The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (7 page)

Georgia was smart enough to go to a CBT therapist and learn new strategies to calm down. So now she’s in her daughter’s room and enjoying their relationship more, knowing that she can let her daughter grow up and not suffocate her. The key process was to separate her own fearful thoughts from her daughter’s potential experience. Remember the Venn diagram? Georgia was overlapping too much with Mia, not letting her have any independence. She had to back off to help her daughter grow and experience life fully and safely.

Once you’ve weighed the risks and benefits, you need to understand that not letting your child do something is as much a risk (to their development) as letting them do it is to their safety. Being a concerned parent is a good thing, but being overbearing and overprotective is not.

One final thought on the basement, which is the source of so many of our behaviors: The past should inform the present, but you don’t want to get stuck in it. You can’t steer the car by looking in the rearview mirror without crashing. To go forward, focus on what’s ahead of you in the road, not what you’ve passed. A glimpse in the mirror can be helpful, but your future lies in front of you. Look ahead.

Where the People You Love Drive You Crazy

W
hen I was young, my brother and I loved to play together
and compete, and to this day we still act like overgrown puppies, going out for jogs and bike rides and sprinting to the finish with the same fierce competitiveness that we had when I was in seventh grade and he was in ninth. We race each other down ski slopes and compete over who called Mom last and who has paid off their mortgage (okay, he wins in most of these categories). Catherine says we still act like adolescents all these decades later because that was the age we were when we last lived under the same roof. The model you had as a kid is the one you tend to replay, over and over as adults. And that is where the conflict comes in—with your mom, dad, siblings, aunts, uncles, and anyone else you have known forever and still spend a lot of time with. You’re not a kid anymore, but they still treat you like one.

The family room is where you spend time with the people you love the most but who have the unique ability to get under your skin. How you define your family is up to you—it can include a best friend or a favorite aunt, or it can include second cousins you grew up with who feel like siblings. The defining term here is nearest and dearest. That closeness means you are going to snap at one another, maybe even yell at each other, but you know the love will always be there. You can wear your pj’s and put your feet up, you can belch and not have brushed your teeth and still feel comfortable with these people because they’re family. You have to love them no matter what—but you don’t always have to like them.

Since no one is ever on their best behavior in the family room—by definition that would take you to the less casual living room—you often revisit patterns of childish behavior that are not always healthy as an adult. You can “revert to type,” which is Catherine’s way of describing how siblings start to interact as if they were still at the age when they last lived together as a family, before going off to college and careers, or other cities. It’s the childhood closeness that brings you back together no matter how far-flung you’ve been for how long; a good jab about how your sibling is starting to act just like crazy (insert nutty relative name here) cuts the distance and years to nil. You know you could make each other laugh that way once, and it’s reassuring to know you can still do it now, as if nothing has actually come between you, nothing important anyway.

You like the familiarity and keep replaying it, even when it may be less appropriate or productive to forging adult relationships that are based in the here and now. The fact is if everyone’s happy acting like nine-year-olds again, you’re probably not feeling any conflict. But more often one or the other sibling decides it’s time to grow up, or a precipitating factor forces them into the adult reality world (a lost job, a foreclosure, a sick parent, or some other grown-up-level crisis), and suddenly one person wants the rest of the family to snap out of it. But something weird happens: Sometimes they can’t. They know only one way of interacting, and they’re stuck, like a broken record, replaying the same stupid dynamic that seemed fun in the good times but is downright annoying when you need an actual grown-up sibling by your side.

The shrinks call it “repetition compulsion,” since you continually and unwittingly repeat patterns of behavior unless you’ve identified them and decided to change them. Think about it: Aren’t you and your sister or brother still replaying the years when you both lived at home? That can be fine, and fun, until it stops working for one of you.

Keeping It Real. Sometimes Real Painful!

There are ways those old patterns help “keep it real,” since you can rely on those who love you the most to tell it like it is. And they rarely spare your
feelings, which is why the family room is both pleasurable and painful, like tickling till it hurts.

For me, coming home after being the boss all day is refreshingly real. I tell my teenage son that the people in my last meeting of the day thought my joke was funny. I try out the joke on him and wait for his response, and he deadpans: “They only laughed because you pay them.” Then he looks up at me and smiles, like “gotcha,” and goes back to his Facebook pals. I know he loves me and he shows it by never giving me a false compliment. In most families, no matter if you’re the boss or the worker bee, when you get home you’re just you, and you still have to take your turn loading the dishwasher and hauling out the garbage. No one has to be nice to you for the wrong reasons, and this is a wonderful thing, because it guarantees that you have healthy counterbalances in your life.

To be emotionally well-rounded, you need to be treated normally by people who don’t identify you as the outside world does. Catherine gets that normalcy from her ten-year-old, who authoritatively tells her, “Mom, you can’t wear
that
to work!” I have what I call my “kitchen cabinet”—my daughter, my son, and my husband. They are the trusted ones who will tell me exactly what they think of my latest TV appearance—that I repeated myself or my hair looked poofy. (Thanks, gang. Duly noted.)

Feedback Is Critical. We Call It “Pinging.”

We measure ourselves and get feedback minute to minute from the first day we are old enough to communicate and understand others, which is to say from the minute we’re born. In psychological terms the process children use to gauge such feedback is called mirroring—they see what gets “reflected” back to them by parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults and learn from it.

As an adult moving through your day you seek out feedback that is helpful in navigating choppy waters. (How am I doing at work? Did I disappoint my dad on his birthday? Do I spend enough time with my kids?) We call this “pinging,” since it’s as if you send out little sonarlike signals
to the people around you, and the pings come bouncing back, either positively or negatively, and you learn to read them and gauge how your behavior is perceived. Like a dolphin, you need to send out the signals constantly and read them accurately in order to steer away from the shoals and out toward open sea.

That’s how you eventually learn to know yourself, and what your own internal pings tell you. Over time, these pings help you become self-aware, so that you can follow your own inner compass toward a direction of your own choosing. Some extremely self-aware people seem to have an easier time of finding their authentic inner voice, but for most of us, it can take practice, work, and a lifetime of pinging to get to the point where following our inner voice comes naturally. The goal is to listen to your own inner pings, but that can take practice and some real and helpful feedback from people you trust.

There are true pings and false pings, and eventually you learn to differentiate. Here is an example of how we learn to tell the difference at an early age:

A while back Catherine’s daughter proudly showed her a drawing she’d done of a horse. “It’s the best drawing I’ve ever seen!” Catherine told her. Hannah, smart six-year-old that she was, didn’t buy it. “You’re just saying that because you’re my mother,” she said. “Well, I
am
your mother,” Catherine said, sensing she was in trouble now, “but it’s
still
a good drawing.” Hannah took another piece of paper and a crayon and scribbled a tangle of lines and said, “How do you like
this
horse?” She was testing her feedback system: Could her mother be trusted to tell her the truth? “Well, I will always love something
because
it’s yours,” Catherine said, “but that’s a scribble mark, not a horse.”

Hannah was satisfied. She’d found a “true” ping, which meant that she could trust her mother to tell her the truth.

Pinging Is Your Inner GPS

Early feedback is critical in molding your personality. Of course, nature plays an enormous role as well, but patterns of behavior and relationships
are largely learned from those around you at a young age. Pinging is one of the methods by which you learn who to trust. It’s also how you ultimately learn to trust yourself.

It starts from your earliest thoughts and actions—a baby’s cries are a way of putting forth her needs. Is she hungry, wet, sleepy? How her caregiver responds to these signals contributes to how she will relate to others in the future. As extreme examples, the anxious mother may pick up her baby all the time, because any cry makes her worried. Though well intended, this hyper-attention to the baby’s needs may lead to the child feeling overly dependent, or smothered, or needing to rebel to get out from under the overbearing mother. On the other hand, the depressed mother, who is unable to motivate and respond appropriately to her child’s needs, may not be able to soothe her infant. If this disconnection continues for months or years, that baby may learn that her needs and desires won’t be satisfied by others, and in the future expect very little from her mom, or spend the rest of her life trying to elicit a response from her mother, who was so unavailable and aloof. This same individual may grow up to be overly solicitous of those around her, in reaction to her early parental deficit.

The point is that a healthy amount of connection, attention, and feedback are what we’re after, not too much or too little, when raising our kids. Both nature and nurture are at work here (though there is nothing you can do about your DNA), but how we were nurtured and how we choose to nurture account for an enormous part of who we are. If we can understand our own pinging experiences, we actually have a chance to change our patterns of behavior and our interactions with those we love.

Catherine explains that this early feedback helps determine your character traits (needy versus secure, outwardly seeking approval versus able to reassure yourself). You also develop your sense of self-esteem, since pinging is one way of seeing where you’re headed (reading the sonar) and where you are on the grid, like some GPS of the personal self. Are you funny? Smart? Athletic? Creative? Musical? True pings let you know for real, which is why it’s so shocking when an obviously terrible singer shows up on
American Idol
and makes a fool of herself. One wonders, has no one ever told this person she can’t sing? These nonperformers are often a little
out of touch, and observers can’t help but think, have they never had true pings? Is it possible they aren’t able to see themselves as we see them, because the mirroring in their life has been distorted?

I am the product of an overly positive mom and a loving yet scrutinizing dad. There are times when my mom thinks I hung the moon and I know this can’t be the case, but I appreciate the love she is trying to show me. So today a compliment that comes too easily I swat away and don’t internalize. But the same is true at the opposite end of the feedback spectrum because all my life I had to brace myself for the honest assessment from my dad, who despite his best efforts to be supportive always delivered the untarnished truth about my performance (
pretty good
has always been high praise in his book).

I now find I’m often defensive, and expect criticism even before it’s delivered. While I value constructive or critical feedback more than an easy compliment or flattery, it’s also true that I get defensive even when the person doesn’t intend to be critical. My “preemptive” move is to sometimes be overly critical of myself before anyone else can level a harsh remark, as a way of being self-deprecating and trying to defuse a situation. Or I’ll lob an offensive comment at the other person when I anticipate criticism coming my way.

This combination of warm, intuitive mom and critical, intellectual dad meant I had to find my own way through their extreme pings and figure out what was real for me. Now I’m grateful for both of their approaches, since it means I can pretty much figure out what’s real, what’s flattery, and what’s vitriol; today I listen to my own calibrated inner compass, and that serves me well most of the time.

A saying that I learned long ago, “You’re not as good as your best days, and you’re not as bad as your worst days,” has gotten me through the ups and downs of running a magazine. Another favorite is “Don’t believe the hype.” Meaning you can get a great review or win a big award one day, and then get berated by a blogger another, but you still have to get to work and do your best every day, earn your next success. Working hard and surrounding myself with people who willingly and liberally disagree with me—in almost every meeting—has helped too. (Pinging like true family
members!) But then I still have to make the call, make the final decision and move ahead, for better or worse, following my gut.

How do you do that? Part of it is mastering the type of thinking described in this chapter. First you have to understand where those outside critical pings are coming from, then you modify those ideas with your own notions about what’s right for you and what’s someone else’s baggage that you don’t need to carry.

Catherine reminds us that pinging is always complicated because every ping comes from an individual who brings to it their own experiences. A tough parent may have had his own tough parents or could be the product of softies and is reacting against that. A pushover parent may be reacting against a strict upbringing and trying to be the kind of parent he wished he’d had. Either way the pingers usually mean no harm, and the sooner you figure that out, the easier it is not to let a ping sting. But don’t forget to listen, because most pings have a little bit of helpful information embedded in the message.

Pinging Goes Both Ways

We also ping, giving out feedback to those around us. We send pings to those we love, and hopefully make sure they’re authentic. Let’s say your child refuses to practice the piano but wants you to tell her she’s playing well enough for the recital next week. You ping, “Well, if you want to play better, you have to practice more! You get better every time you play that piece!” If she practices plenty but still misses notes, your ping can be more forgiving but still honest. “You sound great, honey. There were a couple spots that need smoothing but you’ll get it together by next week.” Even if you want to say something sarcastic, like, “I could have read a book in the time it took you to find that note!” you have to bite your tongue and rephrase it in a loving way. The best pings are when you manage to both keep it supportive and keep it real.