Is Unhappiness Mostly a Choice?
Is Unhappiness Mostly a Choice?
How Adlerian psychology deconstructs the notion of trauma.
I grew up in a democratic country, was raised in a nuclear family, and never suffered from any serious physical or mental impairment. These upbringing standards could be considered privileged, although they are now prevalent in Western societies where most people meet these conditions. Arguably, we are experiencing living standards that are objectively better from a historical perspective, but it doesn't seem obvious that we have become significantly better at keeping everyday problems at bay. Like most people, I had my own struggles, and one of the hardest was becoming socially desirable. It wasn't until early adulthood that I achieved some modest success, which, in retrospect, required a lot of hard work and dedication. Afterwards, I realized that some of my difficulties in socializing could be explained by being on the spectrum, as I consistently scored at a significant level on various screening tools, and on several occasions my parents were advised that I should be evaluated for autism. For some reason, they never seriously considered this option, and it was probably the right decision.
In my early K-12 education, I quickly realized that I wasn't a bright student and was later diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis provided me with a medical explanation and solution, which was basically a whole league of prescription stimulants that somehow had a slight positive impact on my grades. It was less of a problem when I started college, then graduate school was no longer a challenge. Despite this, I remained haunted by my earlier school days, believing that it was due to having ADHD, which acted as a reminder to feel inferior as a person with a mental handicap. It took me quite some time to realize that my brain was functioning normally, but just needed a little extra effort to focus when needed.
Unlike academic achievement, improving social skills required more than just doing homework, but dealing with undesirable social outcomes such as facing rejection. I suspect that if I had been diagnosed early with autism, I might have perceived myself as socially underdeveloped, which could have discouraged me from ever trying to socialize. But I remain unsure how this trajectory would have unfolded. Perhaps I would have been told that things were not settled, that autistic people socialize differently – which is somewhat true, but mostly a euphemism. In general, I'm not strictly against early diagnosis, but I believe there are cases that deserve special treatment and others where ignorance is bliss.
In the wake of postmodernism, new psychiatric terms have gained popularity as the list of clinical terms for mental conditions has continued to grow. This has been followed by a general increase in diagnoses, including all sorts of self-attributed mental disorders, raising a deeper question about their usefulness in improving mental well-being. For example, the term trauma has become hyper-prevalent in common language, and the very broad “childhood trauma” has emerged as an overarching term to describe a range of unpleasant experiences that could fall anywhere from emotional neglect to sexual abuse.
What's particularly striking is the way in which trauma has been used as a casual framework for mapping past experiences to current behaviors. One of the main concerns with this approach is that it leads to an interpretation of events as deterministic causes – a typically Freudian way of understanding. I recently came across The Courage To Be Disliked, which introduced me to Alfred Adler as the third great figure in psychology, overshadowed by Freud and Jung. Where Adler's psychological perspective differs fundamentally from that of his contemporaries is in his understanding of the past, or causality. According to Adler, there is no such thing as trauma. Not that they do not exist, but that their ramifications are fabricated:
No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences – the so-called trauma – but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
A common mistake is to take Adler's definition of trauma at face value. He didn't believe that traumas were without influence, but rather rejected them as self-determining causes. The idea behind Adler's notion of trauma is that people endure varying degrees of suffering, but that the suffering itself is rarely the cause of the struggle, but rather the narrative that people construct from it. For instance, there are multiple ways of dealing with the same circumstance: someone who has experienced unsuccessful social interactions could cope with them through social distancing by telling themselves a story in which they are unsuitable for social context, or on the other hand, they could see it as an opportunity for growth. In both cases, the consequences are determined by the meaning given to the experience. In the case of unhappiness, it may not be a direct consequence of past experiences, but rather social distancing goals.
Bad social experiences may not be the most common cause of unhappiness, but Adler's principles can be applied to most life circumstances, including the most dramatic ones. In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl recounts his journey to find meaning as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, and describes how those who survived were able to connect with a purpose and feel positively about it:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Finally, Adlerian psychology should be examined within its time frame. As with Freud and Jung, most of the earlier thinkers in psychology made claims that are largely unfalsifiable and therefore akin to pseudoscience. Happiness may be influenced – in large part – by individual choices, although recent findings in modern behavioral genetics suggest that heritability accounts for 32–40% of the variation in overall happiness – meaning that nearly one-third of people's happiness can be explained by their genetic makeup. This challenges the conventional wisdom that what makes you happy must apply to others. Yet Adler's conception of causality as rather self-determined remains a powerful idea in opposition to the victim mentality and a call for individual agency.