INCONSISTENCY: REAL OR IMAGINED?

Nearly all of us will at some time be confronted with the problem of having to motivate an aged person after the death of someone he loves. However, consistent with our disinterest in the aged, few of us have been willing to pause long enough to take the problem seriously. When one of our parents dies and the other is left with inadequate psychological resources to enjoy his life, we’re apt to consider the difficulties of the remaining parent an irksome occurrence rather than evidence of a deep psychological problem which ought to command our full attention. Does our disinterest reflect mere lassitude? Is it that older people don’t carry our names forth into the next generation and that therefore we don’t take the trouble to cultivate their respect? If so our painstaking work with our children is suspect in its motivation. More than we’d like to believe, we devote ourselves to helping people who we think will be in a position to help us later on, and thus even many psychotherapists don’t consider older people worthy of their professional time.

LOVE WITHOUT OBSTACLES

How far does a prejudice against the familiar influence you? Do you regularly treat dinner guests better than the people who live with you? Are you regularly late for appointments made with intimated, and seldom late when you’ve made an appointment with a stranger? Do you fawn in front of professional men, and excuse them after they’ve kept you waiting for hours, and, in contrast, complain when someone you know keeps you waiting even a few minutes? If so, like millions, you are assuming, without considering the matter, which the time of people you don’t know is more important than that of people you do, and your discriminatory treatment is renewing that assumption. There is nothing more precious than time, and yet perhaps the majority of us discriminate against the people closest to us when it comes to being considerate about time.

HABITS AND COMPULSIONS

A habit is a practice which we feel an inner urge to carry out but which urges, if we resisted it repeatedly, would diminish after a time and disappear. To say that playing golf is habit, or that gesticulating when one talks is a habit, is to say that by resisting the inclination toward the activity, we could eventually break its grip on us. In contrast, we can’t rid ourselves of a compulsion simply by resisting it. Though we can sometimes reduce compulsive urges this way, they return to torment us. Months, and sometimes years, after we think we’ve defeated our compulsion by resisting it, we feel it suddenly welling up in us again, and we must battle as desperately as before if we are to resist it. If we manage to subdue the impulse successfully this time, we are likely to suffer from severe anxiety or form other serious symptoms.

BACKWARD INFERENCE

The principle of direct effect has a useful by-product-a technique that can help us identify motivators which we hadn’t previously recognized. It is especially good for identifying paranoid acts, and has general use. Once we discover that a particular attitude,, which we consider undesirable, has been entering as a motivation of our actions, and that we have been unwittingly increasing its strength, we can use the knowledge to stop ourselves from intensifying it further. The technique of backward inference can help us identify our own rationalizations in retrospect. If, for instance, we’ve told ourselves we did something out of kindness, when our real motive was either the feeling that we were undeserving or the fear of offending someone, we can use the technique of backward inference to discover the truth. If the main motive for our act had been kindness, the act would have intensified our warm feelings for our beneficiary.

FEAR AND ANXIETY

Physiologically, both fear and anxiety involve the same internal changes, like increases in the rate of heart beat and adrenalin production. To the sufferer, the two conditions feel the same; both are unpleasant, ranging form discomforting to agonizing. Each is accompanied by a sense of danger, the difference being that with fear we can identify what we think is threatening us and with anxiety we cannot. One is afraid of going to war or losing his job, but one is simply anxious and doesn’t know about what. There are borderline cases in which it’s hard to know which edge we think is needed before one’s condition can be called fear instead of anxiety.

SIGNIFICANCE OF EFFECTS

Most of us tend to be blind to the significance of interaction effects. For one thing, other people comprise much of the content of our thoughts; for another, our thoughts about people come to us in the guise of pure observations-like photographs barely affected by quirks of the camera. We look outside and think we are seeing what is there, whereas actually our own behavior plays a role in determining what we see. So strong is the illusion that our reactions to people are based wholly on our objective observations of them that when we change our attitudes toward people without seeing them, we tend to think we’ve made new discoveries about them as we remember them, not realizing that our own behavior since we were with them last may have accounted for the change in our view of them.

RECOGNITION EFFECT

When we want to change our personality, our actions are the only keys available for us to play on. The principles given can help us determine how the keys we play will sound. Our actions provide us with observations of ourselves; and in precisely the same way that other people judge us, we use these observations in constructing our picture of what we call reality. Recognitions effects are reached by a more intellectual process than the others. The interaction, vantage point, direct, and recognition are the four principles that we have been able to identify. It seems likely that other ways by which our actions affect our own psyches will be discovered. People with no training in psychology and little formal education are as likely as anyone to give us important leads.

TRAUMA AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

The sudden experience of having people depend on us is frequently traumatic. The choice to shirk responsibilities pushes us away from other people and predisposes us to make similar choices in the future. Such choices heighten our prejudices and make us feel less deserving of people’s kindness. On the other hand, ministering to people’s needs is the surest way of making us feel like members of the larger family of mankind, which itself as a result of our acts of devotion comes to seem benign. Acts of devotion are the best cure for cynicism.

THE PROCESS OF CHANGE

Most attitudes of concern to us underlie many of our activities. For instance, if a girl dreads sexual contact with men, that dread is almost sure to be motivating more activities than more avoidance of sexual contacts. Very likely, it is playing some part in determining her choices of friends, and decisions she makes in decorating her apartment, in choosing clothing and in buying records. As we grow older, most of our attitudes come to motivate a widening sweep of activities. This is nearly always true where the attitude in question is dread of sexual contact. More generally, it is safe to say of nearly any purely personal attitude that if we have held it for a long time period, we are unknowingly reproducing it, or holding it in place, not by a single activity but by a multiplicity of them.

MOTIVATIONAL DECISION

Nearly every decision has multiple motivators, and therefore the principle implies that a single act exerts effects on many of our already held attitudes. As a rule, most of these attitudes are not conscious, and thus relatively few of the direct effects on us of our actions are apparent. We can even use the principle of direct effect to identify motivators for acts already carried out. Some practice at seeing the principle in operation is needed before using it to help us account for more complicated phenomena. First, consider the problem of why two people acting identically may affect themselves very differently.