50 Psychology Classics (53 page)

We can no longer allow ourselves to believe that happiness is some mystical thing enjoyed only by other people—the paths to it are clearer than ever, and it is up to us to take responsibility for our state of mind.

Born in Albany, New York, in 1942, to parents who were both public servants, Seligman attended the Albany Academy for Boys in New York. He graduated
summa cum laude
in his BA from Princeton University in 1964, and received his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He has been a professor of psychology at UPenn since 1976
.

In 1998 he was elected President of the American Psychological Association, from which he has also received two Distinguished Scientific Contribution awards. Past presidents of the Association include William James, John Dewey, Abraham Maslow, and Harry Harlow
.

Seligman has authored 200 academic articles and 20 books, including
Helplessness
(1975, 1993),
Abnormal Psychology
(1982, 1995) with David Rosenhan,
Learned Optimism
(1991),
What You Can Change and What You Can't
(1993), and
The Optimistic Child
(1995)
.

He is married and has seven children
.

“We are not unlike a particularly hardy crustacean. The lobster grows by developing and shedding a series of hard, protective shells. Each time it expands from within, the confining shell must be sloughed off. It is left exposed and vulnerable until, in time, a new covering grows to replace the old.”

“They had married at 25. And for several years they seemed to be typically eager people enjoying the new experiences of a typical marriage within the professional class. I knew them as friends, but nothing about the quality of threads that bound them as a couple. Except to sense that by now they had their tangles like the rest of us.”

In a nutshell

What seem like very personal changes are often simply transitions from one season of life to another.

In a similar vein
Erik Erikson
Young Man Luther
(p 84)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)

As a reporter, Gail Sheehy was sent to do a story on the conflict in Northern Ireland and got caught up in the events of Bloody Sunday, a Catholic civil rights march in Derry in which 14 civilians, mostly young, were killed by British forces. The day might have remained simply a bad memory were it not for the fact that right in front of her she witnessed a boy have his face blown away by a bullet.

Returning to America, she took stock of her life. At 35, suddenly her lifestyle of journalistic travel did not seem enough. She felt she had been a “performer” in life, not really participating in it, even though she had had a child and been married and divorced. Her “whole jerry built world,” as she describes it, threatened to come apart. She had seen herself as an optimistic, fearless, loving, and ambitious “good” girl, but now she seemed to be looking at the dark side, at what was possibly halfway through her life.

With this terrifying thought, she wondered: What do other people do when this happens to them? Some seemed to push themselves harder with their careers, others began playing dangerous sports, or giving bigger parties, or taking younger people to bed. But she knew none of these things would fill the gaping hole in her psyche.

Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life
was one of the publishing phenomena of the 1970s. The subject of adult life crises was not obviously hot, but with its distinctive cover, serialization in popular magazines, and Sheehy's talent for publicity, the book became a bestseller. The writing style is what you would expect of a classy magazine feature writer, pulling the reader in from the first page.

It is easy to dismiss
Passages
as dated pop psychology, but many readers are moved to exclaim “That's me!” as they recognize themselves in Sheehy's descriptions of the stages of adult life, and the book has made many feel less alone as they negotiate life's rapids.

Sheehy realized that the terrible event she had witnessed was simply a trigger for deeper changes going on within her—some kind of midlife crisis. The experience sparked her interest in other people's turning points, and to her surprise she discovered that these “passages” happened with predictable regularity at roughly the same ages. People tried to blame external events for how they were feeling, but as with herself often the outer events were not the answer.
Dissatisfaction with a life that had seemed fulfilling only a couple of years before indicated that there was something going on at another level.

There was a difference between “marker” events such as graduation, marriage, childbirth, and getting a job—which all obviously have an impact, she noted—and developmental stages that change us from within. We tend to attribute how we are feeling to the marker event itself, when more often the event is simply a catalyst to move us forward into another stage of life. Though uncomfortable and often painful, we should not fear these transition times, as ultimately they mean growth. If we choose to embrace the change, at least we know we are growing.

Sheehy was influenced by psychologist Erik Erikson's idea that at certain turning points we can either move in the direction of personal growth, or stay with the security of what we know. Either way we experience change; the choice is whether we have more control and awareness over the process, or allow it to happen to us.

The stages of childhood and adolescent development have been exhaustively identified, Sheehy notes, but not much attention has been given to
adults
. To write
Passages
, she immersed herself in the literature on life cycles, read a mountain of biographies, and began collecting life stories of people between the ages of 18 and 55. As most of the research related to men, she made sure that the book included the stories of plenty of real women. She also explored life changes within the dynamic of a couple, and the stresses this can place on relationships.

To make the life stages easier to grasp, Sheehy's innovation was to break them down into easy-to-understand decades.

In our 20s we have to work out our path in life, discovering the ways of being or doing that give us a sense of aliveness and hope. We are likely to go one of two ways: to do what we “should” in terms of family and peer expectations; or to pursue adventure and “find ourselves.” We either seek security and commitments, or we avoid commitment altogether.

A man in his 20s feels that he has to do well in his work or be ridiculed. His greatest love is his career. While women may not have the same pressure, if they go the stay-at-home, child-rearing route they may end up with less selfesteem compared to their male partners, who have very clear feedback on how they are doing. Women can begin to feel cut off from the world and valued less for who they are than for their role as a mother. While men in their 20s feel they can do anything, women often lose the confidence they had as adolescents.

Couples in their 20s feel that they will overcome all obstacles, yet behind this bravado is often a level of doubt or insecurity. Women often go for a “stronger one,” a man who can replace their family ties to some extent. But in doing this women avoid their own work of development, and may have to face it later; for example, the woman who marries young and changes significantly in her 30s, coming out of her husband's shadow.

When we near the “big Three O,” Sheehy notes, normally we feel dissatisfaction with the career or personal choices we have made, as if we have outgrown some of them. We have to chart new directions or make new commitments. We may want to change career, or go back to work, or start having children. If we have been in a relationship since our early 20s, we may get the “seven-year itch.”

Generally, Sheehy warns that if we don't have some kind of identity crisis in this “pulling up roots” period of our 20s, we will inevitably have one at a later point when it may take a greater toll.

The 30s are the “deadline decade.” We suddenly realize, as Sheehy herself did, that there will be an end to our life at some point. “Time starts to squeeze,” which refines our priorities. While the 20s are the “anything is possible” decade, the 30s let us know that we may not have all the answers, and this can be a shock. We demand authenticity of ourselves and begin to see that we can't blame anything on anyone else. Women may have bet everything on their marriage and family, but their assertiveness may begin to rise, as they realize that their life is not simply about pleasing others or living up to cultural norms.

Life usually becomes a little more settled. We may tie ourselves to a certain career, and we may buy a house to put down roots. Men may feel that this is their “last chance” decade in which they must become partner in the firm instead of the assistant, or become an established author instead of being “young and promising.”

People of both sexes arrive at the conclusion that life is a lot more serious and difficult than they understood it to be in their 20s. The ages between 37 and 42 are peak years of anxiety for most people. In Sheehy's research, the age of 37 in particular came up again and again as a crisis year.

We feel a sense of stagnation or disequilibrium when we enter midlife. Those who have seemed to climb effortlessly upwards find that life catches up with them. Having intensely pursued a career, we may think, “Was it really worth it? Why don't I have children?” Many a man turning 40 feels underappreciated and burdened, with the sentiment, “Is this all there is?”

The good news is that in the mid-40s a certain equilibrium returns. For those with a renewed purpose these can be the best years, as we see that no one can “do it” for us, and therefore we finally become master of our destiny in a more assured way. The motto of this stage in life, Sheehy suggests, might be “No more bullshit”—we are who we are.

A woman is likely to get more assertive, while a man may want to get more emotionally responsive, having put his emotional needs aside to strive for a career. The opposite sex can begin to lose its magic power over us, since we can now incorporate the opposite of our own sex within our psyches. We feel more independent, less likely to fall in love, but more capable of devotion to another person.

The search for self-identity is what Jung called “individuation” and Maslow termed “self-actualization.” Sheehy's phrase for it is “gaining our authenticity.” Whatever we want to call it, this is the aim of the successive life stages.

At each point we have the chance either to define ourselves further, or to succumb to the ideas of the group and its expectations. We have two selves: the one that wants to merge with others and things, and the one that seeks creative independence and freedom. Throughout our lives we may alternate between one and the other, or they compete within us at the same time.

Many of our decisions may simply reflect a desire to get away from or differentiate ourselves from our parents. People often marry for this reason. Intriguingly, of all the couples Sheehy interviewed, none married for love alone. There was always a stronger reason: “My girlfriend expected it,” “My family wanted it,” “In my culture, it is what you do at my age.” For both sexes, a common reason was, “I need someone to take care of me.” The problem with this is that we come to judge a spouse on how well they take the place of a parent, rather than on their own merits as a person. This allows us to think, when we are not happy, that “he/she won't let me do it,” instead of taking responsibility for ourselves.

To make things more difficult, a couple's development cycles will rarely be in tandem. When the man is growing and enthused, for instance, the woman may be going through a time of doubt and instability, and vice versa. A common result is that we blame each other for what we are experiencing, when the major change is really internal.

The chief enjoyment of
Passages
lies in the vignettes of actual people, individuals and couples, whom Sheehy interviewed. Though these are now obviously out of date, there is still a timeless quality about the stories. She includes a quote from novelist Willa Cather: “There are only two or three human stories,
and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Having greater awareness of the stages of our lives does not mean that we are giving up all control; what it does is allow us to see that the problems that seem unique to us have probably been experienced by millions of others, and may have more to do with our time of life than the other people or situations we may be blaming.

Since
Passages
was published, timeframes for the stages of life seem to have changed. In mid-1970s America, the average marrying age was 21 for women and 23 for men. Today, with people settling down much later, it is almost expected that you spend a few years of your 20s and maybe even 30s discovering what you want to do and having minimum commitments. It is also more common for women to delay having children, or not to have them at all. And Sheehy did not consider life much beyond the 40s, an age when—given longer life expectancy—life really begins for many people.

This begs the question: What form will transition points or life crises take when, as scientists predict, people are healthy even beyond the age of 100? Perhaps we will become more willing to see life as a series of inevitable transitions, separated by relatively stable periods. Maybe we will abandon the old distinction between “youth” and “maturity” and instead see ourselves as fluid, continually evolving creations instead of having a fixed identity.