Handbook of Personality Development

This handbook is for former self-help book junkies and current addicts who have begun to see that no number inspiring stories or "easy, surefire" self-help systems are ever going to make a lasting difference in their lives. There is a surefire way to change for the better, but it isn't easy or quick. Does that bother you? Of course it does. We all hunger for effortless success because we don't trust ourselves to stick with a hard approach over the long haul. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, but that's not us. We are more apt to dawdle while searching desperately for an escape route to an easier way. It can take us a lifetime to see that our mistrust of ourself has led us to let many years slip needlessly through our fingers as we postponed pursuing the kind of life we so much want. I too was a self-help junkie. This book contains a lot of what I learned the hard way once I stopped being suckered by books, audiotapes, and videos that promised an easy path to a new life.

The aim of the book is to help you psychoanalyze yourself, to ensure that most of what's right about you and precious and unique will have an increased chance of participating in your actions and life decisions. There is much greatness in you, whether you believe it now or not. So it's vital that you not squander any more opportunities to fulfilling your potential.

When most people hear the word "psychoanalysis," they think of Sigmund Freud's version of it, which today isn't being practiced even by people who call themselves Freudian psychoanalysts. This book is based on discoveries made about fifty years ago by San Francisco psychotherapist Joseph Weiss, which he organized in a therapeutic system known popularly as Control-Mastery theory. Control-Mastery is a theory about how we humans develop psychologically. According to Weiss, we begin learning about our interpersonal world and our place in it from our experiences in childhood and build on those lessons throughout our lives. The result is an internal concept of reality based on experience that can be thought of as consisting of many interrelated beliefs. These beliefs are held unconsciously for the most part. They operate behind the scenes, shaping many of the feelings, emotions, and thoughts that guide us consciously in our daily lives.

One of the more surprising of Weiss's findings is that we continue working toward changing our self-concept by seeking experiences that will bring new realities into our lives. This seems counterintuitive because we don't consciously devote much, if any, time to self-development each day. As far as we are consciously concerned, we have more than enough to do to adjust to the demands placed on us by our families, friends, and occupations. Nevertheless, at the unconscious level, we never lose sight of our personal aspirations, and we give attention to them in tiny ways each day and continue thinking about them in our dreams. This unconscious effort can go on for a long time before we are ready to seek change in a committed and conscious fashion. Our conscious decisions to seek new directions (or buy self-help paraphernalia), which seem to come out of the blue, actually result from months and possibly years of unconscious testing during which we laid the groundwork for our conscious growth initiatives. Part of Weiss's insight is that we all unconsciously know what our next step in life should be. Fog may totally obscure our life direction way down the road, but we can unconsciously see our feet and the bit of path just ahead, and that's really all we need, because once we have brought ourselves to the outer boundary of our vision, we can unconsciously see a bit farther yet from our new vantage point.

If we know where our life should be headed, and if we unconsciously move our life in that direction a little bit each day, what's the point of psychoanalysis? Well, I have painted the picture a touch rosier than it actually is. True, we know the next small step we should take, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we will take it. What stops us, more often than not, are certain unconscious beliefs. Weiss calls them "pathogenic beliefs" because of their power to impede the developmental process. They slow or stop us by unconsciously making it seem too dangerous to move our life in a direction that will challenge those beliefs. The beliefs create the illusion that danger lurks everywhere except where our life is now. Not only can these beliefs prevent us from taking forward steps, they can induce us to begin taking backward steps, too, in the sense of putting ourselves in situations where we are bound to fail. After a period of going nowhere or in reverse, a person may unconsciously give up and start thinking consciously that his dreams were stupid and unrealistic and that he should "face reality" and "settle down" with a lesser life.

The life we want invariably lies outside of the walls our pathogenic beliefs build around us. Most self-help books say that it is possible to break through those walls without bothering with your belief system or anything else that might be lurking at the unconscious level. They promise, in effect, that their self-help systems are powerful enough to overwhelm whatever may be stopping you unconsciously. That's rubbish. If you had a car that didn't run because of defective parts, would you get it going again by reading it inspiring stories? Would teaching it visualization techniques help? Would psyching the car up with multi-step self-help programs prove effective? Of course not. To get the car running, you need to fix or replace the defective parts. That's what psychoanalysis helps you do. You have defective beliefs operating inside you. Replace them with more realistic beliefs, and your psychological engine will begin running like never before.

With that said, don't get the impression that I'm saying you should shun all self-help books and tapes. Psychoanalysis is tough business, so by all means read or listen to all of the inspiring stories you can find. And if you come upon a self-help system that makes sense to you, definitively give it a try as an integral component of your self-analysis. Psychoanalysis doesn't consist merely of sitting back and analyzing your past; there is a "doing" component to it, too. You have got to start taking bold forward steps, if your psychoanalysis is to continue making significant headway. So if you find a self-help system that helps you do that, fine. Just don't expect it to provide you with the whole answer, and particularly don't expect the process to be easy, no matter what the book or tape promises.

Your pathogenic beliefs took root during childhood. The way children learn about themselves and the world around them is by no means straightforward. That's because children use a number of instinctive shortcuts to help them gather information much more quickly than they otherwise could. The price we all pay for speed is degraded quality. Kids make mistakes right and left, and many of those mistakes don't get corrected in the natural course of growing up. As a result, the personalities of most people are peppered with pathogenic beliefs. We find satisfactory ways of working around many of these, and come to consider the workarounds as personality traits. But others stand stubbornly in the way of important goals and must be removed through psychoanalysis if those goals are to be achieved. The important point to remember about pathogenic beliefs is that they are mistaken beliefs that cannot stand up to scrutiny. That's why gaining a psychoanalytic perspective on your behavior can give you the edge you need to begin beating these erroneous ways of thinking and feeling about yourself and others.

Gaining insight into your past automatically helps you to feel better about yourself because it combats the fear that there is something genetically wrong with you. The realization that what has worried your about yourself is rooted in learned mistaken beliefs will do little to change any of the pathogenic beliefs, though. They will continue to operate until you begin challenging those beliefs in your daily life, thereby demonstrating through experience that they have nothing to say about the person you truly are.

It's inspiring to see this sort of transformation take place, but psychoanalysis isn't about merely watching the past melt away. Your primary focus should be on your life ahead and how defeating pathogenic beliefs expands your personal vision of what that life should be. As you gain skill in defining your personal vision, you will make an amazing discovery. You will come upon a part of yourself that can't be accounted for by learning or other outside influences. This inner spirit is what makes you uniquely you. It is the bedrock of your being, and once you have made secure contact with it, you will know with certainty the direction the rest of your life should take.

The psychoanalytic insights contained here are offered with no knowledge of where you are in your life right now. So the things I will say will hit home only now and then. This unavoidably intermittent level of connection will delay your progress to an extent. You're reading this book because you can't find a way to get you from where you are now to where you want to be, even if you can't now say where you should want to be. Okay, but that doesnÕt mean that you should sit back until you have the clear vision you seek. Here are some suggestions of what you should do to bring your personal obstacles into sharpest focus as possible.

Become curious about your feelings, thoughts, emotions, and actions and start looking to understand how they might relate to each other and to your past experiences, particularly those of your childhood. Everything should fit together logically. Be patient. It'll take a while before you start making significant headway. In the meanwhile, stay curious particularly about things in your behavior that strike you as odd, such as any odd thoughts or feelings or emotions that surface out of proportion to the situations that provoked them. These things don't mean that you're weird. They are merely somehow related to what you have learned. Keep them at the top of the list of things you want to investigate, because they very well could be related to what's stopping you. Your aim should be to develop an almost out-of-body perspective from which you can experience your thoughts, feelings, and emotions nearly as if they were happening to someone else.

If you are lucky enough to have psychological anxiety attacks, try to see what might have provoked them. It may be something someone said or the way the person said it. Or it may be just something you casually observed or a thought or a remembrance that came to mind seconds before. There are generally triggers, although sometimes they are very subtle. Look to something that occurred within a minute of the appearance of the attack. While in the grip of the panic attack, pay as close attention as possible to the thoughts that come to mind. What do they say is fearful? What do they tell you to do to feel better? What is the net effect of the anxiety attack—what does the occurrence of such attacks keep you from doing in your life? What goals do they prevent you from achieving? How are the fears that rise similar to fears that were provoked in the past? In what sorts of situations were those fears provoked? How are those situations similar to what you are facing now? Who provoked them? How is that person similar to the person who participated in triggering the fears now?

I say that you are lucky to have psychological anxiety attacks because it shows that your psychological engine is still running, since the attacks indicate that you are continuing to fight against entrenched pathogenic beliefs. The anxiety gives you a handy point of focus for starting your self-analysis. Use your own judgment, but, if possible, don't combat the anxiety with drugs or alcohol; it's infinitely better to use the anxiety as an aid in getting at yourself, even though it's not very pleasant. Your anxiety will gradually go away as you begin to understand what pathogenic beliefs provoked it and how they operate in other ways in your life. The lessening of anxiety won't necessarily mean that you have beaten the pathogenic beliefs. There will still be more work to do. But it will mean that you have opened enough of a window to your unconscious to communicate with yourself more in terms of thoughts and feelings rather than in terrifying symptoms.

I always hated it when self-help books told me to keep a diary, and I never did it. So I understand if you're not thrilled by the notion. But once I became committed to self-analysis, I began to see that a notebook of some sort was essential. One reason is that insights will come to mind at odd moments, and it's important to keep a record of them because you will forget them if you don't and it may be years before you will remember them again. I used a small spiral notebook that fit into my back pocket. It got pretty battered by the time I filled it with remembrances and thoughts, but it did its job because it enabled me to recall the insights that I later could remember in no other way.

Set aside at least half an hour each day for quiet reflection. Begin by getting yourself in a comfortable position, close your eyes, and then check over each part of your body to make sure it is relaxed. Now think of nothing. That's right, nothing. Don't try to think about anything at all. In fact, try to keep your mind as blank as possible. Imagine that your eyes are looking into the backs of your shut eyelids. If thoughts or memories rise, let them, but don't force the issue. If nothing comes to mind, that's fine too. Just try to maintain a state of undirected consciousness for a half hour. There, you have just learned Transcendental Meditation, boiled down to its essentials. Even if no insights come to mind, you will find that you feel mentally and physically refreshed and reinvigorated at the end of the half hour.

When you feel like doing so, use your relaxation periods to think about your life and the direction it is taking. Try to define the track it should be on and what more you could be doing to get it there. Don't think in terms of what you "should be" doing. Think rather in terms of what you "want to" do. Using "should be" language often takes us off focus because it starts us thinking about what other people want us to do. To hell with what other people think you should be doing! Stay focused on what you want to do. Don't stray from the realization that you are keeping yourself from something important you want.

At times while you are relaxing, thoughts or memories will float into consciousness that you suspect might be psychologically significant. It's good to break out of the meditative state to pursue what they might mean. The best time to come upon such memories is right after waking up from a night of sleep, so try to lie in bed for a while after the alarm rings, if that's possible for you. The memories that come to the surface should be searched for the lessons that were learned from the experiences being remembered. That is, try to imagine what the experiences may have meant to you and what lessons you may have taken from them. Then try to relate the experiences to what is happening to your life in the present. The memories that you catch onto when you wake up remain easily accessible because they participated in your last dream of sleep. The purpose of that dream was to help you deal with the day that awaits you. So look to the lessons contained in the memories you remember upon waking for what you tried to tell yourself the night before.

Another thing to do on occasion during your personal time is try to outline your life story. This story should be told in terms of your aspirations and what happened to them over the years. Update this story to the present and project it into the future. If you can think of no goals you had as a child except getting by, realize that your true goals just got buried in reaction to negative experiences as you grew up. Approach the problem in another way by asking yourself what has always interested you. Sometimes we don't connect what interests us with goals when the possibility of doing what interests us seems out of reach. Try to define how your deepest dreams got buried along the way. Try to see what parts of your old dreams can be salvaged and would bring new meaning to your life if you began pursuing them again. Realize that all is not well if you are an adult with children of your own and all you can think to dream about now is how you can provide a better life for your kids. You should be dreaming about that, but not only that.

Once you have brought your life story up to date and have decided on dreams that you want to achieve in the future, start thinking about the steps you will need to take to make those dreams a reality. Think especially of your first small steps. Again, these should be things you want to do, not things you feel you should do. Put yourself first, for a change. The people who depend on you will survive.

As you consider the possibility of changing your life, you will begin to appreciate why you haven't made the changes before. The reason, you will discover, lies with your feelings. You will anticipate that taking the first small steps would make you anxious or at least uncomfortable. That's no reason to not take those steps. Growing psychologically means stretching yourself, and when you do that, alarm bells do go off inside, because your life is no longer on old ground. Not to worry. The feelings will go away either as you become accustomed to the new ground or as you learn to deal with the feelings through psychoanalysis.

The first rule about bringing significant psychological change to your life on your own is, don't. It's much easier to accomplish if you have someone with whom you can share your fears, hopes, and dreams. That's why people go to therapists. If you can find such people among your old friends, so much the better. But if your old friends wouldn't understand, seek out new friends who would. One handy place to find such people is online, in chat rooms or message centers. Depending on your religious beliefs, God also could serve as such a special friend.

Those old friends who wouldn't understand, are they casual friends whom you see only occasionally, or are they people you see a good deal? If they are the latter, turn them into the former, because they are a drain on your life.

We live in a society where snap judgments are often made in the media and in everyday life about what moves people psychologically to act in certain ways. Very often, these assessments, while not absolutely wrong, are nevertheless off the mark, which will not be good enough for you. So while you are analyzing your life, feel free to make tentative conclusions, but reserve final judgment until you have had a chance to see how well those conclusions work.

It's okay to give up for a period of time. Do it a thousand times, if you must. Give up for a day or a week or even a month or two, but don't ever give up for good. Remember, you have only one life, and with each passing day, you have a little less left. What you do with what remains is what's important. There is time enough to give up, but no point to ever give up permanently. Growing psychologically is a lot like making sourdough bread the old-fashioned way, by taking a moldering piece of dough from a previous batch to serve as a starter for a new loaf. Oftentimes, when we have made progress, we can't capitalize on it right away. We need to let it sit a while and work its way into our psyches before applying it to the direction we should seek. Frequently it will turn out that you "gave up" merely to give yourself distance from decisions that would have taken you in a wrong direction.