Wedding Address (For Mike and Haley)

I am honored to speak here today for Mike and Haley.  This is the part where we typically read First Corinthians 13, love is patient, love is kind...  We know this passage well, and very little can be added to it because it is true, every single word of it.  Return to it at difficult times, its mysteries abound, because there is always more to know about love. My Freshman English professor required us to write on a topic, with the warning: “do not pick love, St. Paul said it best and I have never given a 10 to anyone who attempted”  In honor of Mike and Haley I will assume the risk of a poor grade, because today they undertake one of life’s great risks.  And this is good because one of the Sufi poets has said “we were meant to risk everything for love.”

When I asked Mike what he might want in an address,  nothing overly religious, was his response.  This is good.  I am not qualified to give that address.  But, I can speak as a psychologist and counselor who has observed much.  I can also speak as someone who has loved his way into enough catastrophe to speak confidently of this subject, and I will share that I can speak confidently only because I misunderstood so much in the first forty years of my life.  In fact, if not for one of my catastrophes I wouldn’t even know Mike and Haley.  And that is why I am here today, to attest to the multiple definitions of love. And to offer you a few words about what I believe to be essential.

The first thing I will say is this. It is incredibly easy to get things wrong about love.  This happens not because love is complicated, but because relationships are.  We often misperceive love as a stand in—something to be possessed and held onto, when in fact it is the byproduct of loving. This causes us to insist upon a definition or a standard or a notion, that exists solely in one's own mind. If you want to attempt a truly pointless exercise go try to debate someone that they are not in love if they have told you that they are. They may or may not be, not the point.  But, I can tell you that I am concerned when I encounter someone who protests or insists. Love rarely requires proofs.

The Buddhists recognized centuries ago that it is our desire to grasp and apprehend objects that causes suffering.  If you insist upon pinning love down to a single definition, insisting that you are the only one who ever felt this way in the course of human history, and that nobody could possibly understand your condition, you will find loneliness, pain, disappointment, fear, and the other opposites of love. You are seeking a material possession in place of loving. You have allowed no room for growth. And, I guarantee that you will from time to time feel these things, even in a loving relationship. Your challenge will be to stop and ask is this love, and am I loving?

I will share two things that I have learned.  Since love is the byproduct of a process, it is cumulative.  It does not take away, it moves in the direction of growth not subtraction.  When I had my third child, I did not love the other two any less, I loved them more.  Love does not “complete” you, it magnifies everything that you do.  When I recognized this I scrawled it in a card, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that everything I have suffered was worth feeling that insight alone.  The second thing that I will share, is that you cannot learn or experience love without each other.  This is the hard part, because as I said relationships are hard, and loving another person can be hard at times and over time.  I have observed countless couples, and I have experienced firsthand how we lose the ability to see each other because the person opposite us becomes so familiar.  This is where all the “you always” arguments come from, and if we continue that path to its end we eventually arrive at “you don’t even know me.”

There is an African word Suwabona, which roughly translates to “I see you,” but has a far deeper meaning.  It also implies honor, and because it is a greeting and reciprocated, you see me also, and that we come into being through each other.  Descarte’s famous line “I think therefore I am” misses something essential.  Tich Nacht Hanh’s quote “you are, therefore I am” is closer to reality.   So, this is the challenge—to look at your partner, and again and again, remind yourself often, amongst all of the frustrations, the insults, the illnesses both mental and physical, all of the baggage and boxes—to say these things are not “you,” these things are wounds.  “You” are the person here now right before me.  In the final lines of that Corinthians passage this is stated—for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.

Finally, our culture fills our minds with a lot of garbage, and reinforces the commodification of love—the materialism I spoke of earlier.  If it is correct that loving is a process and love is the byproduct, then it must be cultivated.  The Greeks actually defined love in multiple ways.  When I think of this I imagine a far richer world. My recommendation is that when you struggle, do the opposite of insistence, widen your practice. Find a place for:

Philia—this is the love at the source of friendship.  Plato and Aristotle debated whether it was the most important, platonic love, the brotherly love, why I am here today.  Philia is taking in a guy going through a divorce, and keeping in touch after he moves out, and dragging him back out again when his heart was crushed again.

Eros—we’re going to skip that.  There might be kids here.  But this, I will say—it waxes and wanes, don’t fall for the trap that it’s the one and only definition of love.

Storge—the unconditional love.  You may choose to have children, you may not.  Find something and love it unconditionally.  Dogs are awesome. The planet could use it.

Philautia—love of self. Understand that this is difficult because of the ego, which tends toward narcissism.  But it is essential. It implies honoring your words and commitments, integrity--doing the right thing even when it is hard. Without this you will do dishonorable things.

Pragma—this is the love that comes from commitments.  A friend of mine posted on Facebook that he told his Grandfather he didn’t understand how he did it, day after day visiting the nursing home.  His Grandfather looked at him, baffled and said “I love her.”

Ludus—playful love. For God’s sake please don’t lose the ability to play.

Agape—the type of all-encompassing love often associated with Christ.  Add the other six up, I think you get close.

Mike and Haley, I love you guys and I wish you love in abundance.  thank you for bringing me into being here today.

This Was 40 (The Year I Was Right About Everything)

              I was intending to write a big piece for New Years day, to wish everyone well and tell them how important they were to me this year.  Time did not permit it, but my birth date is close enough that it feels the same as a passing year.  Plus, it is way more personally symbolic.  I can comfortable say that 40 was the single most significant year of my life.  This year closes in nowhere near what I had imagined or anticipated.  When I got divorced a few years ago, I had this odd feeling—what the hell was that?  That entire decade?  It felt like a lifetime.  I remember telling people that I had never given much thought to David Byrne’s lyrics in Once in a Lifetime, but here I was in that decade with a beautiful house and a beautiful wife, and there was never enough time ponder—how did I get here? 

              Later in that song the lines change to “you may say to yourself this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife?”  That is the feeling I was trying to explain to people.  How is that I ended up with a beautiful house and a beautiful ex-wife? How did I get there?  Year 40, ends in that space, exhausted and realizing I lived an entire lifetime in the past year.  I can say this because I lived an entire lifetime from birth to 40.  It was this year that I recognized how fundamentally mistaken I was about almost everything.  I credit Buddhism with this revelation. Meditation revealed layer upon layer of things I mistook for reality. The world is a lie, as the John Dickey biography title suggests. I saw that on a bookshelf one day in a moment of synchronicity, which is what happens you realize that you were sleepwalking through the first half of your life.

              I can assure you that I am fundamentally different person from the one you knew at the beginning of the year.  I feel confident in staking that claim, because it has been my direct experience.  Today, I am not sure I even believe in the self anymore.  I believe in the ego (the Buddhist conceptualization as opposed to the Freudian one)  Today, I believe more in the idea that there are multiple versions of the self because identity is multifaceted and that these versions are cleaved and born, often dramatically—a child is born and your identity as parent is new or expands, you lose a loved one and your identity is transformed instantaneously.  In the early months of my separation and divorce a friend said to me—“you’re a single Dad now.  You have to establish a new identity.” Not long after that I joined a single parents group, recognizing that the move to the suburbs and leaving a job that helped to destroy the previous life had left me in a position with about zero friends.

              This notion of identity and selfhood is complicated and probably consumes a lot more thought than it should.  The only thing that I can share is my own experience as accurately and authentically as language will permit. There was a version of myself that died somewhere during the year. I cannot give you a time or place, this is figurative and qualitative.  I can share with you that his funeral was well attended.  A lot of people loved that guy.  I thought he was ok, at times remarkably good and kind, dedicated, willing to believe the best in others. But, he was also way too externally reinforced—wanting to be seen as good, kind, dedicated.  And rather than simply being those things, he questioned whether he truthfully was those things.  He found out he was because he was encouraged to follow his gut and stay out of his head.  These are practical techniques, I recognized their correlates in DBT which was my professional training, but I don’t know that I had every had to live them so intensively as I did this year. Like any techniques, they are not enough, or they work half of the time.  I am a Taoist at heart, so I will go only so far as to say that they work to bring balance and harmony, until they don’t, otherwise they would not be the Tao.

              I mentioned in previous writings, and herein that I have been studying psychology relentlessly.  Dissertation and comprehensive exams forced me into a place where I had to reacquaint myself with foundational texts.  The consistent meditation and the application of positive psychology caused ideas to fuse in a way they had never done before.  I said to Mickey, it’s odd that I am reading all of the stuff that I was reading at 23 and that it’s like I had never even grasped it, even though I understood it intellectually.  When I tell you that the first forty years feel like I was living a lie, it was because I lacked some of the direct experience to situate many of these ideas that have been swimming about aimlessly in my mind for decades.  As a compliment I was once told I had a kaleidoscopic mind, it never felt that way, it felt more like a mobile strewn with garbage.  It may have looked like I had a mental model, but I confess now that I was winging it.  We all are.  But, the T.S. Eliot line to arrive at the place and know it for the first time is this experience.

              I was struck by a line in Peter Senge’s the Fifth Discipline.  This is my new reading, and I anticipate that it will be another one of those massively influential readings.  The book has proven enormously popular in the area of organizational science. The line that struck me was “we live our mental models.” The subject matter of this book is systems thinking.  And this connected with my recent Buddhist and Cognitive Psychology studies on the self.  If there is no self—no singular entity that we can regard as the self, and if indeed the mind is more accurately modular (the more prominent view in cognitive psychology these days), then I might be better off thinking of the self as a system.  This is one of the things that helped enormously when my suffering was at its most acute.  I was not thinking of it as a system yet, I don’t even wish to go that far because I have not read enough of the book to apply any of the insights.  It did introduce me to the new term metanoia which I will probably be using more frequently to Senge’s consternation.

              In hindsight I do now recognize that what I was doing during the summer was a conscious act of reconstructing a mental model.  Identity and selfhood were necessarily a part, but not the only part.  Both the Buddhists and some of the later psychoanalysts recognized the trappings of the ego, and that it is a part of our being that we are most prone to identifying as the self.  But, the social psychologists, since Goffman have regarded the self as construct that is represented by dual entities: there is the self that you recognize as the self and the one you present to the world.  Social psychologists later elaborated on this model, recognizing that there is a powerful dynamic between the actual and ideal versions of the self.  Cognitive dissonance is experienced when these two dimensions are misaligned, and especially when those involve features that are salient and important.  Nobody likes feeling like a hypocrite, it feels even worse to be outed as such.  Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance theory and motivated reasoning increase the likelihood that you may find yourself doubling down on methods that do not work, because they feel familiar and comfortable.

              So, recognizing the situation I was in I thought about what I liked and what I did not like about the most recent version of myself.  I confess, that at first, I thought only about the recent best version of me.  I liked that I was enjoying parenting and thought of as a good Father, I liked that I was learning and that people appreciated my knowledge and help, I liked that I was concerned with the upkeep of my home and wanted others to notice.   I now recognize that I was neglecting other areas of life, which is far too easy when you are as busy as I am.  And when I found myself in hell, I recognized that I needed to do certain things to leave hell, as I had done in the past.  When I was going through divorce I began exercising and developed a new routine.  In an early stage of life, writing was what carried me out of hell.  I also recognize that a great amount of life is marked, and always will be, with the “shit we don’t want to do.” 

              See, if you like back to the statements in the first few sentences, you will notice that my problem was that a great deal of this was externally motivated.  I hate keeping the house up, it sucks, and I did it because I wished people to think I had my shit together.  But, I don’t, a lot of the time.  But, I know that it is important or my ex and my family will start complaining. This will produce counterproductive stress because one needs less, not more concern, when they feel like they just stopped drowning and got into the lifeboat.  What was different this time around is that I developed a mental model aimed at establishing the ideal self, as opposed to what was present before.

              I want to also get to this notion of the shadow self—an idea advanced by Carl Jung.  When you have one of these moments where you recognize how massively wrong you got everything it is both crushing and liberating.  Jung’s notion of the shadow self is the self you do not want to see, the negative qualities of the self.  I think there is value in the concept, but it has limitations.  What years of working as a counselor and my own personal experience has taught me is that it is a necessary and incomplete version of the self.  One of the heartbreaking facts of life is that we often are forced to confront this inadequate version of the self violently thrust on us as in trauma.  One of the heartbreaking things that I have observed in my professional practice is how dominant this version of the self becomes in cases of prolonged and repeated trauma—especially the type that goes back through childhood:

              “It sounds like so much of your life was just built around survival, and that you had to construct this version of your self, that told the world you were tough, all was well, that whatever it was didn’t really hurt.  But, it’s not really you, and “you” didn’t get to grow.”

              “That is exactly what it felt like.”

              There is a lot in Zen about the master and the student.  It is said that the master that cannot see himself in the student, is not a master and that a student that cannot see themselves in the master, ought to reconsider his instructor.  I am not suggesting that I am a master at counseling, but I am lucky enough to have learned from what others have felt vulnerable enough to share.  I was no master at supervising, but I was fortunate to have some incredible people that trusted me enough to guide them. I am no master at parenting, but I try to learn from these kids who are stuck with me, not knowing that I am winging half of it.  They ended up part of the mental model.  Yes, the model that I have been promising you.  My model of the ideal self, that dragged me out of hell. (crap, my fancy diagram won't cut and paste, it had bubbles and lines, it was not sophisticated but pleasing)

                                                                                        1. Exercise
                                                                                        2. Shit I don't want to do/deal with

                                                                                        3. Meditation

 Ideal Self                                                                       4. Be a good Dad

                                                                                        5. Give back to others

                                                                                        6. Study

                                                                                        7. Do art/creative work

        I selected 7 domains, not for any specific reason other than that I felt that these captured me at times I either felt at my best or they are the things that got me to those places.  I don’t believe that I have ever been my best.  Best is “fixed” and past tense.  There is only better.  That does not imply that the best version of you is not ahead.  Somewhere in March I was told by my uncle that I had to find my Tao.  These are the things that have kept me balanced, I schedule all 7 on my daily schedule and do my best to hit them.  I am human, some days I get 5/7.    They correspond with physical health, emotional/spiritual health, important roles, and responsibilities.  I am lucky that my profession allows me to give back to others daily. I am lucky that I live in a moment of time and space where I have the support to pursue school.  I am lucky that I have three children who provide purpose. There were days where that was the only one that got me out of bed.  All of those 7 are subject to change, otherwise they would not be the Tao.

       I still have no idea where any of this is going.  I can only share that it got me to a better version of myself.   I did a lot of ranting this year. I’ve been on a tear.  I’ve jokingly been told I was high or manic at times.  I assure you I was not.  I was often in pain.  I sometimes experienced ecstasy.  I had some experiences that I cannot comfortably classify, but resemble experiences I read about in the Buddhist literature.   I told Mickey that I figured out the shadow self thing, for my model, and that I then went and drowned him in the bathtub.  She said, “please tell me that you did not tell victim of trauma to do that.”  I can’t remember, she is convinced that you must love every part of you.  I am not sure how I feel about that, but I reluctantly invite this self to dinner.  We laugh.  I say to him “remember that life you were, where you got everything wrong?”  And he says, “My God yes, I could be such a pompous ass at times.” And I say—“yes, but you were also kind, and generous, and I really see only a handful of things that I did not like about you.”  And he says:

“oh, do share…”

“well, sometimes in your exuberance you interrupt people that’s a bad habit, and because you are extroverted and impulsive you can come off egotistical.”

“yes, but it’s actually not egotism, it’s egoism—more like Walt Whitman.”

“well that’s another thing Shadow, aside from a penchant for grandiosity, you have a habit of trying to explain everything.  I know, I know, you don’t want to be a nuisance or hurt people, and you really hate it when people misunderstand your intentions.  But, other people perceive this as anxiety and defensiveness.”

“makes sense, I never felt that I was doing enough. I

  “Shadow you did enough, you’ve lived some incredible lives in the last 40 years.  Can you forgive me for trying to drown you in the tub?”

“For sure.  This Tao thing is working for you.  You have some weird type of confidence I have never seen in you.  Keep up the writing, keep at the dissertation, yell at the kids less, keep at this mindfulness meditation. For God’s sake just please do me a favor, and be better than me, and ok with just that. This is hard on the psyche.”

"I am at least aware that neither if us leaving here is the actual true self."

"you son of a bitch."

        The title of this essay was an obvious joke, the year was replete with failures.  I quoted Beckett once this year—Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.  But, this was also the year I ended up right about everything, in so far as it was the Tao.  It proved right because I have arrived at the later lines in that T.S. Eliot passage—"A condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”  I remember quoting Whitman this year too—“you will hardly know who I am or what I mean.”  I am often unsure of who I am or what I mean.  The lines are from Song of Myself.  It also contains the lines “so, I contradict myself” and “I contain multitudes.”  He’s right.  When I was going through my divorce, and I was prone to angry ranting, my Father often said “to whom much is given, much is expected in return.”  At the time, it was often more than I could tolerate hearing, but he proved right.

       Once in a lifetime (see what I did there) you will reach 40, and if you were lucky enough to have good parents you get to realize how right they often were, even if they were winging it half the time.  Once in a lifetime, you will pass 40 and if it has been as rich as this life has been, you will need a lot less, you may get to let go of a huge chunk of ego through this idea of not self, and you will find (at times) that you are just heart, and that the more you give away the better off you will be, because more will come to you in return.  A couple of years ago my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Zug passed away in her 90’s (I believe).  My mother said she visited her in the hospital and the first thing she did was ask about my son, who was diagnosed with one of those lopsided heads which require a helmet--something so insignificantly trivial relative to the matter at hand.  That is what I want to be, so utterly satisfied with life that I am only concerned with you.  I want to be Aunt Shirley who passed away this month, who up and got married in her 90’s.  I want to be Albert Ellis who saw clients well into his 90’s, cursed constantly, and was known to say I will retire when I’m dead.

      I owe a lot to a number of people who helped with insights and ideas that contributed to the model I outlined.  There is still a lot more being worked on, this is actually a side project to the dissertation. But you contributed and you probably have no idea when, how, and where. You will have to take my word that you did: (Anna, Dena, Mickey, Melissa, Dev, Meghan, Kanishka, Sean, Derek, Sonia, Uncle Clay).  Once in a lifetime you get people like this.

Once in a lifetime you get friends like Jen, Jessica, Brett, Shawn, Sara, Samantha, Laura, Ryan, Zen, Jim.

Once in a lifetime you get to be in the Hip Single Parents group.

Once in a lifetime you may find your self in writing group, or a sangha, or a Quaker meeting house, with a bunch of beautiful and talented local people, and you may ask yourself how did I get here?

Once in a lifetime you get people that believe in you when you have lost all ability to believe in yourself.

Once in a lifetime you get a family like this. Then they all start to feel like family

It’s always right here, as in Zen it is right before you.  It is always right here because it is now, and now is the only thing we experience in our human lives that is eternal.  It is the only place you will ever be right about everything.

If you lost the thread, it is not your fault, I am all over the place, but I was trying to convey that feeling that you live multiple lives in multiple versions of the self.   I don’t know that I convinced any of you, and that really wasn’t my undertaking.  But, I am convinced that I did none of this without you, because I believe that the only thing that one can claim to know as true comes through direct experience.  I know nothing but through my relationship with others.  The Gestalt Prayer:

I do my thing, and you do your thing

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful,

If not, it can’t be helped.

And this is how you fall in love with anything.  See you in this lifetime.

stuff on zen, rejection, Dweck

              There is a post that I have not been able to get to, which includes much of the research that I have been working for dissertation.  If you know me, you will know that I am prone to derailment and tangential thinking.  I realized that this is a habit I will have to curtail, or at least manage, for the Action Research project I am intending for dissertation.   I have a preternatural gift for distraction, discipline is not my strong suit.  But, all of this writing helps, and it allows me to get my focus back to where it needs to be.  Much of this writing is about what consumes me during the week, which is research, parenting, conversations with my friends, and the counseling work that I do which is less frequent than I would like.  I was talking to a friend yesterday, who had a relationship end abruptly.  I had recognized in him an orientation toward growth already in the early days of the event. 

              All year I have been obsessed with the idea of the journey.  I have been on quite a journey for the last 4 years.  I have often mistaken the journey for other journeys.  Almost every friendship I’ve developed recently and all of those immediately present have this certain and relatively prominent feature of self-discovery, revelation, rebirth, etc.  I suspect that this impression is part of two things—my own innate personality features which manifest in a bad habit of conflating other’s stories with my own.  I wish to emphasize that, this type of journaling can have the effect of sounding pompous and egotistic—everyone is on a journey, we always are.  A few of my personality traits of openness, gregariousness, and extroversion too easily lead me to outlandish exuberance at times.  But, there is a counterpoint that intersects here—age.  I just happen to be in a space where many people are sharing midlife transitions and some of them are massive—love, death, loss, parenting, divorce, precisely the type of events that necessitate self-discovery, revelation, rebirth.

              Personality theory is less in vogue these days—especially the psychoanalytic developmental type that Erikson laid out that conceived of personality encompassing the lifespan.   I suppose I could go back and read this, and it would place everything I am trying to say in language from the 1950s.  But, I have little time for that, and I suspect that it is much more ego gratifying to believe that I have stumbled on one of the hidden mysteries of the universe, or at least social psychology, through my own intuition.  And at least I have the source material to go back to.  One of the blessings of being in psychology, as opposed to say history, is that it is a relatively recent institution.  I don’t have to go far in time to read the foundational texts. 

              Presence to this awareness that many close to me are dealing with huge transitions requires acknowledgement that the antecedents are often massive amount of suffering and trauma.  I worry constantly about the supports and resources others have, because I simply do not see them present in the healthcare system, our social fabric is frayed, the village it takes to raise a child is not well supported.  I worry constantly that we are missing something huge, or something huge is about to happen.  I am no longer able to discern if society is hurtling toward something awful, or whether we are just in a transformational moment.  The news is despair, I avoid a lot of it, never thinking I was going to become that person.  Yet, I go out and live and I am heartened by the level of community activity and engagement that I see.  I spoke to a friend the other day with a deep trauma history, and I went straight to my soapbox that the behavioral health system is failing everyone badly—that we are not treating despair, addiction, or trauma well at all.  And then I watch a video like Healing Neen, and I am floored at what is possible. And, not only that—what is possible in one human being.

              I was in dialogue with several friends over the past few days regarding this documentary.  It’s available on YouTube and its worth 50 minutes of the viewing time.  A few people whom I have discussed the video with, have been likewise baffled at the capacity for resilience displayed.  My Mother asked me what do you think it is about her?  It’s multiple things, I am certain of that—timing, encountering specific people at the right time, vulnerability, and mindset.  That last one is something that I am harping on this week.  I confess that I am having a bit of an intellectual love affair with Carol Dweck’s work for the past three weeks.  I think that I have about 7 friends, one client, and multiple family members reading it.  It is also quite possible that they are just saying this to pacify my evangelism. I am very aware that this could be one of those things that is way more relevant in my own mind, the same way that my McSweeney’s writings, repeatedly fated to rejection, seem brilliant and hilarious the moment I send off to the editor.

              So Carol Dweck’s work is pretty incredible, and I have been struggling to find how it fits into the model that I am working on for dissertation.  I have several research papers that I am working through at the moment.  If you are familiar with the Fox and Hedgehog story popularized in Isaiah Berlin’s essay, you will recognize Carol Dweck as a classic Hedgehog style thinker—like Foucault.  This style of thought sees a fundamental pattern or idea present, in a way that comes to feel so abundantly present that it seems almost a given constituent of reality.  For Foucault it was the idea that knowledge equates to power, and that insiders of the power structure use this power to suppress and marginalize others.  For Dweck the overarching theme is that mindsets can generally be reduced to either fixed or growth orientations.  She applies this relentlessly to multiple areas in education and psychology, and has the science to support her arguments. 

              I was speaking to another friend this week, and she asked what I thought about narrative therapy.  I told her that I thought that it is a very effective method for PTSD treatment, but that it needed to be coupled with other methods.  Fortunately, this friend also happens to be a brilliant writer and versed in deconstructionist literature, which I tend to avoid because my head starts to hurt when I try to translate too much of a language only tenuously grasped.  Dissertation has also pushed me into this area, and it got me to thinking that Carol Dweck might have some deconstructionist qualities in her work that are worth further consideration.  If you have read other posts of mine, I have repeatedly and probably obnoxiously insisted that something was terribly wrong with our behavioral health system.  It leaves me with that gnawing feeling that we are missing something huge.  Again, I insist that we are not treating trauma, addiction, and despair well, if it all. 

              After the conversation with my friend, I remarked that whole edifice of psychology is ripe for deconstruction.  My opinion is born of a combination of massive dissatisfaction after working in this system for 20 years, and the hope that positive psychology may bring more balance to our present condition.  The two Carol Dweck articles that I have been reading are on personality, one in particular deals with self-definition and entity versus incremental orientations.  In her popular work Mindset, she uses the language fixed versus growth.  Essentially, the dichotomy is how you view a given capacity—can it be developed versus whether it is fixed and determinative? Entity and incremental theorists respond to a given problem differently.

               I use “given” because it is my belief that we all have elements of fixed and growth mindsets.  I suspect that it is more of continuum, some people are highly prone to fixed mindset thinking, Dweck repeatedly references John McEnroe and his endless capacity to externalize blame and emotional dysregulate into public tantrums.  I also think that “given” is appropriate because some problems are so enormous that we end up in positions that force us to fixed mindsets. The important point that I want to note from her work on personality is that some of the things that we might typically assume as personality, and therefore fixed, may in fact be malleable.  Think for a moment about values, attitudes, beliefs, temperament, preferences, dispositions, and traits and how much of these things we intuitively just label as personality in our common every day experience. 

              Dweck argues that we may have underestimated how much of our so called immutable personality traits are open to development.  My own research area in positive psychology also suggests this.  Hope, Optimism, Resiliency, and Self-Efficacy are all now considered to operate on a continuum as opposed to fixed traits.  They are regarded as states and therefore open to development.  Certainly, some individuals have innate tendencies toward optimism and hope, but that does not mean that hope and optimism are not developable within each of us.  A lot of the research that I have accumulated is related to the workplace; what I described is demonstrably evident to anyone who was generally an optimist who ended up in a department with poor morale.  Personality is the interplay of tendencies and context.

              The second article is more complicated and deals with a more specific aspect of selfhood, self-definition.  The context of the article is rejection and how self-definition shifts depending upon entity (fixed) versus incremental (growth) orientations.  In an effort to find humor in what is otherwise a shitty circumstance, I will use my recent efforts at publication in McSweeney’s.  I am on my third rejection.  If I was dating in a fixed mindset I would go to another bar, and blame this bar for it’s crappy music, and tell myself that the women there were garbage, never once considering that it might be my approach.  See—if I never question my own approach, I never open to the opportunity to learn and refine this approach.  And since I am purely joking in this example above, it is entirely narcissistic—the real tragedy is that I never bother to learn what the women can teach me about life because I’ve only relentlessly pursued my own need.

              One of the great revelations in this article was that fixed and growth mindsets reveal that we make certain interpretations of the world, and through our behavioral responses may end up impeding our growth.  Individuals with a fixed mindset were observed to changed self-definition even on relevant traits.  I will spare you all of the cognitive mechanisms that this runs through (you can pm me if you are really interested in knowing).  This struck me as counter intuitive and worth sharing.  I think the ultimate takeaway for me is that we all have fixed and growth mindsets within us.  This is also consistent with Albert Bandura’s beliefs on self-efficacy.  I had always assumed that when I got something wrong about the world around me, the appropriate response was “crap, what did I do wrong?” better change myself in orientation to the world, as opposed to “well, that sucks, maybe I did the best I could and the world happened to me.”  This seems so transparently obvious, but I can assure you that it takes practice to place yourself in the latter mindset. I am sure that I fail that task multiple times a day.

              What specifically impedes us?  At this moment I am inclined to say that it is often emotions and ego (I am using ego in the Buddhist sense, not Freudian).    Dweck does not follow this thread, but does identify behavior that reflective of fixed mindset in the area of self-definition.  The following behaviors are reflective of fixed mindset and rejection:  a) lingering negative affect b) expecting and guarding against future rejection c) goal oriented to suppression d) less likely to see opportunity for growth and acceptance.  So, as promised, I will use myself as an example with regard to my persistent efforts to convince McSweeney’s of my comic genius.  Why? I can joke about this, and it does not hurt, because my self-definition is not contingent on publication in McSweeney’s.  I can honestly care less, because I am having fun, my writing gets better, and I generate new ideas because of it. 

              I have achieved a.  I am not saying that there is no lingering affect when I receive the rejection email—it’s actually kind of nice that this outfit responds personally to your submission.  I am not sure I am fully there on b, I do anticipate future rejection, the difference is that I really don’t care.  I am also not guarding against—I have this gut feeling that it may happen eventually if I choose to keep submitting. On c, I am not engaging in the mental dialogue of suppression where I tell myself that they did not appreciate my comic genius, or that their publication is garbage and something not worth pursuing, or that I am just not cut out for it.  This could reach comic proportions if I denied that McSweeney’s ever existed or that I had ever submitted anything at all.  I could insist that this was fake news and that they were part of the disgusting media and I would protect my fragile ego.  But then I would never come up with a hilarious idea like the Pope writing a series of yelp reviews for restaurants in the Vatican.

              Instead I am solidly in the inverse terrain of d.  I can assure you that I am happier.  It’s much more satisfying to have thoughts like “ok, assholes I am sending you my fourth effort and opportunity for rejection by week’s end.”  I often reference Zen in these blog posts, and that is because it has had a remarkably transformative effect on me.  It is inextricably tied to everything I have experienced and learned this year, and I still know nothing about it.  I know nothing of comedy either, because like love, life, anything that involves learning is through process and praxis.  I only know that I have made others laugh.  I know that I laugh.  I know that I have made unkind jokes I regret because they have hurt others.  I know that I have had some success with standup.  I will probably try it again, and may even extend myself by trying improv (the actual zen of comedy).  See—none of this is self-definitional, it all is.  If I choose to identify too strongly with any one of those, I am in pain or I am identifying too closely with ego.  Everything in Zen comes back to direct experience.  I clearly know nothing of what it takes to be published in McSweeney’s.  I could care less, but I also do.