• Knowledge isn't power when the facts are too much to bear; knowledge is anxiety.
• to give people hope, not facts.
Alan Deutschman, Change or die : the three keys to change at work and in life, 2007
In fact, the odds are nine to one that, when faced with the dire need to change, we won't.
pp.210-211
The “stages” model is very helpful and has been highly influential among professionals in the field of psychology and health. As set forth in Changing for Good, the 1994 book by Drs. James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross, and Carlo C. DiClemente, it proposes a “trans-theoretical” approach ── that is, it looks to all the major schools of psychotherapy for techniques and finds seven that are particularly effective, including “helping relationships” and “emotional arousal”. Then it describes the best times to apply each of these techniques during the “six stages of change”, from “precontemplation” (a hopeful euphemism for the time when people don't believe that they can change) to “termination” (when the change has become complete and permanent).
The “stages” model has created a clear framework for understanding change that's proven easy to grasp and remember. It has also helped spread many of the most useful insights of psychology to countless people and done incalculable good. I have one very important gripe with it, though. Change or Die is focused on the predicament of those “pre-contemplators”, whom the stages authors identify as people who are demoralized or who are shielding themselves through psychological self-defense mechanisms such as denial, projection, and rationalization. But it's hard to figure out why the first strategy that the stages authors recommend is “consciousness-raising”.
They write: “The first step in fostering intentional change is to become conscious of the self-defeating defenses that get in our way. Knowledge is power. Freud was the first to recognize that to overcome our compulsions we must begin by analyzing our resistance to change. We must acknowledge our defenses before we can defeat or circumvent them.”
I disgree strongly with this prescription. It rarely does any good to tell someone, “Dude, you're in denial”.
The facts won't set them free. Knowledge isn't power when the facts are too much to bear. Then knowledge is anxiety.
“Pre-contemplators” don't need someone to tell them the truth.
They can't handle the truth. That's why they're in denial.
Or, as Dr. Jennifer Melfi, the fictional psychiatrist on television's The Sopranos, says about her clients: “They lie to me, they lie to themselves.”
The point of Change or Die is to show how people can change when the facts and fear haven't motivated them. The real key is to give people hope, not facts.
“”─“”‘’•─“”
Alan Deutschman, Change or die : the three keys to change at work and in life, 2007
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Ranjana Srivastava, A cancer companion : an oncologist's advice on diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, 2014
p.265
For some people, knowledge is indeed power but for others it creates anxiety and a sense of helplessness.
(A cancer companion : an oncologist's advice on diagnosis, treatment, and recovery / Ranjana Srivastava., 1. cancer──patients., 2. cancer──diagnosis., 3. cancer──treatment., RC263.S67 2015, 616.99'4──dc23, 2014, )
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• Not only does time not heal all wounds, but time has a way of cementing into place patterns and habits that were at one time our saving grace (things like lying, or drinking, or pushing away anyone who gets close to us) but are now painful and self-destructive.
• Precontemplation is the stage where in the person who needs to change hasn't even recognized the problem yet.
Allison Fallon., The power of writing it down : a simple habit to unlock your brain and reimagine your life, 2020
pp.150-151
time heals all wounds, but this is categorically untrue. Not only does time not heal all wounds, but time has a way of cementing into place patterns and habits that were at one time our saving grace (things like lying, or drinking, or pushing away anyone who gets close to us) but are now painful and self-destructive.
p.151
These may have been patterns or behaviors that protected us or even saved our lives at one point or another. But later, they become the very thing that tears us apart.
p.151
You can probably think of someone in your life right now who has patterns of behavior like this ── solidified over the passage of time ── that are toxic to their very existence.
p.151
Without careful reflection, attention, committed action, and ── sometimes ── trained help, these patterns in our lives don't change. In fact, they continue getting more deeply ingrained and detrimental.
pp.151-152
Dr. Joe Dispenza puts it this way in his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself:
p.152
If you've been devoted to feeling negatively for years, those feelings have created an automatic state of being. We could say that you are subconsciously unhappy, right? Your body has been conditioned to be negative; it knows how to be unhappy better than your conscious mind knows otherwise. You don't even have to think about how to be negative. You just know that's how you are. How can your conscious mind control this attitude in the subconscious body-mind?
p.152
And there's the part from Dispenza that really gets me ...
I want to be clear that, by itself, positive thinking never works. Many so-called positive thinkers have felt negative most of their lives, and now they're trying to think positively. They are in a polarized state in which they are trying to think one way in order to override how they feel inside of them ... When the mind and body are in opposition, change will never happen.2
p.152
if you tend to feel negatively about the world, yourself, your relationships, or your challenges, most likely it's because this negative state is memorized in your body and your brain. Not only that, but positive thinking won't even touch that memorized state!
pp.152-153
Dr. Pennebaker says,
We are often surprisingly ignorant of our needs, motivations and conflicts.
When out of control, anxious or upset, we naturally change our thinking style.
Although low-level thinking can reduce our pain, it can also narrow our thinking to such an extent that we fail to see that something is the matter.
We can then become the central feature of our self-constructed paradox: if we naturally escape from the knowledge that something is wrong, how can we ever know about it?
How can we ever hope to control the problem or change our lives?
p.153
writers who have trusted me with their stories and their writing process
we were cultivating awareness.
We were starting to see things more clearly.
We were standing outside of our stories, outside of our circumstances, and seeing them from a new perspective.4
p.153
The great thing about this is that awareness is the beginning of change.
p.153
In fact, in therapeutic models of change, the step before the first step is called precontemplation. Precontemplation is the stage where in the person who needs to change hasn't even recognized the problem yet.
(The power of writing it down : a simple habit to unlock your brain and reimagine your life / Allison Fallon., summary: “for anyone feeling stuck and looking to make sense of life, author and writing coach Allison Fallow shares a simple practice and proven method to reclaiming your narrative, increasing your emotional and spiritual health, and discovering more clarity and freedom in ‘The Power of Writing it down’” ── provided by publisher., (print) (ebook) (hardcover)
(ebook), subject: writing ── psychological aspects. | behavior modification | written communication., BF456.W8 F35 2020 (print), BF456.W8 (ebook), 158.1/6──dc23, 2020, )
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Siddhartha Mukherjee, The emperor of all maladies, 2010 [ ]
p.306
“If a man die,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “it is because death/ has first possessed his imagination.”
p.306
If was easy to repossess imagination with false promises; much harder to do so with nuanced truths. It demanded an act of exquisite measuring and remeasuring, filling and unfilling a psychological respirator with oxygen. Too much “repossession” and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.
p.306
David Rieff
All options were closed. His word - the Word - was final, immutable, static. “Like to many doctors,” Rieff recalls, “He spoke to us as if we were children but without the care that a sensible adult takes in choosing what words to use with a child.”
p.306
It took months before Sontag found another doctor whose attitude was vastly more measured and who was willing to negotiate with her psyche.
p.307
Care, not cure.
pp.307-308
Of all the clinicians I met during my fellowship, the master of this approach was Thomas Lynch, a lung cancer doctor, whom I often accompanied to clinic. Clinics with Lynch, a youthful-looking man with a startling shock of gray hair, were an exercise in medical nuance. One morning, for instance, a sixty-six-year-old woman, Kate Fitz, came to the clinic having just recovered from surgery for a large lung mass, which had turned out to be cancerous. Sitting alone in the room, awaiting news of her next steps, she looked nearly catatonic with fear.
I was about to enter the room when Lynch caught me by the shoulder and pulled me into the side room. He had looked through her scan and her reports. Everything about the excised tumor suggested a high risk of recurrence. But more important, he had seen Fitz folded over in fear in the waiting room. Right now, he said, she needed something else. “Resuscitation,” he called it cryptically as he strode into her room.
I watched him resuscitate. He emphasized process over outcome and transmitted astonishing amounts of information with a touch so slight that you might not even feel it. He told Fitz about the tumor, the good news about the surgery, asked about her family, then spoke about his own. He spoke about his child who was complaining about her long days at school. Did Fitz have grandchild? he inquired. Did a daughter or a son live close by? And then, as I watched, he began to insert numbers here and there with a light-handedness that was a marvel to observe.
“You might read somewhere that for your particular form of cancer, there is a high chance of local recurrence or metastasis,” he said. “Perhaps even fifty or sixty percent.”
She nodded, tensing up.
“Well, there are ways that we will tend to it when that happens.”
I noted that he had said “when”, not “if”. The numbers told a statistical truth, but the sentence implied nuance. “We will tend to it,” he said, not “we will obliterate it.” Care, not cure. The conversation ran for nearly an hour. In his hands, information was something live and molten, ready to freeze into a hard shape at any moment, something crystalline yet negotiable; he nudged and shaped it like glass in the hands of a glassblower.
An anxious woman with stage III breast cancer needs her imagination to be repossessed before she will accept chemotherapy that will likely extend her life. A seventy-six-year-old man attempting another round of aggressive experimental chemotherapy for a fatal, drug-resistant leukemia needs his imagination to be reconciled to the reality that his disease cannot be treated. Ars longa, vita brevis. The art of medicine is long, Hippocrates tells us, “and life is short; opportunity fleeting; the experiment perilous; judgment flawed.”
(The emperor of all maladies : a biography of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010, )
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Daniel Goleman, Working with emotional intelligence, 1998
hardcover
658.409
Goleman
pp.327-328
Gauging Readiness
Extensive research (on more than 30,000 people) by James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island psychologist, establishes four levels of readiness people go through during a successful behavior change.
■ Oblivious: As G. K. Chesterton, the British pundit, put it, “It isn't that thy can't see the solution ── they can't see the problem”. People at this stage aren't ready at all; they deny they have any need to change in the first place. They resist any attempt to help them change ── they just don't see the point.
■ Contemplation: People at this stage see that they need to improve and have begun to think about how to do so. They are open to talking about it but not quite ready to pursue development whole heartedly. Ambivalence is rampant; some wait for a “magic moment” of readiness, while others leap into action prematurely but meet failure because they are halfhearted. People at this stage are as likely to say they intend to take some action “next month” as they are to say they'll do it “in the next six months”. Prochaska notes that it's not unusual for people “to spend years telling themselves that someday they are going to change”. They substitute thinking for acting. Prochaska cites the case of an engineer who spent five years analyzing the factors that had made him passive and shy ── but didn't think he understood the problem well enough to do anything about it.
■ Preparation: Here people have begun to focus on the solution ── on how to improve. They are on the verge, eager to develop an action plan. They are aware of the problem, see that there are ways to solve it, and palpably anticipate doing so. People are sometimes propelled to this heightened stage of readiness by a dramatic event ── a heart-to-heart talk with a supervisor, a disaster on the job, a crisis in their personal life. One executive was jolted into bolstering his self-control competence when the police stopped him on the way home from a business dinner and arrested him for driving drunk. At this point people are ripe for change; this is the time for formulating a specific, detailed plan of action.
■ Action: Visible change begins. People embrace the plan, start practicing its steps, and actually change how they act ── their emotional patterns, the way they think about themselves, and all the other facets of transforming a long-standing habit. This stage is what most people think of as “making the change”, though it builds on the earlier steps in getting ready.
“”─“”‘’•“”
p.328
At the neurological level, cultivating a competence means extinguishing the old habit as the brain's automatic response and replacing it with the new one. The final stage of mastering a competence comes at the point when the old habit loses its status as the default response and the new one takes its place. At that point, the behavior change has stabilized, making a relapse to the old habit unlikely.
“”─“”‘’•─“”
p.264
“A large number of people at our training seminars feel like prisoners of the human resource department”,
“They just don't want to be here. And their resistance is infectious.”
Willingness is crucial, but many organizations pay no attention to whether the people they send for training really want to learn or change.
the “eager beavers”, who are ready to change;
the “vacationers”, who are happy to get out of work for a day or two;
the “prisoners”, who were told by their manager they had to come.
p.264
; if people aren't really ready to change, then that fact itself can become a first focus for them.
p.264
If people are not ready to take action, forcing them will lead to disaster: the sham of going through the motions only to satisfy others, resentment rather than enthusiam, quitting.
p.264
a first step is to help people assess their own readiness.
p.264
There are four levels of readiness: obliviousness or outright resistance, contemplating a change at some vague point in the future, ripeness to formulate a plan, and readiness to take action.12
p.264
“Before they come to the first session we try to talk to each person about any concerns they might have”, Kate Cannons says.
p.264
to see if they want to change at all.
“”─“”‘’•─“”
Daniel Goleman, Working with emotional intelligence, 1998
hardcover
658.409 Goleman
other books by Daniel Goleman
Emotional Intelligence;
Vital Lies, Simple Truth;
The Meditative Mind;
co-author, The Creative Spirit.
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When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem
► https://science.slashdot.org/story/14/11/08/1416233/when-we-dont-like-the-solution-we-deny-the-problem
PUBLISHED November 6, 2014 IN Campus
Denying Problems When We Don’t Like the Solutions
By Duke Today Staff
https://today.duke.edu/2014/11/solutionaversion
A new study from Duke University finds that people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically desirable. If they don't, then they tend to deny the problem even exists. “Logically, the proposed solution to a problem, such as an increase in government regulation or an extension of the free market, should not influence one’s belief in the problem. However, we find it does,” said co-author Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. “The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem.”
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