What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [4]
Here are some facts about what doesn’t change:
Dieting, in the long run, almost never works.
Kids do not become androgynous easily.
No treatment is known to improve on the natural course of recovery from alcoholism.
Homosexuality does not become heterosexuality.
Reliving childhood trauma does not undo adult personality problems.
To deal with what we cannot change, the first step, all too often evaded, is to know what about ourselves will not yield. But that is not the end of the matter; there are usually ways of coping. Much of successful living consists of learning to make the best of a bad situation. My purpose here, in part, is not only to point out what will not easily change but to impart the skills for coping with what you cannot change.
This book is the first accurate and factual guide to what you can change and what you cannot change. Since I am going to argue that so many loudly trumpeted claims about self-improvement, psychotherapy, medication, and genetics are not to be believed, that some things about you will not change no matter how much you try, but that other things will change easily, you should know a little about my qualifications.
I have spent the last thirty years working on the question of “plasticity,” academic jargon for what changes and what doesn’t. I have worked both sides of the street. I started my academic life in the field pretentiously called “learning.” Like most of the social sciences of the 1960s, the psychology of learning was enthusiastically environmental, its ideology a reaction to the still-fresh nightmare of the genetically minded Nazis. Just arrange the rewards and punishments right, learning theory held, and the organism (pigeon, adult human, rat, rhesus monkey, or toddler—it mattered so little that we simply called all of them “S’s,” for “Subjects”) would absorb whatever you wanted to teach it.
My years in the learning laboratory taught me that there were many things organisms wouldn’t learn no matter how ingenious the experiment. Rats wouldn’t learn that tones predicted poisoning, and pigeons wouldn’t learn to peck keys to avoid getting shocked. (Humans are even more resistant to change—but more on that later.) My first book, The Biological Boundaries of Learning (1972), set out a theory, “Preparedness,” of how natural selection shapes what we can and cannot learn.1 Evolution, acting through our genes and our nervous system, has made it simple for us to change in certain ways and almost impossible for us to change in others.
With the constraints that evolution places on learning very much in mind, I had to pick my problems carefully. I was and I am an unabashed do-gooder. I wanted to discover things that would relieve suffering—leaving knowledge for knowledge’s sake to other, purer souls. Some psychological suffering seemed to me unyielding, unchangeable because of biology. Other problems seemed more tractable, solvable if only I was patient enough, worked hard enough, and was clever enough. I had to discover the “plastic” problems on which to work.
I chose to work on helplessness, depression, and pessimism. Each of these, I found, could be learned and could be unlearned. In 1975, I wrote Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. Its focus was on how helplessness was learned in the wake of uncontrollable bad events, and how this posture could devastate the rest of one’s life. My most recent book, Learned Optimism (1991), was very much the opposite. It spelled out fifteen years of my research documenting the bad news: Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated. My present research program is trying to prevent America’s most costly mental illness—depression—rather than waiting to attempt cures after it strikes. All this is very much in the spirit of the age of self-improvement and the age of therapy.2
A recurring theme of this