What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (42 page)

Problems of
sexual performance
change quite easily with the right therapy, and I consider them problems near the surface. There is no biological basis for the sexual dysfunctions, but in the throes of one it is quite hard to disconfirm the belief “I am sexually inadequate,” particularly during the vicious circle of spectatoring. These problems are not powerful beliefs, since they are confined to erotic and family life.

Specific phobias
also lie near the surface. Spiders, for example,
are
dangerous: They bite, and very rare ones might even kill you. There is an evolutionary history pushing you to feel this way, but while prepared, the specific content of phobias is not heritable. The belief that spiders are dangerous is hard to disconfirm if you avoid spiders altogether and never find out that if endured, spiders are much more scared of you than you are of them. The belief is of low power—it explains only spiders. With therapy, this fear can be extinguished almost completely—but the phobia may reappear when rekindled by other troubles.

DEPTH OF THE DISORDERS AND BEHAVIOR PATTERNS
(
= maximal contribution per factor)

Panic
lies at the surface. It turns out merely to be a mistaken belief that your heart racing is a symptom of heart attack, or that gasping for breath is a symptom of stroke. Very little else hinges on this belief, and so it is of low power. It is quite easy to disconfirm by showing a hyperventilating patient that his symptoms are symptoms of anxiety or overbreathing, not of heart attack. It does not seem to have a strong evolutionary history, and it is not heritable. When changed by therapy or evidence, panic is almost always cured.

A theory is defined not only by what it claims, but also by what it omits. Most theories of personality claim that childhood is powerful and that emotional traits are likewise strong. My theory denies both of these assumptions. There is no premise here about early learning being strong. My theory says that it does not matter
when
problems, habits, and personality are acquired; their depth derives only from their biology, their evidence, and their power. Some childhood traits are deep and unchangeable, but not because they were learned early and therefore have a privileged place. Rather, those traits that resist change do so either because they are evolutionarily prepared or because they acquire great power by virtue of becoming the framework around which later learning crystallizes. My theory also makes no claim about emotional learning being deep, and therefore traumatic learning has no privileged place in it. When emotional traits resist change, their unchangeability derives from either their biology, their evidence, or their power—not from trauma. I have spent the last thirty years investigating what we learn under trauma, and I am impressed by how very flexible such learning is. The omissions of early and traumatic learning are central to my theory, and fit well with the fact that the influence on adult life of childhood and its traumas is weak. In this way, the theory of depth carries the optimistic message that we are not prisoners of our past.

So I intend to revive an idea long neglected by scientists other than the Freudians: the idea of depth. I believe it is the key to change. Changing that which is deep requires mighty effort—massive doses of drugs or interminable therapy—and the attempt is likely, in the end, to fail. That which is near the surface changes much more readily.

When you have understood this message, you will never look at your life in the same way again. Right now there are a number of things that you do not like about yourself and that you want to change: your short fuse, your waistline, your shyness, your drinking, your glumness. You have decided to change, but you do not know what you should work on first. Formerly you would have probably selected the one that hurts the most. Now you will also ask which attempt is most likely to repay your efforts and which is most likely to lead to further frustration. You now know that your glumness, your shyness, and your anger are much more likely to change than your drinking, which is more likely to change than your waistline.

Some of what does change is under your control, and some is not. You can best prepare yourself to change by learning as much as you can about what you can change and how to make those changes. This has been the purpose of my book. Like all true education, learning about change is not easy; harder yet is surrendering some of our hopes. There are few shortcuts and no quick fixes to be had. You have heard the exhortations of the multibillion-dollar self-improvement industries and the therapy and medication guilds. Much of what you have heard from them has been false promises. Much of the optimism they have engendered has been unwarranted.

I have spent the last twenty-five years investigating optimism, and it is certainly not my purpose to destroy your optimism about change. But it is also not my purpose to assure everybody that they can change in every way. That would be yet another false promise. Optimism, the conviction that you
can
change, is a necessary first step in the process of all change. But unwarranted optimism, the conviction that you can change what in fact you cannot, is a tragic diversion. Years of frustration, self-reproach, giving up, and, ultimately, remorse follow. My purpose is to instill a new, warranted optimism about the parts of your life you can change and so help you focus your limited time, money, and effort on making actual what is truly within your reach.

Recall the “Serenity Prayer” that opened this book: the courage to change what you can change, the serenity to accept what you cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Life is a long period of change. What you have been able to change and what has resisted your highest resolve might seem chaotic to you; for some of what you are never changes no matter how hard you try, and other aspects change readily. My hope is that this book has been the beginning of wisdom about the difference.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been twenty-five years in its birthing. I began to worry about the collision between biological and environmental views of change when I was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s. Three people brought the importance of the issue home to me. The first was Dick Solomon, the very embodiment of the nurture side of the issue—an influential learning theorist who spent his career looking into the
tabula rasa
for the roots of emotion and emotional change. He was my Ph.D. adviser and my teacher. The second was Paul Rozin, then a young upstart with the unheard-of combination of a Ph.D. in biology and one in psychology. He thought the
tabula rasa
approach to learning made no sense. He was my teacher, too. The third person, John Garcia, put learning theory into evolutionary perspective. In a brilliant set of experiments, John had the temerity to propose that learnability itself has been the subject of natural selection. For John, the
tabula rasa
came with many instructions, defaults, and biases. I thought John was right, and began back then to write books and articles espousing this view.

Then the issue lay dormant within me for almost twenty years, as I myself evolved from learning theorist to clinical psychologist to social scientist. I read the burgeoning literature on change and watched the gulf grow wider between environmentalists and biological psychiatrists. As the gulf widened, however, there came the first major discoveries of methods of markedly changing many of the psychological disorders. Disorders that had resisted change now yielded to a variety of drugs and psychotherapies. There seemed to be a pattern in what changed and what did not change, in what changed with drugs as opposed to what changed with psychotherapy. This pattern seemed to be the same one I saw in the work of John Garcia.

The idea for writing a book on this topic was born in Kona Village, Hawaii, in the winter of 1990–91. It came out of conversations about our children with my wife, Mandy, and then with Michael Crichton, the novelist and essayist. Crichton and I both had two-year-old daughters (Taylor and Lara, respectively) and were caught up in the day-to-day tribulations of childrearing. We wondered about what things actually influenced our daughters and what elements of childrearing were wholly without effect. I reeled off my opinions about biological preparedness, sexual identity, phobias, and the
sauce béarnaise
phenomenon. Michael encouraged a book (we have the same publisher, Sonny Mehta of Alfred A. Knopf), and my agent, Richard Pine, was aglow with enthusiasm. And so was my editor, Jonathan Segal, who is not easily kindled.

I sought and received the advice and comments of many people—experts in the wide range of the disorders, drugs, psychotherapies, and self-improvement schemes—and I have tried to integrate that wisdom into this book. I extend my thanks to them now, with the customary absolution for the results. First, the people who read and commented on entire chapters or even longer swaths: Kelly Brownell (dieting), David Clark of Oxford University (anxiety), Michael Crichton (all), Edna Foa (PTSD and depth), Alan Kors (booters and bootstrappers), Alan Marlatt (alcoholism), John Money (sex), Robert Plomin (childhood), Jack Rachman (obsessions), Sandy Scarr (childhood), Amanda Seligman, my oldest daughter (all of
Part 1
), Joseph Volpicelli (alcoholism), George Vaillant (alcoholism), Fred Van Fleteren (booters and bootstrappers), and Terry Wilson of Rutgers University (dieting and alcoholism).

Several people have allowed me to reprint their questionnaires in the book: I thank Lisa Friedman Miller, Lenore Radloff, Melvin Selzer, and Charles Spielberger.

Jonathan Segal and Richard Pine each gave the manuscript several readings and improved it each time, not only sentence by sentence but in substance. Heather Smay read the manuscript as it evolved and was my tireless research assistant. My secretaries, Elise McMahon and Terry Silver, were helpful in ways too diverse to number.

So many conversations, so many constructive comments, so many memos and letters, so much time freely given, so much exchange of ideas—I am sure I have inadvertently omitted some who helped, but my thanks to Jeff Albert, Lauren Alloy, Lori Andiman, Mike Bailey, Paul Baltes, Jon Baron, Aaron Beck, Mary Bell, Beth Brezner, Kevin Brownlee, Greg Buchanan, David Buss, Dan Chirot, Billy Coren, Paul Crits-Cristoph, Rob DeRubeis, Harold Dibble, Ken Dodge, Maureen Eisenberg, Albert Ellis, David Featherman, Alan Feingold, Pamela Freyd, Alan Fridlund, Lisa Friedman, Jim Fries, Don Fusting, Judy Garber, Joan Girgus, Henry Gleitman, Lila Gleitman, David Goldberg, Ruben Gur, T. George Harris, Peter Herman, Tom Hirst, Steve Hollon, Janet Hyde, Lisa Jaycox, Charlie Jesnig, Martin Katahn, Gerald Klerman, John LaRosa, Bruce Larsen, Lester Luborsky, David Lykken, Alan Mann, Isaac Marks, Jack Maser, Dennis McCarthy, Nigel McCarthy, Jeff Meckstroth, Shirlee Meckstroth, Bob Miller, Sue Mineka, Paul Monaco, Peter Muehrer, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Gabriele Oettingen, Dan Oran, James Pennebaker, Chris Peterson, Arthur Pine, Chris Pro-kop, Judith Rapoport, Karen Reivich, Richard Rende, Bob Rescorla, Sam Revusky, Chris Risley, Judy Rodin, Dave Rosenhan, Mollie Rosenhan, Julie Rubenstein, Marvin Sachs, Harold Sackeim, Robert Schuller, Peter Schulman, Barry Schwartz, David Seligman, Irene Seligman, Paul Soloway, David Spiegel, John Stickney, Mickey Stunkard, Paul Thomas, Lou Tice, Joseph Volpicelli, Peter Whybrow, George Wilson, Camille Wortman, and the students in Psychology 709 in the spring semesters of 1992 and 1993.

The most special thanks go to my wife, Mandy McCarthy Seligman, not only for reading and commenting on all of this book (except this part), but for her unflagging good cheer and boundless love. And to Nicole Seligman, my two-year-old. The writing of the book began on or about the day of her conception, and the first draft was finished the day she took her first steps. Her buoyancy and the sunshine she radiates made even the hardest parts easier.