Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blog

The Hunter: ADHD and in Business

Once upon a time, ADHD was adaptive.

The author of ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World (2002, SelectBooks, Inc.) is the first major proponent of the theory that people with the traits associated with ADHD were well adapted to prehistoric hunter/gatherer groups. In this book, Thom Hartmann discusses why farmers (the patient, detail-oriented folk who make up the rest of the population) have the advantage in middle management and other organizing roles, while hunters are natural at entrepreneurship and sales. The two do best in the modern world when partnered up for business, just as human beings first discovered in the few thousand years B.C. Today's average person is a genetic mix of the two types.

The hunter travelled across miles of tundra and woods in a day, taking all his wits and energy could catch and gather. Today, the hunter is lucky he's not completely extinct, since the early migrating farmers he eventually came in contact with lived in communities characterized by disease incubation, larger fighting armies and stable tool-developing societies.

Having recently revisited the hilly and river-fed Stonehenge area myself, however, it is easy to see how hunter/gatherers might be useful to the comfortable, less visionary farmers. The distractible, visually-oriented and impulsive individual can spot dangers and opportunities, change course quickly, and tolerate--and even enjoy--risk-taking. The hunter-gatherer trades his furs, medicinal woodland herbs and fruits, and traditional wisdom for the superior and always available nutritional products of the farmers. The hunter becomes the riverside night watchman and runner, and the farmer becomes his army.

It is a commonly heard maxim in the years since this book came out that you must partner up with those whose abilities are complementary to succeed. This is not to say that a legal partnership is in order (the author has some pointed warnings about these), but do divide the responsibilities of your workforce according to relative strengths, and do not allow yourself to be "promoted' into a management position that does not suit you.

This book is short, with short sentences. It is geared toward the ADHD reader, in other words. In addition to gathering a lot of quick tips, you may find you wish some of the ideas were 'unpacked' more. Nonetheless, it is a quick primer from a successful entrepreneur and ADHD facility director with much relevant experience and examples that he shares candidly.

I recommend this book to anyone with ADHD who wants to earn a better living by making their style work for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chemistry Revisited

Anthropologist Helen Fisher's bestselling Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love (Holt, 2010) came out in paperback this year with an afterword.  Since I would consider it easily my favorite self-help book of the past year, I thought it was worth reviewing in the context of its impact on my practice and to a degree my social circle, as well as to discuss the new afterword.

Fisher's Explorer, Builder, Negotiator, and Director temperament types (determined by the relative impact of certain neurotransmitters--initially in utero--on a given individual) have easily caught on with my clients as a way to normalize largely benign, but characteristic behavior on their part.  Of course, each type has a "dark side", but somehow, the negative qualities/tendencies seem easier for clients to listen to once they feel their essence has been captured by Fisher and myself.

I have clients go to whyhimwhyher.com and take the test there, as it incorporates some visual-perceptual items not included in the book's version of the test (although the book's test is somewhat longer and may be more reliable for this reason.)  I interpret the results for them and, if interested further, I recommend the book to them. 

I still subscribe to the belief that, for most clients, they are in therapy for one of two reasons: either they are fighting with their partner, or they do not have a partner to fight with.  Even for single clients, it helps me to hear their romantic history through the lens of temperament types they prefer or avoid, and perhaps how those they have chosen resemble mother, father, or siblings.  (In a future piece, I will discuss the impact of good or bad experiences with the different temperament types on future partner choices.)

As I look around me, I find striking that some of the successful work groups I am currently in possess synergistic combinations of these personality types.  For instance, a leadership development group I have been brainstorming with (formally and informally) encompasses myself (a philosophical Negotiator) and a fellow who is a primary, creative Explorer.  A subgroup of women supporting these ideas is like a four-legged table: a take-charge Director, open-minded Explorer, civic-minded Builder and and again, me (the imaginative Negotiator).  Each of the other individuals above is a secondary (adaptable) negotiator, so naturally we stick with each other despite our differences.  Granted this system borrows from David Keirsey's (another developer of personality types) which has been used in work groups historically.  But are all relationships not work groups of some kind?

The two most compelling portions of the new afterword are the how to find/how to keep lasting love ones, which draw on social science research.  A piece of advice I found timely as a clinician is the one about not allowing what seems like an overload of internet dating choices to keep you from really getting to know even one person.  Fisher suggests that after you meet ten people, take the time to really get to know one of them. 

I would add to this that there is a class of people who just want to e-mail, but not meet anyone in person, and so I advise clients to gather as much information as they can in a few e-mails and then ask for a brief meeting over coffee.  In addition, of course, you need to find out if the photographs and information accurately reflect the person they really are right now.  There is no sense in putting energy into a long pen pal relationship with someone who may only exist in your--or their--imagination.

So far, two of my clients have found the love of their lives through Chemistry.com, the site Helen Fisher is the scientific adviser for.  But I have other clients who come in happily coupled up already, having met through other large and small dating sites.  Others have had potential mates they meet elsewhere go and take Dr. Fisher's test, so that I can better advise them how to handle issues that come up.

In any case, I think the existence and impact of this book about love makes a terrific argument for why the social sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology) should be talking to each other more often to make a positive impact on people's quality of life.  And as we bring in to the social sciences information about the impact and ethics of using neurobiological data to advise people, we need all the expertise we can get. 

Meditations on Codependence

Melody Beattie's More Language of Letting Go: 366 New Daily Meditations (2000, Hazelden) is a cheery, brightly covered book that offers bite-sized inspirational vignettes from the mind of codependence's clearest thinker.  It is organized by theme-of-the month.  June's theme, for example is "Learn to Say Relax." 

I was encouraged to buy the book when browsing the book tables at an addictions conference earlier this year.  I picked it up, and Claudia Black--a featured speaker on abuse recovery--looked over my shoulder and kindly offered that she recommends the book to many of her clients.  Black is a very intense, tireless chronicler of her patients' "shame-based beliefs fueling compulsive behaviors."  Her books, like Patrick Carnes', can be painful to read, but are filled with rich insights and compassion.

Back to Beattie's book, More Language's entry for today is a good example of how this author has improved on our grasp of the over-encompassing concept of codependence.  Codependent behavior is broken down into one facet per entry.  June 8 is about how we arrive at being judgmental: by making comparisons between ourselves and others, rather than just enjoying what others have to offer.  It ends with a one-sentence prayer: "God, help me learn to enjoy the people and experiences in my life."  

Being judgmental, of course, reinforces the externalization of what is bad within ourselves: someone else is the addict, the problem-child.  They need us to exert control over them.  Never mind what we are neglecting in ourselves that which we actually can have some control over.

We also need to have the confidence that when something is going on that we don't like, we will be able to deal with it at the time.  No prejudgment necessary.

Beattie's book is a good way for clients and therapists to start their days, as clients are often people who are waking up filled with anxiety, depression or dread they need to "let go" of, and therapists are often people from dysfunctional families of origin who may try to do too much for others and can use a daily reminder to "let go" and let others solve their own problems some of the time. 

Organization for Parents with ADD

A little flighty, are we?  

Embarrassed around other parents who obviously have it together?

ADD-Friendly Ways to Organize Your Life (2002, Routledge) is a great handbook for those of us who can't even count the many ways inattention has interfered with the smooth functioning of our households and cost us precious time and energy.  This book was presented to me by a client staying home with several children. She boasted a graduate degree and the associated dreams, but the usual ADD medications had done little for her.  This book, however, had made a difference.

The authors of ADD-Friendly Ways did several things right.  

First, they narrowed down the problems to tackle to just the most common areas of concern for ADD parents: for example, how to make to-do lists, making school lunches efficiently, and letting go of unrealistic housekeeping ambitions when you work outside the home (and most parents do work outside the home now.)  

Second, they remind you not to try to change too many things too quickly, lest you burn out.  Every single new habit takes two to three weeks to take root, after all. 

And third, they recommend working with your inattentiveness rather than against it.  For example, if there's something you forgot to put on your to-do list, stop and put it on right then while you are thinking of it, even if it isn't convenient.  You are less likely to lose track of it, and won't spend unnecessary mental energy trying to remember what you wanted to write down later.

Finally, three other problem areas are covered very pragmatically, while identifying the ADD ways of thinking that create and sustain them:  packratting, overcommitment, and paperwork avoidance.  When to get friend(s) or family to help, versus hiring a professional organizer, is also usefully covered.

Co-authors Judith Kolberg and Kathleen Nadeau, Ph.D. are, respectively, a professional organizer and a psychologist.  They have written a guide to sustainable lifestyle changes for adults with ADD that can not only make the parenting era of life easier, but increase confidence for midlife functioning and beyond.

I would like to say at this point that as a therapist, I am currently rather ambivalent about the phenomena associated with ADD being classified together as a medical disorder, per se.  I see more and more in my practice that a certain temperament and personality style tends to be associated with these phenomena, generally speaking (my favorite anthropologist, Helen Fisher, refers to such people as Negotiators.) Inattentive people have a lot of positive experiences/qualities associated with them (imagination, multitasking capacity and generosity are just a few examples.) Nonetheless, inattention can certainly impair someone in a given context, and many individuals do benefit from the medications designed to treat it. 

Stop Using and Being Used

Do you know someone who keeps getting involved in impossible romantic situations with others?  Or just can't tear themselves away from someone who's 'bad' for them?

Let's look at an obvious example from the news.  In the wake of the Tiger Woods scandal, I can't help wondering about the lure of this man for all of these women who each thought they might be his next wife, implausible as that thought might seem to the rest of us given their... well, cheap self-presentations.   

I picked up Patrick Carnes' The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships (1997, Healh Communications, Inc.) at a national addictions conference this winter, not realizing that Carnes is the psychologist who runs the treatment center at which Tiger was residing at that very moment. Carnes is considered the leading expert on sex addiction in the U.S., and holds trainings here and abroad for mental health professionals wanting to specialize in this area.  He has several books on addictions, recovery and compulsivity.  

Though this is not his latest book, the work exploitive caught my eye.  Tiger's women look like they've been around the block a few times, I thought initially.  Why would they not only allow themselves to be treated in this especially degrading way (invited to perform acts even a prostitute might decline), but assume that this was love between themselves and Tiger?  

On the first point, the fact of being used is often not obvious to the victim for a number of reasons.  For one, the sex addict (the user) has told the victim a compelling story-a bad marriage, unmet needs, lack of appreciation for his important work--and given her lots of flattery and attention.  Particularly for women with a history of abuse/neglect in childhood, this story will feel familiar and be very seductive. They will empathize and/or become codependent with the addict, attempting to rescue him by giving him whatever he craves.  

There is some "nobility" in this, says Carnes, who not only helps the reader see her own role in the exploitation dynamic, but shows how confusing and changeable these roles can be.  Both user and used can experience themselves as helpless victim, angry/defiant victimizer, or bold rescuer at times.  In other words, it may not feel much different to play into someone else's sex addiction than it does to be the sex-addicted player. (That is, unless you are a child, or other dependent, and then a power dynamic comes into play.)

The second point concerns the confusion of addiction with love.  This goes to the central idea of this book that I find most interesting, which is the distinction between seeking intensity versus creating intimacy in relationships.  Carnes provides helpful tables that give the reader a feel for how the intensity of sexual exploitation, with its emotionally charged elements of secrecy, risk, and isolation can create a  high, and a "trauma bond" that can lead to "insane loyalty" in the victim.  Likewise, the addict continues to seek out the high provided by the intense experience, until s/he becomes habituated with this source and seeks out something or someone new.  As Carnes points out, this is not love, but pseudointimacy. Again, those with a history of being subjected to intense negative emotional experiences earlier in life will be particularly vulnerable to such addictions or bonds. 

Intimacy, on the other hand, with its capacity to provide both safety and passion, can only come about through self-knowledge and taking responsibility for one's own happiness or healing from pain.  Learning to be alone--without the abuser in your life as much as is practical--is essential to creating the opportunity for new bonds to form.  Warmth and high intention can then create a healthy bond with another whom you respect.

Carnes presents some examples of mass exploitation (Jim Jones, for one) in which the fear and intimidation levels are of course much higher than they were in the cases of affairs such as Tiger's.  Nonetheless the book's ideas are equally applicable to any exploitation situation that is more subtle and typical--that you might come across among your personal acquaintances, for example. Not only is all of this useful to people in exploitive affairs, but also for a partner left at home, who needs to look at why they may be settling for a partial relationship in place of real intimacy.  

There is far more to Carnes' rich discussion of this subject than I can go into here.  For the therapist or lay reader, Carnes' book is both theoretical and a systematic program with exercises to work through for real change.  The book title link above will take you to Carnes' site, where you can buy the book and look at many of his other recommended resources.   

Difficult Work Relationships

There are many books on the subject of dealing with difficult people at work, but the flat-out funniest title I know for one of these books is Working With You Is Killing Me: Freeing Yourself from Emotional Traps at Work (2006, Warner Business Books.)  This book was written by psychotherapist Katherine Crowley (supervised in her practice by a licensed psychologist) and business consultant Kathi Elster, which gives it both the requisite professional mental health credentials and the business-environment air of efficiency.  It happens to be cleanly organized, compassionate, and absorbing as well.  Examples of difficult situations are presented here in a way most can relate to, while not making it sound overly easy to resolve your own problems at work.

One of the important features of the book's approach to understanding difficult people is that it asks the reader to analyze their own role in the problem.  The book addresses this nicely whether you are an employer or an employee.  What makes you particularly susceptible to conflicting with the kind of difficult person that you have on your hands right now?  The authors refer to these common pairings as 'fatal attractions', and they're quite insightful about the dynamics they present.  They then give suggestions for resolving that particular variety of personality struggle. 

Standard stress management methods are presented in simple form as ways to "unhook physically" while trying to handle a problem of this type.  The last chapter of the book has readers ask themselves whether the corporate environment is for them (sometimes an overwhelming conflict at work signals an overall poor fit with one's environment.) 

As a self-employed person, I highly value having the power to choose the people with whom I will work.  I zealously check references.  When assembling my dissertation committee in graduate school, my sponsor (the pleasantly British developmental psychologist John Broughton) emphasized that we should choose only "nice people who are easy to work with" and promptly took control of the selection process to make sure that would happen.  The result was a virtual love-fest, as the lives of these committees go, and I will be eternally grateful.

One doesn't always have this power, of course, especially during the early part of one's career.  At later points, too, it may be necessary to make very tough decisions about whether the kind of approach this book recommends will make a long-term difference, or whether it's necessary to begin looking for a new employer/employee.  Where the latter solution may be better, the authors tell you.  In this way, you are not stuck believing 'positive thinking' can make any relationship work, no matter how toxic. 

If you're a therapist who's removed from business environments, this book can re-acquaint you and make you more useful to your patients.  You can recommend the book to clients trying to make head or tail of conflict at work, who may benefit from having their problem 'normalized'.

One Inspiring Couple

For the New Year, and the end of the old, I wanted to present a positive example of a couple that seems to make things work in many of the ways the problem-solving books I've discussed this year recommend.

Their story is not a conventional one, so if your sensibilities are offended by flawed people being held up as an example, read no further.

But, it's likely you enjoy reading regardless, since you're still here.  So I'd like to discuss the 'twin' memoirs of Michael Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman. 

Michael Chabon is a fiction writer inspired by the countless comic books of his childhood (he's 46.)  His memoir, entitled Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009, HarperCollins Publishers), is the more artfully and subtly composed of the two works.  He was a writer first, before they met.  She was a Harvard-educated public defender first, and after experiencing the clash between the pull of motherhood and the demands of her career, became a stay-at-home-mother and then a writer. 

Waldman's memoir, entitled Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (2009, Doubleday) is direct prose that engages you transparently. Waldman attracted significant media attention when in a piece called "Modern Love," she discussed loving her husband more than her children.  While this couple is quite liberal in their politics and willingness to expose their mistakes, the idea that you attend to your own needs first, then your marriage, then your children, then everyone else is one I not only espouse in my own psychotherapy practice, but have seen talked about by rather conservative social commentators.  Nonetheless, many people found this idea shocking in the age of child-centered education, parenting and everything else.

It's been said that the success of a marriage depends more on the maturity of the husband than anything else.  If he still wants to be cared for the way his parents did in his childhood, he can never properly take his place as equal caregiver alongside his wife.  As you read Chabon, you see how his father leaving the family taught him how to be alone, to appreciate and respect the support of his mother, who had to go back to school after her divorce, and how to share himself with his own children--indeed, to want to share himself with his children.  When he (briefly married once before) meets Waldman--according to her memoir--he had already envisioned himself a stay-at-home-writer-father.  In other words, he had thought out his adult family role by himself instead of leaving the construction of his family to some future mother of his adulthood.

Waldman, for her part, discusses how her dissatisfied, pre-feminist mother pushed her to seek equality with men in all things and sexual self-expression.  Her resulting strength swung her between the extremes of boring, passive boyfriends and mutually exploitative one-night-stands.  Meeting Chabon broke the cycle.  (It is particularly funny to compare the couple's different accounts of the incentives they were given to go on a blind date together.)  Her ambitiousness in nailing him down with an early marriage proposal was a counterpoint to his big-picture consideration of the usefulness of being a househusband.  There was lots of chemistry (in anthropologist Helen Fisher's terms, she is probably a DIRECTOR/Explorer and he a NEGOTIATOR/Explorer, a highly complementary personality combination.)

Because Chabon was raised with the same 1970's gender equality education she was, Waldman found a man who cooks, cleans and nurtures the (four!) children naturally.  So, she's not angry with him, and voila, she still desires him.

And, when she needed to make a career change, he was responsive and supportive of that which would make him the primary breadwinner for awhile.

To top it all off, Waldman is bipolar, given to extreme mood changes that make her at times rather unpleasant to be around.  The couple, as couples researcher John Gottman would approve of, have found a way to fight "bombastically", get it out of their systems and then get back to liking each other before bed.  There are 'repair attempts', and she takes her bipolar energy outside the house for awhile until she is "bored or tired."  They have found "what works" for her bipolar contribution to the relationship.

Without using the exact words, Chabon credits his wife's extraversion with getting him (the introvert) out in the world.  He works conscientiously to try to understand his two daughters' emerging femaleness, but in the end hands over what feels like an overwhelming difference to his wife ("go ask your mother.") While he silently takes himself to task for this, his wife remarks on just how different things are for her daughters than they were for her, although she still wants to support their sexual self-expression as her mother did hers. 

Perhaps it is self-awareness in each of these writers that has made as much of a difference in creating an adult marriage as anything else.  But clearly there is also the humor on both sides (comical descriptions of the changes in Waldman's body through childrearing, for example, that have nonetheless done little to diminish the couple's physical affection for each other.)  And most of all, there is the element of having chosen well to begin with. 

The Abusive Man

When my elder son was about six years old, he would ask me repeatedly how you could determine if someone is a "bad guy."  Before I could answer, he would supply his own:  "You can always tell, because they wear black."  It saddened me to have to explain to this innocent boy that appearances don't tell you much, the main thing is not to talk to strangers, except some in uniforms, and so on and so on...

Author Lundy Bancroft draws on his extensive experience counseling abusers and their families to answer my son's question, in a way. If it were that easy to tell if men are going to be abusive, no one would give them a chance to do it, or they'd all be in jail.  

Bancroft's Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (2002, G.P. Putnam's Sons) is a Bible-sized, beautifully constructed resource for people who think they may be in a relationship with an abuser (he speaks to gay men and women here, too), and need to be walked through the process of discernment by someone with penetrating insight.  It's also a good reference for therapists, who generally receive only an hour's worth of continuing education on the subject of domestic violence every two years.

According to Why Does He Do That?, abusers are generally defined by their negative attitudes toward women, from which their manipulative behavior arises.  The type of abuse they perpetrate often mirrors what was done to their mothers by their fathers, and has the flavor of whatever socio-cultural background they were raised in.  Cheaters beget cheaters, wife-beaters produce other wife-beaters, and the male children of mousy, passive-aggressive men may act the same way with their female partners when they grow up.  White men may tolerate their women having male friends, but not a 'smart mouth.'  Latino men may not mind being yelled at by a woman, but any attention she pays to other men may enrage them.

About half the time, Bancroft says, abusers seem to have been influenced not by their families, but by negative attitudes about women expressed by their peer group, music they listen to, pornography and other sources in the culture at large.

Bancroft outlines nine types of abuser: The Demand Man, Mr. Right, The Water Torturer, The Drill Sargeant, Mr. Sensitive (the "male feminist"), The Player, Rambo, The Victim, The Terrorist, and The Mentally Ill or Addicted Abuser.  This last, 'tenth' type is really one that can superimpose itself on the previous nine, leading to increased dangerousness. 

Abusive men can combine more than one of the nine types.  For example, the sexually exploitative behavior of The Player is common across many other types, as heightened sexuality may be used by an abusive man to lure women in and give this man a sense of his own awesomeness.  Once a new partner gets to know him, his prowess as a lover may fade as his self-absorption takes over and his moodiness reveals itself.

Of course, it is not just the type, but the intensity of negative behaviors that varies.  Some abusers may never become physically threatening or violent, but--through their unpredictable moods and twisted communication styles--they succeed in keeping women anxious and off-balance in order to get their way. 

Bancroft spends the (long) last part of the book carefully discussing safety and exit planning, as well as how to view 'the system' and all of the professionals in it.  He has suggestions for how to relate to an abused woman (and her children) helpfully, and makes an appeal for community involvement in working toward "an abuse-free world."

I highly recommend this thoughtful book, with its myriad case examples, to anyone who needs a more thorough exposure to, and understanding of, the subject of domestic abuse.  I do not accept domestic violence cases in my practice (it is considered a specialty area,) but abuse issues do crop up with some frequency in established clients, anyway.  For this reason, I am certainly grateful to the 'survivor' who came in and told me about this book, and how it helped her to begin to move on.

Marriage of Opposites

"Why can't you be more like me?"

Was there ever a more interesting, yet unproductive, question asked?  We've all had the experience of being attracted to someone by certain of their traits, and then weeks or months later finding just that thing to be a pebble in our shoe... or worse.

Do opposites attract?  Of course they do, in the beginning.  It's what you do with whatever happens later that determines long-term happiness together, though, particularly when it comes to differences in temperament.  In The Introvert and Extrovert in Love: Making it Work When Opposites Attract (2007, New Harbinger Publications), psychologist Marti Olson Laney explores another branch of the subject she took up in her book, The Introvert Advantage, discussed in last week's post here.  Laney's experience as an introvert happily married to an extrovert inspired her to study and write about this subject further, this time with her husband, Michael L. Laney. 

Briefly, introverts are inner-focused, process information through longer neural pathways, and need more down-time after socializing.  Extroverts are outer-focused, process information through shorter neural pathways, and get a dopamine 'hit' from socializing that makes them feel energized by being in groups, and drained if alone for too long.

As a therapist, my observation has been that couples who are starting out can do well to address this important temperament issue early on.  Indeed, John Gottman, an expert in research-based couples therapy, believes this is the first task of the new couple discovering the dark side of a formerly endearing quality in a loved one: finding a way to accept differences if possible, and not make them into unsolvable problems for the rest of their lives together. 

The 'innie female' and 'outie male' combination, according to Laney and Laney, is the archetypal high-chemistry couple (compare this with Helen Fisher's Negotiator-Director match.)  New couples like this, or those who are new to making a commitment to each other, may not naturally understand their differing needs.  She may feel threatened by his need to socialize regularly, while he gets frustrated by her natural internalization of just about everything.  It's important to depersonalize this dynamic and educate people about the reality of the difference and the fact that as far as we know, it's unlikely to change... much.  (It looks like extraverts do well to develop their 'introverting skills' as they get older, in order to get better at being alone.)  Laney and Laney have many tables and suggestions for both parties--to help themselves and each other--that are easy to understand and absorb.

Other couple combinations are discussed in the book with some surprises.  Have you ever known, for example, an introvert-introvert couple to just implode after many years of seeming quiet bliss?  Such couples can bore and deprive each other to that point, if they don't address the ruts they get into.  If a couple is too much alike in this way, they may project their own problems onto each other and blame one another for not being exciting and different. Again, an issue best identified early on. 

Practically speaking, a therapist can use the introvert self-test in Introvert Advantage with each member of a couple if temperament issues seem prominent, and then send the more worried partner to the bookstore for the innie/outie book. 

In sum, this is a very enlightening survival manual for couples whose basic temperaments grate on each other. It's not a replacement for those couples whose level of resistance to change really requires couples therapy, but a way for most to reach a basic understanding of some immutable qualities and differences between them, and how we can hold these with love.

Introversion Liberated

Recently, when sorting out a difficult personal situation, I was talking to my Unitarian Universalist minister.  He asked me what I planned to do to cope with this problem on an ongoing basis.  I told him, "I'm just going to keep talking to people.  I'm going to talk it out."  He looked at me with that perplexed, former-philosophy-professor look of his and then said something to the effect of, "You're an introvert.  What would you want to go and do a thing like that for?"

Time and time again, I am reminded of the need to honor and work with my own introversion as a pretty stable personality trait.  It isn't shyness, but it does put me in a somewhat disenfranchised minority--kind of like grieving pet owners, or the infertile, but more permanent.  Not that it's something to be terribly sad about, but there is some loss involved.  According to Marti Olson Laney, author of The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World (Workman Publishing, 2002), only about 25 percent of the general population is introverted, while the rest are classified as extroverted.  In other words, the average person is an extrovert.  Okay, not exactly.  She qualifies this by saying that in the higher I.Q. population, the ratio is more like 40 percent to 60 percent.  Nonetheless, the world is set up to encourage extroversion, with its cubicles, stadiums, mega churches and other boundary-busting, overstimulating venues that provide for the needs of the majority who consider anyone sitting next to them to be a friend, of sorts.

Not that introverts cannot enjoy encountering 'the public'.  Consider this Haiku I just came across by Issa:

In the cherry blossom's shade

there's no such thing

as a stranger.

When any of us are feeling happiness or love--internally--we experience ourselves in connection with others, even when silent.

The real difference between 'innies' and 'outies', as Laney refers to them, is in how they process information neurobiologically (innies--long and slow neural pathways, outies--short and fast ones) and therefore in how much solitary recovery time we need after socializing, even one-on-one.  Outies also seek out social stimulation more because, well, they get off on it more, neurologically (dopaminergically) speaking. 

There are, of course, people who are about equally innie and outie.  Laney's book contains a short self-test to tell you where you are on the spectrum (you can go take the Myers-Briggs online when you're feeling ambitious.)  If you are one of these 'hybrid' types, the self-test can help you learn what your more specific needs might be in different situations and custom-tailor your self-care accordingly.

If you suspect you are an introvert and would like a handbook on how to take on the world from your place of strength, Introvert Advantage can certainly do the job, with its practical suggestions for handling yourself and avoiding overload at home and in the workplace.  As a therapist, I often recommend this book to people after giving them the self-test in session.  Introversion has non-specific features to it that can lead people to believe they might have attention-deficit disorder, depression, or that they are 'too withdrawn' for their family or social circle. 

It is important to see this book as one tool for empowerment, however, and not to box yourself into a category.  Other personality traits can be just as significant to deciding how best to cope with life.  See, for example, my discussion of Helen Fisher's typology as laid out for those looking for a romantic partner in Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type.  Labels can take on a brick-building-like reality in our lives, when they are really intended as a way for us to communicate meaningfully and dynamically about ourselves, with ourselves and others.