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.
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