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PSYCHOLOGIST Martin Seligman is acclaimed as a high
priest of positive psychology. In his earlier avatar in the opposite camp,
he probed topics such as symptoms of despair. He made his key discovery
about ' learned helplessness' with the help of dogs, not their masters.
Repeated exposure to inescapable shock, he found, was 'teaching' dogs that
nothing they did would make an iota of difference to their miserable
condition. What Seligman was proposing was heresy. He recalls meeting B F Skinner, the
legendary proponent of Behaviourism, in a men's room after a lecture, only
to be chastised grandly: " Animals don't think anything; they only behave!"
But Seligman persisted with the conviction that his animal model could help
in explaining the sense of utter helplessness that lies at the core of human
depression. Seligman's landmark research also revealed that a small
percentage of animals never became passive in the face of adversity.
Similarly, in his later studies extended to humans, the psychologists found
a corresponding minority of subjects who stubbornly refused to learn to be
helpless. So how does one separate the 'hard-boiled' from those who readily
throw in the towel at the first hint of adversity ?
The difference, Seligman reasoned, lay in the manner in which
people 'explain' or rationalise good and bad events in their lives.
Paradoxically, those who cheerfully bounce back from upsets, he said, might
have an innately optimistic explanatory style that may even contain elements
of 'self- serving' illusions: they might overestimate their abilities or
talents while shrugging off responsibility for losses and failures. On the
other hand, people prone to despair had a persistently negative style marked
by brutal (read self-deprecatory) honesty: neither inclined to grandiosity
nor seeing themselves as charmed children of destiny, they were "at the
mercy of reality" Seligman argued.
So how does one turn off that
cloud of darkness and despair hovering over one's head into a halo of
brightness and good cheer ? Try the exact opposite of learned helplessness--
learned optimism, he said. Teach yourself to be optimistic with a tool that
deliberately disputes catastrophic thinking. Bolstering the illusions that
make life bearable, he said, was one of the roles of therapy. This was akin
to what poetry does by giving us the lie we need to stay alive. |
