Choice Theory (13 page)

He chose to depress for the same reason that millions of people all over the world choose to depress: An important relationship was not working the way he wanted it to work. Such people who choose to depress are not mentally ill; their brain chemistry is not abnormal. It is changed from what it is when they are happy, but that change is perfectly normal for the total behavior, depressing, they are choosing. As I stated, we all learned to depress when we were very young, and we have been using it, when needed, all our
lives. It is only when the pain of this choice gets severe and long lasting that we begin to recognize that something is seriously wrong.

But few of us are prepared to recognize that something is seriously wrong with our lives. It is more comfortable to blame our discomfort on a mental illness or on abnormal brain chemistry. There is not one person reading this book who is not able to depress strongly when his or her life is out of effective control. To see why our brain chemistry is normal for the depressing we are choosing, consider the following scenario.

I am sitting on my cool front porch on a hot summer day. My neighbor, who is a consistent five-mile-a-day runner, comes up the street and heads for my house. I tell him to sit on the steps, which are in the shade. Without his asking, I get him a tall glass of water, and we chat. I decide to teach him a little choice theory. He knows what I do, so I’m sure he’ll humor me.

I ask, “Why are you perspiring so much?” He looks at me as if he doesn’t understand, and I say, “I’m serious, tell me.” He says, “I was running. No one can run on a day like this and not perspire; running and sweating go together.” I say, “I agree that they go together, but why do you say that the running caused the sweating? Why don’t you say that sweating caused the running?” He, not knowing about total behavior, looks at me as if I’m crazy and says, “I don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

And he doesn’t. We are so used to external control thinking, that when things go together, as do running and sweating, we often say one caused the other. But using the same logic, it makes just as much sense to say that sweating causes running. In actual fact, while they do go together,
neither causes the other.
What causes both the running (the acting component) and the sweating (the normal physiology associated with running) is his choice to run. If he had not chosen to run, he would not be perspiring.

When Todd chose to depress, for one or more of the three reasons I explained, he chose a total behavior for which depressing is the normal feeling component. Whatever brain chemistry is associated with that feeling is also normal. The brain chemistry no
more causes his depressing than sweating causes running. It is the
choice
to depress or to run that results in both. That is why I call what I am explaining choice theory. When the neurophysiologists show that the brain activity of a depressing person is different from that of a happy person or from the same person when he or she is happy, they should expect what they find. But in this instance—choosing to depress—not only is the physiology different, but the thinking, acting, and feelings are different, too. In the case of the man who was choosing to run, a much more normal behavior than depressing, only the acting and the physiology are sure to be changed by this choice. What he was thinking and feeling may not have had much connection with his choice to run. But many runners report that they think more clearly and feel happier after they run.

Research that shows that drugs, such as Prozac, reduce the depressing activity in the brain also should be expected. Depressing lowers the brain chemical serotonin; Prozac raises it. A lower level of serotonin is the normal physiology when we choose to depress, and raising the level helps many people who choose to depress feel better. Alcohol, nicotine, and other addicting drugs also help most people feel better because each in its own chemical way injects pleasure directly into the brain. Prozac does the same. And if it gives the user, who has a chronic unsatisfying relationship, a lot of pleasure, it can also be addicting.

Some people who take Prozac say they would not think of living their lives without it. For them, it may be a lot like alcohol. They look forward to their daily Prozac as social drinkers look forward to a few drinks or some wine each day. They are no more addicted to Prozac than social drinkers are addicted to alcohol. But like social drinkers, they would miss it terribly if it was taken away. But some social drinkers move on to become alcoholics. The lonelier they are, the more danger there is of their becoming alcoholics. There may even be more danger of becoming addicted to Prozac because it is prescribed only for people whose lives are known to be out of effective control.

Prozac could not have brought a new relationship into Todd’s
life. It might have helped him to feel better so that he was more able to look for someone else, but it would no more solve his loneliness than would alcohol or marijuana. We would be much better off getting rid of the psychology that is causing so much misery than looking for chemicals that make us feel better but do nothing to solve our loneliness. If Todd refused to take his wife out of his quality world and all he was offered was Prozac, he might need it for the rest of his life, and even then, it might not be effective. Drugs provide pleasure; they cannot provide happiness. For happiness, you need people.

Drugs like Prozac are often used along with psychotherapy. The rationale is that if people feel better through the chemical boost they get from the drug, they will be able to profit more from the psychotherapy. Most reality therapy counselors who focus quickly on faulty relationships have not found the use of Prozac to be necessary, and in all my years of practice, I have never used brain drugs. Good psychotherapy precludes the need for these drugs. If more people would learn and use choice theory, the use of these drugs could diminish. All the usual psychiatric diagnoses, excluding observable brain damage, are chosen for one or more of the same three reasons that people choose to depress.

Choice theory does not come easily to us in a culture that is external control to the core. But my experience with many people, including my wife and myself, who have learned enough choice theory to use it in their lives, has been positive. The fact that the use of choice theory improves marital, family, school, and work relationships instead of destroying them is what makes the difference. Besides, we all have proof of its effectiveness because it is all we use with our good friends.

B
Y THE TIME
I was four years old, I realized that my parents were almost totally incompatible. There had been sporadic violence in which my father broke things, and once I saw him hit my mother. Whenever my parents started to argue, I was frightened. By the time I was six, the violence stopped, and they seemed to get along better. Whatever difficulty they had with each other, they were always loving toward me. Much later I realized that my mother had won by the simple tactic of giving my father the message that he would have to kill her if he didn’t want to let her rule the marriage. He was a gentle man, and I was aware of how mercilessly she prodded him. As young as I was, I could see that he erupted only when he had been pushed beyond his ability to endure.

If the Olympics had an event in controlling, my mother could have gone for the gold medal. My father was totally choice theory. Never in the more than sixty years that I knew him did I ever see him try to control another person except when he was being goaded by my mother. And even then, his heart was not in it. My parents had been married almost seventy years when my father died; in those days most people stayed married. To illustrate what my father had to contend with, I offer the following example.

When I was twenty-four and married, just before I started medical school, my father called me and said he wanted to come to our apartment to talk with me privately. He had never done so before, and it seemed clear from his tone of voice that it was a personal matter. He was at his wits’ end; my mother had done something that was typical for her, but this time she had carried it to such an extreme that he was unable to cope with it by himself. He came to ask me what to do.

For a long time, my mother had been pushing my father to sell his business and retire so they could move to Florida, where they had spent part of each winter for many years. She hated the cold and damp of Cleveland. My father was only fifty-six years old, but he had worked since he was thirteen and could retire. While he was far from sure that he wanted to give up the freedom his business afforded him and the few Cleveland friends my mother allowed him to have, he told me he had sold the business and was ready to sell the house and move to Florida. Now that I was going to medical school and would never go into his business, he felt that there was no reason for him to work anymore. All things considered, he agreed she was right, and he was looking forward to the move.

My mother had seemed pleased with all his preparations and things were going well, but the day he told her that the business was sold and that he was putting their house up for sale, she said to him: “
Why have you done all this? What gave you the idea that I wanted to leave Cleveland and move to Florida? I don’t want to leave this house and all my friends.”
She had no friends in Cleveland and acted as if it was all his idea, that he had not consulted
her and that she had no intention of leaving. He asked me what he should do. I thought a long time and told him, “Pop, you’re only fifty-six. You may live another thirty healthy years (which he did). Divorce her. She’s never going to change.”

He was not prepared for this advice, but if I had to do it over again, I’d say the same thing. When it registered on her that the business had been sold, that there was no turning back, she did go to Florida. She had what she had been pushing him to do for years. It must have occurred to her that she had nothing more to fight about. He had disarmed her by surrendering unconditionally. But after that initial outburst, she did as she always did. She shut up and acted as if she had never said anything. If he had asked her why she said what she did, she would have denied saying it and responded, “I don’t know where you got the idea that I didn’t want to go to Florida.”

But, of course, he let it drop. My sister moved to Florida a few years later with her family, and the last thirty years of my father’s life were much better than any of us, including him, expected. There is a lot more to this story, but I’ve made my point. My parents were incompatible from day one; it was her way or no way. There is such a thing as personality, and hers was much different from his.

I believe that the way we usually relate to other people, best called our personalities, is, in part, written into our genes. I don’t mean that anything specific, such as my mother’s fondness for warm weather or that she was an omnivorous reader, was genetic, but her huge need to control everyone she came into contact with was. What gives us our different personalities is that our five basic, or genetic, needs differ in strength. Some of us have a high need for love and belonging. Others have a high need for power or freedom.

The strength of each need is fixed at birth and does not change. Autistic children have a low to almost nonexistent need for love and belonging. This means they have hardly any desire for human interaction and none for the close interaction that most of us want so much. Given enough human contact, some may learn to interact
with others a little but never to the extent to which a normal child or adult wants. This lack of the desire to belong, much less love, was illustrated clearly in the movie,
Rain Man,
starring Dustin Hoffman. On the high end of love and belonging would be the kind, unselfish people who care for and give a lot of love to severely handicapped children and adults, those who, compared to what they are given, can give little or nothing back.

The differences in people’s personalities, even between brothers’ and sisters’, is striking. My mother and father were hardly unique; many husbands and wives have very different personalities. Some are outgoing, gregarious, optimistic, liberal, and fun loving. Others are sober, quiet, conservative, pessimistic, controlling, and gloomy. The variations are endless. Our personalities are created out of a genetic need-strength profile that is unique for each of us. Some of these profiles, like those of my parents, are highly incompatible; some, such as mine and my wife’s, are highly compatible.

The personalities of some couples are different but complementary; that is, the differences enhance the relationships. But, in my observation, the best marriages are ones in which the husbands and wives have similar personalities. If my father had married a woman who matched his high need for love and low need for power, he would have been a much happier man. My mother, who had an off-the-scale need for power, could love intensely but only if she owned the person; she was not able to separate love from power. This is another illustration of how individual our need strengths are.

What I explain in this chapter is that finding a compatible mate and getting along with a less-than-compatible mate need not be luck. Figuring out your need-strength profile and the profiles of those you want to get along with may not be totally accurate, but it will give you a good working understanding of how you and others deal with people. Not only should you not marry a person with a markedly different personality, but you should not go into any endeavor with anyone whom you may have difficulty getting along with.

Most of the people who are reading this book are already married, and some of you may be wondering, if we are not compatible, is it too late for us? The answer depends on how incompatible you are. In most instances, your need strengths are not so different from your partner’s that working things out is impossible. If you are willing to give up trying to control each other and to begin using choice theory in the relationship, you can usually negotiate these differences. But to negotiate accurately, you need to become aware of what these differences are, that is, which need or needs are in conflict.