Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (24 page)

In addition to the intense unpleasantness that her “love” rule created, it didn’t work well in the long run. For a while Sue’s manipulations did, in fact, get her some of the attention she craved. After all, she could
intimidate
John with her emotional explosions, she could
punish
him with her icy withdrawal, and she could
manipulate
him by arousing his guilt.

But the price Sue pays is that the love she receives isn’t—and can’t—be given freely and spontaneously. He will feel exhausted, trapped, and controlled. The resentment he’s been storing up will press for release. When he stops buying into her belief that he
has
to give in to her demands, his desire for freedom will overpower him, and he will explode. The destructive effects of what passes for love never cease to amaze me!

If your relationships are characterized by this cyclic tension and tyranny, you may be better off rewriting the rules. If you adopt a more realistic attitude, you can end your frustration. It’s much easier than trying to change the world. Sue decided to revise her “love” rule in the following way: “If I behave in a positive manner toward John, he will respond in a loving way a good bit of the time. I can still respect myself and function effectively when he doesn’t.” This formulation of her expectations was more realistic and didn’t put her moods and self-esteem at the mercy of her husband.

The rules that get you into interpersonal difficulty often won’t appear to be malignant. On the contrary, they often seem highly moral and humanistic. I recently treated a woman named Margaret who had the notion that “marriages
should
be fifty-fifty. Each partner
should
do for the other
equally.” She applied this rule to all human relationships. “If I do nice things for people, they
should
reciprocate.”

So what’s wrong with that? It certainly sounds “reasonable” and “fair.” It’s kind of a spin-off from the Golden Rule. Here’s what’s wrong with it: It’s an undeniable fact that human relationships, including marriages, are rarely spontaneously “reciprocal” because people are different. Reciprocity is a transient and inherently unstable ideal that can only be approximated through continued effort. This involves mutual consensus, communication, compromise, and growth. It requires negotiation and hard work.

Margaret’s problem was that she didn’t recognize this. She lived in a fairytale world where reciprocity existed as an assumed reality. She went around always doing good things for her husband and others and then waited for their reciprocity. Unfortunately, these unilateral contracts fell apart because other people usually weren’t aware that she expected to be repaid.

For example, a local charity organization advertised for a salaried assistant director to start in several months. Margaret was quite interested in this position and submitted her application. She then gave large amounts of her time doing volunteer work for the organization and assumed that the other employees would “reciprocate” by liking and respecting her, and that the director would “reciprocate” by giving her the job. In reality, the other employees did not respond to her warmly. Perhaps they sensed and resented her attempt to control them with her “niceness” and virtue. When the director chose another candidate for the position, she hit the roof and felt bitter and disillusioned because her “reciprocity” rule had been violated!

Since her rule caused her so much trouble and disappointment she opted to rewrite it, and to view reciprocity not as a
given
but as a goal she could work toward by pursuing her own self-interest. At the same time she relinquished her demand that others read her mind and respond as she wanted. Paradoxically, as she learned to
expect
less, she
got
more!

Figure 7–5.
Revising "Should Rules."

If you have a “should” or “shouldn’t” rule that has been causing you disappointment and frustration, rewrite it in more realistic terms. A number of examples to help you do this are shown in Figure 7–5. You will notice that the substitution
of one word—“it would be nice
if
” in place of “should”—can be a useful first step.

Learn to Expect Craziness.
As the anger in Sue’s relationship with John cooled down, they became closer and more loving. However, John’s daughter, Sandy, responded to his increased intimacy by even greater manipulations. She began to lie, borrowed money without returning it; she sneaked into Sue’s bedroom, went through drawers, and stole Sue’s personal items; she left the kitchen messy, etc. All these actions effectively got Sue’s goat because she told herself, “Sandy shouldn’t act so sneaky. She’s crazy! It’s unfair!” Sue’s sense of frustration was the product of two necessary ingredients:

Since the evidence suggested that Sandy
wasn’t
about to change, Sue had only one alternative: She could discard her unrealistic expectation that Sandy behave in an adult, ladylike fashion! She decided to write the following memo to herself entitled:

It is Sandy’s nature to be manipulative because she believes that she’s entitled to love and attention. She believes that getting love and attention is a matter of life and death. She thinks she needs to be the center of attention in order to survive. Therefore, she will see any lack of love as unfair and a great danger to her sense of self-esteem.

Because she feels she has to manipulate in order to get attention, she
should
act in a manipulative way. Therefore, I can expect and predict that she will continue to act this way until she changes. Since it is unlikely that she will
change in the near future, I can expect her to continue to behave this way for a period of time. Therefore, I will have no reason to feel frustrated or surprised because she will be acting the way she
should
act.

Furthermore, I want all humans including Sandy to act in a manner that they believe to be fair. Sandy feels she’s entitled to more attention. Since her obnoxious behavior is based on her sense of entitlement, I can remind myself that what she does is fair from her point of view.

Finally, I want my moods to be under my control, not hers. Do I want to make myself feel upset and angry at her “fair, obnoxious” behavior? No! Therefore, I can begin to change the way I react to her:

What is the desired effect of such a memorandum? Sandy’s provocative actions are probably knowingly malicious. Sandy consciously targets Sue because of the resentment and helpless frustration she feels. When Sue gets upset, she paradoxically gives Sandy exactly what she wants! She can greatly reduce her frustration as she changes her expectations.

Enlightened Manipulation.
You may fear that you will be a pushover if you change your expectations and give up your anger. You might sense that other people would take advantage of you. This apprehension reflects your sense of inadequacy as well as the fact that you probably have not
been trained in more enlightened methods of going after what you want. You probably believe that if you didn’t make demands on people you’d end up empty-handed.

So what’s the alternative? Well, as a starting point let’s review the work of Dr. Mark K. Goldstein, a psychologist who has done some brilliant and creative clinical research on the behavioral conditioning of husbands by wives. In his work with neglected and angry wives, he became aware of the self-defeating methods they used to get what they wanted from their husbands. He asked himself: What have we learned in the laboratory about the most effective scientific methods for influencing
all
living organisms, including bacteria, plants, and rats? Can we apply these principles to wayward and sometimes brutal husbands?

The answer to these questions was straightforward—
reward
the desired behavior instead of
punishing
the undesired behavior. Punishment causes aversion and resentment and brings about alienation and avoidance. Most of the deprived and abandoned wives he treated were misguidedly trying to punish their husbands into doing what they wanted. By switching them to a reward model in which the desired behavior got copious attention, he observed some dramatic turnabouts.

The wives Dr. Goldstein treated were not unique. They were ensnarled in the ordinary marital conflicts that most of us confront. These women had a long history of giving their spouses attention either indiscriminately or, in some cases, primarily in response to undesirable behavior. A major shift had to occur in order for them to elicit the kind of response they desired from their husbands but were not getting. By keeping meticulous scientific records of their interactions with their husbands, the women were able to achieve control over how they responded.

Here’s how it worked for one of Dr. Goldstein’s patients. After years of fighting, wife X reported she lost her husband. He abandoned her and moved in with his girl friend. His primary interactions with wife X had centered around abuse and indifference. It appeared on the surface as if he didn’t
care much about her. Nevertheless, he did call her occasionally, indicating he might have some interest in her. She had the choice of cultivating this attention or crushing it further by continued inappropriate responses.

Wife X defined her goals. She would experiment to see if she
could
in fact get her husband back. The first milestone would be to determine if she could effectively increase his rate of contact with her. She measured meticulously the frequency and duration of his every telephone call and visit home, recording this information on a piece of graph paper taped to the refrigerator door. She carefully assessed the crucial relationship between her behavior (the stimulus) and the frequency of his contacts (the response).

She initiated no contacts with him at all on her own, but instead responded positively and affectionately to his calls. Her strategy was straightforward. Rather than noticing and reacting to all the things about him that she didn’t like, she began to reinforce systematically those that she did like. The rewards she used were all the things that turned him on—praise, food, sex, affection, etc.

She began by responding to his rare calls in an upbeat, positive, complimentary manner. She flattered and encouraged him. She avoided any criticism, argument, demands, or hostility, and found a way to
agree
with everything he said, using the disarming technique described in Chapter 7. Initially she terminated all these calls after five to ten minutes to ensure the likelihood the conversations would not deteriorate into an argument or become boring to him. This guaranteed that her feedback would be pleasant to him, and that his response to it would not be suppressed or eliminated.

After she did this a few times, she noticed her husband began to call more and more frequently because the calls were positive, rewarding experiences for him. She noted this increased rate of telephoning on her graph paper just as a scientist observes and documents the actions of an experimental rat. As his phone calls increased, she began to feel encouraged, and some of her irritation and resentment melted away.

One day he appeared at the house and according to her plan, she announced, “I’m so happy you dropped by because I just happen to have a fresh, fancy imported Cuban cigar in the freezer for you. It’s the expensive type you really like.” She actually had a whole box of them waiting so she was able to repeat this each time he visited—regardless of why or when he came. She noticed the frequency of his visits substantially increased.

In a similar manner, she continued to “shape” his behavior using
rewards
rather than coercion. She realized how successful she had been when her husband decided to leave his girl friend and asked if he could move back in with her.

Am I saying that is the
only
way to relate and to influence people? No—that would be absurd. It’s just a pleasant spice, not the whole banquet or even the main course. But it’s a frequently overlooked delicacy that few appetites can resist. There’s no
guarantee
it will work—some situations may be irreversible, and you can’t always get what you want.