figure out what this episode means in your life. Then we would work on answering some questions: Does this remind you of anything? On your best day, how would you prefer to handle this? What stops you from doing that? Whose voice do you hear in your head giving you counsel, and is that voice to be trusted?

It was to be a simple book, a tool for the reader to use on his or her own messy life, kind of a California Closets for the mind and heart. Surely people would jump at the chance to sort through their own life stories and put them in order.

But then my own messy life intervened and I never finished writing the thing, though I do have three successive richly imagined formats filed in a drawer where they can help no one. They heckle me from there, shouting muffled accusations of “slacker!” If they were in charge, they’d give me an Incomplete on my career, and one more term to finish what I started.

Maybe I need to open that drawer. I think in the absence of my approach the world has gone a bit mad. We now have a spew of completely unprocessed minutiae spraying at us every time we turn on the computer or the smart phone or the iPad. The me, me, and more me enthusiasts inflict their me-ness on each other and all bystanders on a daily (or minutely) basis through Facebook, (which knows more about you and your buying habits than you do), Foursquare (which lets you log every single place you went today), and Farmville (that reveals that people you previously thought well of are living pretend lives as farmers instead of reading serious biographies or playing tennis like you thought they were). 

Is no one interested in stopping for a moment to tease out meaning from all that? Anyone?

Apparently Facebook is. Their new Timeline approach builds a history of what you have ever posted and what can be learned from any of the 7 million sites and the apps you use. It’s certainly nice that they care, but all that data isn’t going to help you when it comes to deciding how to make the best life. Like those undigested journal pages, it just churns out an overwhelming volume of raw data, all equally important.

There is a reason why you have a prefrontal cortex and Facebook doesn’t. Your cortex allows you to prioritize, weigh in your values, perfect your unique vision, and stake out your little patch of territory that no one else can stand on. It helps you recognize you.

If I got serious and started up again today on the book, I figure I could finish in nine months or so, you know, like gestating a baby without the morning sickness.

Just think, I could advertise my new baby on Facebook, and if only a fraction of the 800 million Facebook members gave it a try, I would be in the pink, speaking to an audience far bigger than I could dream. Now that I think of it, there would be something bewitchingly subversive about using their methods to meet my goals. 

Stand back. I’m going to open the drawer and see what flies out. Just send in my meals. I’ll be busy making my dream come true. It’s who I am. 

CBH - 09/11

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND ME

THEME: WELL, DUH
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. ~Eric Hoffer

I rented the office, then scoured used furniture stores and garage sales to furnish and decorate it. I even splurged on a painting of a rainy Paris street from TJ Maxx. I was ready. I was in private practice.

My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.

He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice.  It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.

At the same time, at the University of Pennsylvania, a rising star named Martin Seligman, Ph.D., who would become the guru of Positive Psychology later on, was setting up shop too. A research psychologist, he began seeing what he could learn from rats. He tells it all in his new book Flourish (2011).

You don’t get to be guru of anything without an outsized ego, and Seligman doesn’t try to hide his. He details his turning points from rat researcher to human researcher, and later from pathology-seeker to happiness-promoter.

In a rare burst of humility, he acknowledges that his earlier concentration on happiness research (reported in Authentic Happiness, 2004) was lightweight and misguided. In this new book, he sees the light – he has decided to move far beyond mere happiness.

In describing how he came to this recent turning point, he criticizes two common approaches used by his colleagues in the real world of therapy and life change: psychotropic medication and talk therapy. Why? Because, he says, they only target symptom relief, and then the effect wears off.  If that was the case, I wasted my time with that questionnaire and the considerable work that followed. But I have a question. What became of the research (not his) that shows that both approaches are effective for many people, giving the long-term edge to talk therapy?

While he made friends with his rats, I dug in at my office, pursuing one of those useless pursuits, trying to help my real clients find their peace of mind. We explored all the areas of life that I asked about in my questionnaire: their health, upbringing, daily stressors, family issues, spirituality, and others. We tried to bring all that together, locate their obstacles and strengths, and weave it together into a new life story. Quite often we succeeded.

Seligman tested me with this book. For instance, he and his editors might reconsider the section on his stint as a residence hall-based professor who found his students’ needs – over such matters as date rapes and suicide attempts – to be intolerable “hassles” for him. Don’t we want our gurus to be a bit more compassionate than that?

I also stuck with him through his reports of his grouchy, snarky, resistant, sometimes brittle and resentful behavior, even though we might hope for more positivity from our positivity gurus.

I was not an early adopter of Positive Psychology. I was exposed to an earlier generation of it when I worked in a project to provide job readiness training and support to “displaced homemakers.” I was committed to help these abandoned women step outside the narrow “housewife” role into career paths that would build their independence. It became clear early on that the director of the program and I differed on how to accomplish that.

She had run the first round of the six-week program before I came on board, and I was to follow her protocol. At the first session, each participant was to choose an adjective to serve as her nickname in class. It seemed lame but I led the group through the exercise.  The first client chose “Hard-working.” The next, “Feisty.” “Hopeful,” the next.

Wait a minute, I thought. I’d already worked in community mental health for several years and had known numerous women in this circumstance. Where was “Pissed off,” or “Depressed” or “Scared to death,” or “Exhausted”?

The answer was right before me. The clients had heard the line in the directions that I had missed even as I read it to them.

“Be sure you pick a positive word.” Oh. They were so compliant that they were willing to pretend positiveness.

Finally though, one of them came through.

“Hostile,” she said. The other members looked at me in alarm. She’d broken a rule.

“Okay,” I said, “Hostile it is. By the end of the class, let’s see if we can move that to – what would you like?”

“Able to sleep,” she said.

“Good then,” I said, “That’s a deal.”

I was called on the carpet as soon as the women were out the door.

“You allowed one of them to describe herself in a negative way,” said the director.

“But it reflects where she is,” I countered.

“We have to model positivity,” she said.

“But that would be false,” I said. I caught the this-is-only-going-to-get-worse look in her eye.

“You’ll have to help her choose a new word tomorrow,” she declared.

“Are you sure we don’t want to meet them where they really are?” I asked, pushing beyond the intelligent stopping point.

She was sure. The next day we settled on something like “Determined.”  By the end of it, she was sleeping better, but she and I both knew it would have been better to get there the honest way.

I was similarly unimpressed with the next waves of positiveness that washed through the therapy world: affirmations, self-esteem-building, and Seligman’s pursuit of happiness. I figured from the start of my career that the only realistic goal would include a balance between happiness and sorrow, and the resources to survive both. I just kept pursuing that peace of mind I’d been hearing about from my clients. I felt sure that concentrating only on happiness would deny the part of life that has the most to teach us.

As is often the case, science eventually catches up and proves what we already know. Now in Seligman’s new frontier he’s decided to shoot for well-being instead of happiness.  He says that it rests on positive emotions (including happiness), as long as other factors are present, things like engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. Sounds a little familiar to me  – an ambitious goal beyond symptom relief, created by weaving together a variety of elements. Well, duh, Doc, if only we’d been able to have this conversation years ago, maybe I could have been your guru.

In the end, I have to hand it to him. He’s gone far beyond the scope of what I accomplished at my little office. He’s now helping institute his principles in schools here and in Australia, and more recently in the Army to address the needs of returning war vets. And he has maneuvered his new passion for building resilience over treating pathology to the center of his profession.

When I got to the end of the book, my doubts evaporated. This touchy, self-aggrandizing researcher talks not about the pathology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but about the strength and wisdom that comes from Post-Traumatic Growth.

            So we agree. For the best life, go ahead and assemble those positive emotions all you want, but add engagement, throw in some relationships and accomplishments, and wrap it up with meaning. When things really go wrong and life gets as bad as it can, look for strengths to emerge.  Yes. After all our problems, Dr. Seligman and I have ended up on the same team.

CBH 07/15