What Are You Baking?
by: Kay Davidson
Some 40+ years ago I was a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at VCU. When I look back on that training and the field of psychology in general -as it was then- in comparison to what is happening in psychology now, the differences are huge. Perhaps most significant for aspiring clinicians as I was, the view then of the humans we were to be ‘treating’ was strongly biased toward finding out what was wrong with them so we could decide on the appropriate interventions. What disorder did they have?
In fact, Martin Seligman- who may be the most well-known living American psychologist today- has remarked that “for the last 50 years of the 20th century, professional psychology ought better to have been called victimology, so obsessed had it been with the study of what's wrong with people--what's wrong with their emotional lives, their relationships, their physical brains, and why they fail and feel bad and do terrible things to each other”. No wonder going to a therapist was considered stigmatizing by so many people.
Of course, today there is still a substantial focus - as there should be-given to easing the suffering of serious mental conditions but it is notable that the past 20 years have seen the academic world giving significant attention to re-balancing this view. Much of the credit for this shift has gone to Seligman because of the challenge he issued to the field of psychology when he assumed the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1998. First, he claimed that it was important to recognize that psychology was half-baked. He said “literally half baked. We have baked the part about mental illness [but] the other side’s unbaked, the side of strength, the side of what we’re good at.”
He went on to say “This is because since World War II, psychology has concentrated on repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning. Psychology's focus on the negative has left us knowing too little about the many instances of growth, mastery, drive, and character building that can develop out of painful life events.”
For 50 years psychology apparently had its own negativity bias. Fortunately, academic psychology seemed to take Seligman’s challenge to “bake the other side” seriously. The trend in the field in the 21st century has been toward the scientific study of what makes people happy and good. Seligman himself went on to found The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania which, by the way, currently has about 37,000 people enrolled in an on-line introductory course about positive psychology. And the Innerwork Center’s recent keynote speaker, Barbara Fredrickson from UNC, offers a free Intro to the Science of Happiness on her web-site.
So- why is this notable?
First of all, it’s good news that we humans are no longer only studied as flawed beings to be fixed; rather we are also seen as beings with innate capacities to love, to care, to connect and to work for the common good.
And secondly, though I have not seen this connection made elsewhere, I believe that mindfulness in general, and Jon Kabat Zinn in particular, played a major role in tilting psychology in this positive direction. From 1979 on, when formulating and teaching MBSR at Massachusetts General Hospital, patients participating in Kabat-Zinn’s program were told “from our point of view, as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you…”
He went on to write: “The practice of mindfulness involves finding, recognizing, and making use of that in us which is already okay, already beautiful, already whole by virtue of our being human.” So, by the time Seligman issued his challenge in 1998, MBSR and mindfulness had been in the air for almost 20 years baking the other side.
The Mindfulness view of who we are allows us to acknowledge our less than skillful, sometimes dysfunctional tendencies arising from our judging minds, our threat-sensitive brains, and our personal reactivity, while at the same time assures us that who we are is also so much more.
As an experiment, it might be interesting to check in with yourself from time to time to find out how evenly you are baked; to reflect as you go through your day or week: where does the dial land when your thoughts are about you? Toward the dissatisfactions you have about this self of yours? Or toward the positives, the goodness that is particular to you? And where does that dial land when you think about other people in your life, or other people in general? How much critical commentary do you find? How much goodness is registered?
In other words, what are you baking?