Good reads, interesting articles about parenting, mental health, couplehood, the practice of couple and family therapy and related topics.
5 things to do if your kid tests limits
I am starting a series of 8" x 10" posters that you can print with basic tips for parents and couples dealing with common issues I see in therapy. You can download them, print and share them with attribution and a link.
The first is "5 things to do when a kid tests limits."
Thanks for the really cool old-timey clip art from the graphics fairy.
I'd love your feedback.
I get requests for therapy from a lot of young couples. This surprised me at the beginning. When I was first learning about working with couples I read that couples often don't seek help until their patterns of negative interaction have been set for six years or more. I expected to see a lot of couples in their late thirties or forties with kids. Instead, many of the couples I see have been together for two to five years and are without children. At first it was hard for me to get my head around the idea of people in their twenties seeking couple's therapy three years into a relationship. The conflicts they bring to therapy are not the long-standing, cumulative resentments of a couple who have been together for fifteen or twenty years. And without kids in the mix the collateral damage of choosing to end a relationship rather than work on changing difficult patterns is definitely less. But when I speak with them, most of these young couples describe real challenges. The value they place on their relationships is usually high. And as one client told me, "We want to get this right, now, to set a strong foundation."
There are probably a couple of reasons why I see more young couples than I expected, more than perhaps I would have seen if I was practicing twenty years ago. One, I work on a sliding scale, so young couples with less disposable income who are looking come my way. Two, stigma around couple's therapy may have decreased. The third factor, I think, is generational. Unlike previous generations, people in their twenties and early thirties have been living with the sense that lifelong couple-hood is unlikely to succeed. They have grown up with the idea that as many committed long-term relationships fail as succeed (the much bandied 50% divorce rate number for the US has never been that meaningful. The odds of a particular relationship staying together for life are probably higher. A 2005 article in the NYT article gives a good run down of the difficulties with the 50% number). They have seen long-time married couples at close range that were full of anger and hurt, either their parents or friends of their parents. It is my sense that many of the young couples I see, feel that they are doing something very nearly counter-cultural and difficult by trying to stay together and stay loving for the long haul. Viewing staying together in a loving relationship as hard may make some couples more likely to seek help earlier that they otherwise might.
I have been working in an inpatient psychiatric ward in a hospital for almost a year. It has been sad and joyful and sometimes boring or infuriating and full of discovery and very occasionally frightening. Before February, the last time I had been in an inpatient psychiatric facility was twenty years ago when I was a social work student at Columbia and I went on a visit to Ward's Island in New York. In between, I viewed inpatient psychiatry as the place where people who were 'truly mentally ill' were treated. By contrast, the people I worked with, people who were not in hospital beds, didn't seem ill in the same way that someone who is diabetic or has cancer is ill. Of course, I would speak of mental illness when I talked about moderate depression or anxiety or Asperger's syndrome. There are good reasons for this. I have always believed that a person's biology is intertwined with how his or her mind works. The things for which people seek the help of a therapist or a social worker are impacted by their brain chemistry, their genes, in short the organism in which the mind arises. And almost everyone finds having a mental illness -- a biological condition -- less shameful and frightening than being labeled crazy.
But I was never fully convinced that these conditions were illnesses like physical illnesses, either. I am not a doctor and perhaps my layperson's lingering idea of illness -- a microbe from without setting to work to destroy tissues -- is part of the reason I have resisted the description of these conditions as mental illness (most types of cancers and diabetes do not meet this definition of illness). Still, I imagined that behind the doors of a psychiatric ward there were examples of mental illness that clearly demonstrated a causal connection, while yet poorly understood, between disorders of the mind and the physical organism.
I feel like my ideas about mental illness have been made more confused not more clear by working with people whose minds are so disordered they need to be in hospital. I sat in the hospital hallway with a man who positively knew that someone was breaking into his brother's home hundreds of miles away. When I asked him how he knew, he could not give any answer except that he knew. The fact that his idea made no sense to others or to himself did not diminish its intensity. But it saddened him deeply; he understood -- at least in part -- that this thought was nonsensical, yet it was absolutely real for him. It seemed to me, at that moment, that something biological was clearly going on, as if this man had suffered a brain injury and it was only a matter of time before medical science could discover where exactly it was located and how he might be helped. I imagine that almost everyone who has worked with people with schizophrenia must have had this experience and yet the causes of schizophrenia remain unknown after a century of research, and treatment is focused on symptom management. This man has lived much of his adult life absolutely bubbling with paranoid ideas and the accompanying sadness and frustration of not understanding where these ideas come from.
There are people who come into hospital deformed by love. There are the suicide attempts and the severe depressive episodes brought about by failed or elusive love. Occasionally people with no previous history of mental illness come to emergency manic and delusional because love has gone wrong. On the one hand this is the most easy form of disturbance to extrapolate from for most people; everyone has experienced heartbreak or rejection and can imagine him or herself driven to extremes by love. But it is precisely this universality that makes those who end up in psychiatry unusual. After all, what makes one person see his love everywhere, believe she is sending him messages through strangers, chase her barefoot all over the city and fight with police and security guards, when nine hundred and ninety-nine other rejected suitors cry, listen to sad music and then move on? Is that the difference between health and illness? Or is it something else?
In the hospital psychiatry ward you can find people who just about everyone would agree are ill. Even though no one can explain exactly the mechanism, it seems that their biology is making their minds work very differently from the minds of most people and often in ways that feel awful to them and put them in danger. But mental illness of this unmistakable type is a I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of phenomenon because for every clear-cut case there are people who are odd or sad or exuberant who fall in a grey zone.
None of the disorders treated by psychiatry today have a blood test or pathology lab test for diagnosis. They are all diagnosed by symptoms and reading symptoms remains quite subjective.
How we think about disorders of the mind has a real impact. One of the most powerful impacts is the use of drugs to treat mental disorders to the exclusion of talk therapy. Thankfully we have left behind the era of psychoanalysis to treat schizophrenics (as well as cruel theories about how schizophrenia was caused by bad mothering). But now we have moved to a situation where -- in Quebec, anyway -- talk therapy is almost never viewed as a way to treat mental illness despite its proven effectiveness for many -- though not all -- disorders. People discharged from hospital for surgery can get physio and occupational therapy to help with recovery as part of the services covered under their provincial health insurance. Psychotherapy is almost impossible to get in the public system either in hospital or out. I think that this is partly a function of not viewing talk therapy as a way to address a medical illness. How can an illness be treated by talking? As much as disorders of the mind may not look like illnesses, talk therapy doesn't look like medicine. Not to patients and not to doctors and certainly not to ministers of health.
Here is a story that illustrates the constraints of operating solely with a illness/health model of the mind. A man in his late forties was brought into hospital for running around in traffic. He was a chronic schizophrenic. How did we know? Because that was his diagnosis for many years. It was also possible that he had a mild intellectual handicap. Doctors over the years had examined him and observed symptoms that pointed to these conclusions. The psychiatrist I was working with spent a long time talking to him and his family. What we learned was that the man had experienced a terrible set of traumas when he was young and had used a lot of street drugs. He was very reticent but eventually he talked about the toll that the pain he had experienced had taken and his guilt over what he had done to others. For years he had been a patient of various psychiatrists who saw a painfully inarticulate, inwardly focused man who had gone spectacularly off the rails at eighteen and came to the conclusion that he was schizophrenic. But with time it became clear that he was a confused, deeply hurt person (absolutely no intellectual handicap) with very little if any of the psychotic features that are integral to schizophrenia. The voices that he had reported hearing telling him he was bad were much closer to the 'voice' I hear in my head telling me that I better get my work done than the voice a psychotic person hears which causes him or her to look for someone speaking. He had never, in the course of twenty plus years of psychiatric treatment, been given enough space to talk. When we asked him why he was running around in traffic pulling on car doors, he said "I guess I wanted to get away."
This is not just a story about misdiagnosis, "House goes to the psychiatric floor." It is a story about using the tools of medicine to examine something adjacent to -- but not the same as -- medicine. Not every affliction of the human heart calls for a cardiologist.
“The physician, who through his studies has learned so much that is hidden from the laity, can realize in his thought the causes and alterations of the brain disorders in patients suffering from apoplexy or dementia, a representation which must be right up to a certain point, for by it he is enabled to understand the nature of each symptom. But before the details of hysterical symptoms, all his knowledge, his anatomical-physiological and pathological education, desert him. He cannot understand hysteria. He is in the same position before it as the layman. And that is not agreeable to anyone who is in the habit of setting such a high valuation upon his knowledge. Hystericals, accordingly, tend to lose his sympathy; he considers them persons who overstep the laws of his science, as the orthodox regard heretics; he ascribes to them all possible evils, blames them for exaggeration and intentional deceit, “simulation,” and he punishes them by withdrawing his interest.”
At the beginning of this week's This American Life there's a piece in which the writer David Hill, who has dabbled in playing the strategy game Diplomacy, takes Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's old Middle East envoy, to the world championship of the game.
It is based on Hill's article in Grantland. A couple of things were percolating in my head when I heard this. The most prominent was that Dennis Ross seems like a jerk. As much of a jerk as the people who get angry and overturn the board and yell at the Diplomacy tournaments. Maybe more. Not because he is evilly-intentioned or malicious. Quite the opposite.
Dennis Ross is sometimes referred to as the architect of the Oslo Peace accord. For those who don't remember, the Oslo accord in 1993 brought together then Israeli prime-minister Yitshak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to agree on movement towards a two-state solution to the long-standing fight between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. There are people who spend a lifetime studying the ins and outs of these things and they can't agree what went wrong, but one thing is clear in the summer of 2014 as a war rages in Gaza and the south of Israel; the Oslo peace process did not lead to anything that anyone could call a solution. Meanwhile Dennis Ross is a prof at Georgetown in the school of foreign service and a Distinguished Fellow at a fancy institute and Diplomacy coach for hire.
I am not going to go on about Gaza and Israel. My interest here is in the dangers of bringing in expert-consultants and why some people chronically behave badly in interpersonal situations and what they have to do with each other.
Dennis Ross could have told David Hill, "If you want to win, don't take me to the game. You will be painting a huge bulls-eye on your back. And since I am busy at Georgetown I won't be able to stay and clean up the mess you will make for yourself." Instead Ross comes in, gives advice based on his gut and his experience, then leaves Hill in an awful situation, possibly a worse situation than if he had just said "No." Experts generally give bad advice. There are a lot of reasons for this.
1. Experience itself is at best an indifferent teacher. People need clear, unambiguous, immediate feedback in order to learn. In complex areas like adult human interactions its very hard to build in such feedback. When Ross claimed there was a resemblance in the body-language between a Diplomacy player and a Soviet diplomat he dealt with I groaned. I imagined hearing a cop say "Evidence?! I don't need evidence. I've seen lots of guilty people and I can tell when someone is guilty." Which leads to number 2...
2. People who believe they are great at reading people are usually no better than average and sometimes worse.
3. Experts don't have to live with the consequences of their advice. But their clients do. In therapy, I very rarely give advice. I look at what I see and hear and offer it back to my clients. I ask what it means for them. I try to give them different perspectives on their situation, but I m extremely reluctantly to give advice or make predictions, first because I will likely as not get it wrong and, second because they have to live with the consequences, not me.
I once worked at a social service agency. The bosses brought in a consultant who started the session by saying something like, "I usually consult for business. I don't know anything about mental health and social services but I am sure the principles of managing an organization I will teach you are the same." I felt like I'd been slapped. To me, it is rude to come into a room full of people who have over a hundred years of collective experience in their work and say, "Please do not confuse me with information about what you do." If a consultant or expert is talking more than s/he is listening s/he isn't worth paying attention to.
The second thing that caught my attention in this piece had to do with angry aggression. There is a lot of discussion in the piece about whether a person's anger is real or strategic. Angry aggression like swearing, yelling, threatening and ultimately violence is profoundly paradoxical in that it is a way of gaining control by 'losing control' Virginia Goldner has written wonderfully (here for example) from a feminist, psycho-therapeutic perspective about how abusive men's anger is both a willed act of control and an out of control act. Someone else's aggression often provokes such strong reactions in us, even when we know that there is no threat of violence, because it can makes us feel dominated, like control is being wrested from us.
Because it is so frightening, people who aren't comfortable with strong, aggressive expressions of anger, often treat badly-behaved, angry people like they are weather systems, irrational forces of nature, vaguely predictable, but absolutely uncontrollable. This can be a great way for the angry person to get others to defer or comply. Most angry people have absorbed this; the out-of-control expression of real anger gets them what they want. Angry aggression can be highly adaptive, at least until it becomes a disaster.
Which brings us back to Diplomacy and one of the questions posed in the piece: How can less aggressive people deal with aggression? One of the things that the piece explores is the context of angry aggression. In the game what is strategic, would be unacceptable in real-life. Except those boundaries are kept deliberately vague. People are unsure whether aggression is notional or real. The possibility that anger is real and may become out-of-control is what gives it its power. If there were a card in Diplomacy that you could present to another player that said "I storm off, angrily," it would have no impact. For anger to get people to change their behaviour, it has to be real enough.
One of the most pernicious things Ross does is not to account for what the real-enough aggression of other players will do to Hill. Most people can learn to become more detached from another person's angry aggression, to feel less out-of-control in the face of it. Angry aggressive people can learn they won't regain dominance through an intimidating 'loss of control.' But that takes time and establishing safety, things Ross (and IMHO many other fly-in consultants) view as outside their job description.
Friends sometimes ask how to pick a good therapist. Since I can't just say say "Me!" I have had to give this some thought. So here's what I say...
1. It is reasonable to be concerned about price
Therapists want to make money doing what they like to do and -- within reason -- therapists can set their prices based on the market. Therapists who are highly sought after can charge up to 135$/hour. Some professionals (me included) offer a sliding scale based on your income, others don't. Here in Quebec, there can be a difference in price of around 65$ per session depending on who you see. That can add up over ten or twelve or more sessions. Figure out what you can afford to pay and then look around and see if you can match that.
2. Membership in a relevant professional order (Boring but important)
There are a lot of different kinds of professionals who can offer therapy in Quebec. The biggest difference for a member of the public is that medical doctors, including psychiatrists, can prescribe medications and nobody else can. Aside from that there isn't a hard and fast rule about whether a social worker or a psychologist or a drama therapist is going to work better with a particular kind of person or problem. Whatever his or her professional training, a therapist should be a member of his or her professional order, the Order of Social Workers and Family and Couple Therapists, the Order of Psychologists, the College of Physicians, the Order of Occupational Therapist etc. There are three reasons; one, a professional body has looked at this person's professional qualifications and said "S/he is able to do the work." The second reason is that the person is bound by a code of behaviour which you can read. If you aren't sure whether the person has the right to ask for payment in a particular way, for example, you can check (For example, I cannot take barter according to my professional order. Sorry, cabbage growers). Finally, if you have some dispute with the person or if you think his or her behaviour is unprofessional, you have an organization that serves the public interest that you can go to.
Here in Quebec we have a new licensing regime which requires everyone practicing psychotherapy to become a licensed psychotherapist with the Order of Psychologists whether or not he or she is a psychologist. So whether someone is a drama therapist or a nurse or a couple and family therapist she or he will eventually need to be licensed for psychotherapy by the order of psychologists. Among other things, this means that the fabulous art and drama therapists of Quebec -- who haven't had a professional order until now -- now have a place to hang their hats.
3. Clear goals
A therapist should work with you on setting realizable goals for therapy. If a therapist doesn't ask what you want to achieve and can't say what you are working towards and it is something that you want then you should look for someone else.
4. You should feel heard
This will come and go. Sometimes I do a better job listening than other times. But if my clients don't feel heard and understood most of the time then I am not doing my job.
5. Non-defensiveness
You should feel like you can talk to your therapist (politely) about the therapy including what isn't working. Recently a client told me that she was really mad about something I had said in a previous session. I was glad because if she had just continued being angry without raising it we wouldn't have gotten very far. I spent a lot of time asking her about what had bothered her so much and when I understood better why it was so hurtful for her, I apologized and we talked about how I could avoid doing something similar again. Most therapists are happy to have this feedback. If you don't feel like you can, then you need to consider whether you can really get what you need out of therapy with this person.
6. Professionalism
A therapist should be professional about how s/he conducts business; timely, efficient, knowledgeable, organized, respectful of you.
7. Strong
You should feel that your therapist is strong enough, emotionally, to be able to hear things that are painful for you without falling apart. You should not have to worry about taking care of your therapist. Some people have a very hard time with this. Because they are used to caring for others, it can be hard for them to let go and be cared for. But if you don't feel that your therapist can handle your hurt, you need to talk about that with him or her and if you can't resolve it then s/he may not be right for you.
8. Recommendations are helpful, but only to a point.
At this point in my shpiel people usually ask for names. I can give names of therapists I like and admire but fit is important. Ultimately it doesn't matter that much what I think. What matters is, do you feel good about this person. If you try therapy with someone that I recommended or your best friend said was amaaaaazing and after two or three sessions it isn't working, take that seriously. Talk about that in therapy. You may find that turns out to be really helpful. It gives the therapist the chance to adjust. But If that doesn't work, try someone else. It doesn't mean therapy isn't right for you and what you want to deal with. It doesn't mean the therapist is no good. It may just mean that the fit between you and the therapist wasn't right.
Good luck and please leave comment about what has helped you find a good therapist or how you would suggest a friend make a choice.
Scientists have measured 'cool' and determined who has it so teens don't have to worry anymore; they can just ask the adult with the pocket-protector and clip-board. In a neat piece of social science researchers looked at how kids made themselves popular at age 13 and followed them through to age 23. Kids who did things to look older at age 13 in order to be more popular, such as engaging in delinquency, hanging out with good-looking peers and engaging in romantic relationships were less socially successful at 23. (It seems to me there may be a tad of wish-fulfillment of grown-ups who were unpopular 13 year olds). This is moderately interesting for people who work with kids and for parents of teens.
The researchers conflated popularity and 'cool'. Scientists like things that can be measured; popularity among thirteen year-olds is relatively easily measured while cool isn't. The kids I thought were cool when I was thirteen weren't necessarily engaged in 'pseudo-mature' behaviour and weren't necessarily popular. James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause which the authors adduce is a loner not a collector of pretty people. Rather the kids who seemed cool to me did whatever they with seeming ease. The Italian's call this sprezzatura. Castiglinone in the Book of the Courtier has one of his characters say:
“What eye so blind as not to see in this the ungracefulness of affectation, — and in many men and women who are here present, the grace of that nonchalant ease (sprezzatura, for in the case of bodily movements many call it thus), showing by word or laugh or gesture that they have no care and are thinking more of everything else than of that, to make the onlooker think they can hardly go amiss?”
Pseudo-maturity doesn't play into this definition of cool. Of course it can be exhausting to be attuned to how one appears to others at all times and probably detrimental to one's cool, as well, but that is a feature not a bug of adolescence I suppose. Now that we have adopted pseudo-youth for adults as an unquestioned value it is probably a feature of middle age as well. One of the features of Castiglione's work is the way in which people of different ages reflect on the blindness of others and in turn betray their own prejudices.
“Thus it seems to me that old people are in like case with those who keep their eyes fixed upon the land as they leave port, and think their ship is standing still and the shore recedes, although it is the other way. For both the port and also time and its pleasures remain the same, and one after another we take flight in the ship of mortality upon that boisterous sea which absorbs and devours everything...”
I work part-time in the psychiatric inpatient unit of a hospital. I was talking with a patient there who was sad and frustrated because he really wanted to go home. He couldn’t leave because of a court-order for hospitalization. According to the people who brought him in, he had said things that sounded delusional but it was hard to understand what he meant because he speaks poor English and French and so do the people who brought him in. Even with the help of a translator it was hard to understand what he had said and what he was thinking. Was he expressing anger and frustration or was he expressing delusions, including some thoughts of self-harm? “Why can’t I go. I am okay. You see I am okay. I talk normally. I’m not sick,” he said. I said, “We see two kinds of people in psychiatry who say they are not sick. There are people who aren’t sick and there are people who are sick but can’t understand it because of what the sickness does to them.” I was trying to explain the concept of insight.
Insight has two distinct meanings in psychological parlance; one is understanding something through non-logical means, the “un-huh” experience. The other meaning, which I will use here, is the ability to reflect on one’s own mental processes. This second meaning of insight includes the ability to understand when one’s mind is acting in ways that don’t seem normal. Many people who experience delusions or hallucinations, depression, anxiety or mania understand that those experiences are strange mental states. But insight can be affected by mental illness. I saw a patient who was able to have reasonable conversations shortly after coming into hospital for some pretty strange and dangerous behaviour both for herself and for others. She seemed a little unusual, her speech was a little disjointed, a little pressured but she didn’t seem mentally ill until the psychiatrist who was interviewing her asked about delusions and hallucinations she had expressed. The patient, who was quite smart, was absolutely convinced that these things were real; she talked about them in the same relatively reasonable way that she talked about conditions and the routine in the hospital. After a few weeks in hospital and a lot of psychiatric medication, when I asked her about the thing she had been hearing and thinking, she said they were almost gone. I assumed that she would see her previous psychotic symptoms as strange, perhaps embarrassing, perhaps frightening, maybe amusing, or as a piece of herself she had to contend with. Instead she expressed no surprise that she had experienced these things, no recognition that they were odd and no sense that they were connected with her mental illness. The voices had stopped. They had been real, a feature of her life. It was as if the grocery store down the street had gone out of business. It was there, then it was closed, neither its presence nor its absence was remarkable or connected with her mental state.
I asked a psychiatrist who had seen her about this. He said that years of untreated psychosis had “burned out” the patient’s capacity for insight. There is a “kindling hypothesis” in psychiatric illness. The idea of ‘kindling’ in psychiatry comes from the study of epilepsy and other seizure disorders where it is demonstrated that more frequent and intense seizures cause lower thresholds for future seizures. Seizures cause a change that leaves an organism more prone to future seizures, seizures create the kindling for future seizures. Some psychiatric research think that affective disorders such as bipolar disorder may have work in a similar way, early and intense manic episodes may create ‘kindling’ for future manias. I couldn’t find any compelling evidence that this is the case in psychotic illnesses or a clear explanation of what the mechanism might be.
It is clear that certain kinds of brain trauma can cause severely impaired insight. Anosognosia is the phenomenon of not recognizing that one has an illness and is usually applied to someone has suffered a brain injury. A patient may be paralyzed on one side of the body and find reasons not to perform a particular task that requires both hands. The patient is not deceiving; the brain’s capacity to recognize impairment is, itself, impaired.
In psychiatry, insight into one’s illness may be more complicated than in neurology. Going back to the first patient, cultural and linguistic factors can make it very hard to assess. It is also subject to a lot psychological ‘noise.’ When I talked with this patient it became clear he dreaded the idea that people would think he had a psychiatric illness. There are good reasons why people - whatever the state of their mental health - don’t want to be seen as crazy by others. And recognizing one’s own mental illness is a mixed bag. Schizophrenic patients with better insight are more likely to take their medication regularly but are also more likely to be depressed . Paradoxically, denying that one is mentally ill looks pretty friggin’ adaptive if your idea of mental illness is a life sentence of misery and social ostracization.
For me lack of insight was always deeply, primitively, frightening. First of all, it evokes a trap played by the powerful; say you are unwell to prove you are well. At the same time what was always most frightening about mental illness to me was the primal terror of my own insight failing me, the extinction of something that is at the heart of my ‘self’.
I talked to a former patient this week, who had expressed very strange ideas when she was in hospital and who had little idea at the time that these ideas were strange. She is back in her apartment working hard to keep herself well. She still has paranoid thoughts sometimes but she recognizes that they probably aren’t accurate reflections of reality. She is able to challenge them. She tries not to let them govern what she does. She doesn't find it all that upsetting that some portion of her mind is so cruel. It made me feel happy to hear about her improved insight and I think it bodes well for her.
I find that after working with mentally ill people I am less fearful of losing my own insight. I suspect that like any other mental process, especially those connected with creating a sense of self, insight is nine-tenths smoke and mirrors, an illusion played by our brain on our mind. Insight is a kind of delusion itself, the folly that we can know our own minds.
I recently heard Miya Tokumitsu being interviewed about Steve Jobs' famous “Do what you love” commencement address. She has written eloquently about the late-capitalist wish fulfillment implied in this motto; that unlovable work should not only not happen to 'people like us' but shouldn't be seen or thought about at all.
“In ignoring most work and reclassifying the rest as love, DWYL may be the most elegant anti-worker ideology around. Why should workers assemble and assert their class interests if there’s no such thing as work?”
A further critique of "Do What You Love": As a therapist I work with people in their late twenties who feel that they are somehow psychologically unwell because they have not discovered their life's great passion. They have been told by the culture that they should be fully satisfied and thoroughly successful in their social, romantic and work life, drivers of change at every moment. They believe that life can be an unending climb to success and that if they are 'right' all that climbing will feel GREAT! To be anything less than full of love for life (including work) at every moment is a mark of some fundamental wrongness in them. They are discouraged and bewildered by their lack of passion though they have experienced relatively little of life. They live in terror of being soulless drones in marriage and in work and carry the secret shame of not feeling suitably passionate to escape this fate. (Or not passionate about the right things; the internet is built to be terrifically engaging but our culture doesn't view hours spent intensely focused on porn or playing World of Warcraft as DWYL).
The fact is that a person's twenties are early to discover lifelong passion. I vastly prefer Ms. Frizzle's advice to Steve Jobs'. (There may need to be a future blog post about the psychological phenomenon of frizzophilia; sexual desire for Ms. Frizzle.)
I tell clients to focus on trying things out, making mistakes, and picking themselves up when it doesn't work out in love and in work. Perhaps they will stumble upon something that grabs them.
But passion is not guaranteed.
Some people are, by temperament, not very passionate. This is another thing that the DWYL approach elides. It seems to me that love is portrayed in the DWYL approach as a near-rapturous state, fully energized, intensely focused that does not mellow with time. This betrays a misunderstanding about love and about the variety of human temperament. A passionate temperament is a mixed blessing; passion can lead people to wonderful accomplishments but can also lead them to reckless self-regard and cruelty. Those who are less passionate can often be steadier companions and kinder partners. Shame about being imperfectly passionate and fear of being locked into a life without total fulfillment keeps these twenty somethings from moving in any direction.
In a happily directionless part of my twenties, I read George Eliot's Middlemarch, which ends with this very un-Jobs-like valedictory for its heroine...
“The effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Thoroughly contrary to the spirit of the age. Precisely what we need.
