Reading Room
What You Can Change
and
What You Can't
Excerpted From The Book: What You Can Change and What
You Can't
by Martin E. P. Seligman
There are things we can change about ourselves and
things we cannot. Concentrate your energy on what is possible--too much time
has been wasted.
This is the age of psychotherapy and the age of self-improvement. Millions
are struggling to change. We diet, we jog, we meditate. We adopt new modes of
thought to counteract our depressions. We practice relaxation to curtail
stress. We exercise to expand our memory and to quadruple our reading speed. We
adopt draconian regimens to give up smoking. We raise our little boys and girls
to androgyny. We come out of the closet or we try to become heterosexual. We
seek to lose our taste for alcohol. We seek more meaning in life. We try to
extend our life span.
Sometimes it works. But distressingly often, self-improvement and
psychotherapy fail. The cost is enormous. We think we are worthless. We feel
guilty and ashamed. We believe we have no willpower and that we are failures.
We give up trying to change.
On the other hand, this is not only the age of self-improvement and therapy,
but also the age of biological psychiatry. The human genome will be nearly
mapped before the millennium is over. The brain systems underlying sex,
hearing, memory, left-handedness, and sadness are now known. Psychoactive drugs
quiet our fears, relieve our blues, bring us bliss, dampen our mania, and
dissolve our delusions more effectively than we can on our own.
Our very personality--our intelligence and musical talent, even our
religiousness, our conscience (or its absence), our politics, and our
exuberance-turns out to be more the product of our genes than almost anyone
would have believed a decade ago. The underlying message of the age of
biological psychiatry is that our biology frequently makes changing, in spite
of all our efforts, impossible.
But the view that all is genetic and biochemical and therefore unchangeable
is also very often wrong. Many people surpass their IQs, fail to
"respond" to drugs, make sweeping changes in their lives, live on
when their cancer is "terminal," or defy the hormones and brain
circuitry that "dictate" lust, femininity, or memory loss.
The ideologies of biological psychiatry and self-improvement are obviously
colliding. Nevertheless, a resolution is apparent. There are some things about
ourselves that can be changed, others that cannot, and some that can be changed
only with extreme difficulty.
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