What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (40 page)

Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more—absolutely nothing more—than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

Catharsis

The first inner-child premise—that childhood events determine adult personality—is false. Now I want to turn to the second inner-child premise—that coming to grips with childhood abuse cures adult problems.

John Bradshaw, in his best-seller
Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child
, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name
catharsis
, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon.

Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works.
¹⁵
When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups.
¹⁶
Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware.”

The Moral Dimension of Recovery Re-examined

I can find no support for the two basic assumptions of the recovery movement: that childhood abuse influences adult personality, and that cure by catharsis works. Even if the movement has no foundation, however, the appeal of taking on the victim label is still great. It is democratic, it is consoling, it raises our self-esteem, and it transforms others’ contempt into compassion. Or does it?

It depends on the alternatives. If you are alcoholic, the disease label may once have helped you a great deal. The only alternative label used to be “bad person.” Disease is curable, limited, and impersonal. Bad character is permanent, pervasive, and personal. Believing you are bad leads to helplessness, hopelessness, and self-hate. Believing you have a disease can lead to action, seeking out a cure, renewed hope, and some measure of self-esteem. If you are a black teenager, unemployed and facing jail, explaining your troubles as discrimination or bad schools may help for the same reason. The alternative labels, “stupid,” “lazy,” and “criminal,” should you believe them, are self-fulfilling.

Depression, sexual troubles, anxiety, loneliness, and guilt are the main problems that drive consumers into the recovery movement. Explaining such adult troubles as being caused by victimization during childhood does not accomplish much. Compare “wounded child” as an explanation to some of the other ways you might explain your problems: “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” or “sexually dysfunctional.” “Wounded child” is a more permanent explanation; “depressive” is less permanent. As we saw in the first section of this book, depression, anxiety, and sexual dysfunction—unlike being a wounded child—are all eminently treatable. “Wounded child” is also more pervasive in its destructive effects: “Toxic” is the colorful word used to describe its pervasiveness. “Depression,” “anxiety,” and “sexually dysfunctional” are all narrower, less damning labels, and this, in fact, is part of the reason why treatment works.

So “wounded child” (unless you believe in catharsis cures) leads to more helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity than the alternatives. But it is less personal—your parents did it to you—than “depressive,” “anxiety-prone,” and “sexually dysfunctional.” Impersonal explanations of bad events raise self-esteem more than personal ones. Therefore “wounded child” is better for raising your self-esteem and for lowering your guilt.

Self-esteem has become very important to Americans in the last two decades. Our public schools are supposed to nurture the self-esteem of our children, our churches are supposed to minister to the self-esteem of their congregants, and the recovery movement is supposed to restore the self-esteem of victims. Attaining self-esteem, while undeniably important, is a goal that I have reservations about. I think it is an overinflated idea, and my opinion was formed by my work with depressed people.

Depressed people, you will recall, have four kinds of problems: behavioral—they are passive, indecisive, and helpless; emotional—they are sad; bodily—their sleeping, eating, and sex are disrupted; cognitive—they think life is hopeless and that they are worthless. Only the second half of this last symptom amounts to low self-esteem. I have come to believe that lack of self-esteem is the least important of these woes. Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness or passivity, however, accomplishes nothing. To put it exactly, I believe that low self-esteem is an
epiphenomenon
, a mere reflection that your commerce with the world is going badly. It has no power in itself. What needs improving is not self-esteem but your commerce with the world. So the one advantage of labeling yourself a victim—raised self-esteem—is minimal, particularly since victimhood raises self-esteem at the cost of greater hopelessness and passivity, and therefore worsens commerce with the world.

This is indeed my main worry about the recovery movement. Young Americans right now are in an epidemic of depression. I have speculated on the causes in the last chapter of my book
Learned Optimism
, and I will not repeat my conjectures here. Young people are easy pickings for anything that makes them feel better—even temporarily. The recovery movement capitalizes on this epidemic. When it works, it raises self-esteem and lowers guilt, but at the expense of our blaming others for our troubles. Never mind the fact that those we blame did not in fact cause our troubles. Never mind the fact that thinking of ourselves as victims induces helplessness, hopelessness, and passivity. Never mind that there are more effective treatments available elsewhere.

It is more important to focus on responsibility and being forward-looking.
¹⁷
Seeing ourselves as victims of childhood makes us prisoners of the past and erodes our sense of responsibility. All successful therapy has two things in common: It is forward-looking and it requires assuming responsibility. Therapy that reviews childhood endlessly, that does not focus on how to cope in the here and now, that views a better future as incidental to undoing the past, has a century-long history of being ineffective. All therapy that works for depression, anxiety, and sexual problems focuses on exactly what is going wrong now and on how to correct it. All this requires a heightened sense of responsibility for our problems and a commitment to hard work (and even homework) to make the future better. The past is touched upon, but usually to get insight into patterns of problems, not as a way to shuck off the blame.
¹⁸

So I worry that the second season of people in “recovery” will be crippled—not by what actually happened to them in the first season, but by their seeing themselves as prisoners of their childhoods—victims helpless to begin anew in a new season.

The Uses of Childhood

I can endorse the goal of the recovery movement—mobilizing troubled adults to change problems they thought were unchangeable. But I cannot endorse either its premises or its methods. To me, these get in the way of my positive message: Growth and change are the rule, not the exception, throughout adult life. As you enter your second season, many of you are troubled—depressed, anxious, angry, or lonely. You may have become accustomed to your pain, but that does not make it an acceptable feeling to live with the rest of your life. And you need not. There are alternative and effective ways to change, and they have been detailed in Parts 2 and 3 of this book. They are not quick fixes, nor are they emotionally orgiastic, but they are worthwhile and they do last.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I
do
endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into
how
you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem.

Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I’m a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.)

You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don’t believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not.

Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

15

Depth and Change:
The Theory

I
T IS TIME
for a review and for the theory. When we survey all the problems, personality types, patterns of behavior, and the weak influence of childhood on adult life, we see a puzzling array of how much change occurs. From the things that are easiest to those that are the most difficult, this rough array emerges: