Choice Theory

T
HIS BOOK IS ABOUT
how important good relationships are to a successful life. In it I state that, if we are not sick, poverty stricken, or suffering the ravages of old age, the major human problems we struggle with—violence, crime, child abuse, spousal abuse, alcohol and drug addiction, the proliferation of premature and unloving sex and emotional distress—are caused by unsatisfying relationships. This whole book is both an explanation of why this happens and what to do to get along better with one another.

I focus on four major relationships, all of which are in obvious need of improvement. These are husband-wife, parent-child, teacher-student, and manager-worker. I make the claim that if we do not improve these relationships, we will have little success in reducing any of the problems in the previous paragraph.

For me to make such a broad claim may be considered presumptuous but, just before this book went to press, I was pleased to find recent research that strongly supports my thesis that adolescents, especially, need good parent-child and teacher-student relationships if they are to avoid self-destructive behaviors.

The September 10, 1997, issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
includes an article entitled “Protecting Adolescents from Harm,” which describes the first findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health. The most significant finding was: “Parent-family connectedness and perceived school connectedness were protective of every health risk behavior measure except history of pregnancy.”

The research does not as yet go into how to improve these two important relationships, but it does show clearly that this is the direction in which to go—and that is the subject of this book. I would suggest that the researchers also focus on how husbands and wives can achieve more marital satisfaction, which I think is a vital factor in achieving child-parent connectedness. Years ago, a priest I knew in Chicago, by the name of Father John, said something I have never forgotten: “The best thing parents can do for their children is love each other.”

As you read this book you will note that I do not use the word “connectedness.” Although I use “satisfying relationships,” I can see no difference in the terms. I encourage you to read the
JAMA
article if you want to see for yourself how strongly it supports what I say in this book.

S
UPPOSE YOU COULD
ask all the people in the world who are not hungry, sick, or poor, people who seem to have a lot to live for, to give you an honest answer to the question, “How are you?” Millions would say, “I’m miserable.” If asked why, almost all of them would blame someone else for their misery—lovers, wives, husbands, exes, children, parents, teachers, students, or people they work with. There is hardly a person alive who hasn’t been heard saying, “You’re driving me crazy…. That really upsets me…. Don’t you have any consideration for how I feel? … You make me so mad, I can’t see straight.” It never crosses their minds that they are choosing the misery they are complaining about.

Choice theory explains that, for all practical purposes, we choose
everything
we do, including the misery we feel. Other people can neither make us miserable nor make us happy. All we can get from them or give to them is information. But by itself, information cannot make us do or feel anything. It goes into our brains,
where we process it and then decide what to do. As I explain in great detail in this book, we choose all our actions and thoughts and, indirectly, almost all our feelings and much of our physiology. As bad as you may feel, much of what goes on in your body when you are in pain or sick is the indirect result of the actions and thoughts you choose or have chosen every day of your life.

I also show how and why we make these painful, even crazy, choices and how we can make better ones. Choice theory teaches that we are much more in control of our lives than we realize. Unfortunately, much of that control is not effective. For example, you choose to feel upset with your child, then you choose to yell and threaten, and things get worse, not better. Taking more effective control means making better choices as you relate to your children and everyone else. You can learn through choice theory how people actually function: how we combine what is written in our genes with what we learn as we live our lives.

The best way to learn choice theory is to focus on why we choose the common miseries that we believe just happen to us. When we are depressed, we believe that we have no control over our suffering, that we are victims of an imbalance in our neurochemistry and hence that we need brain drugs, such as Prozac, to get our chemistry back into balance. Little of this belief is true. We have a lot of control over our suffering. We are rarely the victims of what happened to us in the past, and, as will be explained in chapter 4, our brain chemistry is normal for what we are choosing to do. Brain drugs may make us feel better, but they do not solve the problems that led us to choose to feel miserable.

The seeds of almost all our unhappiness are planted early in our lives when we begin to encounter people who have discovered not only what is right for them—but also, unfortunately, what is right for us. Armed with this discovery and following a destructive tradition that has dominated our thinking for thousands of years, these people feel obligated to try to force us to do what
they know
is right. Our choice of how we resist that force is, by far, the greatest source of human misery. Choice theory challenges this ancient I-know-what’s-right-for-you tradition. This entire
book is an attempt to answer the all-important question that almost all of us continually ask ourselves when we are unhappy: How can I figure out how to be free to live my life the way I want to live it and still get along well with the people I need?

From the perspective of forty years of psychiatric practice, it has become apparent to me that all unhappy people have the same problem: They are unable to get along well with the people they want to get along well with. I have had many counseling successes, but I keep hearing my mentor, Dr. G. L. Harrington, the most skillful psychiatrist I’ve ever known, saying, “If all the professionals in our field suddenly disappeared, the world would hardly note their absence.” He was not disparaging what we do. He was saying that if the goal of psychiatrists is to reduce the misery rampant in the world and to help human beings get along with each other, their efforts have hardly scratched the surface.

To begin to approach that goal, we need a
new psychology
that can help us get closer to each other than most of us are able to do now. The psychology must be easy to understand, so it can be taught to anyone who wants to learn it. And it must be easy to use once we understand it. Our present psychology has failed. We do not know how to get along with each other any better than we ever have. Indeed, the psychology we have embraced tends to drive us apart. In the area of marriage alone, it is clear that the use of this traditional psychology has failed.

I call this universal psychology that destroys relationships because it destroys personal freedom external control psychology. The control can be as slight as a disapproving glance or as forceful as a threat to our lives. But whatever it is, it is an attempt to force us to do what we may not want to do. We end up believing that other people can actually make us feel the way we feel or do the things we do. This belief takes away the personal freedom we all need and want.

The simple operational premise of the external control psychology the world uses is: Punish the people who are doing wrong, so they will do what we say is right; then reward them, so they keep doing what we want them to do. This premise dominates
the thinking of most people on earth. What makes this psychology so prevalent is that those who have the power—agents of government, parents, teachers, business managers, and religious leaders, who also define what’s right or wrong—totally support it. And the people they control, having so little control over their own lives, find some security in accepting the control of these powerful people. It is unfortunate that almost no one is aware that this controlling, coercing, or forcing psychology is creating the widespread misery that, as much as we have tried, we have not yet been able to reduce.

This misery continues unabated not because we have thought it over and decided that controlling others is best. It continues because when people do not do what we want them to do, coercion and control are all we think of using. It is the psychology of our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, of our teachers and leaders, of almost all the people we know or know about. Coercion, to try to get our way, has been with us so long that it is considered common sense, and we use it without thinking about it. We neither care where it came from nor question its validity.