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Key insights from
The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese
Phenomenon That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real
Happiness
By
Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
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What you’ll learn
What happens when two
Japanese men encounter ancient Greek philosophy and distill pieces of Stoic
and Socratic brilliance with all the practical force of Adlerian
psychology? You get The
Courage to Be Disliked, a book that one reviewer describes as,
“Marie Kondo, but for your brain.” Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was an Austrian
psychiatrist in the early 20th century, and the most obscure of the three
giants of psychology, along with Freud and Jung. Although many people have
lost track of Adler and his school of thought, his ideas have overflowed
the confines of formal psychological study and spilled into numerous
disciplines and mainstream vernacular. Among other accomplishments, Adler
is credited with coining the term “inferiority complex.” His thoughts show up
in works like Steven Covey’s 7
Habits of Highly Effective People and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence
People. Freud and Jung are the most famous founding figures of
psychoanalysis, but Kishimi and Koga argue in The Courage to Be Disliked that
Adler’s ideas about how people change and how to become truly happy have
life-changing (and life-simplifying) potential.
Read
on for key insights from The Courage to Be Disliked: The Japanese Phenomenon
That Shows You How to Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness.
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1. The world will
never change, but if you change your perception of the world, you can begin
to change yourself.
Most people take it for
granted that the world is a realm of profound chaos and complexity. The
idea that life is simple is relegated to the realm of childish naïveté.
Children enjoy a simple world without bills to pay or jobs to perform. They
are free to play, laugh, and dream, and they see the future through hopeful
eyes. The cruel, clarifying realities of war, discrimination, and loss have
yet to darken their vision.
As children grow up a far
bleaker reality emerges. The world becomes populated with problems,
responsibilities, and tragedies. To complicate matters further, many people
in the modern world do not submit to a deity of any kind. In the past it
was simple: Obey your god and you find salvation. There was no
over-thinking or doubt. Without a supernatural being to bring a sense of
solace and stability, people depend on themselves to forge a way forward,
which creates a consuming anxiety about life. When we consider all this,
the idea that life and the world are simple seems out of the question.
All of the above is
axiomatic for most. How can anyone look at the world and see it otherwise?
However counterintuitive it
might seem, the truth is that life is simple, and so is the world. The fact
that people cannot see it has less to do with the world and more to do with
their perception of it. However real the objective world is, it is not the
world we live in. Each of us experiences the world subjectively, in a way
that no one else can experience. You necessarily see the world from a
different position than the next person. Try as you might to show your
world to the next person, you can’t.
So how do you see and
approach the world? Each person has a lens through which they see the
world, and that lens can be tinted dark, which dramatically alters the way
they interact with life. You can lament the dark world or take the glasses
off. It might be so bright that you put them back on or close your eyes.
You may not even want to take them off at all. But if you find the courage,
you can see the world as it is, tint-free.
This opens up the
possibility for people to change. Anyone can be happy—truly happy. They are
not stuck in a dim and darkened world if they choose a different one. The
world will never change, but the way you see it could, and that is what
will make all the difference.
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2. The past does
not matter, and trauma is not real.
We tend to view life in
terms of etiology (the study of cause and effect) and do not spend
nearly enough time on teleology, which tries to understand phenomena in
terms of goals or purposes.
This is rather abstract in
principle, but the implications become more startling when we apply it to
real life examples and how we process those real life examples. Let’s say
you have a friend who is kind and talented, but he is also a recluse,
afraid to leave his apartment. As soon as he steps outside the door, his
anxiety spikes, his knees buckle, his breathing becomes labored, and his
heart rate increases. He feels dizzy and staggers back into his home. He
has become convinced that this is just the way he is, and there is nothing
he can do about it.
Why do you think he is like
that? To understand someone’s behavior in the present, most people go
digging into the past. What was his upbringing like? Were his parents
affectionate or abusive? Was he bullied at school? Let’s say your friend
was abused and bullied when he was young. We might conclude that because of
a lack of love, he has no confidence and the thought of facing the world
“out there” is overwhelming. The causes are abuse and bullying and the
effect is complete paralysis every time he ventures outside. This seems a
perfectly plausible theory, but according to Adlerian psychology, we’ve
gone about the problem wrong.
We naturally look for
causes and effects. To make such causal links (i.e., to think
etiologically) is problematic though. One of those problems is that the
world becomes overly deterministic. The causal explanation holds up well if
an abusive childhood always
led to social isolation, as in your friend’s case. But there
are plenty of people who have endured even more serious abuse and manage to
leave their houses every day without anxiety and dread and even manage to
live productive lives. You say your friend wants to change but can’t. The
explanation for the inability to change is a damaging childhood
environment. Past controls present.
The danger of etiological
thinking is that when we constantly use past causes to explain a person's
present, we have effectively locked people into deterministic molds that
eliminate choice. Adlerian psychology breaks with these etiological
cause-effect ways of thinking that are so pervasive that we take them for
granted. Adler believed that not only does the past not control the
present, the past does not even matter.
“But what about instances
of serious trauma?” one might protest. Adlerian psychology emphatically
rejects trauma. The language of trauma is textbook etiological thinking,
and thus unhelpful. Adlerian psychologists set discussions of past trauma
aside in order to examine the goals a person pursues in the present. Adler
wrote that "no experience is in itself a cause of our success or
failure...we make out of [our so-called traumas] whatever suits our
purposes." In other words, the experiences we have, harrowing or
otherwise, are fuel for the pursuit of whatever goal we were already after.
We are not driven by the experience itself, but by whatever meaning we
create around it.
So in the case of that
reclusive friend, more profound than the abuse suffered in early childhood
is the meaning he assigned to those episodes. That meaning could be
something like, “I am abused and am not fit for society.” But it is his
goal to maintain this narrative and his actions help him further cement
that belief. Even his anxiety and fear responses are bodily manifestations
of that narrative. The abuse may be very real, but for different reasons
than most people suppose. The best thing you can do is find the goals
implicit in your actions and change the goals if you do not like how those
goals play out. This means interacting with the “you now” in the present.
We say he can’t leave
because he is anxious, but what if we switched that to say he is anxious so
that he can’t leave? By making the effect the cause, we find the motivating
telos. He
has concocted a story to carry out his goal of staying in his apartment,
and creating anxiety and fear help him to fulfill that goal.
In sum, we focus too much
on etiology (cause and effect) and not enough on teleology (the purpose a
phenomenon serves). Trauma is an outcome of etiological thinking that is as
popular as it is unhelpful. Much more significant than any experience is
the meaning we assign to it and goals we insist on living out based on that
meaning. In your own life, it is best to start with the “you” in the
present and find those stories you are determined to play out.
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3. You like your
self-hatred more than you think.
Most people who struggle
with self-hatred describe their thought process as, “I don’t see any good
qualities within myself, and therefore, I don’t like myself.” But it’s just
the opposite. They don’t want
to like themselves and thus refuse to see any good qualities
within themselves, in order to maintain that goal of self-hatred.
Sometimes we rely on the
very things we think we want to get rid of in ourselves. Disliking yourself
is the goal you want to achieve, and finding good qualities in yourself
would disrupt that teleology.
When someone comes looking
for a cure for this or that habit that they wish were not there, an
Adlerian psychologist refuses to treat it because it is usually a symptom
of something deeper at play. Moreover, the thing they hate is often a way
of protecting themselves. If they were really cured of that thing they
hated, life would not be any better, whether it’s a student wanting to pass
an exam or an employee hoping for a transfer. There was one young, very shy
woman who wanted to be cured of her blushing so she could confidently walk
up to the guy she liked and tell him she wanted him. But she actually
“needed” her blushing because it protected her against the risk of a deeper
fear of rejection. As long as she was blushing, she did not have to talk to
him, and as long as she did not talk to him, she did not have to worry
about rejection.
If you are like most
people, you believe that no one would want to get involved with anyone as
messed up as you feel you are. What you are really afraid of is the dislike
of others and being hurt. The telos
or goal is to reject yourself before someone else can.
The goal of avoiding hurt
is easy to accomplish. Simply find all the reasons you are deficient, count
them carefully and often, and slowly become the kind of person who does not
enter into relationships with others. When you become the kind of person
who does not do relationships well, you have an excuse to tell yourself
when you get rejected. You could be loved if only you were not already the
kind of person who is unlovable.
Your identity as antisocial
is a virtue that you want to maintain, to live up to, as it were. There is
some kind of perk you are getting out of it (probably avoidance of
rejection) or you would have stopped it a long time ago.
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4. Life becomes
simpler and we become ourselves when we learn to separate tasks.
According to Adlerian
psychology, all our problems are interpersonal problems at root, and the
vast majority of our interpersonal troubles spring from confusion over how
to separate tasks. To determine whose task it is, ask, “Who, ultimately, is
going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?”
Think of how many parents
get on their child’s case for not studying. The parents make it their task
to force their child to study and get good grades, but if you ask the
question who receives the result of the choice not to study, the
answer is: the child. But how can this be? The child’s job is to study, but
surely the parents’ task is to make sure the child does, right?
Wrong. Think about the
phrase that parents often invoke: “It’s for your own good.” It is a deeply
misleading phrase. When parents push their child to study, it is almost
always about their own goal to be viewed by their community as good parents
and upstanding citizens and to maintain control. Really, it is for the
parents’ own good. The child will intuit the sleight of hand and resent
it—even if he can’t yet put to words what he is feeling.
The parent should not
choose willful ignorance about the child’s activity, but in order to
clarify the separation of tasks, parents need to tell the child that
studying is the child’s responsibility. Parents can be ready to help if
help is requested, but otherwise it is best for them not to interfere.
The separation of tasks is
needed in any relationship, not just between parents and children. With
friends, business partners, family members, and marriage partners,
clarifying tasks matters. A general rule of thumb is that the closer the
relationship, the more necessary defining tasks becomes. The separation of
tasks extends even to counselor-client relationships. Many people come to a
psychologist or counselor with the expectation of being fixed. But you do
not bring your soul to a therapist the way people bring their cars to the
mechanic. The task of fixing a person is never the counselor’s job. It is
up to the client to change.
Life is going to be
burdensome until you learn to clarify tasks and give people back the tasks
that are not yours. You will empower the person to whom the task properly
belongs and you will relieve some of the suffering that comes from carrying
more than is yours or feeling let down when others do not do your tasks for
you. Take a load off your shoulders by discovering which tasks are yours
and which are not.
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5. True freedom
belongs only to those who find the courage to be disliked.
Because all our problems
are ultimately interpersonal problems, one might try to become free from
problems by eradicating interpersonal relationships. No more relationships,
no more problems, right? But even if we completely abandoned society, there
would still be the voices of others inside our heads with which we would be
forced to contend. It is impossible to be fully alone. Thus we do not find
true freedom by getting rid of others, but by having the courage to be
disliked by them.
When we look for the
approval and recognition of others, we live other people’s lives rather
than our own. We find ways to squeeze ourselves into molds of expectation
that others have for us. We lose ourselves in the process.
The people who suffer are
not the ones who live without recognition, but the ones who live for it.
They put themselves at the mercy of people who may or may not give them
what they want.
Despite our most meticulous
efforts, some people are simply not going to like us. As long as we attempt
to get recognition from everyone we will be stressed and anxious in our
relationships and devastated when we are disliked. We will stew in the
guilt and disappointment, wonder what we could have done differently, and
mentally play out renditions of exchanges that would have been “better.”
The difference between true
freedom and slavery to recognition is akin to the difference between
pushing a boulder uphill and allowing the boulder to fall down a hill.
Seeking recognition is an impulse as natural as gravity. It’s the
equivalent of letting the boulder roll down the hill. It is not hard to
start seeking recognition. But what happens to the boulder constantly
hurtling downhill? The unique shape and edges are chipped away. There is no
individual character to it. Finding the strength to push the boulder uphill
is hard work, but as we build those muscles, we realize that we are much
more ourselves and much more fulfilled. Our unique edges are not carved
away.
When you are disliked by
someone, it is a sign that you are not attempting to yield to their
expectations for you, that you are moving freely, according to what you
believe is best—not someone else. This will inevitably rub someone the
wrong way. But being disliked is the price to be paid for freedom. You will
not have the courage to be happy until you find the courage to be disliked.
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