“BEING & CARING, A Psychology for Living,” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984.
Selections curated by The Happy President.
PREFACE
We all write, direct, and act the parts we play in the theaters of our lives. These roles grow out of how we feel about ourselves, how we want the world to see us, and the constraints of our environments. Within these contexts, each of us has the option of finding ways to live that help us to feel good and know ourselves more deeply – to create and flow and to stretch and reach.
Being and Caring begins, in Part One, by setting out some guiding principles:
Learn to appreciate and enjoy yourself, your life, and other people, rather than depreciatively judging all these. Live in a self-determining, authentic way that’s based primarily on who you are rather than what others want you to be. Develop the neglected sides of who you are and become a more fully integrated person. Increase your freedom and power by accepting responsibility for your behavior. Sharpen your ability to be aware of events both within and outside yourself.
Part Two presents skills and information about interacting with other people. Parts Three, Four, and Five consider emotion, cognition, and overt behavior. The order is psychological: Emotional clarity facilitates clear thinking, and both feeling and thinking affect our actions. Part Six returns to our connections with others with an emphasis on intimate and other long-term relationships.
PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS
CHAPTER ONE: PERSONAL EVOLUTION
Look in the mirror: What tales do the lines in your own face tell? In our first few years, we all live with the faces we were born with. After that, we start wearing the faces and living the lives we’ve created for ourselves.
Each of us becomes more of who we can be in part by being fully who we are now. “Don’t push the river,” said Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, “it flows by itself.” So often, to fit our ideas about who we should or could be, we stop ourselves from acknowledging who we are. We don’t have to rush headlong into changing ourselves, nor feel unhappy about who we are today to evolve in constructive ways. As we recognize our complexities – our diverse parts that interact, conflict, demand, and counterdemand – we’re more likely to appreciate our processes, purposes, and actions.
Finding ways to enjoy and appreciate ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with the circumstances of our lives is part of what might be called personal wisdom – something as unique as your fingerprints, signature, or way of laughing. Such wisdom includes actively seeking choices and alternatives rather than passively playing the role of a “victim of circumstances.” You can confront your reality creatively rather than accepting other people’s solutions and limitations.
THE EMERGING YEARS OF “PEOPLE PSYCHOLOGY”
Amid the material growth and prosperity that followed World War 2…Unhappiness was seen as a defect in a life of all possible goods. A popular textbook from the forties and fifties comments that a “maladjusted” person was often viewed as morally “bad” or “wrong”.
Adjustment textbooks, valuable to many readers though they were, suffered from two significant limitations. First the goal was some abstraction called “normality.” Normal is “an accepted standard, model, or pattern; especially corresponding to the median or average.” The old “adjustment psychology” sought to help troubled people become like everyone else instead of accepting their own uniqueness.
Second, most of the values and conditions to which a person was asked to “adjust” were unquestioned.
Fritz Perls (1947) argued that in the context of a society changing as rapidly as ours, it’s not clear just what we’re supposed to adjust to. He held that the demand to adjust can interfere with the self-reliance that maturity requires. To adjust blindly, he asserted, is to participate in the collective madness inherent in some aspect of our society.
Jungian analyst James Hillman goes a step farther, pointing out that the “manic consumerism and overtiredness and sleep depressions” of many clients in therapy today reflect the environments in which they live. We need to develop a psychopathology of civilization. As we discover how our culture is crazy, we can conceive of saner, wiser ways to redirect it.
THE MYSTIQUE OF SELF-FULFILLMENT
The humanistic orientation in psychology. (Theorist) Rogers emphasizes a person’s capacity to define the central issues of his or her life. Perls identified the fragmented nature of many people’s experience and the need to move toward a sense of integration and wholeness. Maslow described needs common to all of us as we seek both to be our unique selves and to understand the ways of the world we live in. Their perspectives can help each of us participate creatively in our world without being consumed by it.
The self-fulfillment ethic appears to have three different roots. One is the emergence of a psychology that aims at helping people discover themselves at a deep level, use themselves creatively, and achieve a full, happy life that doesn’t depend entirely on possessions and status. A second is our historic attitude of commitment to individualism. A third is our consumption-oriented economic system that relentlessly exhorts people to buy everything they want – today!
Is the quest for self-fulfillment an unmixed blessing? Some think not. “You’re obsessed with your own fulfillment but you don’t help others with theirs,” such criticism runs. “There’s no cooperative glue there, no shared effort of the kind that’s needed to build a mutually nourishing society.”
In their movement toward greater self-knowledge, people go through stages of development.
The next step beyond self-fulfillment is to take our more fulfilled selves into mutually enriching social relationships with others.
BEYOND CONFORMITY AND THE “ME GENERATION” – BEING FOR ME AND CARING ABOUT YOU
From birth until death, a person can grow in his or her ability to be with other people in mutually fulfilling ways. At the same time, the person is developing an ability to be independent, separate, and unique. Thus contemporary theorists speak of an interplay between two motives: individuation and relatedness. At every point, both are active. The two tendencies not only coexist but support each other. The more I know and the better I feel about myself, the more supportive, challenging, and caring I can be in my relationship with you. And vice versa. This interplay represents the guiding perspective of this book.
When I’ve learned to stand on my own feet, I’m ready to move toward you and with you. It’s then that I discover what synergy means: self-interest enlightened by appreciative awareness of myself in your existence and of your participation in my world. We do for each other in ways that enrich us, too, and do for ourselves in ways that enrich each other.
LIVING BY OUR REAL CONCERNS
Taking Time for Assessment
Taking stock of our lives is something we need to do more.
Living and discovering in ways that embody my life themes may require important redirections of my energy. These may involve changes wihtin my life. My deep concerns are found both in the far future and in how I do what I do each day.
I need to find a way to feel all right about what I do. This doesn’t mean “Chip up and put a sunny face on what’s nasty and uncomfortable.” Rather, it means that if I’ve examined how I use my time and energy and find no more effective alternative, I may need to go easier on myself, and recognize that, all things considered, I’m doing the best I can for me and those important to me.
Clarifying Our Directions
Evolving toward ways of living that demonstrate our own values and priorities involves a self-determination that’s more than just rebellion against others’ expectations. It’s an active process of redefining what we want to do with who we know ourselves to be. How do I know if the direction I choose is a productive one? If it leads me to make better use of who I am, I’m willing to call it growth.
I can distrust my ability to accomplish anything when I focus only on the finished product, and forget that the process of creating somethign can be as rewarding as completing it. When I’m afraid I’ll never make it, I don’t even start. Perhaps if we pay attention to the ways we frighten ourselves, that act will be a start toward what we want to accomplish.
ETHICS AND WISDOM
The direction of our evolution is influenced by the natur of our ethics. Our approach is this: to experience our acts in terms of how helpful or harmful they are – how useful or counterproductive – to whom or what, how under what circumstances.
Our knowing process becomes distorted when we’re required to learn large amounts of information in which we find little meaning or value. Understanding is seeing relationships among facts that are important to me. As I develop understanding, I become able to use my knowledge.
Wisdom goes beyond understanding. Wisdom is the knowledge of the spirit. We tend to expect a different kid of knowing from our spirituality than from our heads – a very personal integration of knowing, feeling, sensing, and doing.
The Happy President 