Blog on mind and brain research and advice

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

March 12, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Apparently, there are some extraordinary people out there who can cure whatever ails us, physically or psychologically. We know this because they excel at self-promotion to the extent that they’re difficult to escape. One of them is the neuroscientist who shall remain nameless and who seems to have spawned a minor genre of professionals debunking his overblown and/or inaccurate claims.

Another is motivational speaker, author, and podcast host Mel Robbins, who can provide us with dating and relationship advice, health advice, sleep advice, explain how we can control our thoughts and feelings, tap into our “limitless potential,” reset our brain, get a handle on stress and anxiety, achieve our goals, lose weight, handle criticism, be happy, confident, and creative, stop getting gratitude wrong (where have I heard that before?), and get along better with our in-laws and other family members. As to the latter, I recommend relocating. It worked for me, so I think that makes me an expert in this field.

She’s the author of several best-selling books, has given a “viral” TED talk, and is a frequent guest on the incestuous self-help circuit. I learned these things by searching online. Prior to the kerfuffle after the December 2024 publication of her most recent book, I had encountered her once, randomly, on You Tube, watched a few minutes of a talk, and moved on, although LinkedIn keeps suggesting I should connect with her. I watched her TED talk and a podcast episode on The 5 Second Rule and read a short excerpt of The Let Them Theory before writing this. I also watched some podcasts and read some posts by others that address the controversy—or I should say outrage—surrounding The Let Them Theory. I’ll put some links at the end.

Prior to her extremely successful stint as a motivational speaker, Robbins was a criminal defense lawyer. This is important.

In a nutshell, The Let Them Theory reminds us that we can’t control others, so we should simply let them do whatever they’re doing. This might sound either obvious or like it could be about our relationships with other people—that it expresses some generosity of spirit—but it’s really not about them. It’s about us and not letting the bad things they are doing get to us. This is questionable advice offered by someone with Green Operating System to other people with Green Operating System. It’s based on Robbins’ interpretation of Let Them, a “theory” that did not originate with her.

No Gratitude for You!

The person who popularized this phrase is Cassie Phillips, who wrote a poem titled Let Them in 2019. This and a subsequent poem titled Let Me became very popular. Phillips gave permission for the poems to be used freely by others. She had “Let Them,” in her own handwriting, tattooed on her inner arm. Many others followed suit.

People familiar with Phillips and her poems were quite surprised that Robbins doesn’t mention Phillips, either in her book or in the frequent guest appearances during which she describes her “discovery” of the concept and the writing of the book she considers to be her “legacy.” It may be her legacy, all right, just not the one she intended.

As if this complete lack of acknowledgement isn’t sufficient insult or injury, Robbins is attempting to trademark the phrase Phillips came up with. If she were to be successful, it would mean no one could use the phrase without her permission, and if anyone did (say some of the many people who have had Phillips’ permission to use it for the past couple of years), Robbins could sue them. Her applications were rejected—for good reason—but she didn’t apply the Let Them theory in this instance. Instead she’s filed for a 6-month extension to restate her case, which means this issue won’t be resolved until later this year. So much for taking your own advice.

Irony Abounds

I’ve seen Robbins give credit to people whose work she couldn’t get away with claiming as her own. It seems especially egregious, given the personal narrative she’s crafted about her rise to success, that she has no problem trampling on people who have fewer resources than she has and essentially stealing from them.

That seems to include her own daughter, Sawyer, who Robbins identified as co-author of The Let Them Theory but whose name was notably absent from the book’s cover. After being called out on this, Robbins recently “gifted” her daughter with credit as a birthday present. (Aren’t you glad you’re not a member of that family?) Sawyer’s name is now included under Robbins’ name, in much smaller print, where it used to say “New York Times Bestselling Author.”

So here is a person, Mel Robbins, who came across a concept articulated by someone else and decided not only to run with it and fail to acknowledge the source, but also to burn the person who had contributed her work to the world in a genuine act of generosity. This is deeply, deeply disturbing behavior. Maybe even pathological.

I would find it odious in any human being but Robbins makes a living advising people on how to live their lives. But it’s important to understand that her purpose in developing a motivational speaker career was to make a lot of money and be successful. She’s tapped into a large audience that is ripe for seduction by motivational hucksterism with little inclination to look behind the curtain. Unlike Phillips, Robbins and her followers—as well as her enablers in the self-help world—are not remotely interested in assisting people in identifying or reaching for aspirational goals. They’re interested in the quick fix, the clever or memorable turn of phrase, the NYT bestseller list, the external signs and trappings of adulation, approval, and material success.

Robbins is a prime example of someone who is in a position where both the experience and the expression of gratitude are wholly appropriate. She ought not to have to be told to publicly acknowledge Cassie Phillips and her daughter, Sawyer. But as I mentioned in a previous post, people like Robbins may talk about gratitude and have much, in theory, to be grateful for, but they aren’t the ones developing a gratitude practice or even expressing gratitude on a personal level. They want to succeed. And it’s more important to them that their success be perceived as a function of their work, their talent, their insight than it is to acknowledge the contributions of others. They need to maintain the narrative. As a result, they don’t just fail to add value to the world; they subtract value from it.

Some links:

Cassie Phillips on Instagram
Sage Justice on Substack
Andy Mort | The Gentle Rebel podcast
angyl can’t read

Previous posts in this series: Should You Practice Gratitude? ~ The Cosmic Gift & Misery Distribution System ~ Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

Always Look on
the Bright Side of Life

March 8, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a British movie but Always Look on the Bright Side of Life could easily be America’s theme song. Barbara Ehrenreich covered the pitfalls of what some call toxic positivity in her book Bright-Sided, which I read shortly after it was published in 2009. It probably goes without saying that I have never been on the positive psychology bandwagon so I welcomed her blistering critique of compulsory optimism.

As one reviewer of Ehrenreich’s book said, “There’s no need to try to sugar-coat the world; reality is far more interesting.”

But what better way to keep our attention focused on the bright side than to get us to compulsively itemize the things we are—or ought to be—grateful for? In fact, many of the benefits cited by a majority of articles and videos promoting the development of a gratitude practice are aimed at generating or increasing a sense of personal wellbeing.

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? —Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

The primary purpose of counting our blessings, in the view of many, isn’t to make us better people. It isn’t to fortify us to go forth and help create a more equitable or humanitarian world for everyone. It’s to make us feel better about ourselves.

Gratitude is touted as a coping mechanism, an alternative to “junk food, self-medication, shopping, etc.” Some so-called coping mechanisms may be inherently less harmful than others, but all coping mechanisms are intended to modify a perceived negative emotional state: to change the way we feel without addressing the circumstances or situation.

When we practice gratitude, we shift our attention from what’s wrong or missing to what is here. —Rev. Connie L. Habash, LMFT

Putting attention on “what’s wrong or missing” is assumed to be counterproductive to this aim. Yet some who have explored the gratitude practice phenomenon have discovered a dark side to trying to drum up gratitude. One negative side effect is invalidating difficult or unpleasant emotions. Emotions provide us with information, so trying to avoid some and only experience others disconnects us from that stream of information.

I suppose that 20 years ago when my partner died suddenly, I could have focused on being grateful for the decades he and I had spent together or for the fact that I still had Tashi, our cat, or that I could remain where I was living. But thinking about what I still had would not have diminished the enormous chasm in my life. He was missing. And that meant something to me. When I think about identifying what I was grateful for in that instance, it feels at the very least dismissive and shallow.

Making ourselves feel better, or trying to, has limits—at least if we want to retain our humanity.

It’s impossible not to conclude that the emphasis on looking for things to be grateful for, no matter what angle we come at it from, serves to—in some cases is even intended to—maintain the status quo. It keeps us focused inward, on ourselves. It chips away at our sense of agency. It requires us to be beholden to someone or something else: the giver who bestows gifts based on criteria we are unaware of and have no influence on. It admonishes us to be satisfied and content—to not wish for more.

It’s an extremely powerful barrier to creating transformational change.

When I said “more,” above, I wasn’t referring to accumulating material goods or status. I mean “more” in the sense of aspiring to be more, to have a more satisfying and meaningful life, and to achieve the objectives that make that possible. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine that will seek immediate gratification unless we train it to help us up our game and our aspirations.

Living = Acting in the World

Essential to creativity is a ferocious dissatisfaction with the status quo. —Roger Mavity, How to Steal Fire

Focusing our attention on what we have is an attempt to inoculate us against dissatisfaction, especially ferocious dissatisfaction, along with anguish, discomfort, sadness, longing, tragedy, confusion, loss, or just a bad mood. There are numerous problems with this trajectory, one of which is that it also inoculates us against joy, exuberance, desire, curiosity, and aspiration.

The most useful—and the most human—way to proceed is to be grateful when we’re grateful, dissatisfied or uncomfortable when we’re dissatisfied or uncomfortable, sad or confused when we’re sad or confused, and joyful, happy, or exuberant when we’re joyful, happy, or exuberant.

And then to be curious. What is it we’re grateful for, dissatisfied with, uncomfortable or sad about? What is the source of our confusion? What is making us happy, joyful, or exuberant? What are we longing for?

Lastly, is there something for us to do about what we’re experiencing? We are not stuck with any status quo. We are not required to accommodate ourselves to our circumstances. We have an ability to create positive, intentional, significant, and sustained change. That’s what we are built for.

There is one more post to come in this series.

The Cosmic Gift & Misery
Distribution System

February 28, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Yesterday morning I looked out onto my patio and discovered a red Mylar balloon in the shape of a heart lazily floating to and fro in the breeze. Today it’s gone, carried away by a gust of wind.

This is New Mexico, after all: the wind giveth and the wind taketh away. The wind routinely creates “fugitive dust,” for which there is a system of warnings in place. The wind is at the top of my list of things I dislike about living here. The light is at the top of my list of things I love.

Sometimes delivery people drop off food I didn’t order, leaving it on the mat outside my front door because they only notice the letter designation of my apartment and not the number of the building. There’s no one to call, no indication of who the food was meant for. Rarely, do these delivery people ring my doorbell or knock on the door, so I have no idea how long the food has been there. I carry it across the parking lot and deposit it in the dumpster.

According to one of the articles I read on developing a gratitude practice, life owes me nothing and all the good I have is a gift.

When I entertain this notion, I’m faced with a disquieting cascade of questions I’m sure philosophers, ethicists, and religious scholars, among others, have been ruminating over for centuries.

I tend to imagine a couple of possible general scenarios. One is that someone or something is determining how “the good” should be parceled out to living creatures. (I include animals here, as it’s obvious the circumstances of their lives vary as greatly as do the circumstances of humans.) Someone who enjoys more good circumstances than bad might find this notion comforting. They wouldn’t question it, thus avoiding looking a gift horse or force in the mouth. They might feel deserving, as well as “blessed.” Maybe their good circumstances make them feel kindly toward those less blessed. Maybe they don’t.

Perhaps kindliness is what a gratitude practice is meant to foster, but there’s no indication that the extremely fortunate comprise the target audience for lessons in gratitude. In many cases it appears that the better one’s circumstances are, the less likely one is to want to share and the less grateful one is. There’s a belief, especially among the most materially fortunate that they alone are responsible for their success. So this method of distribution does not seem to be an overall plus for humanity as a whole—at least if the distributor (let’s just call it that) or distributing force might be expected to have an attitude of good will or good faith toward earth’s living creatures.

The other, equally dubious, scenario is that someone or something is indiscriminately tossing around Mylar balloons or take-out food or IQ points or loving parents or stock dividends. Maybe this distributor or distributing force isn’t paying close attention to the delivery address and isn’t concerned about whether the recipient of such a “gift” wants or needs it; what anyone ends up with is entirely random. This seems less inherently comforting than the first notion but a lot more in line with both experience and observation.

The most relevant definition of gift seems to be this one: something bestowed or acquired without being sought or earned by the receiver.

Gifts, by nature and by definition, are in the control of the giver not in the control of the receiver. We are wired to want things: that’s the definition of motivation. So it’s no easy task to persuade people to be satisfied with their lot in life—not just satisfied, but also grateful!

It’s quite natural that we would want to try to game this system. What can we do to get more gifts? If we can influence the distribution of gifts to get more, are they technically still gifts? Is this a zero-sum game or are there an unlimited number of gifts to be bestowed?

While I agree we aren’t owed anything in particular, it doesn’t then logically follow that all (everything good) we have is a “gift.” First, if this is true for one person, it’s true for everyone: everything anyone has is a gift. So: so what? Presumably everyone gets something. This is just the way the system works. We didn’t set it up and we don’t operate it. It’s literally out of our hands.

The Misery

Second, if this applies to “the good,” it must also apply to “the bad,” unless that’s a different distribution system. What, then, is the appropriate response to the bad that has been delivered to us? There’s a fad in some circles to look at difficult circumstances as “a gift,” too, but those advising us to do so are usually not the ones upon whom such misfortune has been bestowed. I think it requires a certain amount of both privilege and ignorance to adopt this attitude, and espousing it for others seems rather callous.

Yes, each of us may have our personal misfortunes to deal with, but no one reading this is hungry and tired, living in a crowded, torn tent in the winter amid rubble, dead bodies, and unexploded ordnance, wary of snipers trying to shoot us in the head should we venture out to find food for our family.

Are we supposed to be grateful for that? And if we are, what are the ramifications?

One more gratitude post to come.

Should You Practice Gratitude?

February 24, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

No. There you go; you can stop reading and move on with your life, unless you, too have ever wondered what the point is of looking for things to be grateful for and then writing about or listing them.

I previously called out empathy and authenticity, so why not go for a positive psychology trifecta and knock off gratitude, as well, right? To be fair, both empathy and authenticity—at least as authenticity applies to human beings—can be written off as valid concepts, while the same can’t be said for gratitude. What I’m taking aim at here is not gratitude itself, but gratitude as a practice, which involves focusing time and attention on identifying things to be grateful for.

One might think that’s a better focus of time and attention than identifying things to be distressed by, but we shouldn’t be too quick to make that assumption. In my workshop Anatomy of Desire, I ask participants to create three lists: what they have that they like, what they have that they don’t like, and what they don’t have that they want. Writing a list of things we’re grateful for over and over is like being stuck on repeat at step 1 in this list-making process, a step that’s intended as a prequel to the most important step: identifying what we want.

What Is Gratitude, Anyway?

To answer that question, we must head once more into the breach: much as I discovered in researching empathy, it depends on who you ask, what’s being measured, what perspective the person talking about it is coming from, and what his or her agenda or aim is.

Gratitude is considered by some to be an emotion. I could explain why trying to create and sustain a particular emotion, whether “positive” or “negative,” is wrong-headed, but you probably already know that, and gratitude is clearly not an emotion.

There are emotions that accompany the experience of gratitude but they vary from one person to another and even from one situation to another within the same person. A drink of cold water when we’re thirsty, an unexpected gift from a friend, the warmth of home on a snowy day, or the arrival of a tow truck when our vehicle is stranded on a dark lonely road will elicit different types of gratitude and a different range of emotions.

In researching gratitude practices, I encountered several different varieties, including what I call bright-siding gratitude, undeserved gratitude (I am not worthy, but thanks, anyway), and performative gratitude. I’ll tackle that last one in this post.

We’re Doing It Wrong

A neuroscience guru who shall remain nameless claims that everyone is practicing gratitude wrong. He says new research reveals it isn’t experiencing gratitude that matters; it’s expressing it to someone else or watching it being expressed by other people. That would make gratitude an action or behavior.

This is not a new or original idea. An article from Greater Good Magazine quotes a passage from the New Testament in which Jesus healed 10 lepers but only one returned to thank him. Jesus muses as to whether or not the other nine were ungrateful (which is something it is very, very bad to be). The author of the article questions whether or not their gratitude “counted” if they didn’t express it.

The notion that gratitude is something you actively express to the person to whom you are grateful suggests the idea of making lists of things you’re grateful for, which might include a sunny day, does not represent gratitude. Gratitude, by this definition, is an expression, not an experience.

So then can we only be grateful (express gratitude) toward other people? Most of us don’t routinely express gratitude to the water that quenches our thirst or the furnace that heats our home. Yes, there are some cultures that thank nature and the environment for what is provided, but that is not the case for any of the cultures that are part of my heritage or the heritage of most people I know. And it’s beside the point. The water and the heater cannot receive our expressions of gratitude.

The Debt of Gratitude

This view of gratitude turns it into nothing more than a transactional social interaction, which excludes the water and the heater as recipients. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that obligation is one of the synonyms for gratitude. Are we motivated to express gratitude because we’re supposed to? Certainly children are repeatedly told to “say thank you.” In days of yore, writing thank you cards was a chore many children routinely put off. But is “thank you” an expression of gratitude or is it simply an acknowledgement? Is it any different from saying “hello” when you encounter a friend or answer the telephone or saying “good-by” when you leave or end your call?

The aforementioned neuroscience guru claims the expression of gratitude releases dopamine, which is apparently enough to validate this theory. But dopamine is released when we complete a task or a behavior loop. If doing so involved throwing a plate against a wall or shouting an obscenity, dopamine would be released whenever we did that, too. Dopamine motivates us to do everything we do. Dopamine literally is motivation.

The notion that performative gratitude has any inherent value is highly dubious. And I don’t recommend taking up expressing gratitude or finding instances when you can observe other people expressing gratitude, which sounds kind of creepy, in order to generate the release of the dopamine. There are far better ways to generate dopamine and less-creepy things you could be observing.

Wellbeing Enhancement

Most of the cheerleaders for gratitude practice point out how gratitude reportedly enhances our sense of wellbeing—or in some cases, our actual wellbeing. This idea is relatively unexamined, although there’s a tiny sub-genre of writing about gratitude practice that considers the potential negative impacts. The exploration of negative effects, however, is limited to effects on individuals. I believe the negative effects far outweigh the positive and that they extend beyond individuals to groups, societies, and humanity in general.

So…obviously there is more to come.

You Give Truth a Bad Name

January 10, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Not necessarily you, personally. But maybe you. If so, you should stop doing that.

When I came across a promising article posted on a writers’ website titled “The World Needs Writers Now More than Ever” I could do nothing but nod in agreement, although my perspective runs more along the lines of when hasn’t the world needed writers?

I started reading with great expectations—which were immediately dashed when the author referred to writers as “truth tellers.” She says:

Most of us write to discover what we think and believe about the world, and, in the process, we arrive at a certain kind of truth. We share that truth with the world through our words.

That’s a nice idea, but she’s giving writers too much credit for high-mindedness. Far too many of them are active truth dissemblers.

But…fair enough. It’s the case for some writers I know and it’s frequently the case for me to use writing to explore rather than to explain. It’s a practice available to anyone that I wish more people would take advantage of. But a majority of people in this world, including writers, are far more interested in what they know than in what they don’t know. And they write from a position of absoluteness, as if what they have to say is the final word on how it is, what to do about it, and who is right and who is wrong. “A certain kind of truth” needs more definition.

I was further dismayed by a subheading midway through the piece claiming that all of us “have to tell our truth.” Things that are true are factual. There is evidence for them. Something happened or it didn’t happen. It either is or it isn’t. Or maybe we don’t know. Our lack of knowledge has no effect on the truth. There is no truth that is exclusively yours or mine. What this writer appears to be talking about is personal experience which is exclusively yours or mine, even when aspects of it seems to be shared.

However, I expect more from a writer, especially one writing about the craft of writing on a writing website. Personal experience and “truth” are not one and the same. As a writer, that’s a distinction she ought to assist people in making. Conflating experience and truth is what gives truth a bad name. Personalizing truth makes it wonky, unstable, vague.

If we can’t agree on what truth is, then it is hopeless to expect that we can ever recognize truth and respond to or deal effectively with it. It was snowing 10 minutes ago—a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it bit of flurries, but snowing nonetheless. The fact that someone indoors didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means it wasn’t part of that person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t really like snow, but that doesn’t mean snow is bad even though my experience of it is often unpleasant.

Every child in a multiple-child family has a different experience of their parents. They tell different stories with different details and different meanings and different outcomes. None of them are true because there’s no such thing as a true story. We are all personalizing. Well, to be more accurate, our brain is personalizing.

It is processing sensory data through our personal mental model which contains our personal beliefs and making personal interpretations that give rise to our personal experience. Your experience is your experience and mine is mine. Just because it feels “real” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate reflection of reality. If someone doesn’t experience their own experiences as real, they are likely in a dissociative state, which is not healthy. But claiming that one’s experience is or represents the truth is essentially lying.

We are being sold the idea that our experience is our truth as a way of encouraging us to not deny our experience, to give it voice. This is all well and good, but not if in the process we actually disempower ourselves by failing to take into account that we play a role in how our brain creates our experiences. Besides, if our experience represents the truth, then it is not changeable. We have no power or agency in the matter. The world happens to us and we can’t do anything about it. That is not a desirable state of affairs. And it’s not true.

Storytelling

There are types of experiences that humans tend to have—that we are wired to have, so to speak. Some of them may be given less validity by the society or culture in which we live. Sharing such experiences can validate them, which can bring them out into the open, assist individuals in recognizing others have similar experiences, and broaden the understanding of who we all are (as humans).

Stories pack an emotional punch, or they can, that non-fiction does far less easily. So telling a story of your own experience or of someone else’s can have a profound effect. You could say it represents “a certain kind of truth,” but that truth is abstract, not to be confused or conflated with “the truth.” It is a true experience. You or I or someone lived through it. It is what you or I or someone felt. It is how we perceived it.

Some may even consider abstract truth to be more important and certainly more profound than mere facts. Reading stories about other people’s experiences—especially in the form of literary fiction—has been repeatedly shown to help develop social acuity, emotional intelligence, compassion, understanding, and critical thinking, among other things. In short, it can make us better people.

But it’s vital that we know how to separate fact from fiction and experience from reality and that we all have a basic agreement as to what we’re talking about when we talk about truth. Our experience is real, but it is not the truth.