Blame Game
How To Win It.
W. R. (Bill) Klemm, Ph.D.
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY
Benecton Press
Copyright © 2008 by W. R. Klemm
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means without the express written permission of the author.
Published 2008 in the United States of America
Benecton Press
9001 Grassbur Road
Bryan, Tx 77808
Web: BlameGame.us
Praise for Blame Game
I absolutely love this book. Blame is about yesterday. Responsibility is about the rest of your life. Let Dr. W. R. Klemm’s “Blame Game, How To Win It” show you that positive change is within your grasp.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger
Internationally Syndicated Radio Host, author of “Stop Whining, Start Living.”
As one who has spent a lifetime trying to help people have lives of fulfillment and happiness, I am delighted that Dr. Klemm has published “Blame Game.” His book will help people solve their personal problems and achieve their dreams.
Dr. Robert Schuller
Minister of Crystal Cathedral and host of the “Hour of Power” television series
Bill Klemm’s “Blame Game” is the ideal combination of common-sense advice and sound scientific evidence. Professor Klemm’s expertise includes neuroscience, which he presents in easy-to-understand, plain language. He combines it with findings from many relevant fields, especially psychology, to produce a manual for living a good life.
Bob Rich, psychologist and author of 13 books, four of them award-winners.
You can think of Blame Game as “debt relief”
for the hidden costs of
making excuses.
This book is dedicated to the memory of Doris Klemm, my loving wife of 49 years. She made my life infinitely richer, inspiring and teaching me a lot about finding happiness in the face of difficulty.
Other Books By Dr. Bill Klemm
Thank You Brain for All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault (http://thankyoubrain.com)
Core Ideas in Neuroscience (http://neurosciideas.com)
‘Dillos. Road Kill on Extinction Highway? (http://dillos.com)
Understanding Neuroscience
Science, The Brain, and Our Future
Discovery Processes in Modern Biology
Brainstem Mechanisms of Behavior
Global Peace Through the Global University System Animal Electroencephalography
Applied Electronics for Veterinary Medicine and Animal Physiology
Acknowledgments
No book of this kind can be written without a heritage of the writings of great thinkers and motivators. I have tried to acknowledge such sources as much as it seemed practical, yet no doubt many people did not get their fair share of recognition.
Special thanks go to those who have critiqued all or parts of this book. These include daughter Laura, Jim Burke, Cris Mruk, Robyn Pearson, Dr. Bob Rich , Rose VanArsdel, Britta Moore, and members of the Brazos Valley Writers group, Bob Bruce, Barbara Althaus, and Bill Harper.
Contents
Step 1. Place Blame Where It Belongs
Step 2. Move From Denial & Deception to Deliverance
Step 3. Take Charge
Step 4. Re-program Your Brain
Step 5. Run the Program
Sources
Step One
Place Blame Where It Belongs
How does one explain the slaughter of thirty-two innocent people on April 17, 2007 at Virginia Tech University? Even mental-health professionals struggle to explain. There is no shortage of apologists for the killer, Cho Seung Hui. First, there is the hate-America crowd (including many Americans) who say ours is a sick, violent society. Then, there is the gun- control crowd who stand logic on its head by implying people don’t kill people, guns do. Others excuse Hui by attacking the Virginia Tech administrators, asserting that the tragedy would have been avoided if only they had expelled him. Others blame the campus and Blacksburg police. Why is everybody so reluctant to blame Hui?
To say Hui was insane is probably wrong, but worse yet it misses the most important point. Most of the analysis is just so much psychobabble. It is not that complicated. Hui had allowed himself to become hate-filled because he did what most of us do to a lesser extent—he made excuses and bought into them! He excused his anger because he envied rich kids. He found another excuse in his rejection by women. Still scrambling for excuses, he blamed the incoherence of religious doctrines. Finally, the horrendous killing spree emerged when he reformulated his excuses into a lethal rage, justifying his actions with the excuse of “You made me do it.” He never challenged his excuses. He indulged them to the extreme. Instead of seeing himself as the problem, he saw everybody else as the problem. Instead of choosing happiness, he chose death.
Hui is not an exception. There are a lot of other unhappy people out there who are on the edge, just one more excuse away from mass murder. Islamic jihadists have already taken this fatal last step by adjusting the religious doctrine to excuse the murder of innocents.
Everybody wants to be happy, and the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, alongside life and liberty. So why is there so much personal failure and misery? In their professional lives, most people would like to be more successful, to get those promotions, to make more money, to have more positive impact. Why then are there so few chiefs and so many Indians? Some people think that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, often blaming it all on a ruthless free-market economy. This is just another way of making excuses for those at the bottom who don’t climb the success ladder that a free-market economy makes possible. If you want some really chilling news, let me tell you about some of our school children. During the last seven years, I have been working in educational outreach to public schools, and we run into huge numbers of kids who just don’t care about learning anything in school. When we try to point out how this is going to cost them in the future, some actually come right out and say, “It doesn’t matter. The government will always take care of me.”
But we don’t want to excuse exploitation either, which certainly occurs in both free-market and socialist economies.
Most of my adult life has been spent in teaching college students. Low-performing students are very creative in generating excuses for their low grades. In addition to all the “grandmothers that die” every semester, other things get blame too:
“The book/lectures/teacher are too boring.”
“I never had to learn how to study in high school.” (That is usually true. Over half of college freshmen have to take remedial work).
“I was an A student before this class.” (A check of the transcript usually shows this is just not true).
“I get test anxiety.”
“I know more that I can show on a multiple-choice test.” (Multiple-choice tests over-estimate competence.)
“Your tests are too hard/unfair.”
“My roommate distracts my study with incessant talk or music or visitors.”
By indulging our excuses, we avoid addressing the real causes for what’s wrong. We continue the attitudes and behavior that are causing the problem in the first place. To illustrate, we become like the golfer whose shots usually bounce into the rough. That problem is not caused by unfairness or bad luck: it is caused by hitting the ball wrong. The way to stay out of the rough, in golf or in life, is to make your own good luck by keeping your eye on the ball and learning to swing correctly.
Excuses get in the way of success and happiness. Excuses involve placing blame in the wrong place. Misplaced blame leads to a misplaced remedy.
Before we go on, I should point out that success and happiness do not always go together. I bet you know some people, for example, who are clearly successful but don’t seem very happy. Some people are so driven toward success that they could never be happy because each achievement leads to an insatiable desire for the next achievement. Of course, the opposite situation is not satisfying either. It is hard to be happy about failure.
Five-Steps for Placing Blame Correctly
This book’s theme is that excuses obscure seeing the causes of things that block personal and professional fulfillment and happiness. Sometimes we don’t realize what will fulfill us. What will work for you probably depends on your age. Ask people in their 20s what they want most and they may say, “a well-paying job and a start in a promising career.” Later, status and still more money may become desired. Ask people in their 50s and you may hear many people saying they value “friends, family, a life of worthy purpose, health, and spirituality.” In short, the pursuit of happiness is a journey that may have changing destinations.
Another interesting thing is that people are usually not as happy as they say they are. One line of evidence is that people report being happier in face-to-face interviews than they do if the same interview questions are asked by mail. If a face-to-face interviewer is of the opposite sex, self-reported happiness ratings are higher than from the same interview conducted by a member of the same sex. Psychologists attribute this to what they call “impression management.” People want to put on their best face around others, so they put a spin on the image they project because giving an impression of unhappiness makes them look bad.
Sadly, whether in personal or professional life, many people stop their life’s journey short. At some time they bog down, learning to accept whatever station of life they find themselves in. In the business world, this is called “rising to your level of incompetence,” as author Tom Peters so presciently concluded. Peters said this in the context of corporate hierarchies, but the idea applies also to our personal life. Excuses get constructed to rationalize the acceptance of a final station in professional and personal life. Excuses signal what is holding you back from the next rung on the ladder of success and happiness. To take life to the next level, you must recognize your excuses and confront their causes. You may well have reached a level of incompetence, and excuses keep you from growing out of it with new attitudes and skills. Its easier to place blame somewhere else.
This book aims to help readers reach the next level with a “Five-Step Program.” I am tempted to say a “Simple Five- Step Program,” but I don’t want to sound like a snake-oil salesman. I think everybody realizes that finding success and happiness is not simple. All of us struggle. Some people have to work harder at it than others.
These Five Steps are stated as this book’s chapter titles. Basically, the steps require you to:
1. Recognize that excuses hide the causes of fail- ure and unhappiness.
2. Analyze what the excuses are covering up and why blame is being placed in the wrong place.
3. Accept responsibility for what is causing your excuses.
4. Define a program of living that will reduce the need for excuses.
5. Run the program.
In short, this book will not only make excuses unnecessary but can also help make you more successful and happy.
Hiding the Cause of Failure and Unhappiness
I say that a major problem is unwillingness to recognize and deal with the causes of our excuses. We often create our own failures and unhappiness by something we did or did not do, and hide it behind excuses.
“What about bad luck?” you might ask. Sometimes failure or misery comes to you when it is not your fault. Sometimes we are unhappy because something bad happened, such as a divorce, or death of a loved one, or losing a job. It may not be our fault and we could have done nothing to prevent it. There really is such a thing as luck, both good and bad. There really are such things as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as well as being in the right place at the right time. But if we let bad luck become an excuse for failure or unhappiness, we perpetuate our problems. We give up on being able to control events or to cope. Removing the causes requires not hiding them behind the excuses. Excuses chain us to our misery.
In these situations, we would do well to take the advice that Jeremiah gave to the ancient Jews who were carted off into Babylonian slavery. He told them to continue to honor their faith and grow in their individual competence and service. In the words of our modern aphorism, “Bloom where you are planted.”
This past summer, while attending the annual New Orleans “Satchmo Summer Jazzfest,” I got a new perspective on the value of liberating ourselves from excuses. The festival celebrates the musical innovations that Louis Armstrong gave to American music. Most people think of Armstrong as a perpetually smiling and colorful singer (Mac the Knife, Hello Dolly, etc.). What people may not know is that, as many musicians have told me, Armstrong revolutionized American music in terms of rhythm, phrasing, melodic improvisation and technical style.
I have no musical education and never knew why I was drawn to jazz all my adult life. Now I understand. Jazz is a perfect metaphor for personal liberation, creative achievement and joy. No better example exists than Louis Armstrong, an orphan waif who grew up immersed in poverty and racism. He had no hope for success and happiness. Yet he did not allow his low station in life to spawn excuses. He refused to accept his life station as a “comfort zone.” He taught himself the basics of trumpet playing and sought out advice from the pros. His famous singing voice was caused by a terrible throat infection that would have destroyed the careers of most singers. Armstrong liberated himself through a music that itself was liberating. Jazz is not just a musical idiom—it is happy music. It even turns funerals into celebrations.
The point for us is that, no matter our life situation, limitations, past failures, or reasons for sadness, we can find liberation and happiness. Our outlet won’t likely be in music, but an outlet is there for us to find and work hard, as Armstrong did with his music. One way to find this outlet is to run this “Five Step” success and happiness program.
Of course, there are other things besides excuses that make us unhappy. Comparing ourselves to others is bound to make us unhappy, because there is always somebody who is smarter, better looking, richer, or more famous. Pursuit of physical pleasures doesn’t work well either: they are, as the saying goes, either fattening or sinful. Sometimes our attitudes or behavior isolate us from people who could make us more fulfilled. Being angry, obnoxious, aloof, depressed, self- centered or negative all turn people off. But these are things we could change, if we did not persist in rationalizing and excuse-making for not changing. Going back to the Virginia Tech tragedy example, Hui was spurned because he was a nerd. He could have made more of an effort to be less nerdy or found other nerds to associate with. Finally, we can also find help, as long as we admit we need help instead of fabricating excuses.
Excuses are fig leafs of the psyche. We use them to cover up what we don’t want others—or even ourselves to see. Excuses hide the causes of our failures and unhappiness. Excuses are symptoms. When we recognize the symptoms, we can diagnose the cause and find a remedy.
Excuses are also like road signs on the road to happiness. They suggest a need to change direction. When we make an excuse, it means we are covering up for some attitude, belief, feeling, or behavior that is probably making us unhappy. If we make excuses, something needs to be fixed.
Excuses come in various forms. There are excuses for what we did and excuses for what we did not do. There are also passive excuses whereby we use excuses to avoid doing things we should do. We also make excuses for others, delusively thinking we are compassionate when we are actually excusing ourselves for similar failings or buffering ourselves emotionally in case we may someday need such excuses. Excuse-making contributes to “political correctness” wherein someone or something else is to blame for what goes wrong. Nobody has to take responsibility for personal weakness or error. There are also indirect excuses that enable bad attitudes and behaviors, as for example when parents spoil their children, thereby unwittingly encouraging them to behave in unacceptable ways. Another example is provided by spouses of alcoholics, addicts, or spouse abusers who enable the bad behavior by their tolerant acceptance of it. There are situations where no excuse or explanation is deemed necessary because no one is supposed to be blamed—as in no-fault divorce, no-fault insurance, or the legal doctrine of force majeure.
Scape-goating is another example of excuse-making. We had where I work, a Vice President for Research who was forced to resign his administrative position, because some scientists on campus were sloppy in the way they handled dangerous bacteria in their biodefense research. The resulting accidents were not properly reported. The VP paid for the mistakes of the scientists and other lower-ranking administrators. This has the effect of excusing these people because they weren’t monitored sufficiently by the VP. The blame falls on the guy who didn’t prevent their irresponsible actions.
Finally, there is excuse-making’s second cousin—duplicity. How often have you heard people say one thing while meaning another? How often do people give one explanation for their attitude, belief, feeling, or behavior, while hiding the real reason—even from themselves? In such cases, something is being covered up, something that often needs to be fixed.
I know a lot of people whose whole life seems to be built around fabricating rationales that sound better than the real reasons. The real issues never get addressed. This is a typical problem with people who seek psychological counseling. A major goal of the therapist is to get past all the “smoke and mirrors” and hone in on the real issues. In professional life, many careers stall because workers convince themselves that advancement is out of their hands. All of us do this to some extent. Basic honesty is what I am talking about here: telling the truth, the whole truth—especially to oneself.
For years I lamented my failure to move into the top tier of notable scientists. I now admit that I could have had a more rewarding career if I had been more willing to pursue “hot” research areas and to network with scientists who could have opened career doors for me. Sometimes it is easier to whine than shine.
Excuses block the road to fulfillment and happiness even when we make excuses for things we are not embarrassed about or ashamed of. For example, we may make an excuse to keep from taking a better job or career path. We may make excuses for not promoting ourselves in ways that would help our careers. Or perhaps more commonly, we may pass up an invitation to attend an event that really would be good for us.
If you think it is a stretch to link sadness with excuses, I hope to show you why they are not only linked but that dealing with the excuse can remove what is blocking happiness. Consider this example dialog:
Sad Sam: “I don’t have any friends.”
Inquisitor: “That’s sad. Why do you suppose you have no friends?”
Sad Sam’s Excuse: “I just don’t have a good personality. I guess I am stand-offish; that’s the way I am.”
Inquisitor: “Have you ever heard that to get a friend you have to be a friend?”
Sad Sam: “Oh!”
Or consider this kind of exchange:
Sad Sam: “I’m not getting paid as much as I deserve.” Inquisitor: “Are you not a valuable employee?”
Sad Sam’s Excuse: “I work hard to look good. I even get awards from others outside my company. My
boss is prejudiced against me because I’m not in her social clique.”
Inquisitor: “Have you thought about working hard to make your boss look good?”
Sad Sam: “Oh!”
Or how about this:
Sad Sam: “I am unhappy because I am not better at what I do.”
Inquisitor: “I assume this bothers you because it makes it hard for you to look good, to compete.”
Sad Sam’s Excuse: “I am not smart enough to compete. I don’t have the talent.”
Inquisitor: “Why don’t you work at something else that suits your talents better? Or why don’t you take satisfaction in getting to work at what you like, even if you are not as good at it as you wish?”
Sad Sam: “Oh!”
Whether your sadness arises from how others treat you or how you view yourself, you could surely construct similar scenarios for whatever is stifling your fulfillment or making you unhappy. In all such cases, the unhappiness persists because excuse-making blocks the path to removing the cause of unhappiness.
Effects have causes. Unhappiness is caused by something. The cure is to stop pretending. Removing the cause of unhappiness requires recognizing the excuses that hide it, finding the real reason, and fixing it.
Unhappy people are not only a drag on those around them, but they are a drag on themselves. Their unhappiness feeds upon itself. An unhappy person inevitably generates behaviors that are not fulfilling, even counterproductive, and unpleasant for others. Being unhappy makes it difficult to generate the motivation and enthusiasm to do something constructive about one’s sad state. This spills over into one’s professional life. Unhappiness is sustained by a vicious cycle of being sad, which lowers the capacity to do what is necessary to become happier.
We need to distinguish between what we think or say is causing failure or unhappiness and what really is. Each person should distinguish what can and cannot be done about one’s own state of affairs. We usually underestimate the power of thought to identify and fix whatever blocks our path to fulfillment and happiness.
Happiness and Well-Being: A Matter of Choice
For most people, happiness is a matter of choice. Don’t believe it? Listen to what this 74-year-old widow said about the loss of her life’s partner: “It has been more than two years now, and I now choose to be a happy individual and appreciate what I have—not what I have lost.” She inspires and teaches me, because as I write this I am in the process of restoring my own happiness after the recent loss of Doris, the love of my life, my wife of 49 years.
A sense of well being and happiness comes from being content with life. Whether you are satisfied depends on whether life has met your expectations. If you expect too much more in the way of good things than you actually get, then you are likely to be dissatisfied and unhappy. Obviously, this principle implies two ways to increase happiness. Either change your images of how things should be, or improve the reality. This is a choice. But it is not that simple. Sometimes we are unhappy because our expectations are so low that fulfilling them would not bring much success or happiness. So, the trick is to set expectations high enough to be fulfilling and then do what is necessary. Remember what Abe Lincoln said, “People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Fulfillment comes when you accomplish what you set out to do. What you do has a “signature effect;” you own the effort and that makes you feel good. Have you ever been involved in a project where the end result was stamped as yours? For example, maybe you had been chairman of a committee that accomplished some worthy goal. Or maybe you built a greenhouse in the backyard. Maybe you wrote a compelling “letter to the editor” to your local newspaper. Or maybe you ran in a race and made a respectable showing. The signature effect is what makes writers write, artists paint, singers sing, actors perform, comedians tell jokes, scientists to seek discovery, and entrepreneurs to create companies.
Doing worthwhile things brings deep satisfaction. If you have ever successfully quit smoking, for example, you know how great you feel about yourself. Do you watch “Survivors” on TV? In every island adventure, there are several participants who say at the end they got through it because they saw how they were overcoming obstacles and hardships. It was their effort that was producing this result of personal growth, and the incremental progress in personal competence motivated them to keep going. These “survivors” claim they are new people, who can handle anything with confidence from now on. They are new people in the sense that they have changed their attitudes about themselves. They worked hard on their project (making it to the final round), and at all steps along the way, they were motivated to keep going because their efforts were being stamped with their own signature.
But even with a signature, our efforts should not include doing things that continuously make us frustrated, irritated, or defeated—and thus unhappy. I used to play golf until I asked myself, “Why do I punish myself this way? This is supposed to be fun. If it isn’t fun, then do something else.” Of course, when I played a lot, I got pretty good (broke into the 70s), but to sustain that level of play required more time than I wanted to invest in this game. So, my choice was clear: go back to unsatisfying mediocre play or take up another hobby. I took up tennis. At least in tennis, I could work off my frustrations by hitting the ball harder. In golf, swinging harder usually yields a poorer shot.
The Half-full Glass
No doubt you have heard the saying that there are two kinds of people: those who see the glass as half empty and those who see it as half full. Clearly, we are more likely to be happy when we see the glass as half full. Positive attitudes make us feel better than negative attitudes. Approaching life positively has a magnifier effect, because it motivates us to make future events more positive.
Consider how negativity affects friendship. Friends make us happy. But people are less attracted to negative people. We have fewer friends and are less happy as a result. Or consider personal accomplishment. People might be motivated into action by negative attitudes (example: “Congress is a disgrace. I am going to get elected and fix it”). But note that such motivators must be coupled with a positive, can-do attitude. A negative attitude about success destroys our motivation and breeds self-defeating behaviors that cause failure. Failure does not contribute to happiness. Some people may be comfortable in failure, but that is still not being happy.
In Step 4, we are going to explore how the brain can be programmed in ways that promote happiness. Can the brain be trained to improve outlook? Yes. Recent brain imaging studies suggest that one part of the brain focuses on misery, while another focuses on good things. Some biofeedback experiments by R. J. Davidson suggest one can condition the one part of the brain to suppress activity in the other.
But you don’t have to wait for biofeedback therapy. Just remember that what lies at the heart of unhappiness is blaming others or life in general or misrepresenting real causes, instead of confronting your deceptions.
Value Systems
If I had to identify one thing that provides a happy, fulfilled life, it would be this: work hard at something that you are reasonably good at that is in harmony with a worthy value system. Unpaid volunteers can find more happiness in their work than do some millionaires. Ask yourself this about your job: would you still do it if you suddenly inherited a fortune or won the lottery or a TV contest like “Survivor?”
Happiness comes from acquiring or achieving what we value, unless of course we value things that do not serve our best interests. When we value morality, for example, satisfaction comes when we lead a moral life. We can “successfully” lead an immoral life, but such behavior is not consistent with what many of us value.
Motivation arises from what we value and drives us to get what we think will make us happy. If we value a trim, athletic body, we are motivated to exercise and eat right. If we value knowledge, we are more likely to want to learn. If we value ourselves, we want to “be all we can be.”
Religion is a main source of values about attitudes and behavior. The effect of religious belief is especially dramatic in young people, according to a four-year study of teenagers involving a team of 133 researchers led by Christian Smith of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Compared with nonreligious counterparts, religious teenagers had more traditional sexual and other values and were better off in academic success, emotional health, community involvement, concern for others, trust of adults, and avoidance of risky behaviors.
As mentioned, excuse-making is fundamental dishonesty. We need more than to be honest with others; we must be honest with ourselves. When we are honest with ourselves about our moral behavior, we become motivated and empowered to live up to our ideals. The alternative is to make excuses for moral failure, thus corrupting our morals and assuring that changed and better behaviors will not occur. Excuse-making and rationalization lead to hypocrisy.
Clearly, being honest with oneself requires a high degree of introspection. Many people limit their happiness potential because they are not in the habit of self-examination. It is hard to move forward if you don’t know what is holding you back. One thing that helps is to create a frame of reference for introspection. I recommend a sense of worthy purpose. With clear purpose, you can more easily assess if you are on the right track and moving forward.
You have heard the old saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I extend this point to say, “Life without worthy purpose is not worth living.” The reason to examine your life is to find and create a life of worthy purpose, and then to plan and assess its achievement. This vision and its plan are like a seed that defines the fruit. But you have to plant and nourish it.
Happiness Does NOT Come from Without
People learn their state of mind. We can choose what to learn. In essence, we can program our brain’s responsiveness to events. We program our brain to develop a state of mind that governs how we feel and how we react to events. That being the case, the way to be happy is to program our brain in the right ways.
How much you focus on a given experience governs the response to the experience. If you dwell on it, the impact will be greater. What you attend to is what you experience most intensely and what you will remember. Thus, the programming of a brain differs fundamentally from the programming of a computer. A computer only needs to be programmed once. A brain is programmed by repeated exposure to the program. You will be unhappy if the messages you constantly repeat in “self-talk” (that silent chatter in the mind) is predominantly negative.
Another fundamental difference between a computer’s program and a brain’s program is that a computer program can be erased in an instant. A brain’s program disappears only when it is replaced with another program, and this can take a lot of effort and time.
One surprising thing learned about happiness is that it does NOT correlate well with life circumstances. Some people who ought to, because of their life circumstances, feel miserable do not—and vice versa. The explanation? I contend that the difference is how people have programmed their state of mind and their responsiveness to events. It is not the outside events that determine happiness. It is the inward mental programming.
Can money buy happiness? Or is it at least way ahead of whatever is in second place? One study of this question by British economist, Andrew Oswald, found in both Europe and the U.S., that rising national income produces such a small increase in people’s sense of well-being that it is barely measurable. However, the study confirms the expected: unemployment seems to be a large source of unhappiness.
Here is another way to show that money does not buy happiness: over recent decades the Gross Domestic Product of the United States has progressively increased, but studies convincingly demonstrate that the perceived level of happiness of people has shown a mild but progressive decline.
An interesting study on the role of money was presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Sociological Association by Glenn Firebug and his graduate student Laura Tach. They mined survey data from 1972 to 2002 from some 20,000 working-age Americans. When other factors that could influence happiness were controlled, such as health, marital status, education, race, work status, and gender, they found money is most likely to promote happiness when people have more of it than their peers do. This is consistent with the “keeping up with the Joneses” effect, whereby people are not happy if they don’t appear to be at least as well off as their neighbors.
Nobody seems to give much thought to why people are this way about money and the stuff money buys. Ego must certainly play a part. Our sense of self-worth is wrapped up in how we compare ourselves with others of similar status and opportunity. Ask wealthy people why they keep on working so hard, and you are likely to hear, “Money is a way of keeping score.” Yet it need not be that way. We could judge ourselves by different criteria than comparing ourselves to peers. This probably also relates to the peer-pressure phenomenon among children, which most people do not completely outgrow.
Happiness is also influenced by the contrast between a changed situation and the original situation and by accommodating to the changed situation. In other words, happiness is relative. Winning the lottery would be much more thrilling if you were dirt poor than if you were already a millionaire. Also, the happiness of winning the lottery wears off with time. One study that compared 22 major lottery winners with twenty two non-winners found the lottery winners took significantly less pleasure from mundane events and soon became no happier than non-winners.
A recent study on the psychological consequences of money has been reported by the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. This study’s nine experiments revealed that money helps people achieve goals without so much help from others. Money makes people feel self-sufficient, and they behave accordingly. This can prompt them to separate themselves from others, preferring to play alone, work alone, and to put more physical distance between themselves and new acquaintances.
Another strange thing about the sense of well being is that people over-estimate its duration. People expect their current emotional state to last a long time. It doesn’t. This applies to happy states, such as getting married, or unhappy states, such as getting divorced.
People also commonly believe that changing the circumstances of their life will change their state of happiness. “If I could just buy a condo in the Caribbean, I would be happier,” you might say. But don’t count on it. That is why I haven’t bought one yet, much as I fantasize about it.
We get unhappy when we focus on what we lack. It may be we lack something desirable that others have, or we may lack something that we had expected to get. The cure is, as theologian Dennis Prager says, “Get it, forget it, or replace it.” Clearly identify what it is you lack and then either work to get it, or forget about it, or substitute something else.
More fundamental is the control issue. Happiness depends on how much control you have over your environment, over how your time is spent, and over your self talk. If you think of yourself as a victim, you cannot be happy. Indeed, if you were happy, enjoying life would erase your perception of being a victim (see next page).
Risky Thinking
Choosing foolish risks usually has bad consequences in both professional and personal life. All children tend to take unwise chances, but some people do not grow out of the propensity for risk-taking. Habitual risk-takers have trouble vetoing unconsciously driven decisions and choices that are risky. Indeed, unwise risk-taking can be energizing, as if it were a kind of addiction. Impulsivity and high sensation-seeking do tend to run in certain families, but that is just as likely to be due to family culture as to genetics.
Many people pursue happiness without considering imminent consequences. For them, it is easier to gamble. They adjust to and tolerate the bad consequences of their choices and decisions. Habitual criminals are prime examples of people who persist in bad behavior even when it obviously brings negative consequences. Why is their criminal behavior habitual? The price they pay is unacceptable to non-criminals.
Maybe freedom is not so valuable to habitual criminals. There are criminals who actually say they find a certain security in being locked up. Is this why don’t they change? I have a pet dog who runs into her bed anytime she does something that might get her scolded. In her bed, she has learned I will leave her alone. Dogs have their comfort zones too.
Certain behavioral conditions, such as attention-deficit disorder, can co-exist with lack of self control and risky behavior. Perhaps surprisingly, depression is also associated with foolish risk-taking. One study of teens who engaged in unprotected sex revealed many of them had a high degree of depression. Which is the cause and which the effect is hard to know. Depressed people may take foolish risks because they lack self-esteem or feel that life is not worth living. But also they may be depressed because they persist in doing things they know to be destructive, and they think can’t control themselves. One thing even depressed people have is the ability to make alternative choices. Unfortunately, they often make poor choices, which only compounds their problems.
Victimization
Large segments of our population are unhappy because they feel victimized by one thing or another. Many African-Americans feel victimized by racial discrimination. The poor feel victimized by the rich. The sick may feel victimized by their illness, their doctors, or by fate. They may blame a drug company and sue. Many people feel victimized by their biology: they are not good-looking enough, or smart enough, or strong enough, or happy enough. In the Bible’s book of Job, Job felt victimized by God!
Trial lawyers instigate this kind of thinking, eagerly encouraging us to be dissatisfied and to sue for things that go wrong. Juries add to the pressure by granting huge awards. The attitude goes like this: “Whenever something goes wrong, somebody has to be blamed. Let’s see if we can make them pay” (and in the process also ease our guilt over our own contributions to the problem). There may also be an element of helping to set a precedent for when “our turn” comes to cash in. Our litigious society has made it easy to make excuses for our own contributions to our misfortune and to shift blame to somebody or something else. Also, the misery is perpetuated by obsession with what went wrong and who caused it.
Of course greed is also a factor. Going after the “deep pockets” is standard practice. Recently, a drug company suffered a devastating lawsuit loss for selling an estrogen drug for menopausal women. Nobody sued the doctors who prescribed it. Also, nobody seemed willing to accept responsibility for taking the drug, knowing full well that ALL drugs have side effects.
Believing you are a victim can assure that problems will not be solved. In talking about race relations, the Black Congressman, J. C. Watts, Jr., made the point this way: “For those who cling to the identity of being a victim, however well-justified that stance might be, it puts a ceiling on personal development. And for the guilt- ridden, it leads to patronizing, ultimately dismissive solutions, government-dependent solutions that limit understanding, opportunity, and real equity.”
Psychologist Nathaniel Branden has seen patients who perversely resist psychological healing of their emotional pain. He reports that they perceive the injustices done to them as a justification for any objectionable behavior of their own. They see therapy not as a launching pad for independence and happiness but as a substitute for living. Put another way, they fall in love with their excuses. People frequently choose the suffering of substance abuse, being an unwed mother, being poor, and even sometimes having poor health. Branden concludes, “the more we are aware that we choose our actions, the more likely we are to take responsibility for them.” I explain this more in Step 3.
How do people acquire a sense of victimization? Typically, they learn it. It is a program. Children are especially vulnerable to parental role models that teach negative attitudes, teach that problems are imposed from the outside, or that somebody else is to blame when bad things happen.
An unfortunately common way children learn to be victims is through divorce. Divorce prompts them to think they are not loved by mommy or daddy, or by both. Divorce makes children wonder if they caused it by not being better children. Divorce is one of the greatest sources of unhappiness, being so widespread that nearly everyone is affected in one way or another. The U.S. divorce rate is nearly 50%. Roughly half of the children live in a fatherless home, and among some minorities the percentage is much higher. How happy can a child be without a loving father in the home?
Would you believe, excuse-making lies at the heart of divorce? Michael McManus, president of Marriage Savers, observes that each partner in a divorce commonly tries to explain away their poor treatment of their spouse with excuses based on the spouse’s attitudes and behavior.
A victimhood mind-set permeates our culture like dirty dishwater in a sponge. It also teaches us to make excuses. I have already mentioned the vulture lawyers who make their living by convincing people to sue when things go badly. There are also many politicians whose careers are sustained by convincing constituents they are victims (of the rich, of the whites, of the company, of capitalist economy, of uncaring bureaucracy, etc.) and that salvation will come from the government if only the politician is kept in office.
I see a similar and more dangerous thing happening in Islam, where the clerics maintain their status and influence by convincing their followers that Islam is being threatened by Christians and Jews and they, the clerics, will lead the Jihad to a new Sharia paradise on earth in which all atheists, Christians, Jews, and apostate Muslims must either convert or be killed. These teachings give rise to suicide bombers. Their only hope for happiness is in dying and killing as many of Allah’s enemies as possible. Most Muslims are not Jihadists, but many of their clerics are busy at work trying to aggravate their sense of victimization and thereby magnifying their unhappiness. As I write this, I read of Muslims around the world going on a violent rampage, destroying buildings and property and killing innocents, because they and their prophet have been demeaned by some offensive political cartoons in Denmark. Muslim clerics, especially from other countries, have been instrumental in whipping up the general anger. In the minds of Muslim followers, status and authority of the clerics are enhanced in the process. This is not about religion. It is about power.
What has all the previous emphasis on culture to do with programming your happiness? After all, this book is about happiness of individuals, not groups. I bring up these points to emphasize how much culture has programmed who we are. Each of us needs to think about our cultural programming and assess as objectively as we can if it is affecting our happiness. Ask yourself: “Is anybody pulling my strings? “Am I being programmed by other people or by my environment in ways that are not good for me?
Learning to be Helpless
Indulging a sense of victimhood not only makes us unhappy in the present, but it can also teach us to be helpless in perpetuity. If people believe they have no control over their lives, why would they even try to make better things happen? In fact, I bet you know some people like that.
People who don’t exert their will can be pushed and buffeted around by events and other people. Many people may have become habituated to a state psychologists call learned Helplessness. This condition has been well documented in both animal and human studies. One example is with circus elephants that as babies were trained to stay tethered by staking their restraint chain so escape was impossible. Then, later when they are staked out with a simple wooden stake they could easily pull out, they don’t even try.
In people, the situations where learned helplessness develops are much more subtle. Usually, however, these are situations when a people conclude there is little they can do. Trying harder or using a different approach is perceived in advance to be doomed to failure. This doubt breeds powerlessness, which in turn assures unhappiness. Even though the doubt may be irrational, it still has the power to immobilize us. Commonly, we are not only unable to escape our fate, but we feel victimized, blaming others, making excuses, and failing to take matters into our own hands.
The learned element of such helplessness is key to its creation and to its cure. Past lack of success and failure creates the state. The cure is conscious reasoning that unmasks the irrationality of learned helplessness. With free will, we can will ourselves into action and choose to pursue alternative goals, strategies, and tactics. We do not have to be chained to the immobilizing stakes of the past.
Learned helplessness is at the root of lack of personal power. When you choose to be powerless, you exhibit such behaviors as ignoring or disregarding the issue, procrastination and neglect. All contribute to unhappiness. The consequences lead to uncertainty, anxiety, fantasies, diminished capacity, helplessness, and persistence of the status quo. You learn to accept your comfort zone. The state may be real, but typically it is because you have boxed yourself in and not considered looking for a way out. Like the elephant chained to a wooden peg, you have come to accept your state as the norm, when in fact there is no rational reason why that has to be so.
Medical Implications
Did you know laughter and happiness make you live longer? The old saying is true, “those who laugh, last.” How you think, feel, and act have profound influences on physical health. Inability or unwillingness to reprogram your brain may be killing you. This is what the idea of psychosomatic disease is all about. We all know that people who worry too much may get ulcers. We know that people who are anxious or angry may develop high blood pressure. One study reported that ninety people with borderline high blood pressure who were monitored throughout the day exhibited significant blood pressure changes with different emotional states. Blood pressures recorded during angry or anxious states were higher than during happy states and the degree of pressure change was proportional to the degree of emotion.
Data from the National Institutes of Health indicate that of the nine leading causes of death, seven result from behaviors over which an individual can exert conscious control.
Work stress is known to raise the risk of high blood pressure and coronary heart disease. Moreover, the perceived control over work stress significantly affects the degree of cardiovascular effect. In a study of 227 middle-aged men and women, blood pressures were greater in participants who reported low rather than high job control. These effects were independent of job demands, job strain, gender, employment grade, body- mass index, age, smoking status and physical activity. The differences persisted into the evening after work. The effect of low perceived control was most evident in women and in participants with higher socio-economic status.
Stress also aggravates allergies, such as hay fever and asthma. Chronic stress can also cause bone loss, speed the onset of diabetes, and increase the likelihood of cancer. The stress response is the emergency-coping mechanism of the body. When we are in fight-or-flight mode, things like the immune system are switched off. So, cancer and infections have a chance of running amok.
We also program our brains indirectly by things we do that affect our body. Drug and substance abuse have direct effects on the brain, and indirect feedback effects from tissues also affect the brain. Less apparent, perhaps, is the effect of exercise, which can indirectly affect our sense of well-being from exercise-induced release of endogenous opioids. Exercise turns on several families of genes in muscles and these genes have profound metabolic effects that are exerted throughout the body, including the brain. Exercise can even improve memory ability, as I describe in my book on improving memory (“Thank You Brain for All You Remember”).
Many self-help books give a great deal of attention to stress management. Coping mechanisms include changing the reality of a stressful situation so that it becomes less stressful. Alternatively, we can change how we define, frame, or interpret a situation to make it less stressful. When that cannot be achieved, then we must change the emotional reaction to the stress. Effective strategies include venting the emotion (crying, talking about it with others, writing down the nature of your distress), changing the general mood (dancing, music, comedy, vacation, etc.), deep breathing, meditation or relaxation techniques, and exercise.
Step 2
Move From Denial & Deception to Deliverance
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or we grow weak, and at last some crisis shows us what we have become.
—Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901)
Crises, whether big or small, do indeed show us what we have become. What we have become determines our capacity for achievement, fulfillment, and happiness. The first sign of what we become is often an excuse that misdirects the blame for our shortcoming. However, we may not see ourselves as we really are because excuses are designed to obscure our view. Excuses are often more successful at hiding from ourselves what we have become. Others are not so easily fooled. So, not only does our happiness depend on how the past has shaped us, but it also depends on how others view us and treat (or mistreat) us.
I became sensitized to excuse-making some 48 years ago as a graduate student at Notre Dame. I would describe my mentor, C. S. Bachofer, as a taciturn, humorless, hyper-critical, slave driver. He constantly found fault with my work and worse yet, much of his criticism was in areas where there was not much I could do about it—or so I thought. Much of the criticism turned on the fact I was not smart enough. “How,” I thought to myself, “do I make myself smarter?” Needless to say, I was miserable. I never gave much thought as to how I responded to the continuing barrage of criticism, but one day he brought me up short with the question, “Klemm, how old are you?” That struck me as a really strange question, seemingly coming out of the blue. Oblivious to the emotional earthquake this question was about to unleash, I said, “26:” “Well,” said Bachofer, “you are probably too old to benefit, but I am going to tell you anyway. Whenever you are criticized for your academic performance, you make an excuse.” Not much was said after that by either of us. I was too stunned to respond. But I certainly thought about it a lot. He was right, of course. I had gotten into a habit of excuse-making. How could I not? I was constantly being critiqued and criticized, and worse yet, being criticized for innate limitations I thought I could not do anything about. Oops—another excuse!
Excuse-making by celebrities is something we all recognize. Consider former South Dakota governor, William Janklow, who killed a motorcyclist by running a stop sign at high speed. He pleaded not guilty because he was a diabetic and was hypoglycemic as a result of not eating that day. Pete Rose, the famous baseball player who was caught violating organized baseball’s rule against gambling on baseball games, pleaded his expulsion from baseball and its “Hall of Fame” on the grounds he was addicted to gambling. He also blamed his illegal behavior on Attention Deficit, Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Oppositional Defiant Behavior, which he claims he inherited from his mother. Rush Limbaugh, the well-known radio talk-show host, blamed his illegal use of prescription narcotics on chronic back pain. Did these people not realize other people would see their responses as excuses? These are not stupid people. Why can’t they see that they were making flimsy excuses? Whatever possessed them to think they could fool us? Actually, they probably fooled themselves, believing in their excuses. Such failure to recognize and deal with the excuses perpetuates the unhappiness that goes with them. Thus the future may bring more of the same unhappiness.
Here are some common examples of excuses for attitudes and behaviors that make us unhappy: The unemployed worker often says, “I can’t get a job because the economy is bad.” Or, school kids may say, “My grades are bad because I go to a bad school.” Then there is the generic excuse, “I didn’t get a fair shake because I am “ …” (fill in the blank with whatever fits—gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, etc.).
Consider the blame game we play with our public school systems. As U.S. students continue to under-perform compared to European and Asian students, the public blames the teachers, or the school administrators, or the government. Does anybody ever blame the students and their parents? To blame teachers or schools for student failure to learn is a disservice to all. Teachers, even the best of teachers, can only teach. Learning is the responsibility of students (and their often unengaged parents). School learning cultures are polluted with large numbers of students with bad attitudes about learning, such as “to be smart is not cool.” Parents and the general public make excuses for these malcontents by placing blame everywhere but where it most rightfully belongs. This misplaced blame is crippling U.S. public education.
As I write this, a highly publicized example of blame shifting comes to mind. The “shock jock” talk-show host, Don Imus, has just been fired for his disgusting reference to Black female players on the Rutgers basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Whites as well as blacks found this to be terribly offensive. But some Blacks refuse to condemn the people who originated the term and who routinely refer to Black females as “hos”—Black males. Case in point: Black columnist at the Houston Chronicle, Salatheia Bryant, in the process of condemning Imus refuses to condemn the Black males who call Black women “hos,” get them pregnant and abandon them to raise fatherless children. Many Blacks blame irresponsible Black male behavior on white people. Talk about excuses!
The excuses we make for others helps to imprison them in their misery. Such excuses are often a way of excusing ourselves for the same failings or a way to buffer ourselves emotionally in case we may need such excuses in the future. No wonder “political correctness” is so popular. One of many politically correct positions is that the widespread poverty and misery of many Blacks results from racism and the history of slavery, even though no American Black has been a slave for four generations or more. There are other more correct and less palatable explanations, espoused for example by celebrity comedian Bill Cosby and radio/TV news commentator, Juan Williams, among others, who get vilified for their unwillingness to make excuses for their Black brothers. If you are in a group that is getting a pass, you probably won’t see it as political correctness.
We even try to excuse very violent, socially unacceptable behavior. For example, Christopher Pittman, a troubled teenager in South Carolina, killed his grandparents with a shotgun because they had scolded him for fighting on the school bus. His legal defense was his anti-depressant drug had clouded his sense of right and wrong.
Another way to shift blame is to take a perverse pleasure in an undesirable attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. “Nice guys finish last,” as baseball manager Leo Durocher used to say. Or consider a recent Blondie comic strip, where Mr. Dithers, a tyrant of a boss, gave Dagwood an overload of work. Dagwood complains, “This is too much work to do, Boss. Be reasonable.” Dithers replies, “I can’t. That would be out of character for me.”
Here is an example of passive, indirect excuse-making that touches the lives of many of us: parents who won’t discipline their children. Such indulgence tacitly encourages them to develop bad attitudes and behaviors—inevitably leading to their unhappiness. Another example is provided by spouses of alcoholics, addicts, or spouse abusers who enable the bad behavior by their tolerant acceptance of it. Everybody involved becomes unhappy.
Finally, “no-fault” excuses may make the people involved happy that got off the hook, but the underlying causes do not get addressed or solved. Thus, excuses fall into various categories based on:
*
what we have done.
* what we have failed to do.
* our personal weaknesses and failures.
* the weaknesses and failures of others (which includes political correctness).
* passive, indirect excuses that enable bad attitudes and behaviors.
* situations where no excuse is deemed necessary because no one is to blame.
Excuses
in all of these categories are cover ups for things that either make
us unhappy or prevent us
from becoming happier. Do people realize this? No, more typically people blame unhappiness on life events or on a personality trait or on a “bad brain” over which they have no control.
Over 1.5 million people a year commit violent crimes in the U.S. One aspect of environmental influence on anger and violence is now abundantly clear: media violence, such as in movies, video games, TV and gangsta-rap music, contributes to a more violent society. Violence may be inherent in the human condition, but it is also learned. TV, of course, is not the only thing that creates a violent society. If anybody had any lingering doubt about the role of culture in creating a violent society, they only have to look at today’s Afghanistan, Iraq or Palestine. Not much happiness there.
Violence on TV conditions people to become insensitive to violence, causing the U.S. Surgeon General to say “... televised violence, indeed, does have an adverse effect on certain members of our society.” That was in 1972, and there is even more violence on TV and videogames now. Six major professional societies have proclaimed that the research data clearly indicate that violence on TV promotes violence in many children.