What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [129]
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