Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now
Gordon Livingston
Description
Out of a lifetime of experience, Livingston has extracted 30 bedrock truths: “We are what we do.” Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Only bad things happen quickly. Forgiveness is a form of letting go, but they are not the same thing. The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas. Livingston illuminates these and 24 others in perfectly calibrated essays, many of which emphasise our closest relationships and the things that we do to impede or enhance them. These writings underscore that ‘we are what we do’ and that while there may be no escaping who we are, we have the capacity to face loss, misfortune, and regret, and to move beyond them.
Key words: Happiness, Resilience, Meaning
To read reviews of this book visit Goodreads
My Notes
Real friends ‘say the hard things that we need to know if we are to be stronger, better, more generous, more courageous and kinder’.
Truth 1: If the map doesn’t agree with the ground, the map is wrong
Children need stability and security in order to begin to construct their maps for how the world works.
What do we need to decide if someone is suitable for lifelong commitment? Well we can start with who is evidently not suitable.
We usually think of someone who has ‘personality’. The formal definition of personality includes our habitual ways of thinking, feeling and relating to others.
We need to construct the following map in our heads; a reliable guide that allows us to avoid those who are not worthy of our time and trust and to embrace who we are. The best indications that our tentative maps are faulty include feelings of sadness, betrayal, surprise and disorientation. It is when these feeling surface that we need to think about our mental instrument of navigation and how to correct it.
Truth 2: We are what we do
I listen to their stories. Each one is of course, different but there are certain recurrent themes: Others in their families have similar discouraged lives. The relationships in which they now find themselves are either full of conflict or ‘low temperature’, with little passion or intimacy. Their days are routine: unsatisfying jobs, few friends, lots of boredom. They feel cut off from the pleasure enjoyed by others.
Here is what I tell them: The good news is that we have effective treatments for the symptoms of depression: the bad news is that medication will not make you happy. Happiness is not simply the absence of despair. It is an affirmative state in with our lives have both meaning and pleasure.
So, medication alone is seldom enough. People also need to look at the way they are living with an eye to change.
We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel. We are what we do. Conversely in judging other people we need to pay attention not to what they promise but to how they behave.
Most of the heartbreak that life contains is a result of ignoring the reality that past behaviour is the most reliable predicted of future behaviour.
The three components of happiness are;
Something to do
Someone to love
Something to look forward to
Love is ‘is where our concern for the wellbeing of another exceeds, what we want for ourselves’.
We are entitled to receive only what we are prepared to give.
Most of our dissatisfactions with others reflect limitations in ourselves.
Truth 3: It is difficult to remove anything by logic, that wasn’t put there by logic in the first place
What’s going on here? Why do people not seem to understand that criticism causes / creates anger and unhappiness? There is no single answer to this question, of course, but confronting deeply held habitual feelings and attitudes with logic seldom works.
The things we do, the prejudices that we hold, and the repetitive conflicts that afflict our lives are seldom the products of rational thought. In fact, we operate in the world mostly on autopilot, doing the same things today that didn’t work yesterday.
If we wish, as most of us do, to be treated with kindness and forbearance, we need to cultivate those qualities in ourselves.
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 this 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 of perpetual debt.
Families where kids in their twos and thirties still live at home: there is a kind of shared commitment not to change the family. The young people trade their chance at autonomous lives in exchange for the security of a familiar, childlike existence that serves to reassure their parents that they need not relinquish their responsibilities on which their sense of themselves depends. It is like watching a well-rehearsed play. The idea of closing down the production is extremely anxiety provoking.
Finally, when struggling to overcome maladaptive behaviours by the use of logic, one is often confronted with the fact that some ignorance is invincible. People can become wedded to their particular view of how things should work that they ignore all evidence that suggests that change is necessary.
Truth 4: The limitations have expired on most of our childhood traumas
Acceptance of responsibility for what we do and how we feel requires an act of will. It is naturally easy to blame people in our pasts, especially our parents, for not doing a better job.
Change is the essence of life. After people have finished ‘whining’ about their lives. My favourite therapeutic question is ‘What’s next?’ (I have a screensaver with these words scrolling). The question implies a willingness to change and the power to do so. It bypasses the self-pity implied in clinging to past traumas and recognises the importance of leveraging goal-orientated conversation, insight, and a therapeutic relationship into changes in behaviour.
Truth 5: Any relationship is under the control of the person who cares the least
The issues over which most contests are fought in relationships are familiar – money, children, sex – but the underlying causes are usually diminished self-respect and unmet expectations.
The ways in which people come together and choose each other place great emphasis on the potent combination of sexual attraction and a sort of enlightened self-interest that evaluates the other person on a series of qualities and achievements: education, earning potential, shared interests, trustworthiness, and philosophy of life. 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.
We require contracts from people we do not trust; they protect us against those we fear will take advantage of us.
Truth 6: Feelings follow behaviour
We must start something to then feel something.
When people come to a therapist for help, they are seeking to change the way they feel.
Most people know what is good for them, know what will make them feel better: exercise, hobbies, time with those they care about. They do not avoid these things because of ignorance of their value, but because they are no longer ‘motivated’ to do them.
As much as we try, we cannot control how we feel or what we think.
If they say that doing things, they do not feel like doing is difficulty. I acknowledge this and ask them if ‘difficult’ means the same thing to them as ‘impossible’. Soon we are talking about things like courage and determination.
The successful treatment of addictions is only by ‘doing’ something. There is a core belief that each addict has ‘themselves’ the responsibility to stop using that cannot be dodged, rationalised, or shifted to another person.
In an effort to destigmatise genuine mental illness (severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder), we have created a plethora of diagnosis that are really just descriptions of certain patterns of behaviour.
By labelling this and that, we imply that they have a lack of capacity to change their situation and should be held to a different standard of responsibility for their choices than other people.
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 earth, able to struggle with and overcome adversity.
Like other forms of welfare, compensating people who feel helpless validates this emotion and ensures that it persists.
Such as system undermines the self-esteem of those it purports to help and constitutes a self-fulling affirmation of dependency and hopelessness.
The role of the victim is generally accompanied by a sense of shame and self-blame.
Truth 7: Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid
Truth 8: The perfect is the enemy of the good
We are taught to peruse an elusive form of security, primarily through the acquisition of material goods and the means to obtain them. There is a kind of track that we put on early in life with the implicit suggestion that, if we ‘succeed’ we will be happy and secure.
The primary means to this end is education. The structured pursuit of schooling provides a systematic classification of social standing and potential for success, as well as a set of immediate goals that satisfy our need to reassure ourselves of progress.
We live in a competitive society. We are forever dividing the world up into winners and losers.
Control is a popular illusion closely related to the pursuit of perfection. In our dreams we could bend the world and the people in it to our will. Gone would be the need to negotiate differences, to ensure the uncertainty of failure and rejection. Though we come to understand that such a world is impossible, sometimes we go to great lengths to achieve whatever control we can over those around us through the exercise of power and manipulation.
The perfectionist does not trust their feelings, they prefer to occupy themselves with things they can count.
We gain control only by relinquishing it.
Truth 9: Life’s two most important questions are ‘why’ and ‘why not’. The trick is knowing which one to ask
Acquiring some understanding of why we do things is a prerequisite to change.
Socrates said, “the unexamined life, is not worth living”.
Freud’s major contribution to psychology was the theory of the unconscious mind, functioning below the level of our awareness and influencing our behaviour.
Once we acknowledge that there exists below our consciousness a swamp of repressed desires, resentments, motivations that affect our day to day behaviour, we have made an important step toward self-understanding.
Ignoring the existing of our subconscious tends to have troubling results. We notice first the consequences of such unawareness: destructive patterns of behaviour in which we find ourselves surprised that we repeatedly make the same mistakes.
To change such habitual behaviour and maladaptive patterns of behaviour requires first recognition of the pattern.
If people are reluctant to answer ‘why’ questions in their lives, they also tend to have trouble answer ‘why not’ questions. The latter implies risk.
Why questions = morals / beliefs.
In activities that may involve rejection, we tend to act as it our sense of ourselves is fragile and must be protected.
Many people choose continued loneliness over the difficult task of getting to know new people, with its attendant risks of rejection.
Truth 10: Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses
We think of ourselves as the same person whatever we may be doing at the moment. But our different roles demand different attitudes.
We all tend to get defensive if our deeply held convictions are challenged. This is why most political or religious arguments are fruitless.
We need to acknowledge that those qualities of which we are most proud can prove are undoing.
The list of paradoxes is endless: the relentless pursuit of pleasure brings pain; the greatest risk is not taking any. My favourite is the truth that everything in life is a good news/bad news story. The long-sought promotion brings more money and more headaches; our dream vacation puts us in debt; experience has taught us well, but now we are too old to use the knowledge; youth is wasted on the young.
Only by embracing our mortality can we be happy in the time we have.
Truth 11: The most secure prisons we have is those we construct for ourselves
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 of to try, all our unfulfilled dreams, constitute a limitation on what we are and what we could become. Usually it is fear and its close cousin, anxiety that keep us from doing the things that would make us happy. So much of our lives consists of broken promises to ourselves.
Often, we do not do what is necessary to become the people we want to be.
Keeping our expectations low prevents us from disappointment.
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 behaviour and feelings.
One of the most difficult things is to ascertain when confronted with a person seeking therapy is their readiness to change. Some people seek help for pity and where possible compensation. Unless it is accompanied by altered behaviour, it remains only words in the air.
There is a disconnect between what we say and what we do. We pay too much attention to words – ours, 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.
Truth 12: The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting
It is part of the symmetry of life that we descend slowly back into infancy.
Most old people are pre-occupied with self-centred complaints.
I believe that parenthood, a voluntary commitment, does not incur a reciprocal obligation in the young – either to conform their lives to our parental preferences, or to listen endlessly to our protests.
Truth 13: Happiness is the ultimate risk
I re-direct people’s attention to the possibility that there might be advantages to their being depressed. One of the benefits is that it is a safe position.
Asking someone to relinquish depression is often met with resistance. To be happy to take the risk of losing that happiness.
We have designated certain members of the community, police, fire fighters, soldiers, athletes – to assume the risks that the rest of us are unwilling to take.
What is psychotherapy? It is goal orientated conversation in the service of change. That’s what people who come for help want ‘change’. Usually they want to alter the way they’re feeling: anxious, sad, disorientated, 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 characterises those who struggle emotionally is that they have lost or believe they have lost their ability to choose those behaviours that make them happy.
The job of the psychotherapist is to reinstill hope. By asking the question ‘what are you looking forward to?’.
When confronted with a suicidal person I seldom try to talk them out of it. Instead I ask them to examine what it is that has so far dissuaded them from killing themselves.
People in despair are, naturally intensely self-absorbed. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this pre-occupation with self.
Truth 14: True love is the apple of Eden
In some ways, the normal course of human development represents a prolonged version of the story of the fall. Childhood is a series of disillusionments in which we progress from innocent belief to a harsher reality. One by one we leave behind our conceptions of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the perfection of our parents, and our own immortality. And we relinquish the comfort and certainty of these childish ideas, they are replaced with a sense that, thanks to Adam and Eve, life is a struggle, full of pain and loss, ending badly.
Truth 15: Only bad things happen quickly
Change is not rapidly achieved.
We think once we know ‘what to do’ it appears that we ought to find a simple way to do it. The reason it’s there is work to be done, is the psychological power of habit. We need to shed the old habits, over-eating, gambling. These don’t happen overnight.
Virtually all the happiness producing processes in our lives take time, usually a long time. This is why patience and determination are among life’s primary virtues.
Somewhere along the line we became impatient people, expecting quick answers to all difficulties.
As long as we measure others and ourselves by what we have and how we look, life is inevitably a discouraging experience, characterised by greed, envy and a desire to be someone else.
If we believe in the sudden transformation, the big score, we are less likely to pursue the harder and less immediately satisfying work of becoming the people we wish to be.
Truth 16: Not all who wander are lost
We are all taught to do what we are told until sufficient time elapses that we are allowed to tell others what to do.
There is a promise implicit in the process: follow instructions, please others, obey the rules and happiness will be yours.
I talk to a lot of people, particularly men, who in the middle age, feel that the bargain they struck with the system has not been kept. Frequently, they are in secure jobs, own their own homes, have the requisite wife and the 2.2 children, and feel lost. Much of what they aspired to now seems like a burden. They are preoccupied with that they might have missed.
Career changes, marital misadventures, spiritual explorations – all can be forms of ‘wandering’ that seem to depart from the norm but may simply express courage to take risks in the struggle to find happiness and meaning.
Often it is the dalliances and detours that define us. There are no maps to guide our most important searches; we must rely on hope, chance, intuition and a willingness to be surprised.
Truth 17: Unrequited love is painful but not romantic
Unrequited love is a longing for what we cannot have.
We seek the unconditional approval of the ‘good’ parents, the ultimate in emotional security. If we get this as a child, we want it again. If like most of us, we did not, still we wish for it as a shield in an uncertain, often uncaring, world.
Truth 18: There is nothing more pointless, or common that doing the same things and expecting different results
What is frustrating is the experience of making the same mistake repeatedly.
The process of learning consists not so much in accumulating answers but in figuring out how to formulate the right questions.
Nearly every human action is in some way an expression of how we think about ourselves. There are few behaviours that are self-esteem neutral. To all important life decisions ask, ‘How will this make me feel about myself?’
With most marital problems…Ask ‘How did you think this conversation would go if you said that?’
The sad fact is that most people have a low expectation of happiness. It is as if they have relegated the whole idea to the realm of myth that, like Santa clause or the tooth fairy, has been discredited by their life experience.
If what you are doing now isn’t working, why don’t you try something else?
Truth 19: We flee from the truth in vain
Truth 20: It’s a poor idea to lie to oneself
Most of the scandals that entertain us are based on a disconnect between words and behaviour: adulterous preachers, deceitful politicians, paedophile priests.
We routinely invoke theories of accident, coincidence and forgetfulness to explain behaviours that we do not wish to examine closely.
Lying to ourselves disables us entirely from making needed changes.
People are reluctant to take responsibility for themselves, preferring easy excuses to difficult self-examination.
The truth may not make us free, but to lie to ourselves in the name of temporary comfort is the ultimate folly. Life decisions not based on reality are bound to be faulty.
Truth 21: We are all prone to the myth of the perfect stranger
No element of dissatisfaction with our lives is more common than a belief that we have in our youth made the wrong choice of partner.
What is sought, apart from variety, is reassurance. In some respects, every pleasure-seeking activity is a response to our fear of death. As we age, we try to come to terms with the futility of our desires for youth and mortality, one response is to seek out experiences that feed our conceit that we retain our attractiveness. What better way to do this that through sex with someone new?
Infidelity is a uniquely human expression of fear and longing.
Truth 22: Love is never lost, not even in death
To lose that which means the most to us is a lesson in helplessness and humility and survival.
There is no way around grief. You just have to go through it. It is our task to transfer that love to those that still need us. In this way we remain faithful to their memories.
Truth 23: Nobody likes to be told what to do
Keep track of your interactions that consist of criticism or directions. We are not obedient people. We are genetically programmed to question authority.
It is easy to keep doing what we’re used to, even if it’s evidently not working for us.
Truth 24: The major advantage of illness is that it provides relief from responsibility
People enter my office in great distress. No one drops by to chat. The cost of psychotherapy and the stigma associated with any form of emotional disorder ensure that those who seek help are in pain. Many of them are surprised, therefore, when I ask them if their difficulties present any advantages.
They are so used to focusing on their discomfort and the limitations imposed by their anxiety and depression that it has never occurred to them that there could be any kind of payoff associated with these conditions. One of the basic rules of animal psychology is that any behaviour that is reinforced will continue; behaviours that is not will extinguish.
We do those things respectively that produce some reward. It is just hard sometimes to discern what that reinforcement might be. (such as victim = attention).
When no other relief is available to us, some form of illness or disability is one of the few socially acceptable ways of relinquishing the weight of responsibility, if only for a little while. ‘
People are pre-occupied by the obvious disadvantages of their illness, they resent any implication of a secondary gain. And yet, especially in cases where people receive some form of relief from work or other responsibilities, it is hard to escape the possibility that this might play a part in reinforcing and prolonging the sick role.
Each person is responsible for the choices he or she makes in our never-ending quest for happiness.
Truth 25: We are afraid of the wrong things
We live in a fear promoting society. It is the business of advertisers to stoke our anxieties about what we have, what we look like, and whether we are sexually adequate.
If they get us to focus on killer bees, SARS, prowlers of the night, we are less likely to focus on erosion or civil liberties and such like all around us.
We are bombarded by with images of people who have succeeded with little or no effort or ability: trust fund babies, lottery winners & reality show winners.
Fear and desire are opposite sides of the same coin. Much of what we do is driven by fear of failure.
Much of our behaviours are driven by some combination of greed and competition. Success looks like survival of the fittest.
Truth 26: Parents have limited ability to shape children’s behaviour, except for the worse
It is the way we live as adults that conveys the real message to our children about what we believe in.
What is important is children feel loved and respected.
What we say, pales in comparison to what our children see us do.
The secret to happiness is selective attention – focus our awareness and energy on those things and people that bring us pleasure and satisfaction.
Truth 27: The only real paradises are those we have lost
What happens as we try to come to terms with our pasts is that we see our lives as a process of continual disenchantment. We long for the security provided by the comforting illusions of our youth.
To know someone fully and love them in spite of, or even because of their imperfections is an act that requires us to recognise and forgive, two very important indicators of emotional maturity. More important is the fact that, if we can do this for other people, we might be able to do it for ourselves.
Our constant challenge is not to see perfection in ourselves and others, but to find ways to be happy in an imperfect world.
It is the story we tell ourselves about the past, full of distortions, wishful thinking and unfulfilled dreams. How do people recall events so differently? The answer, is what we remember and how we remember it are effected by the meaning of events to us and by the effort we all make to construct a coherent narrative from our lives that reflects what we think of ourselves and how we became the people we are – or wish we were.
People see themselves differently in the present, and as a result, they have different narratives of how they got there.
The problem with our longing for the paradises of the past is that is distracts us from our efforts to extract pleasure and meaning from the present.
Realise that we all colour our pasts either happy or sad.
We have a choice of accepting and enjoying what we have made of our lives.
Truth 28: The ability to laugh is therapeutic
People find it hard to entertain two emotions simultaneously.
Some people treat humour as a minor distraction from the serious business of living rather than an important component, and indicator, of a happy life.
It is possible to be happy in the face of our own mortality.
The mind/body interplay is at the heart of every theory of how we can influence recovery by the ways in which we think and feel about whatever afflicts us.
To share laughter is a way of affirming that we are all in the lifeboat together. The sea surrounds us; rescue is uncertain; control is an illusion. Still we sail on – together.
Smiling is an indication of ‘good humour’
Truth 29: Mental health requires freedom of choice
Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it.
Those who are most unwell or discouraged suffer from a sense that their choices have been limited, sometimes by external circumstances or illness, most often by the many ways we restrict ourselves.
Truth 30: Forgiveness is a form of letting go
Why is it so hard for people to surrender the past? Our memories good or bad, are what give us a sense of continuity and link the many people we have been to the one that temporarily inhibits our changing body.
The problem with living in the past is that it inhibits change and is therefore inherently pessimistic. Certainly, it is true that understanding who we are depends on paying attention to the history of our lives.
If we can relinquish the pre-occupations that are rooted in the past, we are free to choose the attitudes with which we confront the present and future. This involves an exercise in consciousness and determination.
For most of us the process of nursing blame for the past injury distracts us from the essential question of what we need to do now to improve our lives. For many people the past is like an endlessly entertaining, if frequently painful, movie they replay for themselves over and over. It contains all the explanations, all the misery, all the drama that went into making us what we are today. That it may also, when checked against the versions of others who were there, be largely a work of our imagination.
