What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [3]
But the view that all is genetic and biochemical and therefore cannot change is also very often wrong. Many individuals surpass their IQs, fail to “respond” to drugs, make sweeping changes in their lives, live on when their cancer is “terminal,” or defy the hormones and brain circuitry that “dictate” lust or femininity or memory loss.
Clay is one of many who ignored the conventional wisdom that his problem was “biological” and found just the right psychotherapy, which worked quickly and permanently.
Out of the blue, about once a week, Clay, a software designer, was having panic attacks. His heart started to pound, he couldn’t catch his breath, and he was sure he was going to die. After about an hour of terror, the panic subsided. Clay underwent four years of psychoanalysis, which gave him insight into his childhood feelings of abandonment but didn’t lessen the panic attacks. Then he was on high doses of Xanax (alprazolam, a tranquilizer) for a year; during that time he only panicked once a month, but he was so sleepy most of the time that he lost his two biggest accounts. So Clay stopped taking Xanax and the panic returned with unabated fury. Two years ago, he had ten sessions of cognitive therapy for panic disorder. He corrected his mistaken belief that the symptoms of anxiety (e.g., heart racing, shortness of breath) are catastrophic: symptoms of an impending heart attack. Since then he hasn’t had a single attack.
As the ideologies of biological psychiatry and self-improvement collide, a resolution is apparent. There are some things about ourselves that can be changed, others that cannot, and some that can be changed only with extreme difficulty.
What can we succeed in changing about ourselves? What can we not? Why did Trudy fail and Clay succeed? When can we overcome our biology? When is our biology our destiny? These are the central questions I will address in this book.
A great deal is now known about change. Much of this knowledge exists only in the technical literature, and it has often been obfuscated by vested commercial, therapeutic, and, not the least, political interests. The behaviorists long ago told the world that everything can be changed—intelligence, sexuality, mood, masculinity or femininity. The psychoanalysts still claim that with enough insight, all your personality traits can be “worked through.” The Marxist left, the “politically correct,” and the self-help industry added their voices to this convenient chorus. In contrast, the pharmaceutical companies, the biologists mapping the human genome, and the extreme right wing tell us that our character is fixed, that we are prisoners of our genes and the chemicals bathing our brains, that short of powerful drugs, genetic engineering, or brain surgery, nothing basic can change: certainly not mood, or intelligence, or sexuality, or masculinity. These are all ideologically driven falsehoods.
Here are some facts about what you can change:
Panic can be easily unlearned, but cannot be cured by medication.
The sexual “dysfunctions”—frigidity, impotence, premature ejaculation—are easily unlearned.
Our moods, which can wreak havoc with our physical health, are readily controlled.
Depression can be cured by straightforward changes in conscious thinking or helped by medication, but it cannot be cured by insight into childhood.
Optimism is a learned skill. Once learned, it increases achievement at work and