28/01/2012 ARGUING

People argue a lot and suffer greatly in the process, so I shall venture into this difficult area

Once our ancestors came down from the trees, staying alive depended on two basic abilities.  They needed to keep their place in the herd for protection from predators and they also needed the physical strength to hold their territory, fighting off some pretty stiff competition from their fellow apes. In the 21st century, we don’t face so many tigers and our physical survival may be reasonably secure, but our emotional survival is built on the same herding and territorial needs of other animals. Our ancient urge for the safety of the herd drives our profound need for the peace and security of love and belonging. Occasionally our territoriality is expressed in an angry response to losing our parking spot or place in the queue or even our legal rights, but in our daily lives, the part of our territory most likely to be threatened is that which we believe to be true and we hold to be right. Our territory has become much more that of our moral and ethical systems. More than anything else, our truths and values tell us who we are. This is the territory of our identity, individuality and integrity and we will go to great lengths to preserve it.

I propose happiness depends on our ability to stay securely liked and loved while simultaneously marking out and if necessary defending the territory of our beliefs.  In short, we need the skills to define our individuality and to get as much of our own way as possible while preserving the warmth of our relationships.  We all try to win and there’s nothing wrong with that, but there are good and not so good ways to go about it. Even if we do win an argument or get things to go our way, if no one likes us, we won’t be all that happy with the outcome. We are not really serving our own interests if people see us as selfish, nasty or aggressive as we pursue our own ends.

Happy, healthy people prefer to respect the territory of others, be it physical space or ethical values, but everybody is competitive, so put two people together and eventually there will be an argument. Then you will need how to assert yourself effectively and that’s what this little book is about.
Arguing can be fun when there is no aggression; just healthy competition between people who like and respect each other. Then we call it debating or good conversation. Once anger creeps in, the pleasure disappears.
Anger is an animal’s response to territorial threat. Dogs do it and so do we. If you feel you’ve been belittled or trespassed upon, you’ll feel angry, which has the potential to drive aggression or even violence, sometimes turning defence into attack. When this happens, we say somebody is threatened or being defensive.
An argument is bad when someone’s anger drives behaviour designed to win, even at the cost of hurting somebody else. The amount of anger in an argument will be decided by three things:
1. The relationship
The nature of the relationship between two people decides the expectations each has of the other. The closer you are, the more a difference will seem like distance. Similarity of attitude is a major factor in a love relationship and difference feels like rejection. The same difference between you and a work colleague should generally provoke less emotion than between you and your lover, although there is still plenty of ferocious bullying at work.
2. The difference
If an argument is over moral or ethical issues and the more you feel the other person's view violates your sense of what is not merely accurate, but proper and right according to your principles, the angrier you are likely to become. A position that appears to debase your moral, political or religious position, will feel like an attack on the essence of who you are.  Then you more or less have to argue, because if you don't fight back, you’ll feel as if you are nothing.
3. Self-esteem
The emotional security, that is the self-esteem of the individuals who are disagreeing, plays a huge part in deciding how bad an argument will be.  Because like attracts like, people with high self-esteem will tend to hang with people with an equally good self-esteem and so their arguments will be less frequent and less angry.  When two people have a poor self-esteem, in effect this means a greater ease with which they interpret a difference as a rejection or a putdown.  The less you like yourself, the more fights you will have.  The more you like yourself, the more tolerant you will be of difference and the easier it is to treat the relationship as being more important than the issue.

Over the next couple of months, I shall enlarge on arguing and the best approaches to something we should all dislike, all do and probably all need to do.

07/10/2011 EXPECTATIONS

EXPECTATIONS are dangerous things.  It’s far easier and actually much better to live your life in hope rather than in expectation.  The only expectations you should really have are of yourself and even then you need to go easy and learn to be a bit forgiving.
"I have high expectations of myself and high expectations of other people."  paraphrases as "I am a controlling pain-in-the-arse who makes myself and everybody else miserable."  If you put your high expectations on your children, you risk producing either a depressive or a delinquent.  If you expect things of people and they fail, you will be angry; if you hope for something, all that happens is you are disappointed.  Both emotions are unpleasant, but at least disappointment does less harm to relationships than anger and so ultimately less harm to yourself.
If your self-esteem is low, there is every chance you have excessively high expectations of yourself.  In reality, these are your expectations of other people's expectations of you.  There are the standard of intelligence, looks or achievement you believe other people think you should achieve to be accepted by them.  In the unlikely event of your ever meeting any of your expectations, you would only set the bar higher, because the achievement or the looks or whatever are not the goal that you are really after, it is a certainty of acceptance.  Thus irrespective of how well you do, by pursuing perfection to feel sufficiently good about yourself to feel securely loved, you are on an unending quest.
Perfectionism is another word for high expectations.  Unfortunately, it is very easy to look at other people and the less well we know them, the easier it is to see they have achieved as we wish we could.  The only conclusion that can possibly spring from this is that we are in some way inferior.  The perfectionist is never seriously trying or even hoping to be perfect, simply trying to be good enough to feel safe.  When you hear yourself saying of someone "He thinks he’s perfect" you couldn't be further from the truth.
The happy truth is that it is not hard to be accepted by other people.  We are much more likely to be rejected for the things we do to try to protect themselves against rejection than for simply being who we are.  "Why can't I be accepted for myself?"  Answer: you can.

10/09/2011 HAPPINESS

Happiness.  Ah yes, happiness.  The final goal.  Something we are all pursuing in our own way, although sometimes when you look at the things people do, one might be excused for wondering just how serious they are about being happy.  In practice, everybody is acting perfectly logically within his own truth.  People who jump off very high buildings with the thrilling possibility their parachute might not open, or those who choose to half-strangle themselves to improve the quality of their orgasm, are still pursuing something they feel will contribute to happiness.  Happiness is everyone’s destination of choice, but many roads would seem to lead there.

Clearly excitement plays a big part in happiness, so sex is in there for most of us.  Happiness can be extracted from all sorts of achievement; making money, competing physically or intellectually, being awarded a Nobel Prize or merely getting your overdue e-mails answered.  These experiences may crystallise into happiness in their doing, but each is insufficient in itself.  Happiness requires something else.  Happiness needs to be constructed on a foundation of contentment with oneself.  While children, like lambs in the spring sunshine, seem to find joy in mere existence, adult happiness must start with an absence of unhappiness.

If you were willing to agree with this, a psychiatrist might be an appropriate person to talk to about happiness.  With every person I see in my consulting room, I’m trying to help them toward happiness.  To do this they must first find the bedrock of contentment, which is only possible in the presence of a minimum of the three, primary, negative emotions: anxiety, anger and despair.  Too great an intrusion by these feelings and the very best and most exciting of experiences only offer the briefest experience of happiness.

Without question, a sad, angry and anxious person can have moments of happiness, provided the reward of the moment is big enough.  Thus it’s possible for just about anybody to experience happiness for a brief period, but happiness must surely be measured by its duration rather than solely by its intensity.  I suspect someone who uses cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine has moments of much greater happiness than a non-user could ever hope to achieve, yet not too many would see drug users as happy people.

To be happy in a lasting way requires you to be happy with yourself.  If you’re hungry, thirsty, cold or your life is in danger, clearly you're not happy, but we are capable of being unhappy in the absence of any such threat.  Assuming there is no obvious physical danger, I propose there are only two things that make us unhappy.  Rejection or loss of love being one, belittlement and powerlessness being the other.  These fears have their evolutionary origins in survival of the fittest.  An animal finding itself alienated from the herd is either killed by others of its kind or expelled to be inevitably eaten by a predator.  Our ancestors could not have survived if they hadn’t belonged; now it feels as if we are going to die if we are rejected.  The sense of panic while speaking in public or the anxiety asking someone attractive for a date have ancient precedents.  Our fear of being powerless and put down has its origin in another ancestral necessity for survival.  Eating, mating and protecting young required the power to control territory.  Today, without the skills for asserting ourselves and preserving our integrity, inevitably we feel small, worthless and resentful.

The absence of unhappiness, which is the first requirement for happiness, needs no more than the opposite of those experiences that make us unhappy.  To be happy we require a sense of belonging, love and intimacy, in a setting of dignity and a sense of sufficient control to mark out our own patch as individuals.  Once these primary needs are satisfied, leaping off a cliff edge with a parachute is unlikely to be either more or less pleasurable, but risk-taking might become a little less of an emotional obligation.

I feel it is safe to say we all have a capacity for happiness, but we must meet the first requirement, which is to not be unhappy.  On this foundation we need only a level of material wealth roughly equal to our peers and a sense of community and intimacy and we can be happy.  Once this is established, we can extend our happiness with striving and achievement.  Then money can buy more happiness, but only more happiness, not the original article.

29/07/2011 LOVE AND SPONTANEITY

Love is an ever recurring topic in my consulting room.  I can't imagine just how many possible variations on the theme I would discuss in a year.

My last blog went a little against conventional wisdom, suggesting you should look for perfection in love.  You can have a fine relationship if you have never found those moments of perfection, but if they havn't ever surfaced you may be more prone to restlessness or to wonder what's it all about.  Obviously to expect your partner to be perfect is quite different and guarantees disaster; I'm talking of moments of perfection that you find for yourself, those when you can look at her and feel all is right with the world.

Another issue is that of spontaneity.  Spontaneity is a lovely idea, but is something of a myth.  If you expect the bluebird of happiness to suddenly land on your shoulder, triggering unplanned words and acts of enduring love, you have probably been smoking something illegal.  Worse still, if you wait, expecting yourself to produce spontaneous acts of love before you are convinced you are in love, you will wait forever.

Spontaneity is something that needs to be faked.  You need to choose when and where to be spontaneous, plan it carefully and execute is artfully.  Kissing your partner on the back of the neck or putting your arms around her when she is not expecting your touch needs to be a deliberately chosen act of love, even when at that moment there is not a bluebird in sight.  The art lies in faking the spontaneity of love; these are loving acts that consolidate relationships and strengthen feelings of love.  Stealing from the well-known playwright of Stratford, fake spontaneity is twice blessed, blessing him that gives and she who receives.  This is not faking love and really requires very little effort.  It is no violation of your principles, even if the behaviour of the moment is not inevitably the feeling of the moment.  This is being perfectly true to yourself; totally different from faking love itself.

If you ever choose to read An Intelligent Life, you will see I propose that what you do is what you are.  If you want to feel something, especially something positive, you need to choose the behaviour first in the hope of finding the feeling.  If you wait for the feeling before you act, you will do nothing, feel nothing and probably be nothing.

Julian

10/07/2011 OCCASIONAL OBSERVATIONS OF A PSYCHIATRIST

I plan to comment on some of the issues that arise during the week in my consulting room. 

Mostly I'm going to talk about dangers, pains and losses; not because I'm irreversibly negative, but these are the issues that occupy people's minds. Good news looks after itself and certainly doesn't need a psychiatrist.  Bad news needs more attention, simply because survival of the fittest programs us to look out for danger.  Smelling the roses and enjoying them is easiest if you are reasonably sure there are no tigers around.

Unfortunately human thought, misunderstanding and imagination can create tigers where none exist.  A psychiatrist's job is to help corrall those tigers through understanding and behavioural change.  For this reason I intend to offer the ideas I have put before people which have elicited a response of understanding, that has in turn driven an improvement in emotional functioning.  I intend to offer plenty of direct advice, for which I'm willing to take responsibility, so there will be plenty of 'musts' and 'shoulds'

Having said this, my next comment is actually quite positive.

I spend a great deal of my time talking about love.  Mostly it's boy girl love, very frequently it's parent and child.  It's always about feeling not loved enough, because we are always looking for love and always afraid of its loss. One way or another, relationships are everything.

Last week, someone was musing about love and whether she could know if she were really in love.  She made the commonly accepted observation that you shouldn't look for perfection if you're looking for love.  I think this is a half-truth.  I think you  should look for perfection.  I think perfection is an absolute requirement for love, but I think people tend to misunderstand.  Of course you can't look for perfection all the time; no one is going to match exactly your values and needs every hour of every day, but there must be moments of perfection, otherwise you're not in love. There must be those times when you look at your partner and know that he or she is just wonderful; the person you want and with whom you want to be forever.  You must have these moments to be truly in love.

To be in love you must find momentary perfection, because those moments keep you in love through the times that aren't quite so great.

Julian