What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [124]
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