"Changing the Word in Your Heart""Changing the Word in Your Heart"by Michael Finley
[This is a report on one sesson of RENEWAL DAY, a Nov. 14th 1995 event at The Masters Forum in Minneapolis. Joining Martin Seligman for that day were James Maas on sleep disorders, James Autry on humane management practices, and Peter Yarrow on the art and science of singalong. For more information on The Masters Forum, call (612) 617-1075.]
Some 30 years ago, Canadian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Robertson Davies addressed a girls’ school commencement, and asked them what, in the lives they were going out to live, would be the word they harbored in their hearts -- yes or no. Would they become people charged with positive energies or people reluctant to take risks for a better world?
Psychologist Marty Seligman has borrowed Davies’ dichotomy for his own program: a plan to combat the epidemic of psychological depression that is laying waste not only our adult population, but also an entire generation of children.
He uses the image not for the sentiments it evokes, but because it corresponds to a hard truth about human nature. People do indeed have one or two "words written in the heart." The word of the optimist is yes; the word of the pessimist is no.
The difference between the two is far greater than a debate over whether the glass is half empty or half full; it has direct bearing on our chances for success, happiness, and long life.
Specifically, Seligman believes he has pinpointed a powerful connection between pessimistic personalities and clinical depression -- not just pessimistic in outlook during depression, but pessimistic before the onset of depression. Pessimists are four to eight times more likely to succumb to depression.
More than that, he has developed a set of tools for diagnosing pessimistic personalities in people who are not yet ill, and techniques of learned optimism for dispelling the pessimistic cloud -- for changing the word from no to yes.
In combining the two, Seligman may have developed the first program of psychological immunization, a program that has the power to end the epidemic of depression among our young people.
The bottomless hole
Depression is serious business. Its symptoms among adults are passivity, an inability to mount any aggressive effort, reduced cognitive ability, reduced appetite, and feelings of profound sadness. It is ten times more common than it was 40 years ago.
Doctors and psychiatrists have combated depression with electroshock, drugs, and time, but each of these treatments comes at great cost or pain, and there is no assurance the depression will not return.
There are pessimists and there are profound pessimists. Seligman assesses degrees of pessimism using an "explanatory style" measure. He analyzes statements people make, looking for phrases or ideas that suggest how individuals describe the causes of what is happening to them. This technique looks at three poles of thinking:
Stable versus unstable. A stable situation is immutable: "I’ll never get a job." An unstable description is impermanent: "I’ll never get a job in this economy."You don’t want to score high on the global, internal, or stable ends of the spectrum. Of the three, the worst is the unstable category because it digs a mental hole from which there is no climbing out. People able to loosen their grip on the certainty that all is necessarily lost have the best chance of avoiding depression.
Stinkin’ thinkin’
There is an easy method for loosening this grip, and it is called cognitive therapy. Pioneered 30 years ago by Albert Ellis and Tim Beck, cognitive therapy is a two-pronged initiative. The first initiative is to train yourself to identify pessimistic, catastrophic thoughts as you are thinking them.
The messages accompanying the three poles of thinking listed above are all examples of catastrophic thoughts. Here are some others:
"No one at the party will like me."
"I’m a terrible mother."
"No man will ever be interested in me."
"What’s the use? I’ll always be a loser."
Once you train yourself to recognize these incoming bombs, you can use the second initiative, which is to dispute their truth. You can do this because these catastrophic thoughts are illogical -- they are you beating yourself up, and that’s all. Here are counterthoughts:
"How do you know at the party no one will like you?"
"So you yelled at your kids. That makes you an uptight mom, not a bad one."
"No man will be interested in you with that attitude, that’s for sure."
"That’s nonsense. You’re giving up before you try. You have to keep trying if you want to succeed, and you will be no worse off if you fail trying."
If all this sounds like Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, it’s because that skit is a takeoff on cognitive therapy. Yes, it’s true that it is hard for the naturally pessimistic mind to overcome itself, and that is the sad humor of Stuart’s efforts. But it is quite doable. Seligman quotes a 70 percent success rate for depressed adults -- and best of all, these people will have the skills to combat pessimism and depression when they attempt to retake command.
The irony is that if another person were to say something as shockingly negative to us as "You’ll always be a loser," we would spring nimbly to our own defense: "That’s not true. You don’t know me. I win all the time. Here’s a long list of just my recent victories."
Cognitive therapy asks us to respond to the malicious thoughts we bestow on ourselves with the same survival instinct with which we greet the unfriendly assertions of strangers.
The paradox of pessimism
Seligman confesses to some bewilderment at the pessimism in the world. We live in a time of relative peace. The Cold War is over. The nuclear arsenals have shrunk. Communism and fascism are on the run. Fewer soldiers are dying on the battlefield than at any time since the Boer War. A lower percentage of people are dying of starvation than at any time in history. It is an age of music, books, education, and a high level of affluence.
Yet depression rages through our population, taking an especially high toll of the young. The mean age of depressed people today is 15.
Seligman puts his greatest hope in a program called the Icarus Project, for kids between 10 and 12. According to developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, something happens to the brains of people at that age. It is the end of mental childhood, when we become aware of our thinking as something apart from ourselves. This is the distance required to implement the thought-disputing technique of cognitive therapy.
The project tests kids for their pessimism quotient, using the explanatory content inventory (global/specific etc.) It selects a group of kids whose tests show they are at risk for depression and teaches them to identify and dispute pessimistic thoughts.
It also includes kids with other predictors, such as parents who are fighting. The project is a 16-hour teaching module making use of kid-friendly animations.
Comparing the trained group against an untrained control group of kids spanning the full spectrum from pessimistic to optimistic, the formerly pessimistic kids, the control group turned out to have a 44 percent greater likelihood of becoming clinically depressed.
It is an achievement that ranks up there with the campaign to save kids from polio. Indeed, the celebrated inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk told Seligman that if he were just starting out today, he would follow a path like the one Seligman has followed.
Lest anyone think that the connection between pessimism anddepression is the only downside of pessimism, Seligman explained that even a hint of doubt affects our performance. Swimmers, told that their time in an event was slower than it actually was, were even slower the next time out. The shortfall was minor, only half a percentage point. But it was enough to make the difference between finishing first and finishing last.
One final point: Seligman says that while optimistic people live longer, swim faster, and generally enjoy greater success than their pessimistic counterparts, pessimists nevertheless are better predictors of what is likely to happen. The price of optimism is being wrong a lot of the time. Each of us must decide whether that is a high price to pay -- or a bargain.
To contact Mike Finley ... mfinley@skypoint.com