Prime Time - Jane Fonda [23]
Me, fly-fishing with my golden retriever, Roxy, in 2001.
© VERONIQUE VIAL
I know that some of you reading this book don’t believe in therapy; maybe you view it as self-indulgent, the way my father did. But, according to author and therapist Terrence Real, “most psychological conditions can be significantly improved with the right care. Treatment for depression, for example, has been shown to be 90 percent effective. Yet only two in five depressed people ever get help.”6
If temperament is inherited and relatively immutable, why are so many of us able to change how we feel and behave? My interest in the possibility of change stems from a sense I had, starting in my late twenties, that if I was to make my life all that it could be, I would have to change certain things about myself. My belief in the possibility of behavioral change is also what motivated me to found two nonprofits that aim at reducing risky sexual behavior among teenagers—the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University’s School of Medicine.
In Georgia, around 1997, with some of the young men and women my nonprofit, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, worked with.
ON CHARACTER
Dr. George Vaillant addresses the issue of personal change in his book Aging Well. He says that while “temperament to a large extent is set in plaster,”7 our character does change because it is influenced by environment and by our resilience, assuming we have inherited any. Resilience means that we can commandeer the resources, the good coping mechanisms, to deal with stressful situations. An example would be a forty-year-old woman who, in her young years, was sexually abused by her father. Instead of marrying a fourth abusive husband, she decides to run a shelter for abused women. I like Vaillant’s definition of resilience. He says it “reflects individuals who metaphorically resemble a twig with a fresh, green living core. When twisted out of shape, such a twig bends, but it does not break; instead, it springs back and continues growing.”8
When I reviewed my Act I, I could see that I was blessed with resilience. My mother may have been MIA when it came to parenting, but my radar was constantly scanning the horizon in search of a warm, nurturing person from whom I could receive love and learning. Usually it came from the mothers of my best girlfriends. A child who lacks resilience may be in the presence of love but unable to take it in, to “metabolize” it, as George Vaillant puts it.
ON PERSONALITY
Okay. I have discussed temperament (permanent) and character (able to evolve). Where, then, does personality fit in? According to Dr. Vaillant, personality is the sum of temperament and character. This means that some of our personality is permanent (my needing solitude and my tendency to melancholy, which has been banished to a corner, yes, but hasn’t disappeared) and some is changeable (I am less judgmental and negative and more optimistic and loving).
Cognitive therapy has been shown to alter a person’s behavior. Working with a talented cognitive therapist, a person can begin to think differently about the past, for instance, and over time this new thinking activates different structures in the brain. This is referred to as “cognitive restructuring.” With practice and time, a person can begin to automatically think—and act—differently.
During their First Acts, most people are too young to think much about whether and how their character and personality ought to change. They haven’t had enough time to experience the ways in which they affect other people, to become aware of their behavioral patterns. Perhaps that can happen in Act II. As the playwright Nigel Howard once said, “The beautiful thing about learning a theory of your own personality is then you are free to disobey it.”