What Happy Women Know

CHAPTER ONE

Positive Psychology and the Science of Happiness

The US Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.

Benjamin Franklin

I'm not sure how long he had been standing there. I was on the telephone when I sensed someone moving about outside my office. He must have heard me hang up, because he appeared within seconds--a tall, fiftyish man with close-cropped gray hair. When I asked if I might help him, he replied, "God, I hope so."

"We just arrived this afternoon," he said. "I'm hoping you'll have time to talk to my wife." I indicated a chair, and he introduced himself as James.

"We've been to a million doctors," he said. "I hear you work miracles."

"I'm hardly a miracle worker," I said, flattered nonetheless. "Suppose you tell me what this is all about."

In the next 10 minutes, he told the story of his wife, Serena, in such a straightforward manner that I wondered how many times he had recited it before. Her parents died when she was 8, and when no relatives could take her in, she landed in foster care. "I'm sure there are many good foster homes," he said, "but Serena wasn't that lucky. Hers was the kind you read about in those tabloids at the supermarket." He then proceeded to paint a detailed--and horrifying--picture of her young life, as she was bounced from foster home to foster home. In the last home, he said, she had been subjected to both sexual and emotional abuse and locked for hours at a time in a darkened closet. Ultimately, she simply ticked off the days until she felt she could survive on her own in the outside world.

At 16, she packed up her meager belongings, walked out the door, and never looked back. James met her when she was working the counter in a tiny takeout shop where he bought his morning coffee. Eventually, they married and adopted two beautiful babies who were now in their early teens. "She has never been able to forget her past, though," he said. "And lately, things seem to be spiraling downward. I'm really worried about her."

We arranged for her to come to my office the next afternoon.

Serena* was a small woman in her midthirties, with shoulder-length dark hair and dull gray eyes. I'll never forget the first thing she said or the sadness in her voice as she said it: "I don't like living like this, Dr. Baker. I've never been happy, and I don't believe I'll ever be happy."

I knew she didn't mean the last part because after all, she was in my office. At least she hadn't given up all hope.

I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that she could be happy, that happiness is just a way of looking at life. It was clear from the story her husband had recounted that she had courage; she certainly had love, and I believed that if she looked deeply enough, she would find a way to fulfillment as well.

"I don't deserve my family," she said softly.

"And why is that?"

"Because I'm always sad. I put a damper on everything."

Listening to her was like listening to a tape on a player with failing batteries. The word apathy came immediately to my mind. Apathy is one of the hallmarks of depression. Given the choice of which I'd rather work with, an apathetic person or an angry one, I'll take the angry person every time. Give me someone who slams a fist on the desk or throws things at the walls over someone who believes there is no hope. Anger is just another negative emotion that eventually gets resolved. Apathy can take far longer. "Why not start at the beginning?" I said.

First she shared some memories of her parents and her early, happy times with them. (At least I knew there was a time when she had experienced true happiness, even if it was nearly three decades ago.) Then she told me how they died in an automobile accident, and she was sent to live with a foster family--the first of many. "The last was the worst," she said. She lowered her gaze to her lap, clasped her hands, and slowly began to speak of the unspeakable. Five minutes into her story, I stopped her in midsentence. "Serena," I said, "tell me about your children."

Immediately, her whole demeanor changed. She told of her son, "an incredible soccer player, captain of his traveling team," and her daughter, who had just starred in a ballet recital and is a marvelous student. As she spoke, her energy perked up, and she even managed a semblance of a smile.

I wasn't surprised. When I meet someone whose world has been rocked, I let them start talking, then I interrupt and ask them to tell me about someone they love or something in their lives they have great appreciation for. In that moment, the brain switches away from the painful subject to process the new topic. And so, almost within a snap of the fingers, Serena shifted from "I'm not good enough. I'm all alone. God help me; what's going to happen to me?" to "I've got these two amazing and beautiful children."

I kept going. "How did they get great?" I asked. "And isn't it remarkable that you can help human beings grow into the kind of people your children are?" I wanted her to recognize that she was a great success at parenting, and I wanted her to tell me so she would hear it herself. Sometimes people can point out the good in everyone else, but when you ask them about the good in themselves, they haven't got a clue.

The conversation drifted back to her past, and again I interrupted her. This time I suggested we take a walk outside.

It was a crystal clear, perfect Tucson day--the kind of day that every guest at Canyon Ranch prays they'll wake up to. As we walked, I said to her, "Serena, I want you to go to the first thing you see that's beautiful."

She stopped at a purple flower that sat on the edge of a still pond. "Look deep into the flower," I said.

She did.

"Now smell it."

She did.

"Now touch it."

She did that, too. Then she looked up at me as if waiting for her next instruction. Instead, I asked her a question, "How do you feel this second?"

"I feel . . . okay."

"Good. Let's go find something else that's beautiful, and you can tell me all about it."

She indicated a tall, beautifully symmetrical cactus, and we repeated the exercise. She said it reminded her of a favorite sculpture, and when I asked how she felt, she just smiled. I think she instinctively knew what was happening.

Here's the thing about love and appreciation. They are both positive emotions, and when you engage in either of them, or any other positive emotions, you cannot simultaneously be miserable. That's because the brain is not wired to process both a positive and a negative at the same time. Two things are important to know about positive and negative emotions. The first is that negative emotions have their place, which is to work for us in acute and sometimes life-threatening situations. Serena was no longer experiencing an acute situation, it's true, but she continued to function as if she were. That's because the human brain habituates to certain circumstances, particularly threatening circumstances that evoke strong negative emotions.

Because she had been down for so long, her neurological pathways had "grooved" so that even if she was no longer in an unpleasant situation, her brain thought she was. Essentially, it was easy for her to perceive threat almost continually. When one is in a state of constant vigilance, it depletes energy, and this was in large part responsible for her flat affect. Try being on guard duty 24/7, and see how you feel.

The second thing that's important to know about human emotions is that the brain's pathways for evocation of negative and positive emotions are different. In other words, you cannot be on two different streets at the same time. What I was doing in Serena's case was helping her to engage the lesser-used pathways of her brain so that eventually she might have a more positive perspective on life.

A Walk in the Desert

Serena's homework for the week she was at the ranch was to take an "appreciation walk" six times a day. Each afternoon, when she returned to my office, I asked her to talk about the beauty she saw around her. After a few days, we moved on to the beauty she saw in her husband, in her children, and finally in herself.

Had I asked her on the first day to talk about the beauty she saw in herself, she would have been stumped because she saw nothing but ugliness. Women and children who are abused by a more physically powerful male often escape the only way they can--by "running away" in their heads. The problem is, they generally can never run quite far enough to completely get away. Com£ding that situation is the fact that they see themselves as damaged goods, so they rarely return to who they were prior to the attack. It's a little bit like Dorothy in Oz, who couldn't get home until she accepted herself for who she really was. Serena tried to make some sense of her life by assuming there was something wrong with her, which there wasn't. It was her brain recalling the earlier times. It had never let go because, as you'll see later, it couldn't.

But she could.

Today's Serena--the one I had only just met--was a 36-year-old woman who had power and strength and potential she didn't know she had. When I got her to focus on love and beauty, she began to realize there were possibilities out there for her. She had only to look for them.

Once the pump was primed, she could talk about what was good in her life. I believe if we had jumped back into the darkness, we would have exacerbated that darkness. If I had taken her back to the days of the abuse, it would have proved nothing and might have made matters worse. My approach--that is, the approach of positive psychology--does not ignore the pain of life but instead shows how one can exercise the power of choice while engaging life from moment to moment. It is being proactive to a situation rather than reactive. It's one thing to try to fix a tangible object that is broken, but I have never seen the human psyche in that way. The psyche is not something to be repaired in the same way an orthopedist would set a shattered arm.

At our last meeting before she left the ranch, Serena and I discussed what she would do when she got home. She said she wanted to do something to make the world around her a better place. For her children in particular and perhaps, she said, for others as well. "Maybe for foster children. Girls, maybe. Like me." Serena understood that she couldn't erase what had happened to her--it would always be there--but she could transcend it. The memory would remain, but she found a way to live with it constructively and not try to distance herself from it. Essentially, we not only changed the playing field, but we also changed the rules. And it didn't take years of psychotherapy.

The day they left the ranch, Serena and James stopped in to say goodbye. Her eyes were bright, and her husband's eyes reflected hers. She had a new direction now: a purpose and a goal. The apathy was behind her. She saw possibilities in her life. She had hope.

Now, you may be wondering what exactly I did.

The Birth of Positive Psychology

The method I practice is called positive psychology. It is a rapidly growing movement that offers an alternative to clinical psychology. Unlike clinical psychology, which focuses on what's wrong with people, positive psychology shifts the emphasis to finding what's right with them. It works on the premise that identifying a person's virtues, strengths, and character and then building on them is far more helpful than pointing out a person's weaknesses and trying to fix them.

If asked to characterize positive psychology in general, I would say it is the study of the good life. It's the study of what's working. It's essential to understand that positive psychology is not only for the troubled. To the contrary. The idea is to take a life, even a good and happy life, and make it more meaningful. Even the happiest of people can and do benefit from this new discipline.

As you may have noticed with Serena, my method doesn't include burying life's painful experiences. I don't think anyone could, even if they wanted to. Rather, it embraces them as learning experiences and suggests using the new wisdom in a positive, practical way. Serena had a horrific childhood. For years, she visited doctors who tried to help her but failed because they kept asking her to relive the worst of what she'd been through. When I saw her, I quickly let her know I was more interested in her life now than in her past. I encouraged her to appreciate what she currently had, with an eye toward helping her find the possibilities in her future. Positive psychology is all about looking for possibilities.

Could Freud Have Been Wrong?

The science of clinical psychology began in Europe in 1879 as a discipline that concerned itself with things that impair the human mind, such as depression, neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, and delusions. Several decades later, Sigmund Freud introduced his theory of the unconscious and how it influences human behavior. He believed that people who kept their traumatic experiences locked away in a "black box" of memory, which he later dubbed the subconscious, would never be able to fully enjoy their lives until those deep-seated memories were brought to light--that is, to consciousness. Through psychoanalysis--the term he used for his new method of working with patients--Dr. Freud was convinced that he could talk a patient back to the experiences of childhood. Exploring what occurred during that time would be immeasurably beneficial for bringing them peace-- or so he thought.

Dr. Freud's work laid the foundation for clinical psychology in America, where for years it was considered a subset of psychiatry. In 1920, Alfred Adler, MD, convened a meeting of his psychologist peers and suggested the profession would be more highly regarded if it fashioned itself after Western medical practices. Doctors were directed to diagnose and relieve patients' symptoms, and those patients who could function in society were considered "cured."