SHELTER FROM THE NORM

Gratitude from Around the World; I Am So Grateful

My hard drive is failing - causing me to back up, delete, move, organize and reread many items on my computer. I use gmail but a lot of my online presence still has another email address. I have been sorting through and rereading these emails from people who have visited my website, www.narcissisticabuse.com

If you are the victim of a controller and manipulator, this site will enthrall, engage, teach, open up doors and be the turning point, the tipping point. It will change your life. And more, so much more. That's what you told me and to each and every one of you who chose to write, either for a consultation or just to talk, I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts. I am grateful, so very grateful that you did.

The site is also endlessly boring if you have no need for it. Those people don't write, of course, any more than I write to sites that praise the art of knitting or explain in detail how to paint a classic car. I don't need them but so what - I am glad they are there for those who do.

Gratitude is used in positive psychology often. Maybe even seen by some as the cornerstone - if you are full of gratitude, you will be happier. I don't doubt it. I trust that being truly grateful for many things is better than being miserable about just as many. I am certainly happier for the knowledge that I can flip a switch and go into grateful mode, and engage it often. Gratitude journals though aren't for me. And being grateful by comparison ('I am grateful I have food while others starve') is really not me. I don't like comparisons - if you haven't got the common sense to see and know a home is better than a street corner, I think we haven't taught you very well in life so far.

Gratitude is above the comparison mode. It is recognition of change in yourself brought on not by circumstance but by intent.

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us." Albert Schweitzer

Thank you - from Zimbabwe to United Arab Emirates, to Paris and Egypt and Canada, and the U.S, and all those from places I didn't mention - thank you for lighting the flame within me with your words. I am so very grateful and my only regret is not sharing a meal or a drink with all of you in friendship and companionship. We share the electrons and oh how grateful I am for that.

Engines of Change: Actually Using Positive Psychology

It hasn't escaped my notice that this blog title has often had little to do with the posts. I should be ambitious like that wonderfully ambitious woman blogging about using all the tricks of positive psychology.

Here's a shortcut to using positive psychology in divorce. Do it.

My hat's off to the billionaire couple that went to the Beverly Hills Hotel and sat down with legal pads and a bottle of wine and divided the goods. No lawyers! Apparently it was her idea, he liked it. Your jet, my jet, my villa, your villa. The ways of the wealthy are oh so different.

The more I deal with people in divorce and learn about the dirty tricks of spouses and infinitely worse tricks or laziness of the attorneys, the more I want to say: reframe. Here goes: the marriage is bad, let's have a good divorce.

It may be impossible if your are being cheated or abused or if you lawyered up with one of the greedy lazy ones, but try.

Taking control back from the legal system before you get too deeply in is a very good thing to do. Right now I am working with a woman who has spent over 200,000 in 10 months on Silicon Valley bottom fishers. I have heard all the names, the stories, and know the players.

She may be too traumatized by her very abusive spouse to do much positive psychology, and that's a shame. Her emotions are running the show and she is very forgetful. But the calmer she can get, the better the result with both lawyers and the ex. Even if it is only to build a better legal team, outside the sewer of family law.

Philip Zimbardo and Michael Lowy: The Lucifer Collaboration

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007) is Stanford Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo's psychological analysis of how good people become evil.

He has several intriguing main points. Evil seduces people in institutions where there is no oversight. Any good and normal person can walk the slippery slope from good to bad, step by step. Nice people can become sadistic. The context defines them. They were not looking or wanting to become evil, but random chance put them in an evil institution and they became an accidentally evil person. Take them out of the context and they become normal again.

Zimbardo took 30 years to understand what I learned over several months. Good people, put in an evil institution will degrade, shame, blame, and brutalize you. The evil institution with no oversight is family law and family court. Zimbardo says the guards "were allowed to have too much unrestrained power without top-down oversight." Ditto family court and lawyers.

I like this quote from the book: “Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards…helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next.”
— Albert Bandura (Stanford University)

Just like any torturer, emotional or otherwise, take the attorney out of the context and he was "normal". Father, husband, maybe tennis player.

Ironically, Chris Haney, who helped Zimbardo design the Stanford Prison Experiment, is a friend of attorney Michael Lowy, who was to abandon legal ethics, betray, and lie - all in the context of collaborative law. Oversight is purposefully left out of it. It ditches advocacy, worships a process not a goal, and undermines the people it processes. It is a hugely disrespectful institution, valuable to no one, but it focuses on the greed of the attorneys at the expense of the clients.

Zimbardo says: Good people don’t rush in to do evil where angels fear to tread, instead they start by straying only a small way away from their moral center, and each successive step down is hardly different, barely noticeable, until it is too late and their behavior is shocking and may even be awesome of awful.

The moral center of the law is absent from collaborative law. Within that context, Michael Lowy alllowed himself to become my abuser. He knew I had been traumatized and he neglected to talk to me. He knew I wanted to follow the law and he abused me by telling me it was not appropriate. He abused me by giving the man who stole everything from me a place to rest and renew. He abused me by lying about truth telling and doing the one thing no attorney has the right to do: he shared emails with opposing counsel. He sold me out, he sold himself. Collaborative law has been declared unethical in Colorado. I knew that in Palo Alto.

Craig Haney designed the experiment that would explain Michael Lowy.

The same institution that brutalized me and so many other women, has lead me to using positive psychology to help the abused - the accidental victims of the accidental evil doers: those of the family court.

David Duff, Jeffrey Kaufman, Kirby Burnside, Lynn Yates-Carter, David Prince, Michael Flicker, Susan Chung, Ron Romines, Delman Smith, Michael Lowy, meet Philip Zimbardo.

Channeling Chris Peterson

Chris (Chris Peterson of University of Michigan) shared so many insights in his class on positive psychology that I want to get them out to a larger audience.

In no particular order:

Achievement and success both are part of the good life.

We can't judge characteristics in isolation.

Postivive psychology interventions may be simple, but they are powerful when embedded in the context of a relationship

Human Accomplishment and the 10 Year Rule: You need to be in a field for 10 years before you accomplish something (don't tell the tech guys this - youtube was created and sold to google in less than a year) I suspect this has to do with academics.

12-7: work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week: this is necessary to achieve (n.b. see above)

Praise for being smart undercuts its purpose - tell kids how hard they work and praise the effort. Otherwise, they tend to lose out academically over time

Interests: We are our passions.

Competence: We are motivated to do things well

Flow is balance, skill and challenge in freely chosen activity

More....next time

Life is Tough; Take it Like a Woman

'Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of these greatest truths. It is a great truth because, once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult." M. Scott Peck, M.D. (author, The People of the Lie, The Road Less Travelled

Positive psychology doesn't minimize troubles. I look at it this way: it gives you a roadmap to handling the tough times so they become less tough, or happen less often. Why? Because the more you experience positive emotions, the better able you are to handle problems.

Personal opinion: developing your strengths and having more positive emotions allows you to be more sure of your self and not afraid of risks or failures. When they happen - and they will - you look at them and go, "Oh, there you are, hello."

M. Scott Peck is so clear - life is tough. I saw this in a toxic divorce with a narcissist - and those curveballs may still hit, but they don't hurt so much any more. This accidental optimist is a big believer in post traumatic growth.

Happy People Are..

Resilient
Most people bounce back from adversity. The longer in the past, the less important the event. We cope, deal with, and we move on. Resliency hints: If you want to be happier, do something with bad events: use them to effect change - many social and cultural changes have come about because people or groups who were agents of change did something to change laws or norms. Think civil rights and voting. One way to become more resilient is to learn that bad events are part of life, and to learn acceptance is to learn transcendence. The events exist, but you do not put them on your shoulders and carry them everywhere. You let them flow through you, around and above. You recognize them, but do not own them. One way to learn acceptance is to be able to reframe events.

Reframe Events
This is so easy for me I was astonished to find it was difficult for others. This may be where some begin to think positive psychology becomes pollyannaish. Reframing events - or looking at them from a different perspective - is an enormous buffer against depression. Lost the job? Didn't you hate it anyway? Isn't now the time to use the skills developed web designing on the side to begin life as a web designer? (Fill in the specifics for you.) Can't do that because you need money right away? Find a part time unexciting job and keep a journal every night and in 10 days you have an ebook: The Truth Behind the Counter: 10 Life Lessons from A Fast Food Franchise. Last summer I was consulting for someone trying to produce a reality show about happiness. I told her if she didn't make it, she had a book called How I Tried to Make America Happier. But what about something really awful? Like losing custody of a child in a bitter divorce battle? Or losing a spouse to a drunk driver?

Let's try using those examples. I sometimes work with people who have lost custody because they were dealing with spouses who are pathological liars and greedy, lazy lawyers. This caused them to became emotional in an arena where emotion is seen as weakness. Some parents give up parenting. Some hide and do not come out to see the light of day. Others take this event and use it as a catalyst for change. Some learn the law inside and out, go back to school and become lawyers. They go back for modification of custody when they know how to do it better than the original lawyer. Some use the time to change careers, spend more time making money, and hire a better lawyer. Some find the situation is just fine. And everyone who makes it through this heartbreaking time learns they didn't do anything wrong, that life is unfair, that family court does not protect the best interests of the child and they have more strength and less naivete then before and use this wisdom in many ways. The wisest parents learn to change their patterns of parenting to fit the situation and find out there can be a lot of benefits in being the part time parent. A deep bond can be forged with a child you play with more than you discipline. Times for talking and sharing may be shorter but more intense. It calls upon deep core strengths of compassion for the child at a time when parents most need compassion for themselves, and being able to identify what needs to be done in a world turned upside down.

Most of all it means learning how to feel good about yourself when you least feel like it. I honor happy non custodial parents and the lessons I have learned from them.

Losing a beloved spouse is full of pain. The event cannot be reframed, but lessons on how to rise above the depression can be learned. We'll come back to that.

Let's take one more example of everyday events and how to reframe. A client came to me upset that a class she had spent thousands on was "Something I could do better in my sleep." Perhaps you can guess the outcome - I encouraged her to build a better mousetrap. She reframed the bad event into a money making venture that helped others and built upon her strengths.

The value of reframing can't be overlooked. It speaks of possibilites, a future orientation, improvement, help for others, self esteem, healing, and realizing there is always another way to look at a situation and how you do so is under your control.

Is the Universe Friendly?

Albert Einstein said the most important question we can ask is "Is the universe friendly?" He never gave an answer to that question, but since he thought it was the most important one to ask, let's put it there, and look at it every now and then.

People want to be happier. No matter the research says we are fairly happy, (and it does), people want to be happier. Positive psychology has to be used by real people in real time with real issues, and I want to address that in this blog in various ways - how to use positive psychology in different situations, different variables.

COSMETIC SURGERY
I learned last week (from Chris Peterson, Univ of Michigan) that preliminary research indicates that people who have cosmetic surgery might be happier. I'm not surprised by this finding. When you think you look better, you interact more, smile more, are more responsive to people and your environment, and this is pleasing to people. They respond, interactions occur, and you become more outgoing, develop more positive emotions because more are being directed at you. You are bonding, belonging to a wider circle of people. All because of perky breasts or a few less wrinkles? Absolutely. (full disclosure: no work here, but I have nothing against it.)

HAPPY DIVORCED MEN
Ed Diener (University of Illinois) looked at what made people UNhappy. For males, losing a job made them unhappy and this feeling stayed, in some manner with them, no matter if they got a better job. They were forever changed.

For women, it was divorce. Not all of course, but many. Women also initiate most divorces. So why are they unhappy? I suspect it's economics, loss of control, children. If the women have stable finances and the children, they are ok. However divorce is an economic disaster for many women, they are no longer able to parent the same, and they feel helpless.

Are divorced men happier? Not at first, but after a while, yes.

HAPPY PEOPLE: Who are they?
Happy people are extraverted, optimistic, have a sense they control their lives, and have self-esteem. They are everywhere; some places more than others, but the above traits are descriptive of happy people no matter where you find them. Dare we ask: Do they see the universe as friendly?