Techniques 1 : Gratitude Diary

Photo by Antonio Guillem

Just because someone is good at articulating a philosophy doesn't mean they are always good at living it. In recent times I have struggled with anxiety and depression and needed to look to others to teach me how to quell it (while also having the help of medication.) 

One idea I picked up from television. I assume the guy I saw being interviewed was Hugh Van Cuylenburg of The Resilience Project. I'm very familiar with the cover of his book from the library where I work, but have not, as yet, read it.

In talking about gratitude he suggested something very simple. Just write down three good things which happened each day.

I latched on to this and found myself ending each day by writing a list of around fifteen things which were positives. The key was that nothing was too small. A stranger returning my smile. A tasty meal. An enjoyable conversation.

A psychologist I've been seeing said that this is just the way to do such a technique. Those who are not helped often say each day : "I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for my health." The key is to draw attention to the little things which might go unappreciated.

We all tend to have a negativity bias. This makes sense as we need to be aware of dangers and to focus on problems in order to solve them. Our ancestors were more likely to die from being inattentive to negatives than unappreciative of positives. And if we feel a pain in some part of our body, it is a call to attend to a problem.

But sometimes the problem alert signal - in the form of anxiety or depression - becomes a hindrance to addressing the problem itself.

Keeping a gratefulness diary counters the negativity bias. We will still be able to focus on solving problems as needed, but by appreciating the things which go well we will draw more sustenance into our psyche with which to power those problem solving activities.

What I have found is that I am more likely to wake in the morning feeling optimistic and excited about the day to come because I have reason to believe that it will be filled with similar small but precious gifts to the one before.

My suggestions are :

1. Make the list just before going to bed.

2. Write down as many things as you feel like. If you can only think of one, write one. If you think of fifty write fifty.

3. Survey the day from start to finish in your memory, but don't feel you have to write things in chronological order. If you remember something afterwards, just add it to the end of the list. If you remember something the next day which you'd forgotten, you can always add it then.

4. Remember all your senses and how they can give you pleasure. (I always think of the Iranian movie A Taste of Cherry (1997) (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) in which one character tries to persuade another not to commit suicide by reminding him that to be dead is to forgo the pleasure of tasting a cherry.)

BOOK REVIEW : A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century : Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein

 

The challenges which face us as a species are legion. What should we do?

First we have to know who we are and where we are. We need to understand our programming and the ways in which it interfaces with the world around us, both its natural elements and those we have constructed.

The central challenge is one of hyper-novelty. Our instincts change extremely slowly and so are still adjusted to the way we were living many thousands of years ago. Culture changes more quickly, but still requires much time to test its innovations. A technological advance can spread throughout the world almost instantaneously, but a culture of social habits which allow it to be used for our net benefit rather than net deficit might take decades. Social media gives a case in point. It has brung us great benefits, but we are struggling to know how to manage downsides such as addiction and toxic forms of social interaction.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein set out in this book to provide us with tools which we can use to orientate ourselves and begin to improvise strategies for a liveable future.

I sometimes become annoyed with people who interpret human psychology with an evolutionary lens. Clearly our psychology exists within the process of evolution, but it sometimes seems as if people will use evolution as an excuse to reduce everything to the question of what does or does not lead to the prospering of the genes. So we are told that people wear ostentatious clothes for the same reason that some species of bird have bright feathers, i.e. it helps to attract a mate. That is all very well as far as it goes, but it doesn’t acknowledge that a post-menopausal woman may wear fancy clothes because it feeds her ego to get attention. The authors talk about rape as a product of evolution - a reprehensible form of reproductive strategy. This makes sense, but the rape of non-impregnable individuals is very common. Men rape other men and they rape prepubescent children. Rape can be an expression of a distortion of the ego which does not confer any benefit on the individual's genes.

So it seems to me that, just as culture is nested within and interacts with the system which is the genetic evolution of the species, so the psychology of the individual is nested within genetic evolution and culture, and it would be foolish, in trying to understand it, to reduce it to a role of servant to that larger system. Very often we are not even servants, but rather saboteurs, to ourselves.

This is just to give some idea of my own biases. I was not disappointed in the way this book approached the topic of evolutionary psychology. It emphasises the importance of viewing cultural evolution as being in service of genetic evolution. Just as mutations in genes lead to variations which either persist or don’t depending on fitness for life in the environment, culture is a series of experiments (conscious in this case) which lead to changes in society which either prove adaptive or not.

If an aspect of culture is costly in effort or resources and persists for a long time, then we can assume that it is adaptive in some way. The authors call this “The Omega Principle”. This doesn’t mean that the content of this cultural form is necessary true. It may be a myth which encourages socially beneficial behaviour. If a tribe believe that anyone who steals will go to Hell, it will probably lead to them being more cohesive and prosperous even if it isn’t true.

One of the key influences on this book is G. K. Chesterton. You may get a little sick of just how many times the author’s refer to “Chesterton’s fence,” but it is understandable given what a useful analogy it is. Chesterton pointed out that, if you are walking across a field and you see a fence and you don’t know what the fence is for, it is a really good idea to find out before you tear it down. This is Conservatism 101. Tradition is the wisdom we have inherited. Be careful that any change is going to be in your own best interest.

There is an interesting balance between this caution and the authors’ acknowledgement that, at this crisis point of hyper-novelty, we need to prioritise consciousness over culture. Culture is the repository of old solutions and consciousness is what we use to find a new path. I suppose the idea is that we need to learn the lessons from culture in the process of finding a new way.

There is plenty of practical advice in the book, grouped in bullet points at the end of each chapter. A lot of it centres around limiting hyper-novelty - processed foods, pharmaceuticals, unnatural light, etc. There is much parenting advice. And a lot about getting out into nature and being more sociable in person. Their argument against watching pornography seems like very sound advice for others, though I won’t be following it myself. I’ll also give spending time in potentially dangerous wild environments a miss for the time being.

One part of the book I found very interesting was their comment on the growth in diagnoses of autism and the way they link it to young children being “babysat” by screens. This fits well with what I have read from some other writers and it makes complete sense. I’m curious how it will be received though. In the past, explanations posited for psychological disorders which centred around the behaviour of parents have been very strongly resisted.

It’s a book which is very easy to read and full of fascinating information. I never knew that we humans can be usefully thought of as a kind of fish.

The final chapter deals with the question of where do we go from here - how do we secure ourselves a future. The key insight is that we need to find a psychologically satisfying alternative to material growth. We need to be exploring and utilising a new frontier - “The Fourth Frontier” - because it won’t satisfy us to stagnate without adventure. It has to be something other than maximising our exploitation of the Earth’s resources in the service of an increasing population and its indulgence. It’s a fuzzy picture, but I suppose it has to be. It can’t be someone’s planned utopia. It has to be something emergent from the interactions of us all. Thus it can’t be knowable in advance.

I also highly recommend the authors' Dark Horse podcast.

BOOK REVIEW : How to Be an Imperfectionist by Stephen Guise

In my book How to Be Free I said that “the love of perfection is the root of all evil” and that “the key to happiness, mental health and being the most that we can be is absolute and unconditional self-acceptance.” That’s all well and good, but what practical steps can we take to break the hold that perfectionism may have on us and to become more self-accepting? When I was asked this I couldn’t come up with much in the way of practical exercises, but had to acknowledge that that is one of the things people quite reasonably look for in a self-help book. So imagine how excited I was when someone alerted me to the existence of this book which promises a “new way to self-acceptance, fearless living, and freedom from perfectionism.”

Stephen Guise’s book is what a self-help book should be - short, illuminating and practical. It is full of observations which seemed so obvious after he said them that I wondered why I hadn't thought of them before.

Some of us may not view ourselves as perfectionists, but on close examination some of our problems - shyness, procrastination, depression, addiction, rumination - may arise from perfectionistic thinking, from having unhelpfully high expectations of ourselves, of others or of situations or events. Shyness can arise from a feeling that we mustn’t make mistakes in our social interactions with others. Procrastination can come from wanting to hang onto a vision of perfect action rather than discover the imperfections involved in actually carrying it out, or it can arise from over-estimating the effort that may be required in the doing of something or the negative results which might result from it, an unhelpfully high negative expectation. Depression can be increased by fighting against negative thoughts, being intolerant of our deviations from positivity. The “never enough” feeling of psychological addiction is also a form of perfectionism, as is the intolerance towards our past mistakes which takes the form of ruminating over them.

The practical exercises suggested in the book are based around the idea of forming mini-habits - very small daily tasks (so small that there is no excuse not to do them) the purpose of which is to establish the groundwork for larger habits. The example Guise uses most often is his exercise plan of doing one push-up a day. This gradually led to full workouts five days a week. His earlier book on this topic - Mini-Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results - is apparently a best-seller. (I haven’t read it.)

Guise’s approach is not about building up motivation. It’s about removing barriers. We are unlikely to be very good at anything the first time we try it, so becoming skilled and confident in any area of life means removing the barrier of high expectations. One way he suggests we can do that is to adopt a binary view of success. For instance, if we want to give a speech in front of an audience, we can forget about the issue of how well we do it, but count doing it, even incredibly badly, as a success. The only failure is to not give it a go. This isn’t just a trick. It’s being realistic, because the only way we become confident and skilled at public speaking is by being willing to do it badly until we learn to do it well. So doing it badly really is a success, because it gets us far closer to doing it well then not attempting it will.

Another idea I really like is that of replacing the phrase “I should have done…” with “I could have done…” It’s such a simple cognitive technique, but it turns us away from regrets about the past and towards a practical strategy for the future.

Need for approval from others can also be an area of unhelpfully high demands. Guise recommends ways we can break past this barrier and thus gain confidence to be more authentically ourselves. I’m not sure that singing at the supermarket is one of the suggestions of his that I will take up. (I don’t think that my authentic self is sadistic enough to inflict such suffering on others.) The principle is a good one though that, where fear stands as a barrier, liberation can come through the process of desensitisation. The more we do something potentially embarrassing or anxiety-provoking, the more those feelings will decrease.

As Guise points out, this is the problem with so many motivational books. We can build up a high level of motivation, but it too may tend to decrease over time. The beauty of his mini-habit idea is that it requires minimal motivation at the start. The habit, once established, then provides a framework within which motivation can grow, if the habit turns out to be a rewarding one. If you do one push-up a day for a few months, you may find you are curious to see if you can do a few more on your more energetic days. Eventually you are doing enough to feel stronger and more confident, and that is the motivation to join a gym, or whatever. If you write two sentences a day for six months, you may find that a really good idea for a novel is starting to emerge. Then the excitement of discovery is the motivation to keep going. But if you pumped yourself up with motivation, did as many push-ups as you could do before collapsing and said “I’m not going to do that again for awhile” or if you pumped yourself up with dreams of being the next J.K. Rowling and sat down to begin on your first novel and found you couldn’t think of a plot, you might give up before you’d had a chance to really begin. Think of Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. Build the habit and the motivation will come.

Guise isn’t one of these self-help gurus who hands down his wisdom from on high. He’s the kind of self-help author who tells you about the embarrassing thing he accidentally said to the hot woman at the gym. He practices what he preaches not just in life but in the manner of his writing. He doesn’t try to avoid embarrassment. And that makes me feel all the more comfortable in listening to his advice.

I’d recommend this book to anyone. I don’t think there is anyone so perfect in their imperfectionism that they can’t learn something from it. Any book which can give us methods to increase our chances of success in any endeavour we choose to pursue, and provides us with strategies to avoid being hard on ourselves even if we fail at all of them, is definitely worth the short amount of time it takes to read.

Beyond self-help, though, there are ideas in this book which, if they were to take hold, could make all the difference to our chances of survival as a species. Our ecological and economic crises both rest upon our “‘never enough’ bias” (pg. 58). Our apathy arises from our inability to “focus on the process” (pg. 61). The breakdown in community (and thus the cooperative skills we need to work together on solving our social problems) arises from our “need for approval” (pg. 85). Chaos theory shows that small changes in a system can gradually lead to a complete change of that system. Who knows what could be unleashed by an imperfectionist revolution? When you consider how hampered so many of us have been by perfectionism in its many forms, that is an awful lot of potential energy and talent of which we have been deprived throughout the whole of our history (has there been a time not blighted by perfectionism?).

Me... Or My Disease?

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Recently I was reading some feedback comments on Natasha Tracy's Bipolar Burble Blog. The idea was put forward by one sufferer with bipolar disorder that it is important to understand that the turbulent behaviour of individuals with the condition comes from the disease and not from the individual who suffers from it. Unfortunately my manner of questioning the usefulness of this attitude caused some offence to the individual in question. I realised in retrospect that the best way to discuss such difficult topics without giving offence tends to be to speak of personal experiences. So I thought I would use that exchange as inspiration to give a very personal and detailed account of my viewpoint here.

I've experienced bipolar psychosis. To clarify my take on the “Is it me or is it my disease?" question, I'd like to look at two examples of my behaviour in a hospital emergency room while experiencing a psychotic episode.

One of my delusions at the time was that an apocalyptic transformation of human society was taking place and that, in this new world which was coming into being, things were acceptable which would not have been acceptable before. I thought it was O.K. for me to grope the bottoms of nurses. It took a couple of experiments before I recognised that I might be mistaken. One nurse responded angrily, another broke down in tears.

Was this me? Or was it my disease? I wasn't to blame for my behaviour, because, had I not been confused by psychosis, I would not have behaved in that way. I had no desire to cause offence or distress. It was the delusion that my behaviour would not cause such feelings which made it seem acceptable to me at the time. But where did the impetus for the behaviour come from? It came from my desire to grope women's bottoms, something which had nothing to do with my psychosis. I wanted to grope women's bottoms then. I want to grope women's bottoms now. I have two reasons for not doing so :

1. Such behaviour would lead to me being excluded from civilised society.

2. It would be liable to cause distress the women involved.

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One of the symptoms of the manic phase of bipolar disorder is a loss of inhibitions. When we lose our inhibitions, and thus our tendency to censor our expression of our feelings, what is revealed is, arguably, more our real self than the sanitised version we present when we are concerned about making a good impression.

Something else I did during this wild evening in the emergency ward was to point at a fellow patient and shout : “You're not my father!"

Was that me? Or my disease? Once again, I would not have done this if I had not been psychotic. I had no desire to confound or frighten some poor fellow patient. In my confused state he looked like someone I knew, someone from whom I felt a desperate need to declare my independence. (Not my actual father I should point out.)

My disease was the source of my confusion. But the message of defiance, misdirected as it was, was very much my own.

Stability in the personality comes from integration of all of its aspects. If we accept all aspects of our psyche as a part of who we are, then wholeness is possible. If we view some aspect of our thought, feeling or behaviour are something alien and/or hostile which we must contain, fight against or attempt to expunge, then it will tend to become more severe.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation now. One of the major problems we may have if we are suffering from some form of psychological condition such as bipolar disorder or conventional depression is the pressure which may be put upon our relationship with a loved one. No doubt I was a source of distress not just to nurses but to friends and members of my family when I was ill. But I've never been married or had a comparable kind of relationship. What if I had?

When we are suffering it is natural for our attention to centre upon ourselves. If we are depressed or manic we will be selfish. This is inescapable. We may fight against it. We may try to force ourselves to recognise the needs of others. But our heart won't be in it. Maybe we will feel guilty about putting an emotional drain on our partner. If we do, it will make us more depressed or it will add to our mania. The essence of mania is escape. Our situation seems intolerable, so rather than facing it our mind races away into wild dreams or spending sprees or sexual escapades, anything to avoid facing what would otherwise seem to be our reality. I say “seem" because often what is so unthinkable is unthinkable only because we have not yet discovered a comfortable way to think about it. Our problems are not necessarily objective problems.

“I know I'm treating you terribly," we might say, “but it isn't me, it's the disease. I love you."

What is love? It's a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Often what we think of as love is something else - attachment, commitment or sexual attraction. Attachment is when we desire the presence of a person or a thing. When we pick someone to be our partner, we make a commitment to be supportive of them and to try to keep our love for them alive. Love exists when it can. It requires the qualities listed above. If we have to hide something from our partner - be less than open - then that compromises the love between us. The same is true if we lie to a partner, if we fall into patterns of rigidly formulaic interaction or if we are selfish.

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If we feel the need to say “I love you" then love at that point is at best tenuous between us. Since love is a form of communication, both parties can tell if it is happening or not. A more honest approach might be to say : “I want to be with you" or “I want love to occur between us".

One of the barriers to love between someone who is suffering from depression and the person who cares for them is the feeling on the part of both parties that they need to be fair.

We all have desires and needs. If those desires and needs are not met it can cause feelings of frustration. This is irrespective of why those desires and needs have not been met. First we feel disappointed or angry, and only after that do we ask ourselves whether we are being reasonable to feel this way. If we come to the conclusion that we are not being reasonable, all the worse for us, because then we have two layers of bad feeling - one the frustration and on top of that the sense that we don't even have a justification for that feeling of frustration.

The loved one of a person suffering from depression can't possibly give them all that they need. And it is unreasonable to expect it. But the unreasonableness of such an expectation only makes it that much harder to bare. This can become a negative feedback loop. The depressed person places a burden on their partner. They know this is unfair to their partner. So they feel guilty. The guilt makes them more depressed. The more depressed they are the more of a burden they put on their partner, which leads to more guilt, and so on.

But feelings are only feelings. Once we have established that they do not conform to what is reasonable, we can see them as a quality of being and not as a message. What hurts is the implication that we are at fault. If we understand that the other party is just “letting off steam", i.e. giving vent to the frustration of their position, rather than taking what they say as a criticism to be taken on board, even if that is the verbal form it takes, then we can come closer together. It is the log jam of “shoulds" that blocks the passage of love in this kind of situation.

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If we were to insist that the bad feelings and the behaviour they impelled us towards were “our disease, not us" then we would not be able to come to an understanding of the dynamics that generate them or those which could ease them.

And if I told myself my desire to fondle strange women's bottoms was a symptom of a chemical imbalance in my brain rather than an intrinsic part of my sensual nature, then I might live in fear of an unpredictable fit of glute groping rather than being able to look back with amusement at my moment of madness.

Frederick March as Mr. Hyde

Hurt-Proofing Ourselves

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The other day I was having a discussion with a friend about whether or not a particular song in a famous Broadway and Hollywood musical amounted to an offensively racist caricature. I was countering the arguments for it being seen as racist, but I knew that, for me, it was just a game. The song made my friend angry. To me it was just a song in a musical which I enjoy.

I thought about this further to myself, but didn't express my broader thoughts on the topic at the time. “Nothing offends me," I thought. “As far as I'm concerned someone could do a whole musical in blackface and I wouldn't be bothered by it. It wouldn't make me feel bad personally, and why should I be offended on someone else's behalf. Aren't we all able to be offended for ourselves without any help."

This may seem callous or selfish. I'm not saying that this is how everyone should view these things. But if we examine what is going on here I think we can learn something useful.

We have a saying : “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." But we know that this is not true. Other people's insults and putdowns do hurt us. Often they hurt a lot. But why?

To understand this we need to go back to our childhood. The reason we had greater emotional resilience and a greater capacity for joy when we were young children is because our self-acceptance had not yet been compromised. We seemed to ourselves acceptable because nobody had yet taught us that we might be unacceptable in any way. As we got older we were subjected to criticism by adults and other children. If we understood this as an expression of displeasure with our behaviour alone and not a sign that there was something essentially wrong with us, our self-acceptance would not have been compromised. But this can be a fine distinction for a child to have to make. Also we were taught a value system and a set of social norms. If these were unreasonably harsh then we probably developed unforgiving expectations regarding our own behaviour. We developed a conscience which was less like a friendly guide and more like an oppressive dictator who punished us for all failures to follow his orders by undermining our sense of ourselves as acceptable.

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The basis for mental health is unconditional self-acceptance. But what happened as our self-acceptance was eaten away is that it became conditional. We could accept ourselves if we were good. We could accept ourselves if we were successful. We could accept ourselves if other people accepted us. This is a very vulnerable position to be in because others can undermine our self-acceptance at any time by removing the conditions on which that self-acceptance depends.

We may not realise it but we live within a kind of psychological economy in which the traded commodities are the requirements for self-acceptance. Most of the control others exercise over us and of the control we exercise, or try to exercise, over others comes from the application of self-acceptance bribes and threats. When we treat someone well, we help them to bolster their self-acceptance. If we try to control another's behaviour by, for instance, making them feel guilty or shaming them in front of others, we are attempting to blackmail them into behaving in a way which conforms with our own wishes or beliefs about what is right or wrong by trying to take away the conditions for their self-acceptance.

The good news is that we can drop out of this sick economy. Or, if we chose, we can continue to use it against others while being invulnerable to it ourselves. I'm not saying that that would be a healthy thing to do, but it would be possible. The healthy thing to do is to hurt-proof ourselves and teach others how to do likewise. The more hurt-proof individuals there are in the world, the less scope there is for anyone to oppress others.

Of course not all forms of oppression are based on exclusively psychological transactions. Those in positions of power can make decisions prejudicial to those they don't like for whatever reason. And there is always the possibility of violence. But if we are hurt-proof we have a better base from which to deal with problems of organisational prejudice or violence. And there is more solidarity between hurt-proof individuals to stand against such forms of oppression because social relations between such individuals are not compromised by the inherent fragility of self-acceptance exchanges. The less we need the more we are there for each other.

So how do we hurt-proof ourselves?

Let's go back to that saying : “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me." Why do names hurt us? If we are black, why does it hurt to be called a “nigger"? If we are gay, why does it hurt to be called a “queer"? Why does it hurt if someone says we are “ugly" or “pathetic" or “a  loser"?

Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce in the movie Lenny (1974) 

doing his infamous piece about racist words

The reason is that we don't fully accept ourselves. Our self-acceptance has been worn down by this kind of thing. We've taken the put-downs “on board". We have allowed ourselves to get to the point where our self-acceptance is dependent, among other things, on people not calling us these things. When people do so, it upsets our emotional equilibrium. It makes us feel angry or hurt or frightened. Of course the fear may sometimes be applicable if the behaviour is indicative of a desire to do violence to us.

The way to hurt-proof ourselves is to re-learn unconditional self-acceptance. I say re-learn because we knew how to unconditionally accept ourselves as young children. The learning process we went through was that of learning that we were unacceptable or could be unacceptable in various ways. So hurt-proofing can be understood as a kind of unlearning or deprogramming of the unhelpful lessons we learned growing up. We are not brainwashing ourselves to believe that we are acceptable. We are rediscovering a more accountable truth about ourselves.

This may all seem very theoretical, but there is a very powerful and simple strategy which can help us down this path. Unconditional self-acceptance is something we practice, and the more we practice the more proficient we get at it. It is like building up a muscle. This is an important analogy because, while we want to become more like our child self, what we don't want is the child's vulnerability to having its self-acceptance under-mined. Back then we had unconditional self-acceptance because we had not yet been exposed to the harsh realities of life among those whose loss of such self-acceptance also undermined their acceptance of others, including ourselves. For a few years we are usually protected from the full savagery of the neurotic economy of the psyche. We need to regain our state of health, but we also need to know what we did not know as a child, and that is how to protect that state.

Re-gaining unconditional self-acceptance can involve constantly reminding ourselves that we are acceptable irrespective of what we do, what we feel, what we think, what we have and what others think of us. You might question the inclusion of “what we do". Aren't we unacceptable if we do something really terrible? The problem with this way of thinking is that we are blackmailing ourselves. We are saying that the reason not to do something really terrible is that we will remove our self-acceptance if we do. But a shortage of self-acceptance is most likely the motivating force behind doing something really terrible in the first place. The natural state of the unconditionally accepting, and thus non-neurotic, individual is one of benevolence, love, clarity of mind and creativity. If we wish to persuade ourselves not to do something really terrible, the best argument is not that it would make us unacceptable, but that it would be against our own best interests. People who do really terrible things rarely have very rewarding lives. And past actions can't be changed, so to view ourselves as unacceptable because of a past action, no matter how terrible, would only be appropriate if viewing ourselves that way was going to make us less likely to do something like that in future. Since lack of self-acceptance is the root cause of destructive actions, this would be likely to have the opposite effect.

We might want to make use of an affirmation. In this case, why not use the simple affirmation : “I am acceptable." The problem with some affirmations, it seems to me, is that they can set up expectations. If we say : “I am as calm as the lily pad that floats on a tranquil pond," that's all well and good until the next time we lose our temper, and then our self-acceptance is likely to be undermined by the fact that we haven't lived up to our own affirmation. “I am acceptable," doesn't seem to have any short-comings and it is a simple expression of the truth with which we are seeking to reconnect.

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But this is not the powerful strategy. The powerful strategy is one which we can use when presented by anything which might emotionally destabilise us, especially things others might say which tend to leave us feeling angry or hurt.

In our state of conditional self-acceptance, what happens if someone says something to us which compromises that state? What if someone upsets those conditions on which our self-acceptance depends? The first thing which happens is that we take on board what they are saying. If it were a missile we would say that it hits home. Then, if we don't collapse in a heap, we mount our resistance. We tell ourselves why what the other person has said is not true or not relevant. Or we tell them, perhaps angrily. So we may fight back, but only after having been wounded. The habitual defences, conceptual and or verbal, that we use to defend ourselves in these situations are a fundamental part of our character armour. Character armour is a structure of defensive habits. It tends to come into play when we feel threatened, but it can also be something we hide behind in anticipation of being threatened.

If we think of the words or attitudes which might upset us as missiles and ourselves as a ship against whose hull they are aimed, then there is an alternative to the armour which only comes into play after we have been struck. That alternative involves making the ship itself so invincible that the missiles explode impotently like amusing fireworks rather than doing any damage.

This involves a trick which gives us control over the emotional transaction.

Let's look at an example :

Fred comes up to me on the street and he says : “Joe, you're a disgusting piece of shit."

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I don't respond. What I say to myself is : “Fred is a person who is saying that I'm a piece of shit."

Of course this is a skill which might take a little while to learn. We need to learn to take pause, and that in itself can be a challenge. But the more we practise the easier it gets. It won't protect us the first time, but it will after the point at which it becomes habit.

What are we doing when we take this approach? We are removing ourselves from the subjective situation and giving ourselves a way to look at it objectively.

What we would normally be doing is going through this kind of process :

“Joe, you're a disgusting piece of shit."

(I'm a piece of shit. Hey, wait a minute. I'm not a piece of shit. How can Fred say something like that. I'll get Fred for saying I'm a piece of shit.)

Fred has got to me.

Even if my response is modified somewhat by saying “Fred thinks I'm a piece of shit", this is still something which might make me feel less acceptable.

By thinking “Fred is a person who is saying that I'm a piece of shit" I am stripping the situation down to the bare facts. I am not validating the opinion that I am a piece of shit. I'm not even validating the idea that Fred genuinely thinks I'm a piece of shit. He is a person who is saying that. (Of course, it might be more correct to say "he is a person who said that" but somehow the present tense has a more powerfully distancing effect to the past tense.)

Rather than being a person who experiences themselves as being under attack we have put ourselves in a role comparable to that of a scientist observing Fred's behaviour as if he were an amoeba on a laboratory slide.

From this perspective our assessment of what has been said becomes evidence-based rather than emotion-based. Fred is someone who is saying that I'm a piece of shit. Is there evidence for his point of view? Why might he think this way? Is there something wrong with him? Are there factors not directly related to me which are influencing his current attitude? We have the equanimity to ask ourselves these questions because we didn't take on board what Fred was saying directly as a transaction in the economy of self-acceptance. And the more we practise this approach the more our self-acceptance becomes disentangled from what others have to say about us.

You might think I'm advocating a life-style of cold rationality. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a technique to be used where it is useful, not something adopted as an habitual approach to life. If I'm walking down the street and a pretty girl smiles at me I'm hardly going to say to myself : “There is a member of the female gender who is looking at me and curling her lips in a way traditionally associated with friendly feelings." It feels good to be smiled at. This strategy is aimed only at learning how to become invulnerable to social transactions which would leave us feeling disempowered. And it is aimed at disempowering those who would hold us to ransom over our own self-acceptance.

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This is also a strategy we can use on ourselves. Let's look at a way it might be used to help us beat addictive behaviour. Maybe I have a problem with chewing my nails. There I am chewing my nails and thinking “I just can't stop chewing my nails." I'm hardly likely to learn to stop when I'm arguing so persuasively against my own ability to do so. Let's try that again. “I'm a person who chews his nails." Not much better, because I'm tying my self-identity to the fact that I chew my nails. “I'm a person who is chewing his nails." Now I'm clearly faced with the situation, with nothing to undermine any strategy I might come up with to help me stop. And the situation seems much less overwhelming.

By following this strategy we can take ourselves out of the defensive position, and this brings tremendous benefits. Over time we find that we don't need our character armour, and it is only when we no longer need it that we discover just how much of an impediment it was.

When we are armoured we can only acknowledge reality to the extent that it doesn't seriously threaten our armour. Where to acknowledge the truth about something would destabilise us, because our self-acceptance is conditional on that thing not being true, we are forced to live in denial.

Let's say that Sally sees a beautiful clearing in the woods and thinks it would be the perfect place to set up a vegan donut stand. People say she is crazy, you can't sell donuts in the middle of the forest. But she goes ahead and buys the land and builds her donut stand. And it turns out to be a big success. She's never succeeded at anything before in her life. Everyone said she was a loser. Now people are travelling all the way into the woods to buy her delicious donuts. People don't call her a loser any more. They love her because of her donuts. But then, one day, an ecologist comes and tells her that the place where she has built her successful donut stand was once the breeding ground of the fluorescent woodpecker. As a result of her donut stand, this beautiful bird has become extinct. We will never see one again. What can she do but put her fingers in her ears and go "blah-blah-blah"? In her own mind her acceptability as a human being is dependent on the ideas that she doesn't harm animals and that her donut stand is a success.

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Many of us have our own vegan donut stands and our fluorescent woodpeckers. It is the truths we can't face about ourselves, because they would compromise our fragile self-acceptance, which lead to a spectrum of problems from failed marriage to war. Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. If a relationship is between two people whose self-acceptance is not conditional, it will be a loving relationship. But a relationship of dependence based on fulfilling the other party's conditions for their own self-acceptance is bound to be fraught with tension and not conducive to love. Why does marital infidelity sometimes make us so mad that we will kill our partner and risk spending many years in jail? Because our self-acceptance has become totally conditional on having a faithful partner. We would view the incident as a trivial one if this were not the case. It is the damage done to our fragile ego which keeps it from being trivial. And for many patriotic individuals, the belief that their country is a knight in shining armour and any country which would attack it or interfere with its interests could not possibly have a legitimate grievance, is a major feature of their character armour. If this were not the case, peace in the Middle East would not be such an elusive dream.

Let's look at the subject of political beliefs. I'll keep it very simple. I'm not interested in how political beliefs differ, only in how we relate to our own political beliefs and those of others. So we'll just talk about one person who identifies themselves as a conservative and another who identifies themselves as a liberal.

How grounded a person's political belief system is, whether conservative or liberal, is dependent on their level of self-acceptance. If our self-acceptance is unconditional then we will look around us at the world and take in what is going on and listen to all sorts of different ideas. There will be no need to filter what we take in in the way of information or ideas in order to protect us from anything which might contravene the conditions of our self-acceptance. This means that, when we form our belief system, conservative or liberal, it will be founded on a lot of information and a clear understanding of what various individuals on both sides of the political spectrum propose. Such an individual will have stability when it comes to discussing politics as they will in all other areas, as a result of the solid foundations of their self-acceptance. But if someone's self-acceptance is heavily compromised and thus conditional, their political allegiance may quickly become a part of their character armour. I'm acceptable because I'm a liberal. I'm acceptable because I'm a conservative. This leads to two things. If I'm acceptable because I'm a liberal, that means that conservatives are not acceptable. So I am in a strongly adversarial position from the get go, where the vehemence of my opposition to conservatives may become a crucial element in maintaining my self-acceptance. Also, to maintain my position, in the absence of the grounded understanding achieved by the unconditionally self-accepting individual, I will need to filter out or deny any information or ideas which might call my insecure liberal position into question. I may also find myself focussing obsessively on the misdeeds of individual conservatives as a way of reinforcing my liberal-good, conservative-bad dichotomy. And, of course, all these things would be the same if I were a conservative whose conservatism was a crucial part of his character armour.

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We can get an idea of how armoured someone is in their political views by how angry they become at those with the opposite allegiance. This doesn't mean that a person whose political views are less armoured may not view the fact that so many people push for an opposite approach as a problem, but they will not feel it as a personal affront. A doctor recognises that cancer is a problem, but he doesn't launch into a tirade about the evil of cancer. He calmly sets about doing something about the problem. When we look around at a lot of the political conflicts that are going on in our society we can see just how many of us are so desperate to hang onto our fragile vision of ourselves as good guys standing in opposition to bad guys that we are not living in the real world.

So lets get back to where we started with the question of protecting ourselves or each other from racist musicals. Being subjected to abuse and prejudice because of one's skin colour can tend to undermine one's self-acceptance. A musical in which white actors wear black face, in this day and age, might be one straw too many for the camel's back, even though all that is happening is that a bunch of actors are putting a particular kind of make-up on their face. The thing itself is trivial. The effect it has may not be. To someone who has learned the art of unconditional self-acceptance, it's intrinsic triviality is clear. It is no skin off their nose how somebody else decides to comport themselves on a theatre stage.

Now I'm not advocating that we reinstate the institution of the Black and White Minstrel Show. I use this example in order to highlight a significant problem and two approaches to dealing with it. Racist musicals are not a common problem in our society, but other hurtful expressions are. There is hate speech and cyber-bullying on the internet. And many of us are subjected to verbal abuse at other times.

The main approach we take to trying to address these problems and protect those most vulnerable to them is by trying to control such expressions. We may legislate against them and/or we may try to shame those who engage in such practices into stopping. But control strategies never actual solve problems. They may contain them temporarily or they may push evidence of them from one place or time to another place or time. Laws and social pressure give us the ability to force individuals to repress expression of their hostile feelings, but repression doesn't make those hostile feelings go away. The roots of hostility can only be healed when everything is out in the open. The road to health is one which leads towards freedom not away from it.

I'm not arguing that we should abandon attempts to control expressions of hostility. I'm only trying to highlight the limitations of that approach.

The other approach is to promote an understanding of how we can hurt-proof ourselves. We can't possibly protect a psychologically vulnerable individual from all of the expressions of hostility or prejudice which might be painful for them, but we can easily teach the skill of hurt-proofing, so that they don't need such protection. And the same technique addresses other problems. Take body image. We can't protect a vulnerable teenager from seeing fashion magazines, but teach them unconditional self-acceptance and they can't possibly develop anorexia or bulimia.

But one word of warning. Don't try using the method I've outlined above out loud with someone. To have one's power taken away to such a degree must be incredibly frustrating. When having an argument with a friend I responded to his expression of a particular opinion with “You are a person who is saying that. Why should it effect me?" He ended up physically attacking me. Be aware that, if words cease to hurt you, some may resort to sticks and stones.

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