Review – Mindsight

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

by Daniel J. Siegel, MD, published 2010

Triune brain

Vertical integration, bottom to top

brainstem, regulates energy, fight-or-flight response, generates “drive” w/ limbic

limbic region, generates and evaluates emotion, forms relationships, “story-telling” experiences

cortex, 3D mapping and sensing of reality, conceptualizing, meta-thought

Horizontal integration (bilaterality)

left

right

Prefontal cortex functions:

1. bodily regulation, sympathetic (speed up) and para-sympathetic (slow down)
2. attuned communication, alignment of emotional states
3. emotional balance, appropriateness of emotional response, resilience in extremes
4. response flexibility, pausing to think before acting
5. fear modulation, cortical override of amygdala-driven fear
6. empathy, abbility to see from other’s point of view, you-maps
7. insight, connecting past, present and future, me-maps
8. moral awareness
9. intuition, connection of visceral data to rational decision-making

The Tripod of Reflection:

1. Openness, avoiding “should”, embracing “is”
2. Observation, placing the self in a larger context than just the moment
3. Objectivity, not personifying one’s thoughts or emotions as identity

Eight Domains of Integration:

1. Consciousness
2. Horizontal (left and right brain)
3. Vertical (senses, head to toe, brainstem, limbic and cortex)
4. Memory
5. Narrative
6. State
7. Interpersonal
8. Temporal

Secure attachment to parents largely driven by the parents’ autobiographical narrative of their own upbringing

Adult & Child Attachment

Adult Narrative, Infant Strange Situation Behavior

Secure, Secure

Dismissing, Avoidant

Preoccupied, Ambivalent

Unresolved/disorganized, Disorganized/disoriented

Review – The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field

by Nathaniel Branden, published 1994

The possession of self-esteem over time represents an achievement

The power of conviction in oneself is a motivator that inspires behavior.

The level of our self-esteem influences how we act, and how we act influences the level of our self-esteem.

With high self-esteem, I am more likely to persist in the face of difficulties.

If I persevere, the likelihood is that I will succeed more often than I fail.

People often self-sabotage because the mind’s desire to avoid cognitive dissonance forces people to alter the “facts” of their reality (behavior) to their “knowledge” of what they think is true of themselves (beliefs).

The tragedy of many people’s lives is that, given a choice between being “right” and having an opportunity to be happy, they invariably choose being “right”. That is the one ultimate satisfaction they allow themselves.

It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.

A person’s image of the future may be a better predictor of future attainment than his past performances.

Self-concept is destiny, or, more precisely, it tends to be.

We cannot understand a person’s behavior without understanding the self-concept behind it.

An unresolved problem at one level may subvert operations at another.

If one does not understand how the dynamics of self-esteem work internally — if one does not know by direct experience what lowers or raises one’s own self-esteem — one will not have that intimate understanding of the subject necessary to make an optimal contribution to others.

We must become what we wish to teach.

Self-esteem is a consequence, a product of internally generated practices.

Once we understand these practices, we have the power to choose them, to work on integrating them into our way of life. The power to do so is the power to raise the level of our self-esteem, from whatever point we may be starting and however difficult the project may be in the early stages.

Think in terms of small steps rather than big ones because big ones can intimidate (and paralyze), while small ones seem more attainable, and one small step leads to another.

Consciously, we rarely remember these choices. But deep in our psyche they are added up, and the sum is that experience we call “self-esteem.”

Consciousness that is not translated into appropriate action is a betrayal of consciousness; it is mind invalidating itself. Living consciously means more than seeing and knowing; it means acting on what one sees and knows.

I do not indulge in the fantasy that someone else can spare me the necessity of thought or make my decisions for me.

Being present means “doing what I am doing while I am doing it.”

Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider, not to look away but to look more attentively.

The world belongs to those who persevere.

When body therapists work to release the breathing and open areas of tight muscular contraction, the person feels more and is more aware. Body work can liberate blocked consciousness.

If one’s goal is to operate at a high level of consciousness, a body armored against feeling is a serious impediment.

Self-esteem is something we experience, self-acceptance is something we do.

“I choose to value myself, to treat myself with respect, to stand up for my right to exist.”

Compassionate interest does not encourage undesired behavior but reduces the likelihood of it occurring.

The act of experiencing and accepting our emotions is implemented through 1.) focusing on the feeling or emotion 2.) breathing gently and deeply, allowing muscles to relax, allowing the feeling to be felt, and 3.) making real that this is my feeling (which we call owning it.)

In contrast, we deny and disown our emotions when we 1.) avoid awareness of their reality, 2.) constrict our breathing and tighten our muscles to cut off or numb feeling, and 3.) dissociate ourselves from our own experience (in which state we are often unable to recognize our feelings.)

“I am now exploring the world of fear or pain or envy or confusion (or whatever).”

Acceptance of what is, is the precondition of change. And denial of what is leaves me stuck in it.

I am responsible for the achievement of my desires.

I am responsible for my behavior with other people.

I am responsible for my personal happiness.

I am responsible for raising my self-esteem.

What am I willing to do to get what I want?

Taking responsibility for my happiness is empowering. It places my life back in my own hands.

I do not support the grandiose notion that “I am responsible for every aspect of my existence and everything that befalls me.” Some things we have control over; others we do not. If I hold myself responsible for matters beyond my control, I put my self-esteem in jeopardy.

Never ask a person to act against his or her self-interest as he or she understands it.

No one is coming to save me; no one is coming to make life right for me; no one is coming to solve my problems. If I don’t do something, nothing is going to get better.

Self-assertiveness asks that we not only oppose what we deplore but that we live and express our values.

One of the great self-delusions is to think of oneself as “a valuer” or “an idealist” while not pursuing one’s values in reality.

Fundamental efficacy cannot be generated in a vacuum; it must be created and expressed through some specific tasks successfully mastered. I cannot be efficacious in the abstract without being efficacious about anything in particular. The purposes that move us need to be specific if they are to be realized.

Purposes unrelated to a plan of action do not get realized. They exist only as frustrated yearnings. Daydreams do not produce the experience of efficacy.

The root of our self-esteem is not our achievements but those internally generated practices that, amongst other things, make it possible for us to achieve– all the self-esteem virtues that we are discussing here.

For self-esteem, consistent kindness by intention is a very different experience from kindness by impulse.

In the inner courtroom of my mind, mine is the only judgment that counts.

If integrity is a source of self-esteem, then it is also, and never more so than today, an expression of self-esteem.

 

Why Self-Esteem is Necessary to Future-Proof Your Child, and How to Give It to Them

The formal study of the psychology of self-esteem is a modern development, while the concept itself is timeless, immemorial and universal to the nature of the human mind. That we only recently discovered it as an intellectual category and began to examine its principles and the practical applications thereof in concrete detail does not mean that self-esteem was not an operant condition of the human psyche throughout history.

The spirit of the ancient world and the pre-modern past is often thought to be one of tradition and imposed order. Every person was born into a certain station in life which they would inhabit, without change or any particular effort, until their death. Another way to consider this set of circumstances is that the past was a place of entitlement. Entitlement often carries a pejorative connotation indicating undue privilege, but in its broadest sense it applies to any situation in which people deem what they have and what they are due to be a function of “who they are” rather than “what they have done” and it applies to high and low alike.

The emergence of markets, of dynamic technologies and of new thinking about meritocratic social orders heralded the arrival of the age of personal responsibility trodding over the threshold of the age of entitlement. In this new world, the modern world, people had new opportunities to change their station and position in life through strategic ideas and the will to carry it out. Life outcomes began to shift from what role or relationship they were born into, to being due more and more to individual thinking and decisions people made over the course of their lives.

This age of responsibility, unlike the age of entitlement that preceded it, demands active engagement with the psychology of self-esteem to maximize the opportunities presented. Rather than finding oneself resentful, frustrated and confused by an ever-changing society, business and technological landscape, the individual who has mastered the psychology of self-esteem is enabled to continue to change their own ideas and with them, their actions, in relation to this kaleidoscopic shifting of external reality and continually stand to benefit from whatever arrangement it takes. In contrast, the individual living with entitlement feels threatened by change, discouraged by having to think and come up with new plans and ultimately concludes that personal transformation is hopeless and if they can not benefit from progress, they ought to stand in its way and at least enjoy the satisfaction of gumming it up for their historical antagonists and enemies.

The parenting of the past, founded on authority and parental license and the diminution of the individual identity of the child to prepare him or her for their “entitled” adult future, is a severe liability in the modern world and one which few have come to terms with or even understand as a problem. An ever-changing future demands a growth, rather than a fixed, mindset, and a growth mindset stems from confidence in the self’s ability to remain flexible and adapt to new conditions. In other words, a growth mindset is directly tied to the psychology of self-esteem.

Self-esteem being at root a relationship that one has with oneself — feelings of personal worthiness and the capability to seize the good in life — it is incumbent upon parents who wish to “future-proof” their children in a world of hyperactive change to start in infancy with a parenting approach based upon respect. The respect shown for the infant becomes a model for the later child and future adult in how they should relate to themselves.

In other words, parents who wish to benefit from the modern knowledge of the psychology of self-esteem so as to arm their children with a growth mindset in a continuously developing world that demands the greatest creativity and flexibility of thinking to seize the numerous advantages presented on an almost daily basis, should start by grounding their parenting approach in respect for the individual child before them.

Review – Feeling Good

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

by David Burns, published 1980, 2008

This post is less a review of the book and more an exploration of its major philosophical principles and techniques.

Major Principles

All your moods are created by your cognitions, or thoughts, including:

• perceptions
• mental attitudes
• beliefs
• interpretations

When you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by pervasive negativity which infect all of your experiences, including:

• reflections on the past
• experience of the present
• projections/expectations of the future

Negative thoughts at the heart of emotional turmoil almost always contain gross distortions, therefore:

1. gains in objectivity of thoughts translate to elevated mood
2. the most crucial predictor of recovery is a persistent willingness to exert some effort to help yourself
3. it is a part of the human experience to be periodically upset, “getting better” means systematically employing CBT methods to master thoughts and moods over the course of a lifetime

Diagnosing Your Moods

You can use the Burns Depression Checklist (the author’s proprietary list of indicators of depressive thinking) weekly to chart the progress of your depression’s severity. This is important because it introduces objective data into your self-experience. By seeing the change in data over time as a result of specific action, you can break the allure common to all depressive episodes that the present experience is likely to continue on indefinitely, or only get worse.

Understanding Your Moods

Depression is not an emotional disorder, it is a disorder of thoughts.

Practice noticing the negative thought you had just prior to your negative feeling. This will help you generate awareness about the specific “triggers” that instigate a depressive mood. You will begin to notice that right before you feel downcast, you have made a critical or despairing assumption about yourself or other people.

One argument depressed people make is that their depressive mood is an accurate reflection of a depressing reality. However, emotions do not happen automatically based upon experiences, but rather experiences are processed in the mind and filtered through pre-existing thoughts before being translated into an emotional state. Therefore, if your understanding of reality is normal, your resulting mood will be normal; if your understanding of reality is distorted, your mood will be distorted as well.

Thinking you are the one “hopeless”, truly flawed person in the world is a sign of distorted thinking. This is a belief based upon fallacious logical thinking rather than an objective, existent fact about reality knowable to all.

In its essence, depression is a highly credible form of faulty faith in a reality that doesn’t exist. Truly, the cure for long-lasting depression is a “scientific mind” determined to observe and examine reality using sound logical principles.

The 10 Major Cognitive Distortions

Depressive episodes are triggered by one of ten common cognitive distortions, or fundamental logical fallacies embedded in the assumptions and thinking of the depressed individual:

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking, a form of perfectionism
2. Overgeneralization, believing a single instance is an inevitable pattern
3. Mental Filter, focusing on the negatives, ignoring the positives
4. Disqualifying the Positive, turning positive experiences into negative ones by rationalizing why it was luck, a mistake or otherwise unrepeatable or undeserved
5. Jumping to Conclusions,
   1. mind reading, convincing yourself others harbor negative thoughts or evaluations without checking it out
   2. fortune-telling, imagining something bad will happen without evidence or probability
6. Magnification and Minimization, creating a sense of inferiority by catastrophic thinking about flaws and mistakes, while downplaying strengths or achievements
7. Emotional Reasoning, confusing a negative feeling with a factual truth about reality
8. Should Statements, frustrating yourself by comparing yourself and others to a perceived ideal rather than accepting reality as it is
9. Labeling and Mislabeling, confusing your identity with a single action or perpetual state of being
10. Personalization, taking responsibility for things that have nothing to do with you, or are outside your control

Sometimes people experiencing depression worry that if they do not experience the grief and upset feelings of depression, they will not be living authentically. Getting in touch with and expressing valid emotions based upon valid thinking, is a form of emotional maturity; expressing invalid emotions based on invalid thinking is a personal and sometimes social problem that is not at all desirable. Emotional growth and development involves ridding yourself of invalid thinking and the harmful, deluded and invalid emotions that come with it.

Defeating Do-Nothingism

In a depressive state of mind, it can be difficult to summon the determination, motivation and interest in moving one’s goals and life plans forward. Using the major principle mentioned earlier, it is important to consider what kind of self-critical triggering thoughts precede this unwillingness to act. When you are suffering “do-nothingism”, consider the following as a new mental habit:

When I think about an undone task, what thoughts immediately come to mind?

You are likely to find that these thoughts are filled with the logic of futility, hopelessness and general nihilism and discouragement.

Common Mindsets that Yield Action to Inaction

Here are some common cognitive distortions that precede do-nothingism:

1. Hopelessness, the present pain is overwhelming and obstructs your ability to imagine an improved future
2. Helplessness, something other than your own actions stands between you and achievement
3. Overwhelming Yourself, you must do the whole tasks all at once, making it impossible
4. Jumping to Conclusions, assuming without testing to find out
5. Self-labeling, convincing yourself you’re fundamentally incapable by labeling yourself as such
6. Undervaluing the Rewards, the payoff is so small, why bother?
7. Perfectionism, preferring no progress to some progress
8. Fear of Failure, it isn’t worth an attempt if the potential to succeed lies in doubt
9. Fear of Success, you won’t be able to continue after your initial “luck”, so you don’t bother
10. Fear of Disapproval or Criticism, you will be judged harshly by others for your attempt
11. Coercion and Resentment, you are being forced to do something rather than choosing to do it for yourself
12. Low Frustration Tolerance, or Entitlement Syndrome, it should be easy to succeed, if it’s not easy, you must not be made out for success
13. Guilt and Self-Blame, punishing yourself over past perceived mistakes

You may notice that many of these cognitive distortions are simply “inaction-specific” versions of the earlier list from above.

Dealing With Anger

Anger is a common aspect of many depressive episodes. As depressed people tend not to carry out the values of their lives into action, they often experience frustration, resentment and anger about the seeming futility and malaise of their life, particularly when they are in touch with or aware of their latent talents and abilities. Anger is often directed outward at others as an expression of the pain within.

When you label someone, you tend to apply a mental filter that results in disqualifying the positive as you emphasize their poor traits and ignore their good ones. Labeling gives way to blame, blame leads to vengeance. Ironically, you can not enhance your self-esteem by attacking someone else’s, so this act of labeling and attacking the character of others in anger proves doubly harmful.

Mind-reading also leads to anger as you will tend to attribute false ideas and motivations to the other person’s behavior.

Magnification of the original negative event will cause greater than necessary pain and cause the pain to linger longer than it must.

Should/should not statements generate entitled beliefs and entitled thinking leads to resentment and frustration with other people as well as the self.

The perception of unfairness or injustice is the ultimate cause of anger. It is the emotion that corresponds 1:1 to your belief that you are being treated unfairly. Significantly, there is no universal standard for fairness or justice, only different ethical systems based upon tradition, circumstances and logical rationalization of self-interest and specific harmony.

Arguments over who is “right” are fruitless and unresolvable.

Some anger is healthy in motivating change. But to determine if your anger is motivational or de-motivational and depressive, consider these two criteria for anger:

• is it directed at someone who knowingly, intentionally and unnecessarily acted in a hurtful manner?
• is my anger useful? Does it help me achieve a desired goal or simply defeat me?

Techniques for managing anger:

• use the double-column technique to explore advantages and disadvantages of feeling angry and engaging in retaliation
• one you’re ready to calm down, use two column “hot thoughts” versus “cool thoughts” to explore angry versus rational thinking
• rewrite your “should” rules to break free of entitled thinking
• change your expectations of others, allow yourself the opportunity to see their behavior as predictable and not surprising
• try empathy, see the world from your oppressor’s eyes and understand how what they did made sense and wasn’t personal

Examing Depressive Thinking

Some people are so depressed, all they can do is carry their whining and complaining with them everywhere they go. How do you deal with a whiner? Try the Anti-Whiner Technique– when someone complains, agree and compliment, don’t try to help. People who whine never want help solving their problems, they are looking for validation and security from others that their pain is real. By offering solutions, you unwittingly end up sending the message to the whiner that they’re incapable of helping themselves, are being victimized by reality and thus should continue whining!

There is no such thing as a “realistic” depression, although there are realistic reasons for temporarily feeling sad. Consider these two ideas about “realistic” depression:

• sadness follows real loss or failure, is temporary and never impacts self-esteem negatively; this is a “realistic” depression
• depression follows flawed or distorted thinking, is recurring and stems from/causes a loss of self-esteem; this is an “unrealistic” depression

Preventing future depressions:

1. understand why you got depressed (many people never graduate beyond this step because they spend their entire lives in some form of depression!)
2. know how and why you got better; what techniques were effective?
3. acquire self-confidence and self-esteem
4. locate the deeper causes of your depression (many people suffer recurring depression because they never bother to understand what kind of life experiences have made them vulnerable to depression, so they can be on guard against repeating these experiences or the harm of taking the wrong lessons from them)

Downward Arrow Technique, used to mine automatic thoughts for “logical consequences” of silent assumptions, the residue of recurring depressive episodes; then “talk-back” is used the challenge these beliefs.

Taking Action Against Depression

What problems do you face? How are you solving them? This is where the action is, not “worth” or “true self”.

People can spend their whole lives trying to get beneath their depression to an authentic understanding of self when really the difference between a depressed person and a non-depressed person, ultimately, is a willingness to take action to solve one’s own problems.

Why treat yourself in ways it would be rude or uncomfortable to treat others? Encourage yourself to identify your problems and create strategies for resolving them. In taking action, you’ll find your own capability and begin to let the depression go.

Fighting perfectionism:

• make a list of pros and cons
• ask yourself if the standard could ever be realized
• use response-prevention technique and ride the discomfort of not checking
• become process-oriented, which is in your control, rather than goal-oriented, which is not
• unwillingness to make mistakes leads to lack of risk-taking; write yourself a note on the value of making mistakes
• take ownership of your mistakes and assert your right and necessity to make them to keep growing, to yourself and to others

Review – The Drama Of The Gifted Child

The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self

by Alice Miller, published 1979, 1997

Recently I was discussing economic and social philosophy with some friends and the question came up about why certain philosophical ideas aren’t more popular or well-known if they seem to be more logically correct than the alternatives. We entertained a number of reasons why this might be but the one that stuck out to me as particularly weighty is the idea that the truth is deep, long and heavily nuanced and doesn’t make for quick, emotional soundbites. I made the quip, “Why is the economy the way it is? Do you have 5 years to study what you’d need to know to understand it?” followed by, “Why does the political system look as it does today? Do you have an entire lifetime to devote to studying all of human history?”

The other weighty suggestion that was offered is that there are many philosophies that cater to telling people what they want to hear (ie, an easy to accept reality) and only one that emphasizes telling it like it is (ie, a hard truth about reality).

I see echoes of these two notions in the opening of Alice Miller’s “Gifted Child”:

The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves. We can repair ourselves and gain our lost integrity by choosing to look more closely at the knowledge that is stored inside our bodies and bringing this knowledge closer to our awareness. This path, although certainly not easy, is the only route by which we can at last leave behind the cruel, invisible prison of our childhood. We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.

Most people do exactly the opposite. Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists. They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.

This book asks the reader to consider two troubling ideas. The first is that they are likely to be carrying some emotional baggage from their childhood that originates with the way they were cared for by parents and other important adults in their lives. The second is that they are likely to transmit this baggage to their own children (if they have any) and other important, intimate relationships if they don’t find a way to come to terms with it beforehand.

Like the consideration made about the popularity or penetration of certain economic and social philosophies, these ideas are troubling for most people to accept because it forces them to revise their current understanding of the relationships they have with important people in their lives, it forces them to take responsibility for the course of their lives and their choices and give up the perverse safety and security of seeing life through the eyes of the helpless victim and it forces them to concede that the present is not a unique or isolated moment pregnant with infinite possibilities, but rather one moment at the end of a string of moments stretching back into the earliest reaches of human history in which possibilities exist but are limited by certain choices and events which took place in the uncontrollable past.

There is of course great freedom in choosing to explore these troubling ideas but they come at the cost of a grave responsibility that few, based on my practical experience, seem willing to bear.

To find this freedom, one must seek out “the lost world of feelings.” Human infants are entirely dependent upon their adult caretakers for their survival, unlike most other animals who, while weak and undeveloped, are nonetheless able to move around, seek shelter, find food, etc., on their own almost immediately after birth. For a young human, being ostracized or unloved by ones parents is a death sentence. Therefore, the human psyche is wired at birth to prioritize adapting to the parents’ emotional needs over fully developing its own.

If certain emotional expressions or behaviors prove to be problematic for the relationship with the parents, the human child will work to repress and hide that part of themselves. They will disown it and their personality will become dichotomized into “me”, the feelings and behaviors and characteristics I acknowledge and accept because they have demonstrated value with my parents, and “not me”, the feelings and behaviors and characteristics I deny possessing or experiencing because they have been a source of conflict with my parents, on whom I depend for survival.

This is what Miller means when she talks about searching for the “true self.” The irony, however, is that

the child does not know what he is hiding.

That is, it is not as if the child knows what his true self is and isn’t and is lying to himself and others about who he really is. It is more like, he has shoddy vision and can’t see a focused image of himself in true detail, or else he has a map of himself leading to the buried treasure of his own reality but he doesn’t know how to read the map and therefore doesn’t know where his self is or even what he’ll find when he gets there. Every now and then this person might get a glimpse or a sense of their true self in a particularly emotionally charged moment but really all they’re experiencing is the anxiety indicating the existence of repressed and disowned selfhood, not a look at what is missing.

To heal, these emotions must be encountered and experienced. Further, painful emotions must be resolved by tracking down their genesis in early childhood experiences. Memories and relationships with respected and important adult caretakers must be studied and re-evaluated through the more objective eyes of an independent adult rather than the way they were first constructed by a subjective and immature child. This not only allows the adult of the now to be released from the terrors of the former child but it can enable the adult to have new modes of living and doing:

Rational, constructive action depends not only on the intactness of our intellectual faculties, but also on the extent to which we have access to our true emotions.

[…]

the inescapable conclusion is that for people to be able to organize their lives, they must have access to their emotions.

This is one of the many and for me, the most important, takeaways from this book. It is not enough to rationalize about a choice and a potential plan of action. To actually develop an impetus to act requires an emotional experience. Adults who repress certain parts of their emotional selves due to childhood traumas become incapable of acting in certain areas of their lives. They become procrastinators, perfectionists or otherwise evasive in the area of making a decision, acting on it and then sticking with it.

By finding and integrating one’s lost world of feelings, one has the opportunity to become active and empowered in new areas of one’s life that were otherwise mysterious, frustrating or dormant.

One question that comes up for some people as they consider all of this is, “But why did my parents ever treat me in such and such a way?” Using some of the memories and recollections of a famous cultural writer as an example, Miller says,

like so many gifted children [he] was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child’s very gifts […] will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. These regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child’s development.

The parents’ childhoods involved repression as well. For their own survival they learned to disown parts of their emotional experience or certain of their behaviors that caused trouble with their parents. They rationalized this turn of events and created rules for living that would help them avoid these perceived dangers. And then when they had children, these rules and procedures came into question by the existence of the innocent child. And so a new round of repression is started.

The only way the cycle can be broken is for the adult to make the painstaking effort to connect with his child self and understand what happened and how it has impacted him, and then he must choose to live his life differently with that new awareness of his past. This is hard for many to do because

What they do not see, because they cannot see them, are the absurdities enacted by their own mothers when they were still tiny children.

Another powerful idea contained in this book is an explanation of the appeal of irrational ideas to adults with traumatic childhood experiences. The trauma of childhood is itself irrational– there is no “reason” for any child to be abused or neglected by those who brought it into the world, and save those who are simply unlucky in having some external misfortune befall their family (ie, the child is made an orphan when the parents die unexpectedly), there is no excuse or justification the adults could offer a child as to why they are being treated as they are. For survival reasons, the child must make a place in their psyche for irrational ideas to exist because in doing so they “close the loop” on the irrationality and make it seem rational. “Some things just don’t make sense” is a way to make sense of things that don’t make sense.

When this space for irrationality exists, adults can become wedded to irrational ideas and beliefs, such as political ideologies, abusive social relationships or supernatural superstitions. On one hand, they lack the ability to rationally resist these ideas and beliefs because they are willing to accept that not everything has to make rational sense in their lives. On the other hand, they may positively identify with the claims of these ideologies because they appeal to their own experiences or sense of self as a victim who is oppressed by others, that is, they offer a way to feel like they’re getting even. On this point Miller is worth quoting at length:

Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of the infant’s life.

[…]

Political action can be fed by the unconscious rage of children who have been misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped and drilled. This rage can be partially discharged in fighting “enemies”, without having to give up the idealization of one’s own parents. The old dependency will then simply be shifted to a new group or leader. If, however, disillusionment and the resultant mourning can be lived through, social and political disengagement do not usually follow, but our actions are freed from the compulsion to repeat. They can then have a clear goal, formed out of conscious decisions.

Once our own reality has been faced and experienced, the inner necessity to keep building up new illusions and denials in order to avoid the experience of that reality disappears. We then realize that all our lives we have feared and struggled to ward off something that really cannot happen any longer; it has already happened, at the very beginning of our lives while we were completely dependent.

The term “fighting yesterday’s battles” comes to mind when thinking about this irrational space.

While Miller’s analysis applies to any child and any adult experiencing emotional pain and depression (whether they’re aware of it or not!), the book is especially focused on the plight of “gifted” children because of the uniquely problematic experience they can have in this area due to their talents and abilities. Not only do “gifted” children tend to experience these emotional troubles more deeply,

many people suffering from severe symptoms are very intelligent

but they also tend to experience these troubles uniquely through feelings of grandiosity and contempt.

Grandiosity is the concept of identifying one’s personal value as a person with one’s special talents and abilities. One’s greatness isn’t just a part of one’s self, it IS the self. But this complicates the emotional life of the gifted child because it is inevitable that not every part of themselves is grand. There exists then another dichotomy, wherein all the parts that are grand (which may be very few and overall represent a quite limited part of the total person or experience of self) are “me”, and all the parts that are normal or weak (which is likely then the majority and the wider experience of self) are “not me”. And if my parents love and care for the grand gifts I have but dislike or don’t know how to deal with the unexceptional aspects of my self, then

we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, clever… we despise… in short, the child in ourselves and in others.

[…]

“Without these achievements, these gifts, I could never be loved. would never have been loved.”

An emotional experience that often goes hand in hand with grandiosity is contempt.

The function all expressions of contempt have in common is the defense against unwanted feelings. [ie, despising what is not grand about oneself]

[…]

Once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defense against them.

[…]

Contempt as a rule will cease with the beginning of the mourning for the irreversible that cannot be changed… it is, after all, less painful to think that the others do not understand because they are too stupid.

Gifted people often experience contempt for others as an expression of insecurity about the repressed parts of themselves that are not part of their gifts. Unable to have empathy and kindness towards themselves in these areas, they become impatient and hostile towards those reminders of their own weakness that they see in others.

Sadly,

hating and offending an innocent person, using him as a scapegoat, can only strengthen the walls of our inner prison of confusion, isolation, fear and loneliness: it cannot free us.

And the most innocent person of all, the most unfair scapegoat a person can choose in this drama, is their child self. Whether these ideas are new or familiar, I encourage anyone reading this to consider the implications of the ideas contained in this book not as if they describe a set of generalized human experiences but rather as if they describe something specific and personal to the reader himself. If this book’s message can be taken to heart and internalized, it can be the jumping off point for great personal change that will ultimately resolve itself in what Miller refers to as a “healthy self-feeling”:

I understand a healthy self-feeling to mean the unquestioned certainty that the feelings and needs one experiences are a part of one’s self.

 

Review – How Children Learn

How Children Learn

by John Holt, published 1995

John Holt says the essence of his book can be boiled down to two words: “Trust children.” We hear echoes Magda Gerber’s RIE philosophy motto (“slow down”) and Maria Montessori’s “secret of childhood.” If we trust children, what are we trusting they will do and on what basis is the trust being given?

We trust that children will make not only good choices, but the right choices with regards to where they are in their personal development, that they will engage in behaviors and follow curiosities that maximize their ability to learn about themselves and the world around them and how it works. And the basis of this trust is that children are fundamentally competent to be themselves without any additional input, guidance or motivation from parents or other adults, who at best can merely replace the child’s ego with their own.

In reading Holt, I was constantly reminded of my friend’s book, A Theory Of Objectivist Parenting, which asks the reader to consider the philosophical dilemma of how an individual who is treated as incapable and irresponsible for most of their developmental life can suddenly be expected to be a functioning adult with the snap of two fingers. Where lies the magic such that an “animal” child is transformed into a “human” man without the benefit of practice or routine in these modes of thought and action?

Holt believes that children want to learn, and that their behaviors and choices are fundamentally aimed at learning about the important functional relationships of the world around them. They choose their own goals based on their own interests and then determine what preceding knowledge they must obtain to secure their goals. The schooling method, of which Holt is skeptical, involves sequential learning from the basic to the complex, with no object for the instruction other than to master the material. But this is not interesting to most children, because the learning is divorced from a meaningful context (ie, a problem they personally want to solve) and the structuring of the learning often serves to highlight to a child how little he knows about a given field, an unnecessary bruise to a young person’s self-esteem. The result is that children often invest a lot of energy in avoiding learning, rather than engaging with the material, and what they practice is denying their own values and interests rather than gaining competence in knowledge and systems they have no desire to learn.

The ego is so central to Holt’s understanding of how children learn that it almost defies explanation how absent this concern is from most other pedagogical methods! Where did people come up with the idea that the student’s own fascination with the subject (or lack thereof) is irrelevant to the problem of learning? Why should we think it is optimal to follow any path of instruction which ignores this fundamental element? And who is truly being served by such an approach when it clearly can not be the child himself?

A related danger that Holt discusses is attempts to trick children into learning things, by teaching them without them noticing they’re being taught. If the idea is to teach people even if they don’t want to be taught, and if doing so creates resistance to learning, then it does seem logical to try to sneak and cheat the information into children’s minds. But is that respectful, and should we imagine anything else but more failure from continuing to build on such flawed premises?

Holt’s warning is again startling. Children are not aliens who think completely differently from adults. They are simply differently capable people, and their human capacity for reasoning makes it obvious to them, even when they’re very young, when they’re not being treated on the level. How disrespectful to treat another human being this way, with so little concern for their own values and well-being! Imagine trying to “trick” an adult into learning something without their permission or interest, by asking questions one already knows the answers to, or insinuating that something they don’t consider important is actually quite so. Such a person would consider it demeaning to imply they can’t figure out for themselves what deserves their attention and what does not, or that they’re not sharp enough to know they’re being fooled with, and so it is with children.

This is a rich and dense work with many pithy observations I wish I had highlighted the first time through. The author clearly admires children for their potential and their capability alike, and he helps the reader to see children not as helpless, but as empiricists, experimenters and practitioners. The hardest thing for parents and teachers to internalize from this work is the need for them to exercise self-control in light of their penchant for thinking their interventions in the life of children are so critical to the children’s thriving. It appears to be just the opposite!

Review – Crazy Rich Asians

Crazy Rich Asians

by Kevin Kwan, published 2014

On its surface, Crazy Rich Asians is a sordid story of dysfunction and social positioning within mega-wealthy sorta-nobility Chinese families originating in Singapore. It’s full of flashy outfits and the shocking shopping trips that put them in the characters wardrobes; over-the-top square footage and fully-furnished living arrangements in a part of the world known for nearly inhumane density and some of the highest real estate prices in the world; petty gossip like only those with too much time and money on their hands can engage in; oh, and wonderful, wonderful sounding food. For those reasons, it’s an entertaining read.

But just below the surface (not too far, mind you… these issues are philosophically auxiliary as far as I can tell, not intentionally contemplative like a work of classic literature) lie a series of family-planning and wealth-planning puzzles for the observant reader to consider. In no particular order, and with very minor spoilers, these puzzles are explored more below.

The first puzzle has to do with identity. When one of the main characters finds out that the early story of their family’s history is a fabrication, they are thrown into psychological turmoil and shock, their sense of self seemingly obliterated in a moments revelation. It begs the question “Who are you?” One answer is, you are your history, a series of factual contexts and accumulated decisions made up to any point in time at which you exist. Another answer is, you are whatever you believe you are– if you can convince yourself you are, than you are. This question is important for a few reasons. The first is that the way our brains function on a psychological level may require us to have certain beliefs about ourselves to maintain psychological integrity and thus enable us for other modes of action in the external world. We may be able to “constantly reinvent ourselves”, but only within a narrow band of experience or possibility, beyond that we are driven at a hardware level into anxiety and distress. Another reason this question is important is because it sheds light on how arbitrary our identities can be. If we can operate quite competently and confidently with a certain view of ourselves and our role in the world, even if this viewpoint is built on falsehoods, it suggests that what is important in terms of forming an identity is consistency of story, not accuracy. If someone can convince you you are the rightful king, maybe you are. If you come from a noble family but you’re told you’re a lout, maybe you will be. Where does one find “self” in all of this?

Related to this puzzle is parental relationships and the question, “Do you really want to know everything about your parents?” Each one of us is born into a world our parents have already been living for some time. We don’t know all the choices and ideas they had prior to our arrival and often we receive a filtered list of such information sporadically throughout our lives. We don’t have the ability to query our parents’ true thinking at any given moment and without becoming paranoid and running background checks or doing some sleuthing on them, we’re mostly in a position to accept what they tell us about themselves unless we receive some kind of alarmingly contradictory information that would lead us to question it. Similar to finding out your life might have been a lie, do we want to know who our parents really are? We presume they share the good about themselves with us, do we really want to hear about more of their foibles?

The second puzzle is about intergenerational wealth building. The narrative focuses on Singaporean Chinese families of stupendous wealth. Most of this wealth seems to be owned and controlled by surviving matriarchs whose heyday was the 1930s and 1940s (Gen1). The descendants (Gen2) and their children (Gen 3) appear to be idlers. Sure, some of them have “jobs” and other preoccupations, but none of them have to work and none seem to be contributing anything productive to the family wealth, which appears to be managed professionally by outsiders.

Why don’t rich families prepare future generations to manage their wealth responsibly? When the matriarch dies, what will keep the professional managers loyal, and what will give the surviving descendants the ability to manage these obligations without undue risk? Money is clearly important to these families, as they could give it away or have less of it but they don’t. But there doesn’t appear to be a meaningful attempt to teach the succeeding generations how to contribute to its growth and management.

Related to this is the question of what is the value of fantastic wealth? Although they think of themselves quite highly, the families depicted don’t seem to be better at much of anything that doesn’t involve buying things. In terms of character they have the same flaws and struggles as everyone else. If this wealth can’t make you a better person, or, put another way, you don’t use it to enable greater self-actualization, of what use is it? Ironically, wealth in this story is depicted as not creating conditions by which those who possess it can elevate themselves, but simultaneously it explores the ways wealth changes a person in terms of tastes and behaviors. Here we see not how a person’s values change, but the ways in which their ability to express those values do. If you don’t use it to become a better version of yourself, and you don’t learn how to manage and control it, what logical benefits does wealth offer you?

The final puzzle of the story is the puzzle of permanent capital. As none of the major characters and their families seem to contribute to the generation of their wealth, and none seem capable of doing so, where the wealth comes from and how it manages to persist, especially as it is being consumed at such enormous rates, is a bit of a mystery. Of course, in this story we can only see the families whose wealth has persisted across multiple generations despite all of the above-mentioned conditions and despite the changes in social and economic circumstances over decades. What we can not see are the families whose wealth ran aground over this period, because they won’t factor into a narrative about those who have great wealth except as a tale of warning which never seems to be told. It is amateurish and perhaps speaks to the intelligence or values of the intended reader but the author never provides even a small hint as to where the wealth comes from (oh sure, some new money families introduced here and there are the Such and Suchs of plastics, or the So and Sos of tech).

Though friends with government officials and even extant royalty, the primary families are disclaimed as not being of purely aristocratic extraction or otherwise connected directly to a government-based wealth extraction mechanism. But from where else could such voluminous and seemingly interminable wealth emanate from, especially without influence or concern of the family? If such a source exists in the market (a contradiction in terms at the very least), how is it undiscovered by other market participants and thus immune to competitive factors? How is it financed?

In studying great exceptions there is an honest temptation to find some kind of exploitable rule. But I think it’s ultimately a fool’s errand, because you’re essentially looking at a highly improbable stack of luck and trying to figure out how to emulate something that is amazing that it even exists at all.

Review – The Secret Of Childhood

The Secret of Childhood

by Maria Montessori, published 1936, 1982

If you’re looking for a “how-to” on the Montessori Method, this isn’t it. What this book is is an exploration of the philosophical foundations of Maria Montessori’s view of the child in society, based upon some of her historical experiences and study of related social research.

Although this book was published long ago, Montessori’s revelation appears to be, by and large, still a secret. Sadly, it is not just a cultural secret. Even in the West, and particularly the United States, where her ideas seem to have the strongest following, the parenting and educational mainstreams seem to have done little to absorb Montessori’s insights into both theory and practice. If Montessori was correct in her discovery, then it says something both appalling and demoralizing about the failure of society to integrate such important truths. So, what is this “secret”?

The secret of childhood is that it is a period of time during which the child works, not to assimilate himself into society, but to assimilate himself into himself. We hear echoes of Max Stirner (1806-1856, Germany) in Maria Montessori (1870-1952, Italy), for example, compare Stirner,

school is to be life and there, as outside of it, the self-revelation of the individual is to be the task… only freedom is equality… we need from now on a personal education (not the impressing of convictions)… knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.

to Montessori,

Adults look upon a child as something empty that is to be filled through their own efforts, as something inert and helpless for which they must do everything, as something lacking an inner guide and in constant need of direction… the adult makes himself the touchstone of what is good and evil in the child. He is infallible, the model upon which the child must be molded… An adult who acts this way… unconsciously suppresses the development of the child’s own personality.

or to Montessori’s son, Mario, from the preface,

Man has discovered flight, he has discovered atomic energy, but he has failed to discover himself.

or to Margaret Stephenson, a Montessori instructor, from the foreword,

How can one learn through group play what it means to be a mother, father, space pilot, dog, when one does not yet know what it mean’s to be one’s self?

This psychic development of the child, a “universal” as Montessori puts it, into an individuated person, the man, unfolds along a predetermined path dictated by nature.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult’s life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

That is not to say that man’s childhood development is deterministic, but that there is a logic and a succession of predictable stages and events to it, much like a caterpillar becomes a cocoon and then a butterfly.

The place an animal will have in the universe can be seen at birth. We know that one animal will be peaceful since it is a lamb, that another will be fierce because it is a lion cub, that one insect will toil without ceasing since it is an ant, and that another will do nothing but sing in solitude since it is a locust. And just as the lower animals, so the newly born child has latent psychic drives characteristic of its species… A child develops not simply as a member of the human species, but as a person.

And the implication of this fact is that the child, in his childhood, has special needs during this period of development which will allow this process of psychic development to occur without obstruction or injury, ranging from the suitability of his environment, to the tools and instruments he has at his use, to the way he is interacted with and communicated with by adults, who he sees as omnipotent, almost magical, beings of power and authority. (Isn’t it funny to stop for a moment and consider how sure of ourselves and the nature and limits of the adults around us we are, and how truly mysterious any of this was when we first made our way into the world as small children? Just ponder that for a moment if you’re having trouble grasping the significance of Montessori’s “secret”.)

What are some of these differences and needs between children and adults? The first is understanding the significance of work to each. For adults, work is a means to obtain a fixed and known goal, and the general idea is to work efficiently, that is, to get the highest yield in terms of outcome for the smallest amount of resources and energy expended. But for children, the purpose of work is to learn about the self– work is not performed to obtain an income, or to be fed, or to avoid a threat, but rather work is performed to experience the psychic benefit of knowing how to perform the work.

An adult walks to reach some external goal and he consequently heads straight for it… An infant, one the other hand, walks to perfect his own proper functions, and consequently his goal is something creative within himself.

In working, a child applies their intellect to the world, they come to understand their power and ability as a person to influence and change the world more to their liking, a fact that mature adults take for granted.

His hands under the guidance of his intellect transform this environment and thus enable him to fulfill his mission in the world.

Because of this, a child may be seen to work “aimlessly”, or “inefficiently”, or “incompetently”, but this observation is made from the point of view of an adult which is not applicable to the child and their psychic purpose in working. Montessori relates how adults who are finished working are typically tired and in need of rest or recreational stimulation, whereas children who are finished working are exhilarated and self-satisfied at accomplishing whatever it was inside of their psyche that compelled them to perform their work.

Another need is the need for separate property. Children exist in a world created by adults, for the benefit of adults and adults can be capricious with their property and arrangements in ways that are befuddling and intimidating to children. Everything in the child’s world (for example, in the home) belongs to the adults– the furniture, which is sized for the adults; the dishware and glassware and silverware, which is sized for the adults; the books, the clothes, the walls, the art, even the pets!

[An adult is tempted to overvalue his material possessions when they’re being handled by a child, such as with a glass of water being carried by his child.] The adult who does this may even be very wealthy and intent upon increasing his fortunes many times over in order to make his son still more wealthy than himself. But for the moment he esteems a glass as something of greater value than the child’s activity and seeks to prevent its being broken [and so interferes needlessly with the child’s development in stopping him from his activity with the glass].

Montessori describes the adults as “kings”, who may of occasion grant the child a right to temporary use of the king’s property, but never the right to possess the property themselves.

An adult, however high or low he may be, is always a powerful being in comparison with a child.

The child can feel as if it lives only at the mercy and privilege of the king. The child is constantly being instructed and informed how to use something, what to touch and what not to touch, to keep away from this or to go be near that. The child needs some of its own things, in sizes and qualities specific to its uses, so that it may explore and understand and “work” in the world around itself without constantly being in conflict with the adults.

An adult is constantly interrupting the child and breaking into his environment. This powerful being directs the child’s life without ever consulting the child himself. And this lack of consideration makes the child think that his own activities are of no value.

A final need is for adults to appreciate the differences in perceptive faculties of children, who, as Montessori describes, pay attention to details not just different in magnitude, but in kind.

A child’s psychic personality is far different from our own, and it is different in kind and not simply degree.

Adults are accustomed to looking at the world and paying attention to details in a particular way based upon their individual goals, ambitions, professional outlook, educational level, etc. etc. But children often pay attention to details quite differently, and in ways that conflict with adult perceptions or treat them as non-sensical or unimportant.

Children an adults are in possession of two different mental outlooks… Adults frequently attempt to point out ordinary objects to three- or four-year-old children as if they had never seen anything before. But this must have the same effect on a child as one shouting at another whom he thinks to be deaf [who is not so].

An adult may wish to draw a child’s attention to the beach and the ocean, but the child is fascinated by a tiny bug crawling across the sand. Adults are often quick to pass judgment on the child in these moments, as if they are “wrong” for not being interested in what the adult wants them to be interested in, or even questioning their intelligence or development when they seem incapable of taking such an interest. But as with work, observation serves a different purpose for the child than for the adult– it is not to satisfy his desire for recreation, or to attend to a productive goal, but to stimulate his psyche according to these innate, natural needs of his development.

Here are some other interesting quotes I collected:

• The child is a universal… There is, in reality, only the child of all times, of all races, heir to tradition, hander-on of history, crucible of culture, pathway to peace.
• The absorption of culture, of customs, of ideas, ideals, of sentiments, feelings, emotions, religion, take place during the period of the absorbent mind, in the child from zero to six.
• We should try to understand that there is an intelligible reason behind a child’s activities. He does nothing without some reason, some motive… A child does not simply run, jump and handle things without purpose and thus create havoc about the house… Knowledge always precedes movement. When a child wishes to do something, he knows beforehand what it is. [A very Misesian idea!]
• An adult’s avarice, which makes him jealously defend whatever he owns, is concealed under “the duty of properly educating one’s child.” [What Stirner would refer to as a “spook”, or a mental hobgoblin an adult uses to frighten his own psyche and thus prevent himself for taking ownership over his actions.]
• When a child moves slowly, an adult feels compelled to intervene by substituting his own activity for that of the child. But in acting thus an adult, instead of assisting a child in his psychic needs, substitutes himself in all the actions which the child would like to carry out by himself.
• What an adult tells a child remains engraved on his mind as if it had been cut in marble.
• When a child is disobedient or has a tantrum an adult should always call to mind the conflict and try to interpret it as a defense of some unknown vital activity necessary for the child’s development.
• Toys furnish a child with an environment that has no particular goal and, as a consequence, they cannot provide it with any real mental concentration but only illusions.
• Before anyone can assume a responsibility, he must be convinced that he is the master of his own actions and have confidence in himself.

I enjoyed reading this book, it stimulated MY psyche and made an impression upon me in terms of how much more there is to think and know about this subject than what I possess currently. I also enjoyed the archaicness of it, Montessori writes like a civilized person of years gone by, speaking articulately and frankly about the world around her without apology and with much conviction and passion for her subject, something which doesn’t seem to exist anymore in our world of sterile, clinical academics reluctant to take a position on anything of import. But it was not always an easy read and it was fairly repetitious. I will likely come back to the book at some point to re-read certain passages that I found hard to appreciate without an experience of raising a child myself. Yet, I wouldn’t recommend this as an “essential” title for someone looking to up their parenting game unless I already knew they were more philosophical in their approach.

Review – The Dog’s Mind

The Dog’s Mind: Understanding Your Dog’s Behavior

by Bruce Fogle, DVM, MRCVS, published 1992

Peering into the canine mind

If you’ve ever owned a dog, or even just observed one owned by someone else, it seems almost inevitable to ask yourself the question, “What is going on inside that dog’s head right now?”

I grew up with dogs and have fond memories of four different family dogs of different breeds since childhood. But as a child and even a teenager I didn’t spend much time trying to understand the dogs. They were just there, part of the family landscape and in many ways I took them for granted.

Those fond childhood memories influenced my decision almost two years ago to acquire my own dog. This time, my decision was purpose-driven based upon what I understood about dogs and dog breeds, what I hoped for as a lifestyle to be had with my new companion and my own emotional idealism concerning the dog. We ended up buying a pure bred female German Shepherd from a professional breeder who creates showdogs and pets from German working bloodlines. She is a beautiful, intelligent creature to put it mildly.

We spent a considerable amount of time before and after acquiring our puppy studying articles, videos, books and other information at sites like Leerburg.com and others around the web (two other titles which were helpful, amongst many: The Art of Raising A Puppy and How To Be Your Dog’s Best Friend) trying to establish a baseline of knowledge concerning both dog biology and dog psychology to aid the integration of this creature into our home and to improve our chances of training and controlling the animal in a manner beneficial to both parties.

While we’ve been largely successful in this endeavor (so much so that it is hard not to be a bit judgmental towards most of the other dopey, clueless dog owners and dog lovers we come across on a daily basis) the mystery largely remains– what is going on inside that little doggie brain?

The unity of The Dog’s Mind

The author is a practicing veterinarian who I gather may have been an American (or at least was fond of the American revolution at one point, based upon the names he gave to his two Golden Retrievers) but at any rate now lives in the UK. This is a strength of the book because he clearly has personal experience with thousands of dogs of a multitude of breeds and he obviously loves the animal, but it is also a weakness because Mr. Fogle is so intelligent and academically-minded that he often spends a lot of time going into medical and biological minutiae that the average pet owner neither needs to understand (“Here’s a short explanation of DNA sequencing in the dog genome!”) nor is likely to be interested in (“A research study into the effect of X on lab rats showed Y, which may provide interesting insight on the nature of dogs as well.”).

In other words, this is an at-times-top-heavy but otherwise practically-oriented book written by an extremely knowledgeable, experienced and well-read author (read: “scientific”) that explores not dog behavior, or dog psychology but the dog’s mind.

Essentially, Mr. Fogle seeks to explain how

the dog’s mind is a result of instinct, genetics, evolution and selective breeding… hormones influence the mind… and… maternal and peer imprinting and human intervention alter the ways of the dog.

Key ideas here are that the near ancestor of dogs are wolves, a species which inhabits an “opportunist omnivore” ecological niche, and that dogs can never get away from this historical and genetic fact and that despite breed differences which emphasize one characteristic of the dog over another (scent versus eyesight versus aggressiveness versus size, etc.) the mental core of the dog is common to all breeds and can be shaped by humans the same way.

Physiology and psychology

“The Dog’s Mind” is divided into two parts, “The Anatomy and Physiology of the Dog’s Mind” and “The Psychology of the Dog’s Mind”. The first part explores the role of genetics, the “wiring”, size and layout of the dog’s brain, the five senses, the interplay of hormones and the communication strategies of dogs while the second part explores maternal, peer and human imprinting, social behavior, breed differences and finally the effects of age and ill health on the dog’s mind.

Dogs are sentient beings, aware of their own personalities… Dogs dream… They are amazingly perceptive to nuance and observe the most imperceptible changes in us… dogs have been bred to retain the juvenile characteristics of play, exploration and subservience to the leader.

There are so many fascinating insights in this book, far too many to quote them all so I plan to cover some of the more interesting or important ones and sprinkle other quotes without comment as I go.

Speaking of genetics, the author observes that there are more genes which control behavior than there are genes which control “morphology” (the dog’s physical characteristics and appearance) which is part of the reason that there is a large difference in the morphology of an Irish wolfhound and a Chihuahua after generations of selective breeding, yet the “mind” of each animal is quite similar. It also explains why dogs remain so wolflike after thousands of years of domestication and co-habitation with humans. This is so key for dog owners (and the general public!) to understand and yet, tragically, it is not. Most people expect from dogs thought processes and behaviors that are simply unreasonable given the dog’s mind. The dog comes from the wolf, a predator animal, and every dog, no matter how big, small or lovable, continues to think of himself as a predator animal. Like the wolf, the dog is also a pack animal. Amongst modern humans it is popular to be egalitarian and democratically-minded, but to dogs aristocracy and a pecking order is the most natural and desirable system in the world, so much so that attempts to make the dog an “equal” in a human pack can be greatly destabilizing to the point of psycho-somatic derangement.

(Pro tip: if you ever see a “mean” dog that barks/yips at every dog and stranger passerby, you are actually witnessing a situation where the human is unwittingly beta and the dog has designated itself the alpha pack leader and protector… a truly sad and, for the human, completely unwitting state of affairs!)

In the dog’s limbic system, a battle plays out between his instinctive behavior and the negative or positive stimulus humans provide by punishing or rewarding certain behaviors. If we can create a stronger stimulus than the instinct, the limbic system is overridden and we’re able to control the dog’s behavior. A dog that is “uncontrollable” is simply a dog whose owner has not found a sufficiently stimulating punishment or reward to alter behavior. This is important not just for control but trainability– the dog’s mind is most amenable to learning when its interest is aroused which is why positive reinforcement (systems like “marker training“) tend to be the most effective ways to establish long-term behavioral conditioning in the dog’s mind.

Touch is the earliest and possibly the most important of all the canine senses.

The role that senses play in the dog’s mind is another critical piece of the puzzle. When a newborn pup emerges from the womb, its ear canals are closed shut, it can not open its eyes and its wonderful sniffer is fairly ineffective. Touch and sensations of warmth are how it maneuvers itself toward its mother’s teat for its nourishment. This connection to touch remains with the dog its entire life and becomes therefore an important tool of social communication– touch a dog and it feels rewarded, ignore a dog and it feels despondent.

While touch has the biggest social implication, it is smell that is the strongest of the five senses. The book explains that taste is actually fairly restricted for dogs, they basically experience taste as “pleasant”, “indifferent”, and “unpleasant” unlike the human experience of salty, sweet, spicy, bitter, etc. And while a dog’s vision is in many ways superior to a human’s both in terms of distance and operation under varied light conditions, the positioning of the eyes on a dog mean that it is best-adjusted to observing peripheral motion, the “furtive movement” of its prey, rather than focusing on objects directly in front of it. Dogs are also known for their ability to hear sound frequencies humans can not perceive and are even considered to be “musical”, but it is truly the sense of smell that is most developed and differentiated in the dog which means that the dog’s mind primarily experiences the state of reality through smell.

Dogs have around 220 million scent receptors around their nose compared to the average human’s five million.

Smell memories last for life and affect almost all canine behaviors.

The dog uses scent in a number of ways– to sense prey, to sense other dogs, to sense a mating opportunity, etc. The reason dogs seem to forward with humans, sniffing our butts just as they sniff other dogs, is because in a dog the anal glands have developed to give an ID to other dogs. And because smell is so key to the functioning of the dog’s mind, it is the ability to get out of the house and smell things, rather than the exercise, which is most satisfying and important to a dog on a walk. It also means that “the quality of life of a blind dog can still be quite good.”

The chapter on hormones is somewhat technical but one important idea is that in tact male dogs live their entire lives with male sex hormone circulating throughout their body, whereas in tact females only experience the female sex hormone twice a year for a total of four months. This means the volatility of a female dog’s personality is greater than a male’s.

Selective breeding by humans has enhanced the “infantile” vocalizations of dogs. For example, adult dogs rarely whine at each other, but rather at us humans– a learned response. There are 5 primary vocalizations for dogs:

1. infantile sounds; cry, whimper, whine
2. warning sounds; bark, growl
3. eliciting sounds; howl
4. withdrawal sounds; yelp
5. pleasure sounds; moan

Dogs also are masters of body language in communicating to one another, and to observant humans, how they are feeling, manipulating the position of their mouths, ears, tails, hackles, front and hind quarters and even their entire bodies to demonstrate a range of emotional experiences. And in dogs, staring is a form of dominance (like physical mounting), only alpha dogs can look directly at other dogs, so when you pet your dog and it looks away it is expressing deference to you, not disinterest.

Dog psychology

When it comes to the developing dog mind, early exposure to mild stress (loud noises, sudden movements, bright lights, etc.) are valuable in creating a stable, even-tempered pet. Dogs are learning all the time and what they are exposed to frequently and at duration (called “flooding”) they learn to tolerate or even accept as natural.

The concept of “imprinting” is also important. There is a key window in the puppy’s development, from around weeks 6-12, during which it is critical the puppy not only be exposed to humans but also to other dogs so that it learns that both are part of its pack. A puppy only exposed to humans becomes fearful and protective around other dogs, and a puppy only exposed to dogs becomes anxious and often untrainable with humans.

Play is a lifelong activity in dogs… as strong in wolves as it is in Yorkshire terriers.

But even with this human imprinting, a dog still thinks of itself as a dog and expects the human to behave as a dog does, participating in group activities, playing, hunting together and sleeping in the same den.

Puppy Aptitude Tests (PAT) have become popular when selecting a pet from a new litter, but there is little research that shows these techniques are successful indicators of long-term behavior other than those which demonstrate aggression or dominance, which tend to persist into adulthood but which are also rare in high levels in the dog population as a whole.

Regarding dog training, it is important to remember that dogs don’t think symbolically, they operate on a “what you see is what you get” basis. They learn three ways:

1. observation
2. classical conditioning
3. operant conditioning

Dogs are also ALWAYS learning. They pay attention to all cause and effect relationships and will expect them to happen consistently in the future once substantiated once unless they are conditioned out of the expectation. This is why, for example, my dog becomes alert and predatory at the corner of my block in front of a house where it once saw a cat on the lawn– it happened one time and is now imprinted in her mind so she expects to see the cat each time and gets aroused in anticipation.

It’s worth quoting Mr. Fogle at length on this point:

Dogs are learning all the time and our objective is to control the stimuli, responses and rewards. We can do so by reinforcing, not reinforcing or punishing the behavior… They learn fastest when their behavior is consistently rewarded… The timing, intensity and intervals of reinforcement all have direct consequences on learned behavior. Reinforcement must be immediate… The object of canine punishment should be to reveal your power, not inflict pain… if a learned behavior is not reinforced, it is eventually lost.

Another important implication of the way dogs are always learning is that they interpret our reactions to their behavior as the control they have over us. If we respond to unwanted behaviors, they see that as their dominance or assertiveness operating. As humans, we must be very thoughtful about how we respond to all dog behaviors, good and bad, at least as far as we morally categorize them as such.

There was also an interesting list in the book showing tendency of behaviors between male and female, with more likely in females at the top and more likely in males at the bottom:

• Obedience training
• Housebreaking ease
• Affection demand
• Watchdog barking (baselined at 0)
• Excessive barking (baselined at 0)
• Excitability (baselined at 0)
• Playfulness
• Destructiveness
• Snapping at children
• Territory defense
• General activity
• Aggression with dogs
• Dominance over owner

I also thought it was interesting that the author noted that most dog breeds are similar in intelligence although their capacity to excel in certain roles and functions is quite different. Many people tend to think of very small and very large breeds as “dumb” dogs not worth training.

Conclusion

As I said, there is a ton of information in this book. I had read a lot of it in other places before I got to this book, and I found some of the detailed explanations of biological processes a bit overwhelming and beyond my interest in reading the book but that doesn’t change the fact that this is chock full of info. In fact, there is a very handy appendix with training tips for some of the primary behaviors every pet dog should have (come, sit, stay, down, etc.) and the latter half of the book dealing with dog psychology includes not only diagnoses of various forms of dog aggression but also suggestions on how to prevent or treat their development as behavior traits, which could be helpful to many people who think they “just have an aggressive/mean dog.”

Dogs don’t think and behave as we like them to, they think and behave as they do, and what they do is strongly influenced by their genetic heritage as wolves as well as the early experiences they have in the litter and in our care. If we want to have enjoyable relationships with our dogs and other people’s dogs which are increasingly prevalent parts of our society, we would do well to become familiar with the essential knowledge contained in books like “The Dog’s Mind.” It will fundamentally change our relationship with these creatures and may even leave us appreciating, rather than bemoaning, our biological differences.

Quotes – Configuration & Rearrangement

All unhappiness is configuration, all happiness is rearrangement. Your life lacks nothing, the universe contains within it everything, you need only order it as you like.

~Anonymous