Why Smart People Hurt

A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative

Eric Maisel

• Publisher: Conari Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781609258856
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Make the most of your creative and intellectual gifts by overcoming the unique challenges they bring with this guide by the author of Natural Psychology. Many smart and creative people experience unique challenges as a result of their valuable gifts. These can range from anxiety and over-thinking to mania, depression, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel pinpoints these often-devastating challenges and offers solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology. Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart people Hurt, Dr. Maisel will teach you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.
In Why Smart People Hurt, you will find:
· Evidence that you are not alone in your struggles
· Strategies for coping with a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat
· Questions that will help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life

1

SMARTNESS DISPARAGED

Countless infants are born into a social class, ethnic group, religious group, family of origin, or other set of circumstances or environmental factors in which their native intelligence either counts for little or is held as a negative.

Only a few theories of personality, primarily those influenced by Marxist economic ideas, have taken into account the challenges to personality development and expression created by these environmental circumstances. Yet that disparagement and negativity are hugely significant. If you have a good brain and the world you grow up in demands that you shut it down, you are bound to suffer.

Imagine the following sort of day in the life of a young girl with lots of native intelligence. Her household is in chaos, the kind of chaos that poverty, acrimony, addictions, and unfulfilled lives produce. Surrounded by threats, impulsivity, and zero tolerance for free thought, she somehow manages to get to school—and into another anti-thinking environment.

At school, more chaos prevails and, despite the idea that school advocates for thinking, she is confronted with a shrink-wrapped, fact-based, topic-based, and test-driven curriculum that no adult with the freedom to leave would tolerate for an instant.

After school, she goes off to parochial instruction and gets a narrow religious education that demands obedience, allegiance, and more thoughtlessness. Her evening involves her in more chaos, and to escape it she shuts her door, if she is lucky enough to have a room and a door, and finds some stress relief and some self-soothing by watching hours of ready-made, low-level television programming that further numbs her and dumbs her down. Finally she sleeps, only to awaken to another day just like this one.

What will happen to her brain potential in these circumstances? We can imagine. Likely, the best that she can do is bury herself in her books and become a good student, a grade seeker, a dreamer, or a mini-expert in some niche area of thought like spelling or puzzle solving, all of which is a far cry from becoming the deep, free, satisfied thinker she might have become in other circumstances.

That's probably a best-case scenario. More likely, she will not think much, even though she has the ability to think, and when confronted by tasks that require her to think, she will find herself too anxious and too unprepared to meet the rigors of thinking. As a result, she will fail, disappoint herself, dream small, and begin to form an identity that includes a huge doubt about whether she is as smart as she thought she was.

This child is bound to grow sad, bound to act out or to sabotage herself, bound to show the symptoms of one mental disorder or another, from childhood depression to attention deficit disorder to obsessive-compulsive disorder. We may see her try to gain some control of her life through anorexia; we may see her run away, get pregnant early, marry early, try college and drop out, and throughout these years maintain a love-hate relationship with thinking, at once craving it and avoiding it.

A child can't really meet these challenges herself. No six-year-old or nine-year-old or eleven-year-old can change this situation for herself—even if in a corner of her awareness she knows something is seriously wrong, even if she recognizes that there is a better way just out of reach, and even if she tries to stubbornly ignore her environment and entertain dreams and goals for her future.

These negative outcomes are lamentable, but they are also natural. They are exactly what you would expect to see if at every turn you prevented a child from thinking freely and deeply. If you put a good brain in a brain-unfriendly environment, it should not surprise you to see that brain get sad (a state that will eventually be labeled chronic depression), respond impulsively and carelessly rather than thoughtfully, doubt its abilities and its options, and choose a station in life a notch or two below the one it might otherwise have chosen.

Let's follow this child and give her a new lease on life, say, when she is twenty-seven, has had to survive the consequences of these environmental challenges and her own spotty past, and comes into contact with a psychology like natural psychology that alerts her to the fact that the place she has arrived is rather to be expected.

The language of natural psychology—with which we talk about original personality, formed personality, and available personality, about meaning investments and meaning opportunities, about the unfortunate but completely normal (as opposed to so-called abnormal or disordered) consequences of environmental challenges, and about distress relief rather than the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders—can help her think about what has transpired and about what is now required of her if she is to reduce her distress.

In the language of natural psychology, she has an original personality that came with a good brain, a desire to think, and a propensity to think; a formed personality that has had to deal with all the impediments to thinking put in her way and which has dealt with those impediments relatively unsuccessfully; and considerable available personality that possesses an intuitive memory of her original personality and enough awareness of the contours of her formed personality to make real, significant changes.

She can use her available personality to learn how to tolerate the anxiety that now accompanies her efforts at thinking; she can seize thinking as a meaning opportunity and make conscious meaning investments in some thinking domain, whether it's a profession that she thought was out of her reach or a body of knowledge that she would love to study but didn't dare begin for fear of failing herself again. These are the sorts of efforts and changes that she can commence to make.

In addition to learning to deal with the deficits that are part of her formed personality, she can also learn to deal with environmental factors that have not gone away. If she goes back to spend a day with her family, she will again have to deal with that anti-thinking environment. If she has not left her church, she will have to deal with that anti-thinking environment. If her friends sneer at thinking, she will have to deal with them. If she turns on the television to relax, she will have to deal with the anti-thinking programming filling every channel. That she heroically works on herself doesn't prevent environmental factors from continuing their mischief and mayhem.

It is natural and predictable that our environment may pressure us to not think. This pressure will produce pain as we intuit that we are missing out on a native opportunity and will negatively affect our personality, producing everything from math anxiety to depression. If you were born to think and got pushed off that path, then one of your chief jobs, if you want to experience less distress, will be making use of your available personality to craft a new, friendlier relationship with your brain.

A child who grows up in an environment that disparages thinking, that actively works to shut it down at every turn, and that begins to track him and tell him what he is good for and what is beyond his reach, will then find himself in the jaws of his society's work machinery. He will be fit for one sort of job and not another, he will be aimed into one social class and not another, and he will find himself with limited, disappointing options. Here is how Jonathan in England explained it:

I don't know how it works in other countries, but where I live, there is a life-tracking effect in place, where if you happen to be somehow put on the wrong track, as regards your intelligence, it can be a nightmare trying to put it straight later in life.

One of my fellow Mensans complained that she encountered resistance from potential employers because she had been forced to take CSE exams at school instead of the more prestigious O-Level, even though she had later gone on to acquire the professional certifications necessary for her chosen career.

It cannot simply be left up to a young school dropout who has been mistracked and educationally disserviced, and who has been let loose on the world of industry, to now suddenly redevelop the self-esteem that has been robbed from her, to expect her to solve her finances (probably by now on an entry-level job in the service industry) so she can go to college and make it through a degree program as if everything had all been fine and dandy.

It can take years to recover from such a mauling, and even when the emotional and personal side of things is resolved, there is still the matter of no degree and no proper career. Unfortunately, industry and academia both act as if the highest level of educational attainment that was available to a person when young represents the maximum worth of their mind. That's kind of tough when it wasn't your fault.

There needs to be more help for adults in such situations, perhaps via fast-track apprenticeship programs, so that they can get into suitable careers. Many of us in this situation actually read and study a great deal independently and so don't want to sit through classes just for certification. The unresolved situation in my case is a lack of a suitable career that taps in to my interests and aptitudes. I am getting older and remain a highly gifted autodidact unsuccessfully searching for a job in the neurosciences.

A smart person has a desire to think, a need to think, and an ability to think. But the nature of family, school, and work; the structure of society; and the proclivities of the people around him often conspire to put out his intellectual fire.

His family is unlikely to inspire him or flame his desire to think; school is unlikely to inspire him; his job is unlikely to inspire him; his pastor is unlikely to inspire him; mass entertainment and his other relaxations are unlikely to inspire him; the uninteresting conversations around him are unlikely to inspire him.

He can't help but recognize the headline truth about his life and his environment: “Little thinking allowed here.” Yet he may be surprised to learn just how deep this antipathy runs. In fact, in most societies thought is not just disparaged; the thinking person is targeted as an enemy of the people. He is mocked as elitist and effete, his progressive views are hated, and if he lives in a society run by tyrants, he will be silenced and may be imprisoned or murdered.

Tyrants hate intellectuals, for intellectuals as a class see tyranny for what it is and can articulate what they see. They know when freedom is being violated and stolen. They are better attuned to knowing that they are being fed lies. They recognize to what extent the majority opinion is an anti-intellectual one.

Attacks on thinking and attacks on smart people occur all the time. Here is one report from contemporary Iraq, as reported by the watchdog group A Face and a Name: Civilian Victims of Insurgent Groups in Iraq:

Some Iraqi academics see the current attacks as a way to destroy Iraq's intellectual elite. Precise figures are difficult to obtain, but studies suggest that doctors and academics are particularly at risk. A study by the Iraqi Ministry of Health concluded that armed groups have abducted between 160 and 300 Iraqi doctors since April 2003, and killed more than twenty-five. Nearly 1,000 doctors have fled the country, the study said, with an average of thirty more following each month. To stem the outflow, the ministry broadcast a public service announcement on television in spring 2005, with a message that said: ‘Dear Citizens, please do not kill doctors—you may need them one day.’

Professors at Iraq's once prestigious universities are also under attack. According to an April 2005 United Nations University report, assassins have killed forty-eight academics since 2003, and many more teachers and professors brave daily threats. Hundreds of academics and professionals have been threatened with death and told to leave Iraq. According to the Association of University Teachers, 2,000 professors have left Iraq since 2003, joining the 10,000 professors the association says left the country in the twelve years after the Gulf War.

Attacks on people who can think occur in every culture and in every epoch. Rebellious feminists in Russia are labeled with mental disorders made up on the spot for the purposes of incarcerating them. Scientists who point out the environmental dangers caused by business are ridiculed as fear mongers. Every age and every culture has its versions of cultural revolutions, inquisitions, and Scopes trials.

It is impossible for a child who is born smart to have any inkling that her abilities are likely to be disparaged, that thinking itself will be envied and hated by some in her society, or that she may be targeted by her government because she has chosen a thinking profession. What smart child building with blocks or surfing the Net could possibly suspect how unfriendly her species is to thinking and to the fruits of thinking like science, culture, and freedom? Such a notion would make no sense to her. Yet those are the abiding truths about our species that perennially contribute to the distress that smart people experience.

CHAPTER QUESTIONS

1. Was your smartness disparaged as you were growing up?
2. What messages did you receive about your capabilities and talents?
3. What messages did you receive about whether it was admirable or unseemly to be smart?
4. If you received mixed messages about your smartness, what was the bottom line or ultimate message?
5. Given that those messages and that upbringing necessarily influenced your formed personality, what do you need to do now to recover your rightful smartness?

2

SMART WORK AS OXYMORON

We can imagine a situation far back in time in which nothing in a person's life could be singled out as one's profession or line of work. If you had to grow or catch your own food, make your own clothes, dream up your own metaphors for the night sky, heal your own injuries, make your own love matches, concoct your own stimulants and sedatives, and in every way imaginable take care of yourself and amuse yourself, you had no profession or line of work. You were simply living; you were simply a human being.

You weren't a baker or a homebuilder or a utensil maker or a natural philosopher; you were all those things. Now such a life is virtually impossible. While you can be several things—a lawyer during the day and a painter on Sunday; a grocer during the day, a cabinet maker in the evening, and a fisherman on the weekend; and so on—there is an undeniable sense in which our species has sorted itself into jobs, professions, and lines of work.

Smart people, if they get the chance or make the chance, will find themselves needing to choose from among a standard menu of work opportunities with names like doctor, lawyer, teacher, scientist, novelist, entrepreneur, and so on. Each job on this list may hold some cachet in society, but each may also hold no meaning for a given smart individual. The sorting out of society's needs creates jobs and professions—some of which putatively allow for thinking, many of which do not—but that very sorting reduces the chances that a given smart individual can find a line of work that feels genuinely meaningful.

There is no necessary connection between the value that society puts on a line of work and its meaningfulness to a given individual. Society may hold the profession of doctor in high esteem, but if yo...