The following insights, courtesy of Charles Spezzano, Ph.D., offer
somestraight advice on how to think like a grown-up--even when you don't
always act like one.
ON MANAGING YOUR EM0TIONS
THERE IS NO MORE WORTHWHILE AGENDA we can have than to work at
enlarging our emotional capacity throughout our lives. Yet as needs and
desires change, true adults must be able to move freely in many different
directions--in their work and relationships--without having to pull back
from what they want or need because of emotions they can't
tolerate.
One true sign of adulthood is the ability to hold a broad range of
emotions inside and still function. As life happens, we react with some
degree of pleasure or pain, perhaps a blend of the two. And while we all
share the same repertoire of emotions, what sets us apart from one
another is the extent to which we can hold them inside, identify them
correctly, and then act or not act in ways that best serve our
interests.
As infants, we have relatively little capacity to contain and
manage our emotions. As pleasure or pain builds, we start to move in all
directions until we exhaust ourselves. This aspect never
changes--emotions remain calls to action throughout life. When we're
children, our parents help us manage our raging feelings: Mommy puts a
breast in baby's mouth or Daddy picks baby up and holds her. But what
baby experiences is the buildup of tension, followed by its containment
before it gets out of hand.
Like an athlete getting into shape, the more repetitions you have
of this experience, the more automatic it becomes. You can keep your
emotions from bursting out of control. You can manage them. And that is
the beginning of true adulthood.
ON DOING WHAT You SAY YOU'LL DO
MOST DETECTIVE FANS LOOK FORWARD TO the hard-boiled wisdom dropped
in bits and pieces by the hero during the story. My favorite is Robert B.
Parker's Spenser. One of Spenser's prime criterion for evaluating people
is whether or not they do what they say they'll do. For him, it's a moral
issue; for me, it's practical. Life gets very complicated when we say
we'll do things and then don't.
Most of us sense this is not a great was to operate. But the usual
solution we come up with is to bend ourselves into pretzels trying to
fulfill whatever commitment we make. An alternative that seems to work
much more effectively is to make fewer commitments--or, put another way,
to keep quiet as long as possible in the face of other people's
needs.
That may sound callous, but it works. We all have needs, and we all
have ways of communicating those needs to people around us. Sometimes we
just ask directly; often we get it across nonverbally. However the
transmission takes place, the key moment is when we realize that someone
around us needs something. It is very difficult to stifle the reflexive
"There might be something I can do to help."
What is the adult way? When you are ready to help, just do it. When
you are ready to invite someone over to dinner, invite them. Don't tell
them you'd like to have them over sometime. If you'd like to, what's
stopping you from inviting them now? Promises are useless preludes to
real action. Children make promises all the time. Childhood is a time of
potential; adulthood is the time for doing what you can and not talking
about what you can't.
ON GOOD LUCK AND BAD LUCK
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND ANYONE AT a certain moment, try to learn
where their locus of control lies. Is it inside them or in the hands of
someone else? All of us experience ourselves as both active and reactive.
We act with will and a sense of purpose, but we also react to what the
world presents to us. The critical question is whether we believe that
the scale is tipped in the direction of our being in control of our
behavior or on the side of external forces determining what we do.
You cannot have a true adult problem-solving approach to life
unless you feel empowered, and what empowers us is a sense of an internal
locus of controlman "I can make things happen" attitude.
Existential therapists say we should look at adulthood as something
we create. Deterministic therapists encourage us to accept that bad
things sometimes happen. I think we carry versions of these two in our
minds and consult whichever suits our purposes at particular moments. For
some, good outcomes are always due to our virtues and bad outcomes to
rotten luck. And for others, the lousy stuff is our fault and all the
positive happenings are good luck. Or, our good fortune took hard work
and everyone else's was due to dumb luck.
I think a course called "Locus Of Control Management" should be
taught to help Us learn how to balance our perceptions of luck and
responsibility. We do it all the time anyway, but it's the adult who does
it well.
ON WHEN TO BE YOUR OWN AUTHORITY AND WHEN TO SEEK ONE
LIFE PRESENTS US WITH OPPORTUNITIES TO take decisive action--either
we do it or we don't. Each time any of us acts in a situation of
consequence, we come closer to making adulthood a reality. We're saying
that we will move forward by taking responsibility for our guesses, our
mistakes, and our successes.
The wish for an authority figure with all the answers is a
childhood fantasy. But our desire that the experts be omniscient--that
they parent us--keeps us from seeing the limits of their expertise. To
assume responsibility for ourselves and take action on behalf of our own
needs is to be an adult, but how do we achieve that state?
Tags:
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