Choice Theory (8 page)

The more the teachers and the principal tried to force them, with threats and punishment, to do schoolwork, the more they resisted and the more they focused on what was in their quality worlds. I discuss all the things we did in that school to turn it around in chapter 10, on education. But from this much, you can see what we had to do if our goal was to convince the students to do schoolwork. We had to persuade them to put us, and through us, schoolwork, into their quality worlds. We had to treat them well no matter how they treated us. Using choice theory, we were able to build relationships with them, and through these relationships, they began to picture themselves satisfying their needs in school with people. Happiness slowly began to replace pleasure as they began to put the staff and each other into their quality worlds.

As long as the people we want to help have only antisocial pleasure pictures in their quality worlds, all we can do that has any chance of succeeding is to build relationships with them and get into their quality worlds. Punishment, which is used mainly with students, especially with those who come from poor homes and don’t like school, does just the opposite. The more we do what most people believe is right—punish—the further we get from what we want. It is a wonder that our schools are doing as well as they are, considering how much we punish and how many students do not have teachers and schoolwork in their quality worlds.

We all need happy, supportive people in our quality worlds; nothing less will do. It is the job of parents, teachers, and employers to be such people. Too many teachers and bosses do not realize how much they are needed just to be warm, friendly, and supportive to those they teach and manage. It doesn’t take much; a few minutes of attention a day works wonders. But many who teach and manage don’t understand that given care and support, the students and workers who are doing so little now would be willing and eager to work hard.

Without sufficiently supportive people in our quality worlds, we often follow an extreme version of the fourth variation of un-happiness described in chapter 1: We try to force ourselves to do what goes against a basic need or needs. Anorexics are such people. No matter how much they are cared for, they are not satisfied. They starve themselves, ostensibly to be thin but actually to control the people who care about them. Since we all see the world not as it is but the way we want to see it, they may interpret parental care as control. But however they rationalize what they are choosing to do, research has found that they put a picture of themselves in their quality worlds as being thinner than whatever they see in the mirror.

If these young women hold rigidly to this unsatisfiable, changing picture, they will starve themselves to death. In practice, only a very few do, but it’s hard to figure out who will and who won’t starve herself to death. Why they starve themselves is not an easy question to answer. My guess is that they discover that doing so gives them an unexpected feeling of power over the people they believe are not treating them the way they want to be treated.

When a powerless adolescent suddenly has control over her entire family, it feels so good that she can’t start eating. She literally becomes addicted to her internal endorphins and fails to feel the pain of hunger. If she ate, she would lose all this power and the pleasure that goes with it. Later, when I discuss child rearing, I explain how to raise a daughter so she gains reasonable power at an early age and has no need for the abnormal power that an anorexic suddenly gains and has no idea how to handle. The key in rearing all children is to surround them with loving, supportive people in their quality worlds who help them to experience both freedom and power responsibly. Anorexia is a graphic example of the strength of the quality world. The wrong pictures can ruin lives.

To get along better than we do now with another person, we need to try to learn what is in that person’s quality world and then try to support it. Doing so will bring us closer to that person than anything else we can do. But it is not easy to find out what is
in another person’s quality world, and it is not always easy to support what we find out, as the example of anorexia shows so clearly. No parent can or should support that crazy picture. Tell the truth: “I care about you, but I can’t support all you want to do.” The treatment of anorexia is difficult even if you know what is going on and beyond what I can explain in this book.

Most of us are reluctant to share what is in our quality worlds even with people we are close to because we are afraid they may not support what we want—that they may criticize or ridicule what is so important to us. We know we would choose to feel hurt, angry, or both if they did. For example, a man wants to write a novel but he’s afraid to tell his wife. He fears being told, “That’s ridiculous. What do you know about writing a novel?” Fearing this put-down, he doesn’t tell her. This way he can’t get hurt. But since he can’t share it with her, he may grow resentful. The thing is, she hasn’t actually said anything; it’s all in his head. She might be quite supportive if he told her. It’s his fear that has led to his discomfort. Still, in too many marriages, fear and resentment are common and start with the early criticism of what may be in the other’s quality world. The best thing to do if you know choice theory is to explain the quality world and what you are afraid of to your partner. This is the way to get trust in a marriage when more is needed. If you don’t, your resentment may lead you to criticize and blame your partner, which further reduces the trust.

It is common for people, following the third belief of external control psychology—that it is your right to make people do what you want them to do—to put a picture in their quality worlds that goes beyond relating, to actually owning someone. If you own that person, it is right to make him or her do what you want. Any ownership picture is a relationship disaster in the making. It almost always sets us up for disappointment, anger, and conflict. Ownership pictures may lead to murder; prisons have thousands upon thousands of men and some women who killed their spouses who would not be owned. Robert Browning’s tragic
poem,
My Last Duchess,
portrays so clearly how ownership can turn to disaster when the owner is jealous.

It is especially hard for powerful people to be tolerant of the quality worlds of people who are less powerful. If everyone could learn that what is right for me does not make it right for anyone else, the world would be a much happier place. Choice theory teaches that my quality world is the core of my life; it is not the core of anyone else’s life. This is a difficult lesson for external control people to learn.

Most of us have two pictures of ourselves in our quality worlds. One is a slightly idealized picture, the other an extremely idealized picture. Because of these two pictures, when you look in the mirror, you first compare what you see with the extremely idealized picture and are not satisfied. You may think about it for a moment; then you quickly realize that matching that picture is impossible, since you may never have looked as good as that generous picture. After a moment of displeasure, you realize it’s not worth the effort and stop thinking that way. For most of us, the extremely idealized picture is a fantasy picture. It’s there and we enjoy it, but we don’t take it seriously. We settle for the slightly idealized picture that we have a reasonable chance of achieving. I picture myself being a better tennis player but nowhere close to a professional.

But just as we can choose to put people into our quality worlds and picture them anyway we want them to be, we can also choose to take them out. Parents and children are generally an exception, which I explain in chapter 9. Even though it is unusual, we can actually remove every single person from our quality worlds except ourselves. No matter how we picture ourselves, we can’t take ourselves out. That picture may be totally unrealistic, but as long as it is what we want, we have to keep trying to be like it. We can’t escape from this self-imposed task by taking ourselves out of our own quality worlds. To take ourselves out would mean we don’t exist. There is, however, one thing we can do if we refuse to change the picture of ourselves being OK all alone. We can kill ourselves, and this may be one
motivation for suicide: I’d rather be dead than continue to struggle trying to feel good with the way I choose to be—all alone. This is different from the usual motivation for suicide: I’d rather be dead than struggle for a relationship I can’t have.

Because it feels so good to be with them or we believe it will feel so good to be with them, we may get involved destructively with some of the people we choose to put into our quality worlds. It is sometimes dangerous to our health or happiness to put certain people into our quality worlds, and we often know it when we put them in. And to be fair, it may be destructive to them to put us in. We may take drugs, commit crimes, abuse others, cheat, lie, or commit suicide with the someone who is in our quality worlds.

Therefore, whether we like it or not, or anyone else likes it or not, the people we put into our quality worlds are neither good nor bad in the sense that the real world defines good and bad. What the real world thinks may have a lot to do with putting them in or taking them out, but it is what
we think
that counts. They are there because we believe, or at least hope, that it will feel very good to be with them and bad to be without them.

It’s the same with things. Almost all the
things
we choose to put into our quality worlds are attached in some way to people because this attachment provides much of the good feeling we all want. There is less satisfaction in owning a fine house, a powerful car, or a great painting if no one enjoys it with us. The things we picture in our quality worlds may not be anything we want to own. They may be pictures of a beautiful sunset, a gorgeous public garden, a full moon, or the sighting of a huge blue whale, but all these pictures are most enjoyable when we share them with people we care about.

What we most
believe in
is our religion, our political convictions, and our way of life. Music, art, sports, almost anything can be part of our way of life. But systems of belief that are strong enough for us to put into our quality worlds mean little to us if we cannot convince another person that what we believe is also good for him or her. We don’t have to convince everyone, but it hurts if
we can’t convince someone who we believe is worth convincing. In fact, if we are able to convince people, this becomes a good reason to put them into our quality worlds. Most of us start trying to convince the people close to us and then, if we are successful, we go on to our acquaintances, but less often to total strangers. If those we know refuse to believe, few of us are ready to go to extremes to convince them.

Of course some are willing to go to extremes. There are terrorists who have systems of belief in their quality worlds that are in violent opposition to the workings of governments and are willing to act on those beliefs. Huge amounts of blood have been spilled in wars in an effort to get others to believe as a few powerful leaders do. Our unwillingness to extricate ourselves from the war in Vietnam is an example of how difficult it is for politicians to change a quality world belief that, right or wrong, the United States should never lose a war. Few of our citizens shared that rigid belief, and the army is now well aware of the risk of going to war when that going-to-war picture is not in the quality worlds of the majority of the people.

With serious threats, you can force most people to choose to say or do anything to stay alive. But this behavior will continue only as long as the force is in effect. What you can’t do, no matter how much you threaten or punish, is make anyone change any picture that he or she has put into his or her quality world. The one thing no one can take away from you is the freedom to control your own quality world. This freedom was well illustrated by two recent, closely related newspaper reports.

The first report was that computers in schools are not leading to increased learning, as measured by proficiency tests. The second, a good-news-bad-news story, stated that American fourth graders are now showing significant gains in mathematics and science compared to those in other countries, but American eighth graders are lagging even further behind other eighth graders. What the first story illustrates is that teacher-student interaction is being replaced by computer-student interaction. Computers are good tools, but they are not teachers. Used by a good teacher who
understands their limitations and who interacts enough with students so that they put this teacher into their quality worlds, computers can help. Used without teacher interaction, computers mean little, and that, according to my experience, seems to be how many are being used.

The same reasoning applies to the drop-off in learning between the fourth and eighth grades. What is actually being measured in both instances is the number of students who have their teachers in their quality worlds. Go into any first-, second-, third-, or fourth-grade class anywhere in the country and observe what is going on. Then take a look at any sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-grade class in the same school district. You will see a marked difference.

Many more younger students are involved in learning than older students. This is another way of saying that many more younger students than older students have their teachers in their quality worlds. Exactly why this drop-off in learning occurs is explained in detail in chapter 10, but the overall reason is simple. External control psychology is many times more prevalent in the upper grades than in the elementary grades. It is the use of this psychology, not the students or teachers, that is the cause of this discrepancy.

The best way to explain how we learn what pictures to put into our quality worlds is to begin with a newborn baby. All she knows for the first few weeks of life is how she feels. As long as she feels good, she sleeps or, when awake, looks around. It’s when she feels bad, for example, when she’s hungry, that the survival genes take over. Then she gets purposeful and begins to do what she can to feel better. But besides the few behaviors she is born with, crying and fussing, there’s not much she can do.