The Hero's Journey
Thought of the Month
January 2011
Attributing outcomes and mental health
People who attribute negative events (such as failing a test) to things about themselves that are hard to change and that affect a broad spectrum of their lives experience learned helplessness, which puts them at risk for depression and poor health, gives them low expectations about the future, and makes them likely to give up easily on future tasks. People who attribute negative events to things that they can control and change, such as the time they spend studying for the next test, are less likely to be depressed, are less likely to have health problems, and are more likely to try harder when the going gets tough.
Timothy Wilson
Wilson, T. 2011. Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change. New York: Little, Brown and Company, page 64.
Comment
by Reg Harris
Copyright © 2012 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission, please contact me.
My mother, who is now 91 and confined to bed in a local care home, was the archetypal victim. All of the negative events in her life were the result of someone or something acting against her. Her poor health was not the result of a weight problem, poor diet, lack of exercise or negative attitude: it was the result of a mosquito bite, radio waves directed at her by neighbors or some other external source. Her isolation in her job was the result of her coworkers trying to destroy her or get back at her, not her own bitterness, acerbic behavior and paranoia. The jewelry and other personal items that “disappeared” were taken by a weekly housekeeper, my father, my brother or me; they didn’t disappear because she’d misplaced them or forgotten where she had hid them.
The sadness is that her life did not have to come to this end. The problem with attributing the events in our lives to external forces (i.e., luck or another's malice) is that we rob ourselves of the power to affect our own lives. If my mother had accepted responsibility for her problems, she would have understood that she had the power to resolve those problems. She would have lived in the reality of her life, where she had control, rather than in a dark fantasy world of her own creation, where she was the victim.
In 1954, American psychologist Julian Rotter developed a theory he called the “locus of control.” The locus of control relates to the degree of control that we feel we have on the events in our lives. People that tend toward an external locus of control tend to feel that other people, luck or fate determine the events in their lives. People with a high internal locus of control tend to feel that they are in charge of their lives, that their own behavior and actions determine the events in their lives.
There is an interesting relationship between one’s locus of control and the Hero’s Journey. Often we are called to a journey because there is a conflict between what we want or need and our perceived ability to satisfy that want or need. When the desire for something becomes so strong that it pushes through the threshold of our sense of inefficacy or fear of failure, we face a choice: to risk change and growth by challenging and transforming our self-perception or to retreat deeper into the self-defeating rationalizations and delusions that protect us from the anxiety of self-responsibility and freedom to choose.
This process of personal transformation can be threatening and painful because it usually involves dropping the protective illusions and avoidances that protect us from facing a painful truth. It requires that we acknowledge the reality of who we are. As I wrote in my article on gestalt's paradoxical theory of change,
...the masks, roles and other defenses that we created to protect our egos in the past are now preventing us from embracing our future. In fact, these defenses have begun to choke us, trapping us in an obsolete identity, often formed in childhood, and making change impossible. Simply put, before we can become what we can or want to become, we must first discard these defenses and become who we really are.
In this context developing a sense of efficacy in our lives, the journey can be seen as a three-stage process which: 1) breaks down the delusions and rationalizations that support an external locus of control (road of trials or disintegration), 2) creates a void or space where new meaning and understandings can emerge (abyss), and 3) builds a greater sense of self-efficacy and control (reintegration).
Another way to look at this process is as reframing meaning. When we have a high external locus of control, the meaning we ascribe to a negative experience will tend to place us in the victim’s role rather than in the hero’s role: why do these things always happen to me? When we have a high internal locus of control, we see a negative experience not as a reflection of some innate inadequacy but as a learning experience that will help us make more effective decisions or take more positive action in the future. In other words, the meaning we give an experience―even a negative experience―will affirm our sense power, strengthen our resolve and enrich our lives.
In this sense, the hero’s journey is a process of building more effective, life-affirming meaning in our lives. This new meaning will enable and motivate us to take action to affect our life experience rather than to wait passively for experiences to happen to us. Because facing the challenge to reframe our meaning involves life-altering changes and a threat to our sense of being, it can be considered an act of heroism. In Will I be the hero of my own life?, Swami Chetanananda writes,
Heroes are people who, in a real way, have confronted and changed their identities through the process of some kind of intense difficulty that they had to undergo. This intense difficulty is sometimes consciously chosen and accepted; at other times, it is just thrust upon a person. …However impossible the endeavor, they take on the challenge and digest whatever hardships they are called upon to endure. In the process, they find within themselves a sense of strength that allows them to shed who and what they were, thereby becoming a completely different kind of person—a hero (p. 4)
By developing a more responsible and action-oriented meaning in life, we can develop the skills we need to face challenges and frame them in a way that is life-affirming. In Redirect (2011), Wilson writes,
What really sets optimists apart is that they have better coping strategies in the face of adversity—they confront problems rather than avoid them, plan better for the future, focus on what they can control and change, and persist when they encounter obstacles instead of giving up (p. 66).
The point is that when we attribute our success or our failure to forces outside of our control, we give up our power to affect and determine (to the extent we can) our own lives. Often, in our own heroic journeys, our call to adventure arises from an opportunity to build new meaning. The journey opens the doorway to transformation, to changing the way we see life. It allows us to face our fears and self-defeating beliefs, and to take control—to become the heroes in our own stories, the architects of our own futures.
References
Chetanananda, S. 1995. Will I be the hero of my own life? Portland, OR: Rudra Press.
Harris, R. 2011. Gestalt's paradoxical theory of change.
Wilson, T. 2011. Redirect: The surprising new science of psychological change. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Your feedback is always welcome. Contact me.