Choice Theory (10 page)

“Todd, what I need is the story. Tell me, what’s on your mind?”

“I’m depressed. I feel terrible. I’m so upset I haven’t been able to go to work for a week.”

“Are you blaming anyone for how you feel?”

At first I look for the relationship that’s gone awry. Then I look to see if he does the usual external control thing and blames someone else—in this case his wife—for how he feels. This question will gain his attention and get the therapy started.

“It’s my wife. She left me. About a week ago I came home from work. She’s usually there, but she wasn’t then. I didn’t think about it too much, sometimes she has things to do. But an hour went by and she didn’t call, and then I noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

“A note from her, held by a magnet to the fridge, two words,
So Long.
And she was gone. I went to the bedroom; her stuff was all cleaned out. All her clothes, everything. I was devastated. I mean, I love her. How could she do that to me?”

“I can’t tell you how; only
she
knows that. But I wonder why? That’s a big move. She must have been really upset about something. What do you think it was?”

“It’s hard to say. It’s really hard to say.”

When a client says, “It’s hard to say,” he usually knows what’s really going on but doesn’t want to talk about it. He may have to admit that he had more to do with what happened than is comfortable. I just break through that reluctance by acting as if it wasn’t there.

“Well, say it anyway. This is the place to say hard-to-say things.”

“Well, I don’t really think I am, but she had been saying I was too domineering—that I called all the shots. But the funny thing was I thought she liked it. She’s a lot younger, ten years, twenty-three years old. I know more than she does. I thought she liked it when I kind of always took over.”

“Do you want her back?

“My God, of course, I want her back. Can you help me get her back?”

I didn’t answer that question. Maybe we need to talk more to try to find out whether her coming back is the best thing for him or even for her. By not answering, I don’t say I can or can’t. But my next question, asking what he has been doing, implies that maybe he could do something better than he has until now. In my experience, that’s how most clients interpret it.

“What have you been doing since she left?”

“Nothing really. I’ve been so upset. I’ve just been sitting home.
Some of the guys from the office were worried about me. They came to see me, and one of them gave me your number. I just can’t seem to get myself going. I’ve heard about depression, but I never realized what it was. I’m kind of paralyzed.”

I don’t respond to that remark because I can’t offer him anything that would directly help him feel better. While I listen to him telling me how he feels, I don’t talk much about feelings. He’s here and he’s talking, that’s doing something. I focus on what he’s been choosing to do. I’ve got to get him thinking about choice and choosing, and this is a good place to start.

“Since she left, I gather that you’ve chosen to sit home and not go to work, is that right?”

“Doctor, you don’t understand. I haven’t chosen to sit home.”

“You’re right, I don’t understand. How can you say you haven’t chosen to sit home? Has anyone been making you sit home?”

“But I’ve been upset, too upset to go to work. I haven’t chosen anything. I’ve been upset since I read that note.”

“You chose to come to see me today.”

“But I need help; that’s why I came here.”

“Have you tried to contact her? Have you heard from her?”

“I’ve been hoping she’d call. I thought about trying to find her, but then I thought we might get into a fight and that would make things worse. For a little while I was real angry, and then, when it sank in that she was gone, I got real sad. Doctor, I love her and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be domineering; it’s just the way I am. My dad’s like that, but it doesn’t seem to bother my mother. Maybe I learned it from him.”

“Does it matter whom you learned it from?”

“I thought psychiatrists were interested in stuff like that.”

“I’m not interested in your parents. You’re grown up. I’m interested in what you’re going to choose to do now. I’m interested in what you want. And I’m interested in helping you choose some way to get it if I can. We have to deal with the fact that she left. Do you think she’s gone for good?”

“That’s just it. I’ve been racking my brain. I don’t know. If she
was thinking of coming back, I think she might have left some of her stuff. It’s all gone, clean. It all happened so suddenly; I just don’t know what to do.”

“Suppose you could talk to her right now. What would you tell her?”

“I’d tell her I’m so sorry. I’d tell her I didn’t know what I was doing. I took her so much for granted. I was such a blind asshole. I thought she loved the way I stuck my nose into everything. It was my criticism. I’d never admit she could do anything right. Always some little thing was wrong. She called me Mr. Perfect, not in a mean way or anything like that, and I kind of thought it was a compliment. We never fought. We made love. About a week before she left, she said that things weren’t working out the way she wanted. She asked if I felt that way. I said that the only thing that bothered me was that she didn’t seem real happy. I told her she should try to be happier. She said she had been trying, but it didn’t seem she could do it. She asked me if I thought there was anything I could do. I said that I’d always done everything I could do. I didn’t see how I could do any more. She said she’d guessed I’d say that. After that she seemed a little happier, and I thought things were better. That was why I was so surprised when she left.”

“You still think you couldn’t have done anything differently?”

“Oh no, no. Now I see I could have done a lot of things differently. But how do I tell her that? She’s gone. I’ve waited for her to call, but she hasn’t.”

“Don’t you want to tell her that you miss her, that you love her, that you’re willing to change?

“Of course, but how? Even if I knew where she was, I’m afraid I’d screw things up worse. I’m not the kind of guy who can admit that it was my fault. The first thing I’d do is blame her. I’m depressed but I’m still a little angry. She shouldn’t have left like she did.”

“Can I make a suggestion? It’s worked for some people I’ve seen.”

“My God, yes, what?”

“Write her a letter. Tell her how much you love her and miss her. And tell her you’ll change. I don’t want to tell you what to write. It has to be you, not me. It has to come from your heart or don’t bother. But you might tell her you’re seeing me for help and ask her if she’d come in and see me together with you. This way she wouldn’t have to be alone with you, and she might be willing to do this much.”

“I could do that. It’s a good idea.”

“This way there’s no pressure; she can read it and think. She won’t have you hanging on the phone; that would be too much pressure. Write the letter and bring it in to me. We’ll look it over together before you send it. Is that OK?”

“That’s good, real good. I like that idea. I’ll be glad to bring it in. That’s good.”

“Tell me, how do you feel now, I mean right now?”

“I feel better, a lot better.”

“Why do you feel better?”

“Because I’ve got something to do. I don’t feel as helpless. It may work; it just might.”

Todd went home and must have really worked on the letter. It was a masterpiece. If he was still in his wife’s quality world, it might work. I thought he had a chance, but her cleaning all her stuff out like that didn’t look good. His wife read the letter and called him. She wouldn’t talk much, and he didn’t pressure her, which was smart. She said she’d come to see me with him, and he made the appointment.

When she came, she didn’t say much. He made a long emotional pitch for her to try it again.

She listened carefully but then she shook her head,
no,
and said, “Look, we’d been married four years, I owed you this much. You’re not a bad guy; you’re just not for me. If you didn’t know what I was upset about, that really tells me something about you. I’m only twenty-three; I can’t take a chance with you. You sound great now, but it’s only because I put pressure on you. It’s a game for you, and you hate to lose. It’s not a game for me. It’s over. I don’t want anything that’s not my fair share. No alimony, nothing—just
my part of what we saved while we were married. I can make it OK by myself.”

She thanked me and left.

Todd was quiet for a long time and then said, “I can’t live without her.”

“That’s a pretty dramatic statement. Are you planning on killing yourself?”

If I had any worry that he was going to commit suicide, I wouldn’t have said it, but he was not the kind of person who was suicidal. He had too much going for him in other parts of his life. What I said seemed to defuse the tension.

“No, I’m not going to kill myself, but I’m going to feel awful for a long time; I really loved her.”

“Take as long as you want. Unhappy people are how I make my living.”

“You don’t take all this very seriously do you?”

“Not very, because I know the rest of the story, and it’s OK.”

“What do you mean you know the rest of the story?”

“I mean that in a short time you are going to find someone else. And if you treat her like you promised your wife you were going to treat her a few minutes ago, you’ll be very happy. That’s how it’s going to end.”

And that’s how it ended. It took a few months for him to get his wife out of his quality world. He was already out of hers. He did find someone and even brought her in to see me. By that time I was so much in his quality world that he wanted me to meet her and approve of her. No one can predict how well a marriage is going to go, so there was no reason for me to do anything but be supportive. He had told the new woman all about me. He had told her the truth about his failed marriage, that he was too domineering. This woman was his age and seemed quite realistic about him.

Since he had told her the truth, I asked her, “What do you think, how has he been with you? Is he taking over your life?”

“No, quite the contrary; he’s been great.”

“But maybe he was great with her in the beginning. That happens, you know.”

He chimed in, “No, it’s not going to happen that way.”

And it didn’t. She was cautious, but in about a year they got married. I saw him a few times during that year. Things were OK. The interesting part is that his first wife called me in about a year to tell me that she was happy, too, that she had met the kind of man she wanted.

Reality therapy now includes explaining choice theory to my clients. While Todd was getting over the loss of his wife and getting started with the new woman, I had a chance to teach him the choice theory that explained what had happened, and he told me that he taught his new girlfriend all I taught him. It seemed to help them both get off to a good start. I especially taught him about his choice to depress. I taught him what to do if a situation arose in which he again was beginning to choose to depress or any other of the common varieties of unhappiness that human beings ordinarily choose.

As I stated, when he came in, I knew he was involved in, or had just lost, a long-term unhappy relationship because that’s almost the only reason a client comes to a psychiatrist’s office. As I explained, I was almost certain it was with his wife. What is more startling to most people is my claim that he was choosing the misery he was complaining about. This is a radical departure from what most people believe, especially from what every client I have ever seen believed when he or she sought psychological help for the painful symptoms he or she identified as
depression.
When we depress, we believe we are the victims of a feeling over which we have no control. When we depress strongly for a long time, this choice is usually called clinical depression and is considered a mental illness.

A widespread current belief is that mental illness is caused by an imbalance in brain chemicals. To correct this imbalance and to feel better, patients need brain medication, and for depression, most psychiatrists immediately think of a drug like Prozac. I did not think of using any drugs to treat Todd. I did not believe that he was suffering from mental illness. I believed that he chose to depress to deal with the situation and that I would be
able to help him make some better choices with no need for medication.

Later, when I was teaching him choice theory, I began by teaching him that all he, or anyone else, can do from birth to death is behave. Examine your own life and try to identify a time when you were not behaving. All your significant conscious behaviors, that is, all behaviors that have anything directly to do with satisfying basic needs, are chosen.

Not only are we always behaving, but we are also always trying to choose to behave in a way that gives us
the most effective control over our lives.
In terms of choice theory, having effective control means being able to behave in a way that reasonably satisfies the pictures in our quality worlds. When he came to see me, Todd had the picture of himself, still with his wife, in his quality world. He knew nothing about choosing his misery or about his quality world; what he knew was that he felt bad and wanted to feel better.

After he wrote the letter instead of sitting around feeling miserable, he felt better because now he was doing something that might help him solve his problem. In other words, he felt better because he believed he was doing something to regain more effective control over his life. Writing a loving letter to a woman who has left you is a much more effective way to behave than just sitting around choosing to be miserable, and he did feel better. Later, when he changed what he wanted from a picture of his wife in his quality world to his new fiancé in that world, he got almost total relief.
Again, these are our choices when we want to stop choosing a painful behavior like depressing: (1) change what we want, (2) change what we are doing, or (3) change both.

It was clear in the therapy that Todd had the ability to make better choices even when he was strongly choosing to depress. If he was able to make these better choices and to stop depressing, then it is also fair to say he was not suffering from any form of what is commonly called mental illness. There was nothing wrong with his brain that prevented him from being able to make these choices. As I explain later, choosing to depress, no matter how
strongly or how long in duration, is not a mental illness. Like all our behavior, it is a choice. It is not as direct a choice as walking and talking, but when you understand the concept of total behavior, you will see that all our feelings, both pleasurable and painful, are indirectly chosen. But an indirect choice is still a choice.