Choice Theory (4 page)

But you can do more than stop. You can replace forcing and retaliation with negotiation. Tell your son why you are not going to punish him anymore—that your relationship is more important to you than his schoolwork and that you want to do some enjoyable things with him the way you used to. He knows you want him to do his schoolwork; you have more than made your point. Hammering away at it is totally unproductive. If he and you can get back to being close, the chances of his doing schoolwork and everything else you want him to do are much more likely than if you continue to be estranged.

We must realize that if we coerce anyone too long, there may be a point of no return. We and they may never be close again.
Lacking this closeness, some children begin to give up on relationships and, eventually, embark on a lifelong destructive search for pleasure. To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem. These words define the difference between external control psychology and choice theory.

When I checked my thesaurus for the words in the previous paragraph, I discovered that more of them were external control than choice theory. Since our language is a mirror of our culture, this is strong evidence that we live in a world that is attuned more to destroying relationships than to preserving them.

Despite the fact that we have had little success in improving relationships, as a nation we are concerned enough about this misery to spend a lot of money trying to reduce it. In just one area, public education, billions of dollars continue to be spent to improve school success, with no improvement no matter how success is measured. President Bill Clinton devoted ten minutes of his 1997 State of the Union address to education. He had some good suggestions and hinted that more federal money would be provided if it were needed.

But if there is a truth about people that no one can dispute, it is that success in any endeavor is directly proportional to how well the people who are involved in it get along with each other. Although this truth is self-evident in marriages and families, it is equally true in schools and workplaces. Students who get along well with their teachers and with each other are almost always successful, but, overall, less than half the students do. And the proportion of students who do so is less than 10 percent in schools in poverty neighborhoods, urban or rural. In these almost nonfunctional schools, most of the money and effort is not only wasted, some of it is used to purchase disciplinary programs that are harmful to the relationships that students need to succeed in school.

We need a national effort to run schools in which teachers and students are happy. But we have to go far beyond the schools and build a society in which husbands, wives, family members, workers, and managers are much happier than they are now. I will risk being called naive and say that ultimately this book is about happiness. Of all that we attempt, this seemingly modest goal is the most difficult to achieve.

To be happy, I believe we need to be close to other happy people. Therefore, the fewer happy people there are, the less chance any of us has for happiness. The world is filled with lonely, frustrated, angry, unhappy people who are not able to get close to anyone who is happy. Their main social skills are complaining about, blaming, and criticizing others, hardly the way to get along well with anyone.

What I would like to introduce here and explain much further in later chapters is that unhappiness can lead people in two directions. The first unhappy group tries to find the way back to happiness, which I define as pleasurable relationships with happy people. The second unhappy group has given up on finding happiness with happy people; they no longer even try to have pleasurable relationships. But like all of us, they do not give up on trying to feel good. They continually search for pleasure without relationships and find much of it by abusing food, alcohol, drugs, and by engaging in violence and unloving sex. If we cannot create a society in which more people are happy, we will never come close to reducing these destructive and self-destructive choices.

Recently a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Agency said on public radio that there are a half million heroin and cocaine addicts in New York City. Even if this figure is exaggerated, if we added alcoholics, who are also addicts, the number would be staggering. Almost all these unhappy people have abandoned good relationships for nonhuman pleasure. They find quick, intense pleasure easily in drugs because this pleasure requires nothing more than getting the drug into their bloodstream. Except for finding the drug, other people are not required.

Some of the unhappy people I am talking about are not necessarily
poor or members of a minority. They are not necessarily involved with drugs, violence, or unloving sex. Many of them are responsible people who take care of themselves and do no harm to others. But because of the way they choose to behave, they are unable to sustain satisfying relationships with happy people, and as a result they are miserable. Misery is among the most democratic of all life experiences.

Because we don’t understand the difference between seeking happiness in relationships and seeking pleasure without relationships, we don’t understand why unhappy, pleasure-seeking people are so difficult to help. We assume that they are looking for the human relationships that helping professionals like psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and counselors ordinarily try to provide.

But with the second group of unhappy people, those who have given up on relationships and are looking for pleasure without them, this assumption is wrong. They may talk as if they are looking for relationships, but it’s only talk. They don’t make this attempt themselves, so the job of helping them is much harder than if they were still seeking happiness. Whether we like it or not, someone must reintroduce them to people who are seeking happiness.

Counselors and teachers are the most likely people to do so, but nonprofessional volunteers who know choice theory and have good people skills (such as successful retired people) are a source to be considered, which I discuss in the last part of this book. For alcoholics, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) offers relationships they desperately need, and it is successful with about half who attend the meetings. If there is a defining characteristic of AA, it is that the organization uses much more choice theory than external control.

All of us, professional and nonprofessional alike, will have more success with this pleasure-seeking group (no matter how they behave) if we understand that what they are lacking is relationships. But to relate successfully to them, we must be scrupulous about not trying to control them. External control, their use
of it and others’ use of it on them, has led them to where they are. What also seems to work is to teach them choice theory, which can explain what they are doing to themselves. Choice theory education could be a part of every correctional and drug rehabilitation program because it is in these programs that these people are found in large numbers. Teaching them in small groups can be very effective because it offers them the opportunity to build relationships, in a sense by experiencing the theory as they learn it. As I begin to explain in the next chapter, we need each other; that need is in our genes.

B
ECAUSE OUR PARENTS
, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and teachers—grandparents are often an exception—are all dedicated to trying to make us do things their way, we quickly learn to practice external control psychology. What we do not learn is the underlying motivation for all our behavior, for example, why long-term relationships are so much more important to us than to most other living creatures and why they are so hard to achieve. As I explain our motivation, which I believe is built into our genes, I will also explain that there are genetic reasons why we choose so many controlling behaviors.

When we are born, about all we can do is cry, fuss, suck, and thrash our arms and legs. This crying and fussing, an early expression of anger, is our way of trying to force our mothers to care for us, and most mothers choose to respond to these demands. Without this care, we would quickly die. This early crying, which is our attempt to satisfy a genetic need to survive, introduces us to
what will be a lifelong practice of trying to control others. But this is only an introduction; we are not so strongly driven by our genes that we cannot learn to take care of ourselves.

The following story shows not only that the child’s struggle for control is not genetic but that we can care for people we are not related to and don’t even know. On a plane from Los Angeles to Minneapolis, a child, who looked to be around sixteen months old, screamed for the whole three-hour trip. The mother was at her wits’ end. All of us felt for her and what she was trying to deal with. Some even tried to help, but the child was implacable. Fifteen minutes before landing, the mother shrieked, loudly enough to be heard all over the plane:
“This has been a flight from hell!”
The child was in pain; perhaps his ears were not adjusting to the change in pressure. His brain was programmed to interpret the pain as life threatening, and driven by his need to survive, he did what he could: He screamed. He knew what he was doing—he was trying to force his mother to help him. At that age, he knew no other choice.

But when these controlling behaviors stop working, as they will as the child grows older, the child can easily learn to take care of himself. Suppose the same child, ten years from now, still has some trouble with changing air pressure. On the same flight with his mother, he won’t scream for three hours. He will understand that his mother can do nothing, that he is not in danger of dying, and that screaming does no good. He may even be concerned that, if he screams, she may get angry and give him even less comfort. He will pay no attention to his genes and will bear his pain as best he can.

But something else was going on during that plane ride. Almost all the passengers felt warmly toward the mother, and we would have put ourselves out to help her if we could. This is only one small example of the obvious fact that most of us care for people we don’t know. We are also willing to pay taxes and donate to charity to care for strangers. This caring for those who are not related to us is a uniquely human behavior.

Since the long-term care of our children and lifelong concern
for members of our species takes a lot of time, energy, and resources that could be devoted to our own and our children’s survival, I believe that humans have additional genetic instructions, as strong as survival, that drive us to be closely involved with each other all our lives. In an affluent country such as the United States, where literal survival is not a major concern for most people, the vast majority of the misery we suffer or the happiness we enjoy is related to our ability to satisfy these nonsurvival instructions. To explain what I mean, I have to briefly discuss genetics.

When a sperm fertilizes an egg, each has contributed fifty thousand genes to this first cell. These hundred thousand genes carry the instructions for what each of us is to become. As the first cell divides and subdivides the billions of times it takes to create a person, a copy of these initial genes is duplicated in almost all the cells of the growing fetus. Every cell that carries a copy of these genes is instructed by one or more genes to become what is needed—skin, muscle, bone, bone marrow, heart, lungs, and brain.

Geneticists have discovered that these hundred thousand genes contain the total program that, when followed, causes each of us to become anatomically and physiologically what he or she is. If I have brown eyes and black hair, it is my genes that have provided these anatomical characteristics. If I have good digestion or musical talent, it is due to the physiology of my stomach, intestines, or brain, all derived from my genes. If I have cystic fibrosis, it is because some of the genes that deal with my lungs are not working anatomically or physiologically as they should.

Geneticists are continuing to try to discover the exact purpose of all hundred thousand genes—the human genome—but much is still unknown. They agree that thousands fewer than the hundred thousand genes are needed to produce a baby with a normal anatomy and physiology. This leaves a huge number of genes whose function is yet to be discovered. I believe that some of these unknown genes provide a basis for our psychology—how we behave and what we choose to do with our lives.

Therefore, besides survival, which depends a lot on our physiology, I believe we are genetically programmed to try to satisfy four psychological needs: love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun. All our behavior is always our best choice, at the time we make the choice, to satisfy one or more of these needs. All living organisms, plant and animal, have survival, including the ability to reproduce, programmed into their genes. Higher-order animals share some of our other needs. For example, dogs can love and can even be jealous, but they do not love with the intensity, complexity, and variety of human beings.

More than those of any other higher-order animals, our genes motivate us far beyond survival. Our need for love and belonging drives us not only to care for others to the point of caring for others we do not know, but also to seek satisfying relationships with special people, such as mates, family members, and friends all our lives. Other genes drive us to strive for power, freedom, and fun. Some large-brained animals, such as whales, porpoises, and primates, seem to have similar needs, but not enough is known to compare their needs with ours. My guess is that there are many similarities. Even though we do not know what these needs are and may never know them to the extent I explain in this chapter, we start to struggle to satisfy them as soon as we draw our first breath. We continue this struggle all our lives.