March 5, 2019--Best Advice Ever

Chief Justice John Roberts was invited to give the commencement address at his son's middle school graduation.

I came upon what he said when working my way through Greg Lukianoff's and Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad ideas Are Setting Up A Generation for Failure.

The title of the book is self-explanatory as is what the Chief Justice had to say. For me it's about the best advice anyone ever offered to teenagers. 

Here is some of what he had to say--

Now around the country today at colleges, high schools, and middle schools, commencement speakers are standing before impatient graduates. And they are almost always saying the same things. 

They will say that today is a commencement exercise. ‘It is a beginning, not an end. You should look forward.’ And I think that is true enough, however, I think if you’re going to look forward to figure out where you’re going, it’s good to know where you’ve been and to look back as well. And I think if you look back to your first afternoon here at Cardigan, perhaps you will recall that you were lonely. Perhaps you will recall that you were a little scared, a little anxious. And now look at you. You are surrounded by friends that you call brothers, and you are confident in facing the next step in your education. 

It is worth trying to think why that is so. And when you do, I think you may appreciate that it was because of the support of your classmates in the classroom, on the athletic field and in the dorms. And as far as the confidence goes, I think you will appreciate that it is not because you succeeded at everything you did, but because with the help of your friends, you were not afraid to fail. And if you did fail, you got up and tried again. And if you failed again, you got up and tried again. And if you failed again, it might be time to think about doing something else. But it was not just success, but not being afraid to fail that brought you to this point. 

Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. 

From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. 

I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion. 

Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend upon your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.

February 22, 2019--Coddling of the American Mind

Greg Lukianoff's and Jon Haidt's, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up A Generation For Failure, offers a convincing analysis of how the rise of "fearful parenting"; the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play; and the new world of social media that have engulfed teenagers have led to major changes in childhood itself. Much of it not for the better.

As a sidebar, there is an excellent summary of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and how the issues it was developed to address are among the developmental consequences of this new childhood.

CBT focuses on a cognitive feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs can produce powerful negative feelings, which in turn drive clients' reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative, emotion-based beliefs. This produces a cognitive triad that can cause depression and a negative pattern of self-regard: "I'm no good," "My world is bleak," and "My future is hopeless."

CBT therapists work with clients to help them break the disempowering feedback cycle (which they call schemas). If people work to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it frequently gives them some relief from negative emotions so that they can hopefully be released from them and become more open to questioning their negative feelings, thereby rising from their depression and becoming more positively oriented and activated.

I have found this approach to be helpful in my own life and thought it might be for yours as well.

To become less theoretical and more specific, the list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize while undergoing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  

EMOTIONAL REASONING:  Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.  "I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out."  

CATASTROPHIZING:  Focussing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely.  "It would be terrible if I failed."  

OVERGENERALIZING:  Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident.  "This generally happens to me.  I seem to fail at a lot of things."

DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as "black-and-white thinking, ""all-or-nothing thinking," and "binary thinking"):  Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms.  "I get rejected by everyone," or "It was a complete waste of time."

MIND READING:  Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts.  "He thinks I'm a loser."

LABELLING:  Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking).  "I'm undesirable," or "He's a rotten person."

NEGATIVE FILTERING:  You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives.  "Look at all the people who don't like me."

DISCOUNTING POSITIVES:  Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgement.  "That's what wives are supposed to do-so it doesn't count when she's nice to me," or "Those successes were easy, so they don't matter."

BLAMING:  Focussing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself.  "She's to blame for the way I feel now," or "My parents caused all my problems."