What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin E.P. Seligman

Martin Seligman is one of my favourite personal development authors. Not only are his books easy to read, but as the founder of the Positive Psychology movement he’s got the academic credentials and professional experience to know what the research says, and what he’s talking about.

His book What You Can Change and What You Can’t is billed as “The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement”. I was drawn to this book while contemplating the question: “Just how much can a person change?” I was particularly interested in whether it’s possible to make major changes in how we relate to other people, like if an introvert can become an extrovert. I’ve done the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator a couple of times in the past and I was never certain whether I was really an introvert, or just a traumatised extrovert. I love hanging around people when it goes well, but it hasn’t always gone as well as I would have liked and some of my early interactions with people were quite traumatic. I believe this is what led me to develop tremendous social anxiety.

The Complete Guide To Successful Self-Improvement?

I found the section that addresses the question Do Childhood Events Influence Adult Personality? perhaps the most interesting. Referencing studies of identical twins raised apart, Seligman promotes the idea that adult personality is almost entirely genetic in origin, heavily discounting environmental factors. When commenting on studies of the impacts of childhood trauma, he says:

“The major traumas of childhood, it was shown, may have some influence on adult personality, but the influence is barely detectable. … There is no justification, according to these studies, for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, beating up your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.”

I was quite surprised at how extreme his view of this appeared. Surely the role models that we have in our early childhood, like our parents, siblings, wider family and friends must have a massive influence on the development of our sponge-like brains and our resulting personalities?

The traumas he refers to are events such as death of a parent, divorce, physical illness, beatings, neglect and sexual abuse. They don’t seem to include the sort of parental emotional attachment issues that I and my clients all experienced, which I believe leaves our nervous system in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and dramatically influences our personality development. Experiences like parents incapable of expressing emotion constructively, or parents with such low self-esteem that they argue frequently but don’t actually divorce.

Much earlier in the book when commenting on the children of parents who fight, he says:

“Once their parents start fighting, these children become unbridled pessimists. They see bad events as permanent and pervasive, and they see themselves as responsible. Years later this pessimism persists, even after they tell us their parents are no longer fighting. Their worldview has changed from the rosy optimism of childhood to the grim pessimism of a depressed adult. I believe that many children react to their parents’ fighting by developing a loss of security so shattering that it marks the beginning of a lifetime of dysphoria.”

That certainly sounds like a major childhood trauma having an impact on an adult’s life to me. Perhaps the distinction comes down to how “trauma” is defined. The book also talks quite a bit about Post Traumatic Stress, which certainly can impact the way we feel about ourselves and how we relate to the world around us.

Seligman’s other books, Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness are also worth a read. If you’re particularly interested in the boundaries of psychotherapy and its mainstream alternatives when it comes to tackling common psychological problems though, this is the book to cover that territory. Click here to buy it on Amazon.