What to Do Between Birth & Death

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 worthwile 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?

Deborah Meier's story may point us in the fight direction. A high school teacher, she felt trapped in the massive and largely unsuccessful 200-year-old public school system. For her, taking action took the form of opening a school in East Harlem, the incredible success of which led to her eventually winning a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

n order to accomplish what she did, she had to recognize that her choices were either to use the unsatisfactory options already out there or to take action of her own devising---creating her own version of adulthood.

ON SKIRMISHES AT THE FENCE

As we build our life, we erect an imaginary fence around it and place our experiences either inside or outside that fence. Inside are all the actions we allow ourselves to perform; outside are all the actions we will no longer do.

The reason for placing an action outside the fence is always the same: fear of emotional pain. As life goes on, many of us begin to live as if there are thoughts we cannot think, emotions we cannot feel, and options we can no longer exercise. Keeping these possibilities outside the fence tends to make us feel secure.

But that security eventually proves to be an illusion. Life confronts us with these possibilities over and over, and whenever they come close to the fence, we feel threatened. So instead of dealing with the big anxiety in a showdown, we fight constant skirmishes all our lives.

Years ago, Rollo May discovered that among women who had been rejected by their mothers, those who admitted rejection suffered less anxiety than those who denied it. Once the deniers pinned their security to keeping the thought "My mother has rejected me" outside the fence, anything that threatened to make them aware of this reality became a danger. So danger was everywhere.

As May understood so elegantly in his book Love and Will, what we are seeking when we erect our psychological fences is freedom from disturbing emotions. But, May argues, the meaning of life lies in the acceptance of the insane mix of emotions such as love, loneliness, and rejection that characterizes all relationships.

When as children or as hurt adults we develop the habit of lifting as little emotional weight as possible, it temporarily spares us the pain that is part of developing any muscle. But it also keeps more and more of life at a distance, and we get more and more out of shape emotionally. The key piece of wisdom in May's psychology is that the whole point of the game of life is to bring inside the fence as many emotions and actions as you can before you die. That's the true measure of adulthood.

ON THE PLEASURES OF NOT BEING WATCHED

One of the genuinely liberating and happy outcomes of a good analysis is the gradual discovery that nobody cares about us to the extent we once believed they did. We grow up imagining that people have an enormous investment in what we do and don't do. That illusion grows out of our parents' tendency to experience us as reflections of themselves. In our homes for a short period at the beginning of life, we are all famous.

Outside the family lies the world at large,. Its inhabitants look at us and mostly shrug. At times they may need our cooperation to get something done. A few may become attached to us. If they need our cooperation and we don't give it, they feel frustrated. If they become attached to us, they will hope for some caring concern from us. Unlike our parents, however, none of them will be watching us all the time.

Our parents register emotionally how well our doings match their expectations for us; we, in turn, register their reactions. The whole process of being cared about, watched, and treated as an extension of someone else inflates our awareness of ourselves as actors on the stage. This inflated self-consciousness is a huge burden, but we all start out our adult life bearing it.

Some of us never dump that burden and continue to feel the pressure of those ever-watchful parental eyes. Life remains a performance for which we never quite feel well-enough rehearsed.

Others, either through self-realization or therapy, come to see that they're very much more alone in the world than they had imagined, and that no one is watching anymore. When this breakthrough happens, there can be a sense of loss that the audience is gone and you're alone on the stage--but there's also a sense of relief. This once-frightened child peeks out from the place he's been hiding and sees that the watchers are gone. He's alone. He can be silly or spontaneous but, from now on, much less vigilant.

ON SATISFYING MOTHER

No one can study psychology without reading a great deal about mothers. But the comment that sticks most firmly in my mind came from a family therapist who said that in order to become an adult, you need to be in a relationship with your mother in which you are neither her agent nor her enemy.

I have become convinced that every child and adult with whom I have worked in therapy or analysis started out life satisfying the desires of their mothers. That was the top item on their agenda. They learned to understand those desires more profoundly than they learned to know their own.

Fortunately, there are happy and secure mothers who manage to communicate to their lucky offspring that satisfying mother is not the number-one priority in life. Some others, however, don't give that message, and it's the face of that mother that has launched a thousand diatribes. As all the newer psychoanalytic theories emphasize--contrary to Freud's vision of development--every child's safety and security is rooted in the feeling of being loved by a contented woman who tells her children that their ways of loving her and being angry at her are acceptable. To keep this woman we get in life's first lottery contented and happy, all of us, as children, will willingly sacrifice our personal desires, feelings, thoughts, and actions. But then we emerge into adolescence and adulthood unable to set a clear and satisfying course for our own lives.

How can we emancipate ourselves from mother and grow up? We have to come to understand that if something makes us happy and mother unhappy, good and bad do not have to be perversely redefined for us. "Good" is supposed to be that inner sense that tells us, "This is me, this is right for me, this satisfies me." Now, given mother's unhappiness, we have a powerful reason to relabel all of this as "bad." To achieve true grown-up status, we must struggle against the worst outcome of this conflict, which is: "What makes me happy is bad." If we can reach the point where we can say: "What makes me happy is good for me and good for me only and I cannot be responsible for her happiness," then we are well on our way to growing up.

ONE LAST WORD

What is the answer to this large, all-so-important question of growing up? It is obviously too complex to be explained fully here, but a significant aspect lies in understanding the differences between merely playing a role and actually assuming a specific identity. Maybe someday we'll all have clip-on video cameras through which we can record the way we were and felt before we entered professional schools or became spouses and parents. Then, when we got stale, we could review these films of ourselves with a healthy sense of "Oh, yes, now I remember. Before I took this part, this was the way I was going to live my life .... ".

From What To Do Between Birth and Death: The Art of Growing Up, copyright c 1992 by Dr. Charles Spezzano (William Morrow & Co.).