In Praise of Ordinary

I like Milton Erickson’s habit of gently, and sometimes rudely, disorientating patients. If Mumbo Jumbo has indeed conquered the world, we have to counter with counter-intuitive reasoning. Given that we live not in a world of things, but of symbols, many of the symbols in a consumerist society have privileged currency. They often lend themselves to a monochromatic world where things are expected to be fast, easy and simple. As most of us know, responding to this kind of talk can only be palliative at best or cosmetic at worst. And so much of our work in the therapy room is an invitation into an unpopular world that is hard, slow and complex. I suspect that we can do so confidently because when clients do enter this world they have a chance of finding a self that they can respect. However, we all need a bit of help when presenting our patients with some of the harsher realities of life and so, for what it is worth, here are some uncommon wisdoms and research findings that can disorient our clients into the benefits of ordinary:

“I think I have got depression”

Many clients enter our room convinced that they are suffering with depression. They often are. But it is still useful to ask them to wrestle with Andrew Solomon’s differentiation between grief and depression: “Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance”. Even if we are depressed, that may not be a bad thing. While Sheldon Kopp may say that “we prefer the security of our misery to the misery of insecurity”, the evolutionary psychiatrists Watson and Andrews would probably say it in a gentler manner. They argue that mild depression causes intense introspection and self-examination which is essential in aligning changes to better fit with one’s character. We all need a little depression every now and then.

“My marriage makes me unhappy”

I have not met Frank Pittman, but I imagine that when clients enter his office and complain of not being happily married, he says "And so? I thought that we got married to grow up”. And if Goleman is right that learning to act against impulse is a marker of emotional maturity, marriage will give plenty of those opportunities. While John Gottman has received some criticism for packaging his findings for the media and leaving out some of the nuances of his work for fellow clinicians, some of his findings can powerfully remind clients that they ought to rethink how they measure their marriages. When clients in difficult marriages protest that they love each other, it’s useful to remind them that love is not a good predictor of marital outcome (once again, in Kopp’s words, “Love is not enough, but it helps”), but that respect is. Respect may have none of the gloss of love and by comparison may look ordinary, but much of a good marriage revolves around ordinary. Reading between the lines, many of Gottman’s master marriages seem to get to the positive sentiment override by having a lot of mildly pleasant moments rather than spectacular events. It is harder to help couples deposit R50 every hour into the joint account than it is to get the couple to occasionally lavish lotto tickets on each other. Slow, hard and complex.

Gottman would also take aim at compatibility talk. A miserable couple may just import their misery into their shared passion, as any doubles sport can so clearly illustrate. But even if there is a lot of fighting, we are now familiar with the finding that the amount of fighting is not predictive of a good or bad marriage, but the kind of fighting is. For those couples who announce that they hardly ever fight, or that they fight too much, a brief review of repair attempts is useful. What we fight about may also have a bearing. Happy couples have the uncanny knack of fighting about the 25% of their lives that can be resolved and ignoring the rest. Sadly Gottman does not tell us how to discriminate between the stuff that can get resolved and the stuff that will just make things worse. I would suggest, though, for those of us who have unsuccessfully tried to get a bank balance through our spouse for the last twenty years that this be firmly consigned to the 75%.

I will leave the last word about marriage to Carl Whittaker.

When couples announce that they are thinking of getting divorced, you can remind them that one of the greatest family therapists of all time also got divorced... often. But he kept on remarrying the same partner over and over again.

“My life is so middle class”

This is good. Middle class has got unfair press and economist Robert Frank has lots to say about the benefits of being in the middle of the middle class. He also hints that you are helping others by not going for that promotion. Noreena Hertz has documented how countries with a large Gini coefficient have all sorts of associated social ills and how being on the top of the pile courts death by stress-related illness and being on the bottom courts death by infectious illness. Because money has to be in limited supply to have value, a lot of people have to live in cardboard boxes for Carlos Slim Helu to be able to live in his $44 billion house in New York. If you want to be specific, try and earn about R35 000 a month. Martin Seligman may add to the picture. Despite distancing himself somewhat from his earlier book Authentic Happiness, his recommendations for how to be happy sound particularly Old Normal—be happily married, get rooted in a rich social network, have some form of spirituality and avoid negative events and negative emotions. Maybe there is still room for Toyotas, sandwiches, noisy kids and dogs who poop on the living room floor.

“My children are so advanced”

One of David Elkind’s great irritations are “gourmet parents” who have embraced the hyper-capitalist tendency to see all of life as a paid-for experience and who overschedule their children’s lives. These parents live in parallel with their children instead of the mess of intimacy. We are all aware of the importance of securing our children room for free play and the importance of everyday connection, but perhaps it is time to more actively debunk the nonsense about accelerating children through their milestones with products like Baby Einstein and believing that listening to Mozart is going to help them at maths. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff make a sound case for the power of ordinary-how the essential ingredients for raising children are embedded in everyday life... what Tom Hodgkinson calls “fertile neglect”. According to Richard Louv, this can be a backyard experience with few props. Neighborhood friends, no access to technology, boredom and parents who resist pleas to entertain combine into a powerful cocktail that will inevitably result in noise, danger, injuries and stories of mastery. These stories do not come from the managed and supervised experiences engineered by parents. At the other end of the continuum, it might also be incumbent on us to warn against the exaggerated promises of how technology can help our children grow. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff maintain that these claims are mostly baseless if not actively harmful. While many arguments against technology have merit, the most informed argument comes from Barry Sanders who refuses to take an alarmist view and prefers to suggest that the real danger of unmanaged technology is that it displaces the ordinary activities within which we have been hardwired to grow.

Amen.

References

1. Wheen, F. (2004). How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World. Harper Perennial: London.

2. Barber, B. (2007). Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Norton: New York.

3. Solomon, A. (2001). The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression. Touchstone: New York

4. Kopp, S. (1972). If You Meet The Buddha On the Road, Kill Him. Sheldon press: London

5. Cited in Solomon.

6. Pitman, F. (1998). Grow Up: How Taking Responsibility Can Make You a Happy Adult. St Martin’s Press: New York.

7. Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ. Bantam: New York.

8. Silver, N. & Gottman, J. (1999). The Seven Principles for making Marriage Work. Three Rivers Press: New York.

9. Whittaker, C.A. (1989). Midnight Musings of a Family Therapist. WW Norton: New York.

10. Frank, R.F. (2007). Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. University of California Press: Berkeley.

11. Hertz, N. (2001). The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. The Free Press: New York.

12. Seligman, M.E.P. (2001). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment: The Free Press: New York.

13. Elkind, D. (2001). The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too fast Too Soon. Perseus Publishing: New York.

14.Rifkin, J. (2000). The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience. Tarcher/Putnam: New York

15.Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R.M. (2003). Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Our Children Really Learn—And Why They Need To Play More and Memorize Less. Rodale: New York.

16.Hodgkinson, T. (2009). The Idle Parent. Penguin: London.

17. Louv, R. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: New York.

18. Sanders, B. (1994). A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age. Vintage: New York.

About the authors

Tim Barry and Lee Joseph are psychologists in private practice. They are co-founders of the Hilton Urban Farmers’ Association and the Hilton Home Brewers’ Association.