Choice Theory (9 page)

In no more than a week or two, she learns to put pain, crying, and getting fed together, and from this combination she then directs her crying toward getting fed because getting fed feels very good. She soon learns about sucking and milk and becomes aware that something is feeding her and it feels good. This vital survival
knowledge, which feels so good, is the beginning of her quality world. It will grow much larger as she learns more, but even when she becomes an adult, it will never become very large because she will put into it only those people, things, and beliefs that feel much better than anything else she knows at that time in her life.

In a few more weeks, the something feeding her and helping her to feel good becomes someone and then a particular someone, in most cases her mother, the first person most of us admit into this special world. The baby also begins to learn that crying is an all-purpose behavior that leads not only to less pain but often to happiness as her mother and even others go out of their way to care for her when she cries. She doesn’t know what happiness is, but she learns that this feeling is associated with close contact with people, which will prepare her for learning what happiness is later. As this happens, she begins to realize the difference between feeling good and bad, a difference that will motivate her for the rest of her life.

By the time the baby is six months old, she is well aware that feeling good is highly related to her quality world picture of her mother, but she also begins to learn that her mother’s efforts to comply with her continued demands are not perfect. If the baby has a little intestinal gas, her mother can’t do much but pat her back to help her burp. Sometimes her mother succeeds and the baby feels better, but whether she succeeds or not, the baby may begin to appreciate in a dim way that her mother always tries to help her to feel better. But she also learns that there are times when she has to do as well as she can by herself.

Her appreciation that her mother is always trying to help her even though at times she can’t is another reason the baby continues to keep her mother strongly in her quality world. But she also learns that helping herself, no matter how good a mother she has, is a good idea. As she learns to help herself, she begins to put a strong picture of herself into her own quality world. She is now planting the first seeds of personal freedom. The more others in our quality worlds let us do things for ourselves, the more we learn to take care of ourselves.

When the baby is around two years old, that strong picture of herself that is starting to form is now given an unexpected jolt. Unknown to the baby, but well known to her genes, she is now being driven by a new discomfort: She wants some power. Who better can she turn to than her parents, to see if they can do something to help her get rid of this new frustration? At some trifle, some small difference between what she wants and what is in her quality world—perhaps she has misplaced a toy—she chooses to scream and keep screaming, no matter what her mother or father does. Some parents call this checking-out-my-power time “the terrible twos” because it becomes obvious when most children are about two years old.

Although she is unaware of what she is doing, the child, driven by power, is now exploring her controlling behaviors that have worked so well to find out if they work well enough to get rid of every discomfort that comes along. That’s the ultimate goal of power. No one achieves it, but some babies come pretty close for a while. The baby says to herself,
Why not find out how much I can get others to do for me.
Much of what she is checking out has to do with power, but as time goes on, it may also have to do with freedom and fun. In search of freedom, she may run all over a market and cry her head off when her mother catches her and puts her in the shopping cart. She may find a book in a store and start to look at it—fun and learning—and have a tantrum if her father won’t buy it. At times, it’s not so much that she wants anything in particular, she just wants to see if her parents will respond quickly and enthusiastically to her demands.

Sometime between two and four years, she discovers there is a limit and restarts the maturing process of modifying the picture of her parents doing everything for her that she had begun to form before the need for power kicked in. She finds that her parents won’t do as much as she wants them to, but they are still well worth keeping in her quality world. The preschooler begins to learn that wanting things that depend on others who won’t or can’t get them for her is just too painful, it isn’t worth it. She learns the process of not wanting too much. That adjustment of
her quality world based on what is possible is well worth learning. She also begins to take some people, who used to fuss over her but have now stopped, out of her quality world and begins to get more realistic about putting people into her quality world.

Good parents who make clear what they and others will do and what children have to do for themselves can help the children create sensible quality worlds. Divorced parents who compete for a position in the children’s quality worlds are not in a good position to teach this lesson, and the children are often more than willing to exploit this situation. How well children learn to deal with reality, and huge numbers learn to do it poorly, has a lot to do with whether they are happy or miserable for the rest of their lives.

But as children grow older and begin school, they get another shock: External control is a two-way street, and most of the traffic is coming the other way. More and more, teachers and parents join together and try to make them do a great many things they don’t want to do—like homework, which is seldom in any child’s quality world. But homework is strongly in teachers’ and parents’ quality worlds. If children don’t do it, the teachers and parents threaten and punish. Thus, children now get hurt by the same people who used to spend a lot of time and effort making sure they felt good. They have no idea that their parents, now invoking the third belief of external control, know what’s right for their children and are acting vigorously on that knowledge.

Still, the home part of these early years between about age four and preadolescence is usually satisfying because few parents are so strongly punitive that their young children even consider taking them out of their quality worlds. If the parents are sensible enough to couple their increasing demands that the children do what they tell them to do with a lot of love and with explanations of why these demands are being made and are strong enough to cope with the children’s resistant behaviors by not responding in kind, things usually work out well. The children keep their parents strongly enough in their quality worlds to realize that cooperation is better than trying to force the parents and not succeeding.

By their teenage years, when the sex-power hormones start to flow more freely, the power struggle between parents and children escalates even with children who had been obedient in the past. During these years, many parent-child relationships are damaged severely at a time when teenagers, who are exposed daily to many opportunities to get into trouble, need their parents in their quality worlds more than ever.

Each is trying to make the other do what the other does not want to do, or each is withdrawing from the other because he or she decides that this person is never going to be the person I want him or her to be. And following the external control they are practicing to the hilt, each is convinced that he or she is right. Parents who understand choice theory bend over backward to try to maintain themselves in their teenagers’ quality worlds. The advice I can give them that worked well in our house is this:
Pay close attention to what they do but little attention to what they say.
It isn’t always easy to do so. But if you know about the quality world and that you are risking your position in your child’s quality world by threatening and punishing, you have an incentive to learn to do it.

What makes things so difficult in our society is not our inability to get along well with the people in our quality worlds. If we can’t get along with them, we simply stay uninvolved, sometimes going so far as to avoid them. But although staying uninvolved may work for people we know, it will not work for a community. To do as many of us are increasingly doing, hiding behind the external control of security systems, guards, and gated walls, is not the American dream. The biggest problem of our society is our inability even to conceive of getting to know, much less get along with, many people who are repugnant to us. We see them as dangerous or potentially dangerous, and many of them are. They are the last people we would consider putting into our quality worlds.

But neither we nor the people we fear and try to avoid have any idea that we need each other. We and they have the same genes; our need for belonging, if not love, has no conditions. Whatever conditions we impose have to do with the psychology
we use; there is no psychology in our genes. As long as external control psychology continues to be the psychology of our society, we have no way of dealing with these people except to punish them and hide from them.

If we would change to choice theory, we would begin to think differently. We might begin to realize that neither hiding from them nor punishing them has any chance of getting us the comfort and security we want. Then we might consider a totally safe and low-cost alternative: reaching out at least as far as teaching choice theory widely in a community. Choice theory could do no harm and would have as good a chance of helping those we fear and shun as it has of helping us. Just one concept, wider knowledge of the part our quality worlds play in our lives, could make a difference. I expand on this concept of community in part 3 of this book.

T
ODD, A NICE-LOOKING
, well-dressed young man in his early thirties, came to my office for counseling. He immediately told me he was very depressed, by far the most common complaint that brings anyone to a counselor. The therapy or counseling I practice is called reality therapy. It is based on choice theory and focuses on improving present relationships, almost always disregards past relationships, and depends for its success on creating a good relationship between the client and the counselor. As soon as Todd sat down, the following went through my mind.

If he knew choice theory, he would know a lot more about himself than he knows now. But, of course, if he knew choice theory, it is unlikely he’d be in my office because he would not have done what I’m certain he did that brought him to see me today. The need for psychotherapy, or at least for extensive psychotherapy, would be reduced if capable people such as this young man knew and used choice theory in their lives. But he doesn’t know it,
so my job is to teach it to him as part of the counseling. What I will teach him is that he is not satisfied with a present relationship, the problem that always brings people to counseling. His past could have contributed to the problem, but even though most current psychotherapies initially focus on it, the past is never the problem.

It is possible that the relationship is with a girlfriend, but that’s unlikely. In my experience few men go into therapy over a girlfriend. At his age, it could be with his mother or father or with a child, but again it is unlikely. In his case, his wife is doing something he doesn’t want her to do. Of course, she may perceive the same of him, but since he is here, he is the person I have to counsel.

When he tells me he is depressed, I’m sure he believes that this misery is happening
to
him. But I believe he is choosing the misery he is feeling. What I will teach him is that he is choosing to depress to deal with something his wife is doing that he doesn’t want her to do. I will explain why I change the adjective,
depressed,
to the verb,
to depress.

Since all we do is behave from birth to death, in choice theory all complaints are changed from adjectives and nouns (the way most of us express them) to verbs. This change is crucial because it teaches that not only are we actively choosing what we are complaining about, but we can also learn to make better choices and get rid of the complaints.

My counseling will offer him two options. If he chooses one or both of them, he will feel better. If he refuses to choose one or both of them, he will not feel better and very likely will feel worse than he does now. He won’t like these choices—at least not at first—but if he wants to feel better, they are all he has. First, he can choose to change what he wants his wife to do. Second, he can choose to change the way he is dealing with her. Depending on which option he decides he wants, he may do one, the other, or both. When he does, it is almost certain he will feel much better than he has felt in a long time.

Todd will immediately take exception to my claim that he is
choosing the misery he feels. Whenever we feel bad, it does not seem like a choice; it seems as if it is happening to us. This is the reason I do not tell clients they are choosing what they feel until I have prepared them with enough information about choice theory so they can understand what I am talking about. If I just tell them straight out, they may get up and leave.

But after two or three sessions, this is exactly what Todd began to understand. In his case, it was too late to help his marriage. His wife had left him before he came to see me and did not come back. But these same choices were helpful with the next woman, whom he later married. If he treated her as he had treated his first wife, that relationship would not have had much chance either. The following is the essence of what we discussed in the first few sessions of therapy. A lot of the getting-acquainted talk and banter, during which we learned about each other, is omitted here, but it was important for us to do if we were to develop the warm supportive relationship necessary for successful counseling.

Todd came to trust me, and we quickly got down to what to do about the broken relationship with his wife. It was obvious to me that he wanted a good relationship with her. It was also obvious to me that if he couldn’t patch things up, he could probably find another love, but this option was not on his mind when he came in. The following are some short sequences of dialogue, just enough so you can begin to see what reality therapy is. I also pause as I go along to explain what was on my mind at the time, so you can see how I wove choice theory into my counseling. I started this way: