#40: A Little Knowledge Lights the Way

The origins of a new discipline in psychology: gardening with grouches.

“Wait. This whole field of psychology started because of a kid calling her dad a grouch?!”

Curled up on one end of the living room couch, my stepson - The Boy™ - is deejaying while reading from an introductory psychology textbook. No, it’s not forced indoctrination, although the thought has crossed my mind more than once, to bring additional balance to a home full of current and future engineers. No, this study is of his own accord, in advance of next term’s AP Psychology course.

I’m in the kitchen, seasoning a soup and being (happily) peppered with questions. Like the one above, relating to a section on the origins of positive psychology. The sub-specialty was born in the late 1990s after renowned psychologist Martin Seligman had an epiphany while weeding his garden with his five-year-old daughter. It was going as efficiently as you might expect, and after expressing his frustration with her silliness, she had some advice:

“Well, daddy, on my fifth birthday I decided that I wasn’t going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”
Dr. Martin Seligman, interviewed by Kim Mills on the podcast, Speaking of Psychology

What Dr. Seligman then wondered was whether it was possible to, indeed, stop being a grouch. Could a perennial pessimist learn positivity? Is there such a thing as a scientific study of positive psychology?

I’ve spoken in the past about my brief dalliance with natural medicine. What attracted me to it initially was the deep thread of humanity embedded within it, and which is often lost in the teaching and practice of healthcare. I would move on from the field because of its lack of rigour and evidence, but that spark - the interest in nurturing the good in us - continued to gestate. As I moved on from undergraduate studies of what made being a more optimistic person, to predictors of well-being, I came across Seligman’s gardening epiphany, fleshed out in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, with his colleague, the late Christopher Peterson.

“…psychology had been all about what was wrong, pathology, weakness, the things that were going wrong in the world. Indeed, I had worked on that for 30 years. Depression, schizophrenia, drug addiction, suicide and the like, but that’s only half the battle. The other half of the battle is recognizing what’s going well in life, building it and leading your life around it.” - Dr. Martin Seligman

Everyone may have weaknesses - some anxiety, bouts of depression, being prone to stress - but according to Seligman and Peterson (2004), these features do not cancel out the anxious person’s courage or kindness, the depressed person’s leadership or persistence, or the stressed person’s love of learning or spirituality. Instead, the study of positive psychology focuses on describing, measuring, and then finding ways to nurture these strengths, which we all have in varying degrees.

If you have about 30 minutes, you can learn for free¹ your unique profile of strengths.

Personally, I’ve found it immensely valuable in self-awareness and self-care, as it has helped me frame my own character development. (Maybe it could help you frame your characters’ development, too!) To give you a sense of the results, here’s a screen cap of my top five, i.e., the most prominent strengths that characterize “Bryn”. Interesting that my top five are from two virtues: wisdom and transcendence. I feel so Yoda (although, truthfully, I’m Grogu eating all the blue cookies).

What do you think your strengths are? What does the test tell you, and are you surprised?

Credit: David Selbert

With the page turn of the calendar comes an avalanche of resolve.

To do more. To change something. To be better.

It’s easy for us to think about what’s wrong, but in line with the letters I shared with Camille, I want to instead make a more concerted effort about seizing the present. But rather than focus on what I don’t have (i.e., an inability to not eat the entire pan of blue cookies butterscotch confetti squares²), what can I do to nurture and lean into my strengths? Some initial ideas I’ve started exploring in the early new year include:

• The temperature blanket that I started last week (creativity, love of learning).

• A shortlist of half-day and full-day winter hikes, so Ben and I are never stuck for a place to trek on the weekend. It will help us get outside in these colder days (appreciation of the beautiful outdoors, curiosity).

• Illustrating really funny text conversations between my family and I in my yearly journal (humour, creativity).

• Reading more. I just downloaded StoryGraph to document my literary travels, which often touch on all five strengths. (I just finished Where the Deer nd the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman, and love his word play and dry humour.)

• Listening to full albums, and hopefully finding new artists to add to my playlists. So far, I’ve listened to Atum: A Rock Opera in Three Acts (Smashing Pumpkins); The Immaculate Collection (Madonna); and, Wet Leg’s self-titled album.

• And of course, writing Campfire Notebook!

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I explain some of the history of the birth of this new area of psychological study to The Boy™. There’s a brief pause, and then quiet mutters over the rock tune streaming from the next room as he flips the page. Something about how he, too, could have been famous in a textbook for telling his dad he’s a crab sometimes.

It seems humour is a strength of his, too.

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1. You can purchase detailed reports, or you can see for free the summary profile like I have. The free profile has all 24 in order of most prominent (top 5), to your middle strengths (6-19), and then your five lesser strengths. I haven’t seen the detailed reports, but assume they get into the more in-depth descriptions of the strengths found in their classification manual I linked above, updated with references, etc. The book itself is an interesting read, as it talks about their criteria for what makes a strength, how they settled on the 24, and then a substantive description of each one.

2. You know the ones - the butterscotch and peanut butter ones dotted with coloured marshmallows. If you don’t - if these were not part of your exposure to church-adjacent functions - well, they are a capital-T treat.