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| This is not one of the puppies in Seligman and Maier's experiment, but it is very cute, and sad. |
* This post is about when I was confused in a particular way that was hard and dark and sad and I felt unable to find a way to make life work. It also involves cruelty to dogs. Look away now if you’re not up for it right now. Otherwise, read it with a friend nearby and plan to eat or do something nice afterwards.
In 1965 Martin Seligman and Steve Maier performed an experiment on dogs that involved giving dogs electric shocks. Basically, the dogs were divided into groups. In the first part of the experiment, one group of dogs were given shocks which they could stop by pressing a lever. For the other group of dogs, however, the shocks were random and could not be stopped. Being relatively intelligent animals, the dogs in both groups quickly worked out what was going on.
Both groups of dogs were then put in a different situation. They were placed in a box with walls low enough that they were easily capable of leaping over them. When the first group of dogs (the ones who had been able to control their situation by pressing the lever) were given electric shocks, they quickly learned to jump out of the box and solve the problem. The other group of dogs had learned from the previous part of the experiment that they were helpless, that no matter what they tried they were incapable of changing their situation for the better, so when they were given electric shocks they tended to just lay there, looking sad and getting more and more depressed by the fact that life, to them, seemed to be just a series of nasty shocks which they couldn’t predict, control or avoid.
Of course the point of this experiment rests on the fact that people are like dogs and dogs are like people. I imagine myself inside the head of one of the dogs in group two. I can create in my mind some impression of the stress of going through all the behaviors I can think of and finding that nothing works. I try every single thing I have ever learned to make my life work out. Confused, I try again. How could this be? Nothing works. Nothing. It seems staggering, incomprehensible. But then, maybe it’s true? Maybe life is just one shitty shock after another and I can’t really do anything about it. I try once more, half-heartedly, now already sort-of-believing it. I go through the motions, more to confirm my awful new hypothesis than find a solution. Once my hypothesis is confirmed, I establish a rule. At least with my rule I have an explanation, so I go ahead and apply my new rule to all future situations. Woof. Whimper.
I imagine that the group two dogs are more resigned and stoic than filled with dramatic, outraged despair. I have a bias towards imagining that dogs are emotionally tough, that an abused dog doesn’t suffer as much as an abused child, say, because dogs don’t have the same sense of their own importance. Maybe this is a fantasy but even so, even in this diminished canine imagination, I imagine Rusty, or Gem, or Goldie, or Black going into a deep sadness, and experiencing a kind of existential confusion. Is this really how my life was meant to be? Is this life-thing really worth all the effort?
Part one
When I was 10 or 11 my tennis coach developed a habit of making sure my shirt was tucked in. He would even untuck it so that he could tuck it back in. He did this because it was an easy way to get his hands into my pants even when other people were around and were, I thought, watching.
When I was about 13 I spent a period of my school life trudging from one area of the yard to another trying to look like I was going somewhere. Nonetheless, most days I managed to find groups of boys willing to chant “AIDS carrier, AIDS carrier, AIDS carrier...” at me, clapping, leering and laughing. I remember walking home from the bus one day wiping off a thread of spit that had landed on my face. It ran from above my right eyebrow, across my nose and down to the bottom of my left cheek.
When I was sixteen, my dad was quite sick. I was in a representative cricket team. On January 18, 1988, everyone except dad came to watch me play. It was very rare for anyone to come and watch me play, so for me this was a special treat, although I suspected that it was probably pretty boring for them. When we got home dad was lying on the floor just inside the front door, stiff and blue and lifeless.
When I was 18 I left Australia and went to South Korea. Rita, a bubbly Korean-Canadian, or kyopo, was the first person I had had a sexual relationship with. We used condoms every time. Once or twice, they broke and within two months, she was pregnant. She was 22. I’d just finished high-school. We spoke about keeping the baby, but she was older and more certain she didn’t want it. I thought that was the right decision, but still felt responsible, powerless and sickeningly bad.
After I gave my speech at my 21st, a friend named Kirsten came up to me and told me that I’d said “um” 57 times. In most situations I’m a relatively fluent public speaker, so this hesitation and confusion was a bit unusual for me. But the thing I didn’t tell her, or anyone who was there that night, was that even during my speech I was acutely conscious that there was someone there whom I hadn’t expected to be. By the time I was 19 I had been molested and bullied and, as far as I was concerned, had played important roles in killing my dad and my unborn child. I had expected, even hoped, that the person who wouldn’t ever make it to my twenty-first birthday was me.
But I did make it, and afterwards I kept being alive, which was unexpected, not very pleasant, and left me with something of a problem. As I saw it, I had two ways of explaining the shocks that had happened with a sort of telling-but-not-predictable regularity in the early part of my life. Either I had had control over them (that is, I had made them happen somehow and was, therefore, responsible for inflicting a lot suffering and sadness on myself and the people around me) or else I hadn’t (in which case I was helpless and life was a random series of unavoidable crap events).
Part two
When I was in my mid-thirties I lived for a short while in a one-bedroom flat in Flemington, a suburb in Melbourne famous for the horse races that are held there each Spring. My flat had low ceilings and heavy brick features. In it I felt as if there was a small but ever-present danger that I would be squashed, but it had double doors that opened onto a small balcony, a large window above the bed, an open plan kitchen-dining area and a bathroom with a tiny bath in it. I’d had a bit of a crack-up when I was 25, but that was nothing compared with the lapse into helplessness, confusion and despair that I went through in that flat in Fleminton.
I’d got to a point where I seemed to have tried all the behaviors I could think of. And nothing worked. That shift was important. It wasn’t that nothing had worked; it was that nothing worked. Nothing at all. Happiness was unachievable and, despite my best intentions, I tended to hurt the people around me.
From being a healthy weight, I lost about 10 kilograms in a month. The idea of eating made me feel ill, and what little I did manage to eat, my stomach - which was constantly tense - squeezed out so quickly that I was shitting thin streams of undigested food, it seemed, within minutes of eating. I had intense cravings for sugar. Energy. I had constant headaches and was exhausted. At one point I went for a swim with a friend and managed to swim one length. At the end of that lap I cried with exhaustion. I couldn’t sleep. My thoughts circled around and around. There was no way out. I was the dog in the box. I lay down on my bed, helplessly depressed, thinking that the only way to avoid the next shock (and of also being the source of sadness and pain for others, too) was to kill myself. I cried, whole evenings spent bobbing in and out of bouts of tears like someone being lifted up and down by an ocean swell. If I breathed out very deeply, I would cry. If I bumped into a cupboard or dropped a fork, I would cry. I was alone and scared and unable to articulate to anyone how confusing it was to want to take responsibility for my life but to know that every way in which I had taken responsibility for my life at every other point in my life had led me to this point, to the flat in Flemington and the night spent comparing the virtues of a folding pocket knife and a good sharp kitchen knife.
I didn’t want to kill myself; I really just wanted a rest. I was confused to the point of panic about how to move forward. I was convinced that I had tried every kind of behavior I knew and that nothing had or would work, but at the same time unable to quite believe that this was the case. Other people were happy. Other people, I assumed, didn’t want to kill themselves, so what was it that I was missing? What were they doing that I wasn’t? I had no answer - only that I was me and they were they - and that it was simply true for me that I would never find the answer, the right way to be, or think, or feel or act or whatever it is that happy, healthy, loving and constructive people do. For me, for those few months, it felt like death had to be easier than the life I had lived.
(And this held true even though I was totally aware that my life had been easy - comfortable and luxurious even - full of love and support and wonderful opportunities. I have met people who have survived much tougher childhoods than mine, and I make absolutely no claim that my childhood was in any way worse than anyone else’s, and I acknowledge that compared to many it was startlingly pleasant. Somehow that fact only added to the problem. How hopeless must I be to have failed even with all of those gifts and chances?)
In the car park of unhappiness
Seligman and Maier’s experiment has made it to #4 on a list posted on the internet of the Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments. Being the dog in the box is not pleasant. Confusion like that is so full of despair and anxiety that it is like being caught in a whirlwind of unacceptable, unresolvable, impossibly undesirable choices that have to be made. I think of it as like being caught in a giant car park in which every empty space you see is taken just as you approach by someone who acknowledges you with a little wave and, at first, a kind of satisfied, confident and encouraging smile. You drive for hours and hours, getting more and more anxious, driving faster, running low on fuel, and still there is nowhere for you to park. You see people come and go. They park, do their shopping, return with packages wrapped up like prizes, and then drive out the exit. You see cars on the road beside the car park, moving swiftly onwards, but you can’t even find the exit. It seems to have disappeared. You’re stuck in this maze of cars and ramps, arrows and concrete. You follow people back to their cars, you drive quickly, you make turns against your better judgment because your better judgment hasn’t worked yet so you think you need to try your not-better judgment. You try your second and third and fourth best judgment. You second and third guess your second and third guesses. Nothing works. Not for you anyway. People’s smiles are still confident and happy, only there’s a note of commiseration in there as well now. You’re obviously not having much luck. You drive and drive. It starts to get dark. You’re exhausted. You start crying with frustration. Your exasperated screams appear awkward and dysfunctional and the way you sound your horn and punch the steering wheel cause people to not want to give you their spots. Sometimes people look away and pretend not to see, or using some magical skill of intentional blindness they really don’t see, and so you feel invisible, impotent, powerless, pointless. You get jealous of inanimate objects. Even the litter in the rubbish bin has somewhere to stop and rest! It gets to the point where all you want to do is crash the car and walk out of the car park.
Intense episodes of depression has that level of rage and despair and confusion. The voices in my head used to have a simple running dialogue that repeated over and over, getting faster and faster and louder and louder.
“Nothing works.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing works’? How can nothing work?”
“Nothing works.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing works’? Don’t be stupid. How can nothing work?”
“I’m telling you, nothing works.”
And?
Seligman explains that experiment with dogs and the important implications it has had for the development of an approach to treating depression and promoting happiness in his book Learned Optimism which is great, but what about the dogs themselves, and the people who re-enact that same experiment in their own lives?
15 years ago, in the middle of the night in the front room of a ramshackle two story house in Gore St, Collingwood, I had one of those realizations where awareness of the problem and the knowledge and motivation to solve it arrive at exactly the same time, shattering a way of being that until that moment had seemed fixed. I was 25 and living what from the outside looked like exactly the kind of life I should have been living. I was tall, had dark curly hair, was fit and worked with a great group of people selling outdoor and adventure equipment in the city. I was living with friends in a hip inner-city suburb. We cooked each other Thai curries and went indoor rock-climbing. But I wasn’t really there. If you had met me then, you wouldn’t have had to dig too deep to find that part of me that was rigid and lifeless, locked up and fearful. The realization that suddenly erupted inside me in the middle of a painful late-night phone conversation with my ex-girlfriend was that I was numb, disconnected, lonely, friendless and sad, and that I couldn’t do it any longer. The actual words I said that night were, “I need my family back.”
(My partner Lily and I went out last night and saw Your Sister’s Sister. In it, the male lead says at one point, “I’m sick of being dead.” It’s the same sentence.)
Coming back to life after seven years of numbness was like emerging into the air after a long long dive underwater. In an instant, sounds and colors became sharper; the air tasted better; even painful feelings felt wonderful, like being stroked on bare skin by a lost lover. The next morning, still messy and exhausted but certain of the way forward, I visited my mum and reclaimed my relationship with her. I struggle to imagine that I could ever be more grateful to her for anything than I was (and am) for how she received me that morning.
At other times, like after a death or a birth, I think we all taste a little bit of that pure, intense, grateful awe at the wondrous, beautiful, infinitely astonishing and gorgeous fact of life. But for me that peak moment only lasted a few weeks before it faded and life slowly crept back to being its normal, boring self. I can summon it, but never as clearly as I first experienced it, and I have never been as numb as I was back in my early twenties, but it gets ordinary.
So at times my journey through confusion has been dark, hard, exhausting and scary. I would love to say that it’s been worth it, that out of it has grown layers of wisdom, empathy, compassion, mindfulness, gratitude, or any of a great list of things that might be attributed to it. But I don’t really know. The emotional confusion and damage experienced by many people (often far far worse than mine) probably produces more good reasons to be insensitive, numb, thoughtless, violent and concerned only with defending and satisfying oneself than to be fearless, kind and loving.
But ultimately what I have learned is that I can cut my wrists or put a bullet in my head or crash the car, or I can can cut myself off from my emotions and all the people around me; the end result is not exactly the same, but pretty similar. The difference is, of course, that one action leaves me room to come back and the other doesn’t, but either way it involves choosing a kind of death. The other choice, in amongst all this frightening confusion, is to choose to be alive: alive to myself, the world and the people and opportunities in it. It may be scary. Let’s face it, it often is scary. When none of my old behaviors seem to work, being alive may involve running into walls, crashing through old ideas of what works and what doesn’t and leaping before I can see where I’m going to land, but it’s better.
The end (of the beginning?)
One of the ways to train a dog out of learned helplessness is simply to get him or her to play with a dog who doesn’t have depression. When a dog sees another dog jump out of the box and get away from the electric shock, it doesn’t take him or her long to decide to jump out of the box himself.
God,
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
These posts are a lead-up to the next edition of Metta, which is built around the theme of confusion. Sign up to follow our posts and like and share us on Facebook.
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