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by Barry Michels
Remember Vinny? He was the stand-up comic introduced in an earlier blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-tools/201205/dying-laugh. Vinny was so scared of asking for help he hid in the minor leagues of comedy. Using the Reversal of Desire, he learned to conquer avoidance and take his career to a whole new level. After that, his greatest dream came true—he won the lead role in a TV sitcom.
A few days after his victory celebration, I saw him in my office. I told him he was going to need a realistic plan to deal with the pressures of his new situation –getting along with actors he felt competitive with, reading lines that might not be as funny as he’d like, etc. He didn’t seem to hear me; instead he launched into a self-satisfied rant about all the celebs he was meeting and how funny they thought he was. Evidently, he wasn’t done celebrating.
Alarm bells went off in my head. “Vinny, this is the point where people self-destruct. If they aren’t used to success, they think they can stop working on themselves. But reality hasn’t changed. You need the Reversal of Desire even more than before.” He said, “Doc, have you seen how the world treats stars? I’m on easy street from now on.” I had the distinct feeling that I was watching a train wreck in slow-motion; Vinny had left reality for fantasyland.
I was stupefied, but I shouldn’t have been. Most of my patients had the same pattern of behavior. They’d try the tools, love the results they got, and then stop using them. Why?
Every one of us has a “magical something”—a relationship, job, achievement or possession—that we fantasize will rescue us from the treadmill that is real life. For Vinny the “magical something” was fame. Now that he’d achieved it, he believed that struggle was a thing of the past. We call this fantasy of an effort-free, undemanding life “exoneration.”
Vinny ended up paying a huge price for quitting the tools. Predictably, he quit therapy and slid back into his Comfort Zone, showing up hung-over and late for work, refusing to learn his lines (“I improvise 100 times better than they write”), and being nasty and uncooperative with his fellow actors. The situation worsened until eventually, he was fired.
He returned to therapy deeply depressed. I had to convince him that the only way back to the land of the living was to start using tools again. I told him, “Only the tools can restart you and restore a sense of meaning to your life.” But how do you get someone who has lost all hope to make the effort to use tools?
The answer is willpower. It’s an amazing gift because it’s always available to us – as long as you’re conscious you can always use a tool. But most of us don’t know how to generate the willpower to do so. Most commonly, we wait until we’re at risk of losing something important to us: a job, a relationship, our reputation. We’ll stay up all night to write a report because we know we’ll be fired if we don’t hand it in. But there’s a problem with this way of generating willpower: it’s episodic; once the report is handed in, danger has been averted – and with it, the willpower it sparked.
If we could find something that sustained that sense of being in jeopardy, it would be a permanent source of willpower. We don’t like to think about it, but there is something you’re always at risk of losing: your future. I demonstrated this to Vinny by asking him to close his eyes and imagine that, defeated by his own depression, he never used the tools again. “What would your life look like after a few years?” He grimaced immediately. “I’m a decrepit, three-hundred-pound loser, lying in bed … Oh my God!” Something had terrified him. “I’m living in my mother’s house!”
This wasn’t funny to Vinny, it was a disaster. Every person has his own version of a future destroyed by his passivity in the present. That’s the ultimate source of jeopardy, and the ultimate source of willpower. The fifth tool in our book, called Jeopardy, uses your awareness of this danger to trigger the sense of urgency you need. It creates unstoppable willpower.
I told Vinny to use Jeopardy whenever he needed a tool but felt too demoralized to use one. He used Jeopardy to get himself to use the Reversal of Desire, at first on simple things, like getting up early and getting some physical activity every day. Soon he began to feel better, and he was able to use the Reversal of Desire to tackle something tougher – making amends to the people he’d alienated. A few refused to take his call, but most forgave him, and several actively helped him restart his career. I was worried that once his career took off again, he’d stop using the tools, but before I could even say anything, he laughed and said, “Don’t worry doc, whenever I get the urge to quit -- I see myself living with mother. That'll keep me using the tools for the rest of my life.”
That’s when I knew that Vinny’s psychotherapy had been successful.
-- Barry Michels
