The Road Less Traveled - SECTION I - Episodes 5 - 8

 

Episode 5:   Responsibility

We cannot solve life's problems except by solving them.

This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race.

This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.

We cannot solve a problem by saying "It's not my problem." We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us.

I can solve a problem only when I say "This is my problem and it's up to me to solve it."

But many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: "This problem was caused me by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me. It is not really my personal problem."

The extent to which people will go psychologically to avoid assuming responsibility for personal problems, while always sad, is sometimes almost ludicrous.

A career Sergeant in the army, stationed in Okinawa and in serious trouble because of his excessive drinking, was referred for psychiatric evaluation and, if possible, assistance. He denied that he was an alcoholic, or even that his use of alcohol was a personal problem, saying, "There's nothing else to do in the evenings in Okinawa except drink. "

"Do you like to read?" I asked.

"Oh yes, I like to read, sure."

"Then why don't you read in the evening instead of drinking?"

"It's too noisy to read in the barracks."

"Well, then, why don't you go to the library?"

"The library is too far away."

"Is the library farther away than the bar you go to?"

"Well, I'm not much of a reader. That's not where my interests lie."

"Do you like to fish?" I then inquired.

"Sure, I love to fish."

"Why not go fishing instead of drinking?"

"Because I have to work all day long."

"Can't you go fishing at night?"

"No, there isn't any night fishing in Okinawa."

"But there is," I said. "I know several organizations that fish at night here. Would you like me to put you in touch with them?"

"Well, I really don't like to fish."

"What I hear you saying," I clarified, "is that there are other things to do in Okinawa except drink, but the thing you like to do most in Okinawa is drink."

"Yeah, I guess so."

"But your drinking is getting you in trouble, so you're faced with a real problem, aren't you?"

"This damn island would drive anyone to drink."

I kept trying for a while, but the Sergeant was not the least bit interested in seeing his drinking as a personal problem which he could solve either with or without help, and I regretfully told his Commander that he was not amenable to assistance. His drinking continued, and he was separated from the service in mid-career.

A young wife, also in Okinawa, cut her wrist lightly with a razor blade and was brought to the emergency room, where I saw her. I asked her why she had done this to herself.

"To kill myself, of course."

"Why do you want to kill yourself?"

"Because I can't stand it on this dumb island. You have to send me back to the States. I'm going to kill myself if 1 have to stay here any longer."

"What is it about living in Okinawa that's so painful for you?" I asked.

She began to cry in a whining sort of way. "I don't have any friends here, and I'm alone all the time."

"That's too bad. How come you haven't been able to make any friends?"

"Because 1 have to live in a stupid Okinawan housing area, and none of my neighbors speaks English."

"Why don't you drive over to the American housing area or to the wives' club during the day so you can make some friends?"

"Because my husband has to drive the car to work."

"Can't you drive him to work, since you're alone and bored all day?" I asked.

"No. It's a stick-shift car, and I don't know how to drive a stick-shift car, only an automatic."

"Why don't you learn how to drive a stick-shift car?"

She glared at me. "On these roads? You must be crazy."

 

Episode 6:   Neuroses and Character Disorders

Most people who come to see a Psychiatrist are suffering from what is called either a neurosis or a character disorder.

Put most simply, these two conditions are disorders of responsibility, and as such they are opposite styles of relating to the world and its problems. The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough.

When neurotics are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that they are at fault.

When those with character disorders are in conflict with the world they automatically assume that the world is at fault.

The two individuals just described had character disorders: the Sergeant felt that his drinking was Okinawa's fault, not his, and the wife also saw herself as playing no role whatsoever in her own isolation.

A neurotic woman, on the other hand, also suffering from loneliness and isolation on Okinawa, complained: "I drive over to the Non-Commissioned Officers' Wives Club every day to look for friendship, but I don't feel at ease there.

I think that the other wives don't like me. Something must be wrong with me. I should be able to make friends more easily.

I ought to be more outgoing. I want to find out what it is about me that makes me so unpopular." This woman assumed total responsibility for her loneliness, feeling she was entirely to blame.

What she found out in the course of therapy was that she was an unusually intelligent and ambitious person and that she was ill at ease with the other Sergeants' wives, as well as with her husband, because she was considerably more intelligent and ambitious than them.

She became able to see that her loneliness, while her problem, was not necessarily due to a fault or defect of her own.

Ultimately she was divorced, put herself through college while raising her children, became a magazine editor, and married a successful publisher.

Even the speech patterns of neurotics and those with character disorders are different.

The speech of the neurotic is notable for such expressions as "I ought to," "I should," and "I shouldn't," indicating the individual's self-image as an inferior man or woman, always falling short of the mark, always making the wrong choices.

The speech of a person with a character disorder, however, relies heavily on "I can't," "I couldn't," "I have to," and "I had to," demonstrating a self-image of a being who has no power of choice, whose behavior is completely directed by external forces totally beyond his or her control.

As might be imagined, neurotics, compared with character-disordered people, are easy to work with in psychotherapy because they assume responsibility for their difficulties and therefore see themselves as having problems.

Those with character disorders are much more difficult, if not impossible, to work with because they don't see themselves as the source of their problems; they see the world rather than themselves as being in need of change and therefore fail to recognize the necessity for self-examination. In actuality, many individuals have both a neurosis and a character disorder and are referred to as "character neurotics," indicating that in some areas of their lives they are guilt-ridden by virtue of having assumed responsibility that is not really theirs, while in other areas of their lives they fail to take realistic responsibility for themselves.

Fortunately, once having established the faith and trust of such individuals in the psychotherapy process through helping them with the neurotic part of their personalities, it is often possible then to engage them in examining and correcting their unwillingness to assume responsibility where appropriate.

Few of us can escape being neurotic or character disordered to at least some degree (which is why essentially everyone can benefit from psychotherapy if he or she is seriously willing to participate in the process). The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence.

It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. Nor is this assessment and reassessment painless if performed adequately and conscientiously.

To perform either process adequately we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination. And such capacity or willingness is not inherent in any of us. In a sense all children have character disorders, in that their instinctual tendency is to deny their responsibility for many conflicts in which they find themselves.

Thus two siblings fighting will always blame each other for initiating the fight and each will totally deny that he or she may have been the culprit.

Similarly, all children have neuroses, in that they will instinctually assume responsibility for certain deprivations that they experience but do not yet understand.

Thus the child who is not loved by his parents will always assume himself or herself to be unlovable rather than see the parents as deficient in their capacity to love. Or early adolescents who are not yet successful at dating or at sports will see themselves as seriously deficient human beings rather than the late or even average but perfectly adequate bloomers they usually are. It is only through a vast amount of experience and a lengthy and successful maturation that we gain the capacity to see the world and our place in it realistically, and thus are enabled to realistically assess our responsibility for ourselves and the world.

There is much that parents can do to assist their children in this maturation process. Opportunities present themselves thousands of times while children are growing up when parents can either confront them with their tendency to avoid or escape responsibility for their own actions or can reassure them that certain situations are not their fault. But to seize these opportunities, as I have said, requires of parents' sensitivity to their children's needs and the willingness to take the time and make the often-uncomfortable effort to meet these needs. And this in turn requires love and the willingness to assume appropriate responsibility for the enhancement of their children's growth.

Conversely, even above and beyond simple insensitivity or neglect, there is much that many parents do to hinder this maturation process.

Neurotics, because of their willingness to assume responsibility may be quite excellent parents if their neuroses are relatively mild and they are not so overwhelmed by unnecessary responsibilities that they have scant energy left for the necessary responsibilities of parenthood.

Character- disordered people, however, make disastrous parents, blissfully unaware that they often treat their children with vicious destructiveness. It is said that "neurotics make themselves miserable; those with character disorders make everyone else miserable." Chief among the people character-disordered parents make miserable are their children. As in other areas of their lives, they fail to assume adequate responsibility for their parenting.

They tend to brush off their children in thousands of little ways rather than provide them with needed attention.

When their children are delinquent or are having difficulty in school, character-disordered parents will automatically lay the blame on the school system or on other children who, they insist, are a "bad influence" on their own children. This attitude, of course, ignores the problem. Because they duck responsibility, character-disordered parents serve as role models of irresponsibility for their children.

Finally, in their efforts to avoid responsibility for their own lives, character-disordered parents will often lay this responsibility upon their children: "You kids are driving me nuts," or "The only reason I stay married to your father [mother] is because of you kids," or "Your mother's a nervous wreck because of you," or "I could have gone to college and been a success if it weren't for having to support you." In such ways these parents in effect say to their children, "You are responsible for the quality of my marriage, my mental health and my lack of success in life." Since they lack the capacity to see how inappropriate this is, the children will often accept this responsibility, and insofar as they do accept it, they will become neurotic. It is in such ways that character-disordered parents almost invariably produce character-disordered or neurotic children. It is the parents themselves who visit their sins upon their children.

It is not simply in their role as parents that character-disordered individuals are ineffective and destructive; these same character traits usually extend to their marriages, their friendships and their business dealings-to any area of their existence in which they fail to assume responsibility for its quality. This is inevitable since, as has been said, no problem can be solved until an individual assumes the responsibility for solving it. When character-disordered individuals blame someone else-a spouse, a child, a friend, a parent, an employer- or something else-bad influences, the schools, the government, racism, sexism, society, the "system"-for their problems, these problems persist. Nothing has been accomplished.

By casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow spiritually, and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society.

The saying of the sixties (attributed to Eldridge Cleaver) speaks to all of us for all time: "If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem."

When a Psychiatrist makes the diagnosis of a character disorder, it is because the pattern of avoidance of responsibility is relatively gross in the diagnosed individual.

Yet almost all of us from time to time seek to avoid-in ways that can be quite subtle-the pain of assuming responsibility for our own problems. For the cure of my own subtle character disorder at the age of thirty I am indebted to Mac Badgely. At the time Mac was the director of the outpatient psychiatric clinic where I was completing my psychiatry residency training.

In this clinic my fellow residents and I were assigned new patients on rotation. Perhaps because I was more dedicated to my patients and my own education than most of my fellow residents, I found myself working much longer hours than they.

They ordinarily saw patients only once a week.

I often saw my patients two or three times a week. As a result I would watch my fellow residents leaving the clinic at four-thirty each afternoon for their homes, while I was scheduled with appointments up to eight or nine o'clock at night, and my heart was filled with resentment.

As I became more and more resentful and more and more exhausted I realized that something had to be done. So I went to Dr. Badgely and explained the situation to him. I wondered whether I might be exempted from the rotation of accepting new patients for a few weeks so that I might have time to catch up. Did he think that was feasible? Or could he think of some other solution to the problem? Mac listened to me very intently and receptively, not interrupting once.

When I was finished, after a moment's silence, he said to me very sympathetically, "Well, I can see that you do have a problem." I beamed, feeling understood. "Thank you," I said. "What do you think should be done about it?"

To this Mac replied, "I told you, Scott, you do have a problem."

This was hardly the response I expected. "Yes," I said, slightly annoyed, "I know I have a problem. That's why I came to see you. What do you think I ought to do about it?"

Mac responded: "Scott, apparently you haven't listened to what I said. I have heard you, and I am agreeing with you.

You do have a problem."

"Goddammit," I said, "I know I have a problem. I knew that when I came in here. The question is, what am I going to do about it?"

"Scott," Mac replied, "I want you to listen. Listen closely and I will say it again. I agree with you. You do have a problem. Specifically, you have a problem with time.

Your time. Not my time.

It's not my problem. It's your problem with your time.

You, Scott Peck, have a problem with your

time. That's all I'm going to say about it."

I turned and strode out of Mac's office, furious. And I stayed furious. I hated Mac Badgely. For three months I hated him. I felt that he had a severe character disorder. How else could he be so callous? Here I had gone to him humbly asking for just a little bit of help, a little bit of advice, and the bastard wasn't even willing to assume enough responsibility even to try to help me, even to do his job as director of the clinic.

If he wasn't supposed to help manage such problems as director of the clinic, what the hell was he supposed to do?

But after three months I somehow came to see that Mac was right, that it was I, not he, who had the character disorder.

My time was my responsibility. It was up to me and me alone to decide how I wanted to use and order my time. If I wanted to invest my time more heavily than my fellow residents in my work, then that was my choice, and the consequences of that choice were my responsibility. It might be painful for me to watch my fellow residents leave their offices two or three hours before me, and it might be painful to listen to my wife's complaints that I was not devoting myself sufficiently to the family, but these pains were the consequence of a choice that I had made. If I did not want to suffer them, then I was free to choose not to work so hard and to structure my time differently. My working hard was not a burden cast upon me by hardhearted fate or a hardhearted clinic director;

it was the way I had chosen to live my life and order my priorities. As it happened, I chose not to change my life style.

But with my change in attitude, my resentment of my fellow residents vanished. It simply no longer made any sense to resent them for having chosen a life style different from mine when I was completely free to choose to be like them if I wanted to.

To resent them was to resent my own choice to be different from them, a choice that I was happy with.

The difficulty we have in accepting responsibility for our behavior lies in the desire to avoid the pain of the consequences of that behavior. By requesting Mac Badgely to assume responsibility for the structure of my time I was attempting to avoid the pain of working long hours, even though working long hours was an inevitable consequence of my choice to be dedicated to my patients and my training.

Yet in so doing I was also unwittingly seeking to increase Mac's authority over me. I was giving him my power, my freedom. I was saying in effect, "Take charge of me. You be the boss!"

Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity, be it "fate" or "society" or the government or the corporation or our boss. It is for this reason that Erich Fromm so aptly titled his study of Nazism and authoritarianism Escape from Freedom.

 

Episode 7:   Escape From Freedom

In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.

I have a brilliant but morose acquaintance who, when I allow him to, will speak unceasingly and eloquently of the oppressive forces in our society: racism, sexism, the military, industrial establishment, and the country police who pick on him and his friends because of their long hair.

Again and again I have tried to point out to him that he is not a child.

As children, by virtue of our real and extensive dependency, our parents have real and extensive power over us. They are, infact, largely responsible for our well-being, and we are, in fact, largely at their mercy.

When parents are oppressive, as so often they are, we as children are largely powerless to do anything about it; our choices are limited. But as adults, when we are physically healthy, our choices are almost unlimited.

That does not mean they are not painful. Frequently our choices lie between the lesser of two evils, but it is still within our power to make these choices.

Yes, I agree with my acquaintance, there are indeed oppressive forces at work within the world. We have, however, the freedom to choose every step of the way the manner in which we are going to respond to and deal with these forces. It is his choice to live in an area of the country where the police don't like "long-haired types" and still grow his hair long. He has the freedom to move to the city, or to cut his hair, or even to wage a campaign for the office of Police Commissioner.

But despite his brilliance, he does not acknowledge these freedoms.

 He chooses to lament his lack of political power instead of accepting and exulting in his immense personal power.

He speaks of his love of freedom and of the oppressive forces that thwart it, but every time he speaks of how he is victimized by these forces he actually is giving away his freedom. I hope that some day soon he will stop resenting life simply because some of its choices are painful.

Dr. Hilde Bruch, in the preface to her book Learning Psychotherapy,

states that basically all patients come to Psychiatrists with "one common problem: the sense of helplessness, the fear and inner conviction of being unable to 'cope' and to change things."

One of the roots of this "sense of impotence" in the majority of patients is some desire to partially or totally escape the pain of freedom, and, therefore, some failure, partial or total, to accept responsibility for their problems and their lives.

They feel impotent because they have, in fact, given their power away. Sooner or later, if they are to be

Nowhere, to my knowledge, is the issue of the freedom to choose between two evils more eloquently and even poetically defined than by the Psychiatrist Allen Wheelis, in the chapter "Freedom and Necessity"

In his book How People Change (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). It was tempting to quote the chapter in its entirety, and I recommend it to anyone who desires to explore the issue more fully.

fCambridge, Mass., Harvard Univ. Press, 1974, p. ix.

healed, they must learn that the entirety of one's adult life is a series of personal choices, decisions.

If they can accept this totally, then they become free people.

To the extent that they do not accept this they will forever feel themselves victims.

 

 

Episode 8:   Dedication to Reality

The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem-solving, which must continually be employed if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth. Superficially, this should be obvious.

For truth is reality. That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we  are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world-the more our minds are befuddled by falsehood, misperceptions and illusions-the less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions.

Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost.

While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore.

They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy.

First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.

By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort.

They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct (indeed, even sacrosanct), and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired.

Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever-enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them.

The world itself is constantly changing.

Glaciers come, glaciers go.

Cultures come, cultures go.

There is too little technology, there is too much

technology.

Even more dramatically, the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing.

When we are children we are dependent, powerless.

As adults we may be powerful. Yet in illness or an infirm old age we may become powerless and dependent again.

When we have children to care for, the world looks different from when we have none; when we are raising infants, the world seems different from when we are raising adolescents.

When we are poor, the world looks different from when we are rich.

We are daily bombarded with new information as to the nature of reality.

If we are to incorporate this information, we must continually revise our maps, and sometimes when enough new information has accumulated, we must make very major revisions.

The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. And herein lies the major source of many of the ills of mankind.

What happens when one has striven long and hard to develop a working view of the world, a seemingly useful, workable map, and then is confronted with new information suggesting that that view is wrong and the map needs to be largely redrawn? The painful effort required seems frightening, almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the new information.

Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive.

We may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality.

Rather than try to change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality.

Sadly, such a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and correct it in the first place.