Another Change

OK. I'm going to make an admission here, and I'd like you all to promise first that if you're going to laugh, you'll do so silently and cover your mouth with your hand. Deal? Maybe? Here goes:

The aforementioned breakdown had me casting about in a lot of directions for ways out. Good god it was awful. The reasons behind it were largely unbloggable, so I couldn't go into a lot of detail about it then (and can't now), but I was hitting the end of my rope just about every day and couldn't see any reason for it to get any better anytime in the next ten years, give or take. I was spending way too much time crying quietly in the bathroom or the kitchen while Frances watched a dvd, which only made me feel guilty on top of everything else: I'd dragged her away from her friends and home and father, for this? For an apartment with a crazy mom crying in the bathroom while her brains rotted in front of the television? I had to do better, and I knew it.

My most popular post ever is still the one I wrote years ago about my falling-out with Attachment Parenting. In it, I wrote about how I hit a wall at nine months, decided I had to let her cry-it-out no matter my ideological opposition to it, and then bought every book about it I could find in the bookstore, on the principle that if you're going to turn coat you may as well turn all the way. This was similar.

My entire life, I have never asked for help nor admitted to weakness of any kind. A sort of high-sheen invulnerability was prized in my family and I adopted it wholly; a series of disasters and catastrophes made it such a matter of habit that I could no more picture casting it off than I could picture casting off my skin. My bag of dissociative tricks was well-used: count to ten, picture the issue as a physical injury, imagine you are watching a movie about it, practice what you have to say until the words are just sound and the emotional content is stripped from it. It's just pain. Keep going.

By February they had all failed me. I was not coping. Instead I was trying desperately to hid from Frances what a wreck her Mummy was.

I made a number of decisions, most of which can't be shared here, and thank heavens for small mercies because it's certainly stuff you'd rather not know. I also actually asked for help. I think I even wrote it down somewhere. Eventually, I broke down and bought (this is the part where you can't laugh) a few several maybe a dozen, I didn't count, self-help books.

Wow. I can't believe I said that in public.

That high-sheen invulnerability is sticky stuff, let me tell you. What, me? Help? Pfah.

Anyway, some were useful, and some weren't. Some of the useful ones were useful despite rather large and glaring flaws, and some of the not-useful ones nevertheless had very useful sections. On the assumption that everything of interest to me is necessarily of interest to my large and dedicated readership (still no laughing!), I propose to share with you the useful stuff. May none of you ever find yourselves where I was.

~~~~~

First up, because it's on my mind from all my recent talk about career changes, is Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, a former head of the American Psychological Association and one of the founders of the movement known as Positive Psychology, which aims to improve good things instead of fixing bad things. It's the psychological equivalent of preventive health maintenance or wellness in physical medicine--how to improve good health instead of how to make sick people well. I picked this one up after getting sick of reading about problems and diagnoses, so I sympathize. It's a worthy aim, and he comes at it from a pretty impressive scientific background, and that's all good. But I have a few substantial caveats before I get to the useful stuff:

1. He is unbelievably critical of people who are trying to resolve childhood trauma, using such phrases as "undeservedly bitter" when describing people who are unhappy about their pasts. He makes the argument that childhood trauma, including the death of a parent and sexual abuse, has no impact on adult personality, but so what? OK, someone who starts out smart, introverted and talented at the clarinet will still be all those things if she is a victim of incest, but that does not equate to their being no impact on one's life so that their "bitterness" is "undeserved." I'd suggest, if you are trying to resolve childhood truama yourself, that you either approach this section with a mammoth grain of salt, or you put this book aside until you have some resolution in sight.

2. He then makes the standard argument about the importance of secure attachments between children and their adult caregivers, without which children cannot learn to form healthy relationships as adults. So: trauma has no impact, but if your mom frowns at you a lot you may be wounded for life.

3. He is not any kind of parenting expert but still feels free to dole out an entire section of parenting advice, based entirely on his own experiences, after arguing that genetics rules adult personality and that childhood has practically no impact! Arguments which, if he actually believed them, would render the entire concept of good parenting (not to mention his own parenting advice section) completely useless.

That aside (and I admit it's a lot) it's a useful book, and it has a handy companion website with all kinds of quizzes on it. The quizzes won't give you html code you can stick on your blog to advertise to the world how optimistic, happy, or grateful you are; but they are scientifically validated, unlike the ones on OKcupid, and have been used to measure the results of positive psychology interventions. Meaning that people who followed the sorts of exercises he includes in the book generally saw their scores on the questionnaires go up.

The one I want to talk about today (good god, I need to learn how to shorten my prologues) is the Signature Strengths questionnaire, for which, yes, you will need to register on the site (it's free) and yes it takes a loooooong time. There are a lot of questions. But at the end it will give you a list of the five good things you are best at doing, the idea being that the more often you have the opportunity to use those strengths in your everyday life, the happier you will be.

Here are mine, in order:

Creativity, ingenuity and originality
Appreciation of beauty and excellence
Bravery
Judgment, critical thinking and open-mindedness
Love of learning

I'm going to go out on a self-congratulatory limb and suggest that it's pretty accurate. (Note: all of the results are good ones. You can't fail this test.) (Note 2: Some reviews criticize his methodology for deriving the list of strengths. The criticism may be valid, but I'm not concerned here with whether or not his list of strengths is cross-culturally exhaustive or scientifically defensible, only whether or not it may be useful.)

How often do I get to use any of those at my current job? Never. What room is there to use them more often here? None. This is the downside of government: your job is defined by legislation so doing something different is technically illegal. What I do is apply regulations, policies and guidelines. Other people got to do all of the thinking. What likelihood is there of finding work that uses those strengths given my current qualifications? None. That alone helped tip the scales towards going back to school.

Whereas, on the other hand, everything I choose to do outside of work involves at least one of those five, if not more or even all. Writing, blogging, crafts, reading about everything under the sun--if I do it unpaid under my own steam, you can bet it matches that list. I've even noticed that my preferred parenting style approaches that list (hopefully in a way that meets Frances's needs instead of imposing my preferences on her); when I can be creative about what we do together, make something lovely, or learn something together it is much more satisfying than engaging in repetitive role-playing involving plastic figurines. We have two projects on the go right now: designing and sewing up our own stuffed monster, and writing out and illustrating a storybook about a family trip to a playpark on the moon. These are fun for both of us.

There is my personal endorsement of this one tool and how it can be used if you are feeling vaguely dissatisfied with how your life is currently set up and aren't sure why, or if you want to make a change but can't figure out which direction to move in. Not that it will solve that for you, but it might give you another way of looking at the issue.

Or maybe just give your self-esteem a boost by telling you, guaranteed, five good things about yourself.

Posted by Andrea at June 12, 2008 10:09 AM under Change Addict

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