Martin Seligman on Prospection: Being Motivated by our Vision of The Future

Martin Seligman is a former president of the APA, the father of Positive Psychology, and author of the book “What You Can Change and What You Can’t”, which I really enjoyed and recommend highly.  Some of his recent comments apply perfectly to my view of how to get beyond addiction.  Here’s an excerpt of an interview he did with Maia Szalavitz at TIME:

The basic rock bottom premise of psychology for the last 150 years is that we’re driven by our past. Positive psychology has come to convince me that we’re drawn into the future.

I’m very interested in what is called “prospection.” As we’re talking now, what you’re doing is thinking about how you can write this up, whether to use or reject what I’m saying now. Lots of human activity is making mental simulations about the future, [or prospection]. I’ve been writing something on the ubiquity of prospection and arguing that the basic premise that humans are driven by past is wrong.

At this point in my life, the sentiments above are simply common sense – I know that what I expect, dream, envision, or plan is what propels my life and behavior – but back when I had a problem with drug use, such thoughts never occurred to me.  More importantly, I don’t think such thoughts ever occurred to the psychiatrists, therapists, and counselors charged with helping me, and that’s a shame.  Believing that I needed treatment for the disease of addiction, I put my life in these people’s hands, and expected them to lead the way.  What I received was not a positive vision of the future, but rather a grim depressing vision of a lifelong addiction in which I could only focus on getting through “one day at a time.”  From what I was taught in the recovery culture, my genes, brain chemistry, and past completely ruled my future, and furthermore, I should never envision a future without addiction because it simply isn’t possible – relapse is a part of recovery – and I should only focus on being sober today because you can never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.  More from Seligman:

I’m all for past influences, the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn’t take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them.

To the extent that our child-rearing and therapy is based around reliving the past as opposed to making people better about thinking about the future, that’s a revolutionary thing I’m after — getting our therapists and teachers to make patients and children much better at prospection and letting go of the idea that we are prisoners of our past. We haven’t been good at teaching people to be good [evaluators] of possible futures.

The past certainly influences what we are, but I think we’ve had 150 years of social science and are still unable to predict what you’re going to do tomorrow by asking what you did yesterday.  (full article at Time.com)

I’m totally on board with Seligman’s vision here.  In fact, it’s what I already do.  When I work with someone to help them change their substance use habits, a massive part of the equation is getting them to envision that brighter future.  But before I even get to that, I need to undo the damage done to them by the recovery culture – that is, what semblance of a vision for the future that AA allows people to have is only a negative one.

The recovery culture leaves people in a state of complete and total uncertainty about whether or not they can stay sober, yet instilled with an unwavering certainty that they will always crave drugs and alcohol, that they’re vulnerable to “triggers”, and that they’ll forever be unable to control themselves.  Moreover, they’re taught not to look past today since they can only live “one day at a time”, and the practice of the 12 steps only truly focuses on the past.  In rebuilding their lives, 12-steppers are taught to inventory their past wrongs & resentments, and then focus on making amends for the past.  Then they’re taught to focus on character defects from the past.  They relive the past by talking about it as the main topic of many meetings.  When they get done with all of this, they move on to doing 12-step service work, which is helping other addicts and alcoholics.  There is no step which involves planning for a brighter future.  Even prayer, which could be used as a perfect method for envisioning a brighter future, is only taught by AA as being focused on doing god’s will for that day.  Essentially, there is little prospection available to steppers, they’re mostly taught to focus on the past and today – and to fear the future.  It leaves people in a state of perpetually trying to escape their past, terrified of repeating their mistakes or falling pray to their “character defects.”

So for people exposed to the recovery culture, all of that needs to be undone – for lack of a better word, they need to deprogram.  Once that process is taking place, the entire focus of what I do with people is to get them focused on the life that they want.  We work on identifying dreams, setting goals, and breaking them down into smaller actionable steps which they can get actively involved in now.  The effect is the polar opposite of what happens in the recovery culture – my clients have something to look forward to when they get up in the morning, they experience successes, confidence builds, and they gather momentum towards a rich and rewarding life.  Essentially their focus on a brighter future draws them away from the addictive habit, and they’re able to simply move on with life.

I help people to do this through coaching techniques, but you can do it on your own right now if you’re motivated.  It’s something to think about – have you given yourself a carrot on a stick to chase after?