Excerpt
Ordinary Magic
Chapter 1Spiraling DownSingle starting errors . . . multiplied through time
into a fan-shaped array.
—Ian McEwan, Lessons
I was four years old when I first got caught in a spiral. At least it’s the first one I remember. My family had moved from Michigan to California for a year and a half, and my new preschool had a “No running” rule, inside or out. I was a willful child with lots of energy, no friends, and little regard for dumb rules. So I spent every day chasing the other kids around the playground, breaking that rule. Most days ended with me in the bleachers in “time-out.” I just wanted to play!
Things might have kept on muddling along that way but for a telling event on school picture day. At least it was telling to me. A teacher sat me right in the middle of the group and made a point to ask me, among all the kids there, to hold the school sign. Why would she do that? I wondered. Was this supposed to make me like her, or this terrible school? Slowly it began to dawn on me that maybe I’d become “the bad kid,” the one who must be pacified, the troublemaker.
But I wasn’t a bad kid! They were the evil ones. My anger began to boil. A fine moral outrage rose up within me. No future child could suffer my fate. Impelled, I began to follow the director around as she showed the school to prospective parents—and told them exactly what I thought of the school.
For the director, that was it. She ushered my parents in for a meeting and told them I would not be welcome back. “We’ll tell the other parents whatever you like,” she said. My father, wonderfully antiauthoritarian, responded, “How ’bout the truth?”
Things don’t go wrong just at once. Often, they start small, sometimes in tiny, almost imperceptible steps. A little feeling, a small thought, an action taken or withheld. But then they gather speed, and before you know it, they’ve spiraled out of control. You get locked in a conflict with a teacher and decide they’re your enemy. Your partner is late for date night—again—and you decide they don’t love you. You fail a test and conclude, “I’m not a math person.”
How do we get there? And how can we get out of these cycles or, better yet, prevent them from starting in the first place?
I’ve thought a lot about spirals, both as a kid and now as a partner, a parent, and a general-purpose human being. And as a social psychologist, a teacher, and a professor, I’ve studied spirals, the bad thoughts and feelings that set them off, and what we can do about them. Through these experiences, I’ve come to appreciate three foundational ideas.
The first is that, almost all the time, the self-doubt and mistrust we experience don’t just pop into our heads randomly. We’re not crazy, with wanton worries, at least not most of the time. Our doubts are triggered. The situation gives you your worries. In preschool, I was getting in trouble every day. I had reason to wonder if I was seen as “the bad kid.” That question was on the table. That’s why the event at school picture day was telling to me. It wouldn’t have been telling to my friend George. He wasn’t getting in trouble every day. Or take a student in the first generation in her family to go to college. She has reason to wonder whether she will belong in college; her family hasn’t previously. Then, if she’s excluded from a party, say, or criticized by a professor, it will mean something a little different than it would to a student whose parents have advanced degrees. Our doubts are legitimate responses to the world as it is. That means we can’t expect to excise them quite as a surgeon would a tumor. But we can learn to recognize them, to predict them, and then to contend with them.
The second big idea is that the doubts and worries that preoccupy us often take the form of questions—big, existential questions. Here are three of them:
Who Am I? Questions about how we see ourselves and, often especially, how other people see us: Am I seen as a bad kid?
Do I Belong? Your place in the spaces that matter most to you: Do people like me belong here?
Can I Do It? Your goals and abilities: Am I smart enough to do this?
These aren’t beliefs we hold with confidence. They’re not firm knowledge of your faults and failings, at least not at first. They’re things we’re trying to figure out: fearsome prospects, threats in the air, specters of all sorts and kinds. They might start small, a little fear, a shadow of doubt, but then, when just the right thing (the wrong thing) happens, that fear looms before you. Then you must contend with it.
Do you know the white bear study? Years ago, researchers showed that if you tell people not to think about something (“Don’t think of a white bear!”), they can’t help but do it (Did you?). But when it’s one of these mental bugaboos, that’s even more true. Am I seen as a bad kid? First a question like this threatens to take over your mind. You might deny it or try to push it away, but it pops up again and again. It’s all-consuming. That’s because the question is important. It matters for your sense of who you are, for relationships you care about. So you want to figure it out.
After taking over our minds, questions like this threaten to take over our lives. They act like leading questions. They point us toward negative conclusions; then those conclusions can quickly become self-fulfilling. The sad irony is that when we act on the basis of these thin slices of evidence, we risk making our fears come true.
At my next and much better school, the teacher did a very California thing. She had all of us five-year-olds sit in a circle on the rug and asked each of us to share what we were feeling. When it got to my turn, I said, “I wish I was a bee and could sting all of you.”
I did myself no favors berating my new classmates. Clearly, that question was still on my mind. But I got lucky. The teacher gave my parents a call, a kind call. My parents explained why I might be a bit mad, and the teacher reacted well. She pulled me closer. A downward spiral was averted. But I wonder, sometimes, how else that story might have gone. I was a little White boy and my parents were academics. Even by preschool we have stereotypes about misbehaving kids. Would a teacher have been so kind to a little Black or brown boy? Would she have pulled him closer? Or might she have thought, Maybe he’s a little troublemaker?
One of my all-time favorite studies shows how spirals can start in relationships. The social psychologist Sandra Murray at the State University of New York at Buffalo brought couples into the lab where she’d designed a provocative situation. In one group, each person got a work sheet that asked them to list “important aspects of your partner’s character that you dislike.” So, both people wrote briefly and then moved on. Everyone was fine. No problem.
In Murray’s second group, however, even though she said both people would do the same task, they actually got different instructions. One person was prompted to list their grievances, but the other was asked to list all the items in their home. That left the first person sitting there, watching their partner write away for nearly two minutes longer, on average. Imagine you’re that person, watching your partner scribble on and on, filling page after page with your failings. Ouch.
Murray’s study was designed to see how that experience might affect people with high versus low self-esteem. When you don’t think highly of yourself—you think you’re not so fun, not so attractive, not so kind—it’s easy to doubt that someone else could think well of you. And in fact, when the people with low self-esteem saw their partners writing away, seemingly unable to stop, they rated their partners more negatively and felt distant from them.
Questions like Am I really loved? make us see the world differently, and if we see things differently, we react differently. If you read your partner’s irritation as more evidence that they’re tired of you—instead of, say, that they had a bad day—you might withdraw emotionally or lash out. That generates still more irritation from your partner—and more evidence for your pessimistic hypothesis: Now I know I’m not loved. Before you know it, you’re spiraling down, out of control. Will that initial question come to define you, or at least your relationship?
But this cycle isn’t inevitable, and that’s my third point. This is a process, and that means it’s not fixed. It’s answers we are looking for when we face defining questions. When we find better ones, we can flip the script, free ourselves, and spark spirals that propel us upward. The things we worry about most are the issues that will define our lives: Does my partner love me? Will I be a good parent? Can I accomplish what matters to me? We can get better at anticipating these questions and recognizing them when they come up, both for ourselves and for other people. We can develop an ear for psychological questions. Then, by accepting these questions instead of suppressing them, we can find answers that are “wise” to our situations, answers that are legitimate and can help us thrive. In doing so, we can become more resilient: in Murray’s study above, people who had high self-esteem were unfazed by watching their partners write on and on about their shortcomings. Maybe we can learn their secret.
