Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

When Ted and Karen met, they were opposites attracting. Karen radiated spontaneity and lightness. Ted, a serious guy with the weight of the world on his shoulders, felt that her carefree presence transformed his life. “Everything she says and does is charming,” he effused. In turn, Ted represented the rock-like “father figure” she had never had. He was just the kind of stable, reliable guy who could give her a sense of security.

But a few short years later, Ted saw Karen as an irresponsible airhead. “She never takes anything seriously … I can’t depend on her.” And Karen saw Ted as a judgmental tyrant, dissecting her every move.

In the end, this marriage was saved—only because the couple learned to respond to each other not with angry labels, but with helpful actions. One day, when Karen was swamped with work, Ted came home to a messy house. He was angry and wanted to scold her, but, drawing on what he’d learned from Beck, he instead said to himself, “What is the mature thing to do?” He answered his own question by starting to clean things up. He was offering Karen support rather than judgment.

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

Aaron Beck tells couples in counseling never to think these fixed-mindset thoughts: My partner is incapable of change. Nothing can improve our relationship. These ideas, he says, are almost always wrong.

Sometimes it’s hard not to think those thoughts—as in the case of Bill and Hillary Clinton. When he was president, Clinton lied to the nation and to his wife about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Hillary defended him: “My husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.”

The truth came out, as it has a way of doing, especially when helped by a special prosecutor. Hillary, betrayed and furious, now had to decide whether Bill was a permanently bad and untrustworthy husband or a man who needed a lot of help.

This i good time to bring up an important point: The belief that partners have the potential for change should not be confused with the belief that the partner will change. The partner has to want to change, commit to change, and take concrete actions toward change.

The Clintons went into counseling, spending one full day a week for a year in the process. Through counseling, Bill came to understand how, as the child of alcoholic parents, he had learned to lead a dual life. On the one hand, he’d learned to shoulder excessive responsibility at an early age—for example, as a boy sternly forbidding his stepfather to strike his mother. On the other hand, he had another part of his life where he took little responsibility, where he made believe everything was okay no matter what was going on. That’s how he could appear on TV and earnestly vow that he was not involved with Lewinsky. He was in that no-responsibility and high-denial space.

People were urging Hillary to forgive him. One evening, Stevie Wonder called the White House to ask if he could come over. He had written a song for her on the power of forgiveness, and he played it to her that night.

Yet Hillary could not have forgiven a person she saw as a liar and a cheat. She could only forgive a man she thought was earnestly struggling with his problems and trying to grow.

THE PARTNER AS ENEMY

With the fixed mindset, one moment your partner is the light of your life, the next they’re your adversary. Why would people want to transform the loved one into an enemy?

When you fail at other tasks, it’s hard to keep blaming someone else. But when something goes wrong in a relationship, it’s easy to blame someone else. In fact, in the fixed mindset you have a limited set of choices. One is to blame your own permanent qualities. And one is to blame your partner’s. You can see how tempting it is to foist the blame onto the other guy.

As a legacy of my fixed mindset, I still have an irresistible urge to defend myself and assign blame when something in a relationship goes wrong. “It’s not my fault!” To deal with this bad habit, my husband and I invented a third party, an imaginary man named Maurice. Whenever I start in on who’s to blame, we invoke poor Maurice and pin it on him.

Remember how hard it is for people with the fixed mindset to forgive? Part of it is that they feel branded by a rejection or breakup. But another part is that if they forgive the partner, if they see him or her as a decent person, then they have to shoulder more of the blame themselves: If my partner’s a good guy, then I must be a bad guy. I must be the person who was at fault.

The same thing can happen with parents. If you have a troubled relationship with a parent, whose fault is it? If your parents didn’t love you enough, were they bad parents or were you unlovable? These are the ugly questions that haunt us within a fixed mindset. Is there a way out?