I hadn’t considered that if the only thing that keeps you going all day is knowing you’ll get to turn on the TV after dinner, you probably are depressed.
Above all, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion—an apt phrase, given John’s worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.
Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons that cause them to mimic others,
“Before diagnosing people with depression, make sure they’re not surrounded by assholes”),
The answer to an unasked question is always no,
“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”
ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”
Now when her computer crashed or a pipe burst in the kitchen, she’d say, It’s just one of those things.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.” Fromm was right; people didn’t use extra time earned to relax or connect with friends or family. Instead, they tried to cram more in.
Frankl maintained that people’s primary drive isn’t toward pleasure but toward finding meaning in their lives.
There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.
You can’t get through your pain by diminishing it, he reminded me. You get through your pain by accepting it and figuring out what to do with it. You can’t change what you’re denying or minimizing. And, of course, often what seem like trivial worries are manifestations of deeper ones.
The grief psychologist William Worden takes into account these questions by replacing stages with tasks of mourning. In his fourth task, the goal is to integrate the loss into your life and create an ongoing connection with the person who died while also finding a way to continue living.
I tell John about what’s known as the psychological immune system. Just as your physiological immune system helps your body recover from physical attack, your brain helps you recover from psychological attack. A series of studies by the researcher Daniel Gilbert at Harvard found that in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate.
Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature. A person who was yelled at by her boss but could get fired if she yelled back might come home and yell at her dog.
“The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.”
I thought about how many people avoid trying for things they really want in life because it’s more painful to get close to the goal but not achieve it than not to have taken the chance in the first place.