What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [130]
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