Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now

by Gordon Livingston

The three components of happiness are something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to. Think about it. If we have useful work, sustaining relationships, and the promise of pleasure, it is hard to be unhappy. I use the term “work” to encompass any activity, paid or unpaid, that gives us a feeling of personal significance. If we have a compelling avocation that lends meaning to our lives, that is our work. It is a tribute to the diversity of human life that people can find pleasure and meaning in pursuing mediocrity on the golf course or at the bridge

Much is made of the presumed difficulty in defining “love.” Because the basis for the feeling itself is mysterious (Why do I love this person and not someone else?), it is assumed that words cannot encompass what it means to love another. How about this definition? We love someone when the importance of his or her needs and desires rises to the level of our own.

More commonly, feelings of love or the lack of it are noticeable in all the mundane ways we show that someone matters to us, especially in the amount and quality of the time we are willing to give them.

The point is that love is demonstrated behaviorally. Once again we define who we are and who and what we care about, not by what we promise, but by what we do. I constantly redirect people’s attention to this.

to ourselves? Can we love the truck that runs us over? The other thing that true love requires of us is the courage to become totally vulnerable to another.

The other thing that true love requires of us is the courage to become totally vulnerable to another.

This is why there is truth to the adage that we all get the marriage partners we deserve, and why most of our dissatisfactions with others reflect limitations in ourselves.

There is no single answer to this question, of course, but confronting deeply held, habitual feelings and attitudes with logic seldom works.

The motivations and habit patterns that underlie most of our behavior are seldom logical; we are much more often driven by impulses, preconceptions, and emotions of which we are only dimly aware.

To say that one must give to receive, that we reap as we sow, is to mouth platitudes. Yet what could be truer? Why then is it so difficult to do? Like most explanations of why we act as we do, the answer lies in our past experience.

Many are the ways that parents instill a sense of obligation in their children. By accepting life and nurturance a child apparently incurs a debt that can be repaid only by meeting parental expectations.

Is it any surprise that there should be some feeling of reciprocal obligation on the part of children?

This question, “What do I owe my parents?” frequently distorts people’s lives well into, and sometimes throughout, adulthood. In fact, our children owe us nothing. It was our decision to bring them into the world. If we loved them and provided for their needs it was our task as parents, not some selfless act. We knew from the beginning that we were raising them to leave us and it was always our obligation to help them do this unburdened by a sense of unending gratitude or perpetual debt.

Finally, when struggling to overcome maladaptive behaviors by the use of logic, one is often confronted with the fact that some ignorance is invincible. People can become so wedded to their particular view of how things should work that they ignore all evidence that suggests that change is necessary.

What is important is to go about this examination sympathetically, in a way that emphasizes learning but rejects the assumption that even the most awful experiences define our lives forever.

“What’s next?” (In an act of consummate subtlety I have a screen saver on my desktop computer, visible to patients, with these words scrolling.) The question implies both a willingness to change and the power to do so. It bypasses the self-pity implied in clinging to past traumas and recognizes the importance of leveraging goal-oriented conversation, insight, and a therapeutic relationship into changes in behavior.

It is misplaced kindness to offer only sympathy, even where it is clearly justified. It is hope that I’m really selling.

Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least.

Each person’s assessment of a prospective mate using these standards creates a certain set of expectations. It is the failure of these expectations over time that causes relationships to dissolve.

While it takes two

people to create a relationship, it takes only one to end it.

I acknowledge this and ask if “difficult” means the same thing to them as “impossible.” Soon we are talking about things like courage and determination.

To ask people to be brave is to expect them to think of their lives in a new way.

The point is, in an effort to destigmatize genuine mental illness (severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), we have created a plethora of diagnoses that are really just descriptions of certain patterns of behavior.

When applied to people who abuse food, alcohol, or other substances, or who simply require medication to control their anxiety, the term “disabled” removes not only any sense of responsibility for overcoming one’s problems, it damages irrevocably the self-respect that comes with the sense of being a free person on the earth, able to struggle with and overcome adversity.

We all know people who are perfectionistic. They tend to be demanding of themselves and those around them and to manifest an obsessive orderliness that is, in the end, alienating. They do not trust feelings and prefer to occupy themselves with things they can count.

The problem with perfectionists and their preoccupation with control is that the qualities that make them effective in their work can render them insufferable in their personal lives.

Acquiring some understanding of why we do things is often a prerequisite to change. This is especially true when talking about repetitive patterns of behavior that do not serve us well. This is what Socrates meant when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That more of us do not take his advice is testimony to the hard work and potential embarrassment that self-examination implies.

Freud’s major contribution to psychology was his theory of the unconscious mind, functioning below the level of our awareness and influencing our behavior.

As when President Nixon, in a speech before Congress during Watergate, said, “It is time to get rid of our discredited president . . . I mean present welfare system.” (Or as when Condoleezza Rice began a story, “As I was telling my husb—As I was telling President Bush . . . ”)

such an inner life (as did Nixon, who was terrified of psychiatrists), we will be surprised when our determined efforts at control collapse. (Why did he choose to tape and preserve the incriminating conversations that destroyed his presidency?)

If people are reluctant to answer “Why?” questions in their lives, they also tend to have trouble with “Why not?”

When presented with new things, the operative question may be “Why not?” but people frequently defend themselves from disappointment by asking “Why?” This can lead to the creation of endless excuses for not taking the chance implied in declaring oneself available.

There are certain personality characteristics that are highly correlated with academic and professional success: dedication to work, attention to detail, ability to manage time, conscientiousness. People who have this constellation of traits are generally excellent students and productive workers. They can also be difficult to live with.

People with compulsive character structures are vulnerable to depression, as is anyone who seeks perfection in an imperfect world. It is often puzzling to such people that approaches that make them successful in their work are so poorly received by those they live with. Obsessive people put a strong emphasis on control. Anything that threatens this sense of being in charge induces anxiety. This leads inevitably to efforts to reassert control, in effect redoubling the behaviors that produced the problem in the first place. The resultant conflict produces feelings of frustration and discouragement that further reinforce a sense of failure.

Again, the “How’s that working?” question can keep therapy within useful parameters,

But we need to acknowledge that those qualities of which we are most proud can prove our undoing.

Fate, it seems, has a sense of humor.

When we think about loss of freedom, we seldom focus on the ways in which we voluntarily impose constraints upon our lives. Everything we are afraid to try, all our unfulfilled dreams, constitute a limitation on what we are and could become. Usually it is fear and its close cousin, anxiety, that keep us from doing those things that would make us happy. So much of our lives consists of broken promises to ourselves. The things we long to do—educate ourselves, become successful in our work, fall in love—are goals shared by all. Nor are the means to achieve these things obscure. And yet we often do not do what is necessary to become the people we want to be.

Before we can do anything, we must be able to imagine it. This sounds easy, but I find that many people do not make the link between behavior and feelings. I blame modern medicine and the advertising industry for much of this problem. We have become used to the idea that much of what we don’t like about ourselves and our lives can be quickly overcome with little effort on our part. The marketing of medications that favorably affect our mood, changing our appearance through plastic surgery, and self-improvement through consumption all play into the fantasy that happiness is for sale. Malcolm Forbes famously suggested that, “Anyone who thinks that money can’t buy happiness is shopping in the wrong places.”

This is not “hope” in any realistic sense; it is dreaming. I tend to confront patients who talk about changing their lives, but do not take concrete steps to do so. I often ask them whether their latest plan to do something different is a real expression of intent or simply a wish. The latter can be entertaining and distracting, but should not be confused with reality.

lessons for us all. One of the most difficult things to ascertain when confronted with a person seeking therapy is their readiness to change, their willingness to exercise the fortitude that is necessary to do so. Some people seek help for reasons other than actually changing their lives. We live in a society that has elevated complaint to a primary form of public discourse. The airwaves and courts are full of victims of this and that: childhood abuse, mistakes of others, random misfortune. Voluntary behaviors have been reclassified as illness so that sufferers can be pitied and, where possible, compensated. Not surprisingly, many of these people appear in psychiatrists’ offices expecting a sympathetic ear and medication that will relieve their feelings of distress. Often they want testimony to support lawsuits or letters to excuse them from work. They are not there to engage in the difficult process of examining their lives, taking responsibility for their feelings, deciding what they need to do to be happy—and doing it.

accompanied by altered behavior, it remains only words in the air. We are a verbal species, fond of conveying our minutest thoughts. (Remember the last time you listened to someone talking into a cell phone?) We attach excessive importance to promises. Whenever, as happens frequently, I point out to people the discrepancy between what they say they want and what they actually do, the response is surprise and sometimes outrage that I will not take their expressions of intent at face value but prefer to focus on the only communication that can be trusted: behavior.

Probably the single most confusing thing that people tell each other is “I love you.” We long to hear this powerful and reassuring message. Taken alone, however, unsupported by consistently loving behavior, this is frequently a lie—or, more charitably, a promise unlikely to be fulfilled. The disconnect between what we say and what we do is not merely a measure of hypocrisy, since we usually believe our statements of good intent. We simply pay too much attention to words—ours and others’—and not enough to the actions that really define us. The walls of our self-constructed prisons are made up in equal parts of our fear of risk and our dream that the world and the people in it will conform to our fondest wishes. It is hard to let go of a comforting illusion, but harder still to construct a happy life out of perceptions and beliefs that do not correspond to the world around us.

Usually they want to alter the way they’re feeling: anxious, sad, disoriented, angry, empty, adrift. Our feelings depend mainly on our interpretation of what is happening to us and around us—our attitudes. It is not so much what occurs, but how we define events and respond that determines how we feel. The thing that characterizes those who struggle emotionally is that they have lost, or believe they have lost, their ability to choose those behaviors that will make them happy.

There is simply no denying the anger embedded in any decision to kill oneself. Suicide is a kind of curse forever on those who love us. It is, to be sure, the ultimate statement of hopelessness, but it is also a declaration to those closest to us that their caring for us and our caring for them was insufficient to the task of living through another day. People in despair are, naturally, intensely self-absorbed. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this preoccupation with self. Instead of just expressing the sympathy and fear that suicidal people evoke in those around them, therapists included, I think it is reasonable to confront them with the selfishness and anger implied in any act of self-destruction.

It is an offense to the natural order of life for parents to bury their children. In a just world it would never happen; in this world it does.

When you think about it, it’s remarkable that, instead of being hopelessly discouraged by such a state of affairs, we persist in trying to extract happiness from our brief time on earth. And of all the ways we pursue it, it is, as Genesis suggests, by “cleaving” to each other that we come the closest. (What an amazing word is “cleave,” conveying at once opposite meanings: to split asunder and to hold fast.)

course in human personality and behavior that contains useful information on how to avoid catastrophic mistakes in one’s choice of friends and lovers. So, like most of life, the important task of choosing whom to fall in love with becomes another example of trial and error learning. If only the trials weren’t so costly.

When I listen to comments from elderly people who have been married fifty, sixty, or more years answering the inevitable question about “the secret to a successful marriage,” it seems to me that a high tolerance for boredom often heads the list. Such bromides as “We never went to bed angry” or “Moderation in all things” convey a philosophy more geared to survival than to pleasure. Where, one wonders, is the idea of endless, renewable love?