When Museum Becomes Tourism

France took a step that inadvertently elevated the standard of tourism by creating the world’s first Ministry of Culture in 1959. The newly elected President Charles de Gaulle wanted to revive and enhance French culture. He appointed the writer André Malraux the first minister of culture, with a mandate to give the public free access to the culture of France. The hyperactive Malraux jumped into the job. With equal doses of imagination and egalitarianism, Malraux assembled a bureaucracy to register, repair and recover all that was considered France’s patrimony or national heritage.
 
Malraux built on the work begun a hundred years earlier by Prosper Mérimée, also an author, who as France’s inspector-general of monuments spent over eighteen years listing and protecting France’s historic masterpieces. He blocked locals from destroying masterpieces, saving 4,000 buildings by classifying them as historical monuments, including the bridge at Avignon and the basilica at Vézelay. Malraux institutionalized this preservation and went further by getting laws passed requiring the centuries-old buildings to be cleaned. And he declared that, if at all possible, these gorgeous buildings and monuments had to be open to the public—French and foreign alike.
 
Under Malraux, the French museum system became one of the most expansive in the world. Paris alone seems to add a new major museum every decade: the then-audacious Centre Georges Pompidou, which included the National Museum of Modern Art, opened in 1977; the Musée d’Orsay was a masterful 1986 conversion of a Beaux-Arts railroad station into the permanent home of the country’s collection of Impressionist paintings, and most recently the Quai Branly Museum of indigenous art was inaugurated in 2006.
 
That is just a portion of the cultural world opened up by the new ministry. From the beginning, Malraux was keen on establishing and supporting arts festivals around the country: music in Aix-en-Provence, photography in Perpignan, film in Cannes. The aim was to raise the profile of French culture; the result fifty years later was a multimillion-dollar cultural tourism business.

And so it went for several decades. Decisions and innovations of the French government, somehow, eventually provided the undergirding of the classic tourism industry of today. Tourism officials told me repeatedly, “This was done without regard to tourism,” while relating how critical some innovation had been for tourism.

 - Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

When Tourism Alleviates Poverty

The final anomaly is the central role of government. Tourism is that rare industry whose “product” is a country. Travelers first decide what countries to visit, and then what city, region, beach resort or historic site. And all travelers to foreign lands must pass through borders that are controlled by a government that issues visas, stamps passports or turns people away.
 
That is only the beginning. Governments are like the head of the octopus, controlling in obvious and subtle ways just about everything that affects travel and tourism. Governments can preserve cultural sites or allow them to be destroyed; they can set aside wilderness areas or issue permits to build resorts along a deserted beach; they can require sewage and water installations for any new construction or they can build super airports that flood rural areas with tens of thousands of tourists.
 
Some preservationists see proper tourism as a salvation for remote areas; others see tourism as slow death. Governments—local, regional and national levels—decide whether an international company can build a new hotel, whether to give a new route to an airline, whether to build a conference center, whether to bid for an international event like the Olympics. The list is endless and is critical to the industry.
 
Finally, governments are the main sales force for tourism. Offices and ministries of tourism spend millions of dollars promoting their country to tourists, with brands and slogans like “New Zealand—100% Pure”; “Incredible India”; “Austria. You’ve arrived!”; “South Africa: Inspiring new ways” or “Smile, you’re in Spain.” National tourism websites are the starting point for many travelers.

Tourism Requires Models of Good Practices
 
“The issue of numbers of tourists, what they do, that is the key to sustainability,” said Luigi Cabrini, the UNWTO’s expert on the subject. “We have to get away from the idea that sustainability is just ecotourism with five people alone walking in a forest. We need models of good practices.”
 
“The reputation of tourism is often poor, and rightly so,” said Cabrini. “It is an extremely sensitive sector. We need ethics codes, guidelines, statistics and data that help the industry, and to work with business, education, governments. That means also looking at pollution; environmental degradation; corporate cultural monotony of tourist establishments; international tourism that undermines local economies and dealing with the sheer number of tourists. In the end, tourism plays an important role alleviating poverty, widening appreciation of different cultures, as informal diplomacy and exchanging wealth from the rich to the poor nations.”

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

When Tourism Revives Economy

Three years later World War II broke out. France was occupied by Germany, and when the war ended in 1945, the devastation to French society and its economy was enormous; the immediate postwar situation desperate. The French turned to the Americans for help. … France was broke. It was incapable of quickly rebuilding its manufacturing sector in order to sell goods overseas and earn the hard currency it needed. What made sense was to bring the money to France, to have American tourists with dollars fill the tables at cafés and restaurants, buy souvenirs, take train rides and patronize hotels and country inns.
 
The French were excellent students; they wanted to make money. Once they understood what makes a hotel modern and comfortable, they convinced officials at the Marshall Plan to help underwrite a miniboom in hotel room construction. By the end of the plan France boasted 452,471 rooms, more than any other country in Europe. They also latched on to the idea of making Paris a popular city for conventions. From those American-inspired beginnings, Paris grew to become the world’s most popular city for meetings.
 
Tourism v.s. Public Diplomacy
 
U. S. officials also hoped that American tourists would play a role in diplomacy. In one of the first modern instances of tourism purposefully used as public diplomacy, both governments decided that American tourism would strengthen the ties between the two people and win the French over to the American side of the burgeoning Cold War. At that moment the French Communist Party was one of the strongest political parties in the country. The French government sided with the United States against the Soviet Union but not because of those American visitors.
 
On the contrary, this was the moment when the Americans and the French discovered how much they didn’t like each other. The American tourists thought the French were “haughty,” and the French thought the Americans were vulgar consumers. At one point the U.S. State Department had to print advisories to American travelers with “tips for your trip” for getting along with the French.
 
This was the first hint that simply letting tourists loose in a foreign country would not necessarily lead to better understanding. Mass tourism by people who couldn’t speak the native language often had the opposite effect. (The French eventually solved that problem by learning English, now the international language.)
 
The plan did fulfill the American goal of getting France back on its feet and firmly within the western camp, as well as establishing a new pattern of trade with the United States. The biggest impact, though, was on France, which exceeded its goal of wooing 3 million tourists to the country in 1952. American government aid had kick-started the modern tourism industry in France with those hotel rooms, tourist airfares and inculcation of the idea of Paris as the ideal city for glamour. From then on, the French government kept its hand in all aspects of tourism.

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

When Tourism Enriches the Elites

Cambodia was the last country drawn into the larger Vietnam War, and it was being torn apart by massive bombings, indiscriminate shelling and horrifying atrocities… Cambodians had to wait twenty more devastating years for peace to come, twenty years of unimaginable hell. The war ended in 1975 but the victorious Khmer Rouge immediately launched a revolution that killed off one-fourth of the people and purposely destroyed most of Cambodia’s sophisticated, cultured society. That fatal madness was followed by another decade of decay and neglect as Cambodia was fought over as a dubious prize in the last decade of the Cold War.
 
The United Nations finally sent a peacekeeping mission to Cambodia in 1993, putting an end to foreign intervention and years of war. They supervised a democratic election, but the losers threatened a civil war if they weren’t included in the government. The U.N. gave in to their demands and anointed a joint government that included some brilliant officials, some incompetent officials, many corrupt officials, all working in an atmosphere of mistrust. These were the people charged with reviving a poor, exhausted country with few resources.
 
They did agree on one matter—tourism would be essential to their recovery. There wasn’t much left standing after war, revolution, genocide, famine and degradation: manufacturing had been depleted by 1975; farming was largely at a subsistence level thanks to too many radical experiments; and many of the surviving professionals and educated classes had fled Cambodia for life overseas. Tourism, centered on Angkor, that would attract wealthy middle and adventurous classes, was the only industry that could bring in desperately needed foreign exchange.
 
Among poorer countries, Cambodia became a pioneer in using tourism as a development strategy at the end of war. In theory, the country had everything: the exquisite ruins at Angkor, comparable in their majesty and cultural importance to those in Greece and Egypt; unspoiled beaches and islands on the southern coast along the Gulf of Thailand; and the sophisticated French colonial legacy that could be seen in the cities and towns with their blend of Cambodian and French colonial architecture that was as seductive to modern tastes as the overlay of the British Raj in India. The fact that the country had been forbidden to tourists for decades made it all the more attractive. Cambodia was “authentic,” with its tragic history, delicate art, dance and cuisine, and its reputation for enchantment as well as cruelty.
 
Corruption and Shoddy Development
 
Tourism brings in $2 billion each year, but it enriches Cambodia’s elite rather than helping the underprivileged. Poverty and unemployment is worse around tourist areas, especially Angkor. It is changing the face of Cambodia—not for the better. In two recent surveys the National Geographic evaluated how countries cared for their priceless cultural heritage sites and coastlines. Cambodia was the only country that ranked among the worst in both categories. Angkor still impressed but was criticized for the unrestricted flood of tourists under “atrocious” management, the overdevelopment of nearby hotel areas that was threatening the temples themselves, and the exclusion of local Cambodians from benefiting from “this resource.”
 
Tourism has thrived on the practice of the government grabbing land from the farmers and peasants and then selling the property to firms tied to a few dozen elite officials. They are behind the country’s new resorts, hotels, spas and prime beachfronts. Those beach resorts in the south were singled out by the National Geographic jury for shoddy development, with too many seedy bars and hotels, poor waste management and a strong whiff of corruption.
 
Cambodia’s beauty can be breathtaking: Angkor gives many visitors a taste for the mystical. At the same time, tourists are often moved by this splendor in contrast to the country’s tragic modern history and poverty.
 
And on the surface the tourism industry is a huge success. Tourism proceeds account for 20 percent of Cambodia’s domestic product. Tourism is the second-largest employer in the country, providing 350,000 jobs, just behind the garment industry. Roland Eng, who is still a champion of his country’s tourism industry, presciently warned a few years ago that while tourism can bring wealth, alleviate poverty and conserve natural and cultural heritages, it has to be regulated. “Left to itself, tourism development does not necessarily fulfill those roles,” he wrote.

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

 

When Tourism Becomes 'Good News Only'

With few exceptions, travel writing and travel sections share the singular goal of helping consumers spend their money pursuing the dream of a perfect trip. They seldom write critical reviews; only articles about what to do and what to buy and how to experience a destination. This “feel-good” approach is rare even in lifestyle journalism, which is where to find the travel sections.
 
Modern travel writing took root in the late nineteenth century—the age of ocean liners and trains—when writers took it for granted that travel meant adventure, not comfort, and that anyone making a month-long trip overseas wanted to dive into foreign lands and cultures. In those days writers rarely specialized in travel alone. They saw themselves as the gatekeepers to the world, noting all that was miserable as well as glorious about foreign cultures. Their touchstone was Marco Polo, the grandfather of all travel writing.
 

New Heart of Travel?

An elegant woman who had been the editor of the newspaper’s influential Style section, Newhouse was a veteran of the “lifestyle” genre of reporting. With so many more nations to cover and technological changes in the travel industry, she refined her writers’ mission to concentrate on describing the experience of traveling to a certain destination and to write consumer stories to help tourists make the most of those trips.
 
These new consumer pieces were shorter and reported on lower fares and bargain flights, and they were decidedly subjective, emphasizing the personal point of view. “If you lose the vision of an individual, how they interpret a country, you’ve lost the heart of travel,” Newhouse said. Travel writing was becoming reporting an “experience” where the reporter didn’t need to know that much about Burma as show a talent for telling a good story about the experience of visiting Burma and well-researched recommendations for where to spend the night. This produced the major emphasis on “good news only” consumer travel writing. Travel sections told the reader where to go and what to do, but not what to avoid.
 
The rise of the Internet confirmed this direction. With its websites rating hotels, airlines, restaurants, and tours, travel writing became singularly focused on practical consumer information.
 
Travel writing and its refusal to treat the industry seriously can take some of the blame for tourism’s frivolous reputation.
 

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

When Tourism Becomes an Industry

But just as tourism is capable of lifting a nation out of poverty, it is just as likely to pollute the environment, reduce standards of living for the poor because the profits go to international hotel chains and corrupt local elites (what is called leakage), and cater to the worst of tourism, including condemning children to the exploitation of sex tourism. Like any major industry, tourism has a serious downside, especially since tourism and travel is underestimated as a global powerhouse; its study and regulation is spotty at best.
 
Tourism is one of those double-edged swords that may look like an easy way to earn desperately needed money but can ravage wilderness areas and undermine native cultures to fit into package tours… What is known is that tourism and travel is responsible for 5.3 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and the degradation of nearly every tropical beach in the world. Without global enforcement of basic rules, cruise ships are a major polluter of the seas and pose serious risks…
 
A Threat to native habitats and cultures
 
To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages.
 
Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.
 
“low volume and high value” tourism
 
In reaction, concerned industry leaders—large and small—and environmentalists have created the idea of ecotourism, a form of travel to promote the protection of natural habitats and eventually the preservation of local landscapes, cultures and people. The idea has become so popular it has entered the lexicon of political correctness. Philanthropists are underwriting ecolodges in Central America and wild game parks in sub-Saharan Africa. Tourists opt for vacations on organic European farms, while some add volunteer days at the end of their vacations in Asia to build homes for the poor. Few nations have shown more caution about the tourism industry and its downside than Bhutan. The Himalayan nation that measures progress through its happiness index has purposefully kept the number of tourists low to insure that the country’s culture, environment, faith and economy aren’t perverted by huge influxes of foreign tourists. The government says it limits tourists by regulating how many hotel rooms are available and limiting other tourist “infrastructure” as well as imposing a high tourist tariff. Bhutan calls this “low volume and high value” tourism.
 
At the opposite end of the spectrum are countries like Cambodia and cities like Venice. Cambodia encourages so many tourists to visit its great eleventh-century temple complex at Angkor that the rare temples are sinking because the surrounding water table is being drained by hundreds of new tourist hotels. In Venice, with a native population of less than 60,000, over 20 million tourists descend on the city every year, an onslaught that is pushing the locals out of their homes and emptying the city of essentials like neighborhood greengrocers and bakeries. 

- Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, 2013.

The Stages of Sleep

Sleep begins with NREM sleep, progressing through the three basic NREM sleep stages, sleep stages 1 and 2 and slow wave sleep. NREM sleep is then followed by a relatively short REM sleep episode. The time between falling asleep and the end of the REM episode constitutes a sleep cycle.

NREM Sleep

Stage 1
Sleep is very light sleep and it occurs during transitions from awake to asleep. Your muscle tone begins to decrease during this stage but slow eye movement continues. Most people don’t even notice that they’re sleeping at this point.

Stage 2 
During this stage of sleep, eye movements stop, and brain waves slow—with intermittent rapid wave bursts called “sleep spindles”. Most people when woken-up from stage 2 sleep realize that they were sleeping. If you’ve ever woken someone up during this stage, you probably noticed that the person slowly opened their eyes, looked around confusedly, and then went back to sleep.

Stages 3 and 4 (slow-wave sleep) 
In these stages brain waves slow further to a pattern called “delta waves” mixed with occasional spurts of faster waves. Heart rate and body temperature continue to drop, along with blood pressure and muscle tone. Eye movements remain absent. This is the deepest most restorative stage of sleep. If your alarm clock goes off during slow-wave sleep, you may feel confused and groggy for several minutes after waking up.

REM Sleep

This is when you do most of your dreaming, and is a time when your brain is actively encoding lessons that you learned and memories that you made throughout the day. Some people have called this type of sleep “paradoxical sleep” because it involves relatively fast brain activity and irregular heart rate and blood pressure, as well as characteristic rapid eye movements. During REM sleep your limbs are temporarily paralyzed, perhaps to keep your body from acting out action packed dreams.

Your sleep progresses through these cycles of NREM and REM sleep about every 90 minutes. Your brain engages in most slow wave sleep earlier in the night, which will ensure you get enough of this most restorative sleep state even if you cut your night short by an early morning meeting. If this happens to be the case, just remember that you can always catch up on sleep with a short nap during the day!

- StanfordOnline SOM, Staying Fit

Cognitive Distortions

Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed in the 1960s by Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, Freudian ideas dominated psychiatry. Clinicians assumed that depression and the distorted thinking it produces were just the surface manifestation of deeper problems, usually stretching back to unresolved childhood conflict. To treat depression, you had to fix the underlying problem, and that could take many years of therapy. But Beck saw a close connection between the thoughts a person had and the feelings that came with them. He noticed that his patients tended to get themselves caught in a feedback loop in which irrational negative beliefs caused powerful negative feelings, which in turn seemed to drive patients’ reasoning, motivating them to find evidence to support their negative beliefs. Beck noticed a common pattern of beliefs, which he called the “cognitive triad” of depression: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”
 
Many people experience one or two of these thoughts fleetingly, but depressed people tend to hold all three beliefs in a stable and enduring psychological structure. Psychologists call such structures schemas. Schemas refer to the patterns of thoughts and behaviors, built up over time, that people use to process information quickly and effortlessly as they interact with the world. Schemas are deep down in the elephant; they are one of the ways in which the elephant guides the rider. Depressed people have schemas about themselves and their paths through life that are thoroughly disempowering.
 
Beck’s great discovery was that it is possible to break the disempowering feedback cycle between negative beliefs and negative emotions. If you can get people to examine these beliefs and consider counterevidence, it gives them at least some moments of relief from negative emotions, and if you release them from negative emotions, they become more open to questioning their negative beliefs. It takes some skill to do this—depressed people are very good at finding evidence for the beliefs in the triad. And it takes time.
 
But it is possible to train people to learn Beck’s method so they can question their automatic thoughts on their own, every day. With repetition, over a period of weeks or months, people can change their schemas and create different, more helpful habitual beliefs (such as “I can handle most challenges” or “I have friends I can trust”). With CBT, there is no need to spend years talking about one’s childhood.
 
The list below shows nine of the most common cognitive distortions that people learn to recognize in CBT [based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders]
 

EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
 
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
 
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
 
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
 
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
 
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
 
NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
 
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
 
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Definition of 'Trauma'

In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury.
 
In the 1980 revision, however, the manual (DSM III) recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.” The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions. In fact, even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention.
 
By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything “experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” The subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word “trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health professionals but by their clients and patients—including an increasing number of college students.
 
As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts was the shift to a subjective standard. It was not for anyone else to decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic (or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of students have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them. 

Concepts sometimes creep. Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages—even college students, who are sometimes said to need safe spaces and trigger warnings lest words and ideas put them in danger.

- Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: 

How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation, 2018

The Needs for Connection - Belonging & Intimacy

 The need for connection—to form and maintain at least a minimal number of positive, stable, intimate relationships—is a fundamental need that affects our whole being, permeating our entire suite of emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. While individuals differ in the strength of this need, connection is an irreducible, undeniable human need. The need for connection actually consists of two subneeds: (a) The need to belong, to be liked, to be accepted, and (b) The need for intimacy, for mutuality, for relatedness.
 
The Need for Belonging
 
As with all the other needs, the critical metric is the distance between your need for belonging and just how unmet this need is in your daily life. Research shows that those who report the highest levels of loneliness are those who have the highest unmet need to belong. The greater the discrepancy between a person’s need to belong and their satisfaction with their personal relationships, the higher the levels of loneliness and the lower the levels of life satisfaction in their daily lives.
 
This finding applies both to those who are living alone as well as those who are living with others. Simply living with someone does not guarantee that connection needs are being met. It’s the quality of the connections that matter for predicting loneliness, not the quantity of connections or even the proximity of the connections. Let’s take a closer look at this other essential component of connection.
 
The Need for Intimacy
 
While a secure attachment style serves as a critical foundation for connection, it does not assure intimacy. The essence of intimacy is a high-quality connection. What is a high-quality connection? Jane Dutton and Emily Heaphy define a high-quality connection as a “dynamic, living tissue that exists between two people when there is some contact between them involving mutual awareness and social interaction.”A high-quality connection makes both people feel especially vital and alive. A low-quality connection, on the other hand, can be downright depleting. As one business manager put it, “Corrosive connections are like black holes: they absorb all of the light in the system and give back nothing in return.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Need for Attachment Security

The four adult categories of attachment style—secure, fearful, preoccupied, and dismissing—can be represented as a combination of just two dimensions: anxious and avoidant. The anxious-attachment dimension reflects a concern about being rejected and abandoned and is the product of beliefs about whether others will be there for you in times of need. The avoidant-attachment dimension has less to do with a sense of safety and more to do with how you regulate your emotions in response to stress—whether you use others as a secure base or pull away and withdraw from them.
 
Studies show that these two dimensions are only weakly correlated with each other, which creates the possibility that people can score high on both dimensions. A further implication is that “secure attachment” doesn’t exist as a separate category; secure attachment is just the combination of low anxiety and low avoidance. Modern research suggests that there is no such thing as a completely securely attached person; all of us are at least a little bit anxious and avoidant when stress rears its head in our relationships.
 
Nevertheless, your particular placement on the anxious- and avoidant-attachment dimensions has important implications. Those who score lower on these dimensions tend to report more constructive ways of coping and regulating their emotions, thoughts, and behavior, and they report higher levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological adjustment, healthy self-esteem, and even heightened altruism, volunteerism, empathy, and increased tolerance of people who are in a different social group than those who are more insecurely attached. It’s clear that secure attachment doesn’t just set the stage for more satisfying relationships; it also sets the stage for many other aspects of growth.

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Healthy Self-esteem

All people in our society (with a few pathological exceptions) have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually) high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. —Abraham Maslow, A Theory of Human Motivation (1943)
 
Maslow and other humanistic psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, have been blamed for inspiring the self-esteem movement in the United States, which reached its apotheosis in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on feeling good about oneself as the answer to all of life’s problems. But a close reading of the psychological literature suggests that the problem isn’t with self-esteem but the pursuit of self-esteem.
 
So what is a healthy self-esteem? Modern research has identified two distinct faces of healthy self-esteem: self-worth and mastery.
 
Self-worth
 
Maslow sometimes distinguished between the need for self-esteem and the need for esteem from others. However, modern research shows that the evaluation of others is often linked to our self-esteem. Like it or not, we are a social animal, and the judgments we formulate of our self frequently incorporate the judgment of others. Social psychologist Mark Leary’s research has shown that our feelings of self-worth strongly track our social value, or at least our perceptions of our social value. (Sometimes our perceptions are inaccurate.)
 
Leary and his colleagues Katrina Jongman-Sereno and Kate Diebels distinguish two forms of social value we can have in this world: relational social value (the degree to which we regard our relationship with others as personally valuable and important) and instrumental social value (the degree to which others perceive us as possessing resources and/or personal characteristics that are important for the benefit of the collective good). Those with a high sense of self-worth tend to like themselves, and view themselves as having high relational value.
 
Mastery
 
Your entire life history of successes and failures influence the attitude you have toward yourself as an intentional being capable of reaching your goals in life. The more successful you are at making progress toward your goals, the more confident you feel, and the two tend to spiral upward toward a stable sense of mastery. Vice versa, the more your goals are thwarted in life, the more you tend to spiral downward toward insecurity and feelings of incompetence. Since we are such a social species, mastery also tends to be linked to social value, but mastery tends to track instrumental social value more than relational social value. Those with high mastery tend to have traits that confer greater social status in their society due to their usefulness to others—not necessarily the characteristics that are valued in a friend, family member, or social group.
 
While both a healthy sense of self-worth and mastery are strongly related to each other—people tend to develop both forms of self-esteem in tandem—the two can come apart. It’s possible to view yourself as a willful agent in the world, capable of accomplishing your goals, but not really like or respect yourself. And vice versa, it’s possible to like yourself while not feeling very effective in reaching your goals. Tafarodi refers to these situations as “paradoxical self-esteem” and has shown that such variations have implications for how we process and remember social feedback from others.
 
This is why feelings of self-worth are so strongly linked to the need for belonging.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (3) - Grandiose Narcissism

In fact, we found that grandiose narcissism is related to reports of greater life satisfaction. But we found that this increased life satisfaction is likely to come with a cost—disconnection from one’s own self. We found that those scoring high in grandiose narcissism reported high levels of imposter syndrome, a weak sense of self, self-alienation, a greater likelihood of accepting external influence, and higher levels of experiential avoidance.
 
Both forms of narcissism involve defense of a particular self-image. Vulnerable narcissists mount a vehement defense against being rejected and appearing unworthy of love and belonging. Grandiose narcissists fiercely defend a superior self-image. Both strategies can sometimes be helpful in achieving self-enhancing goals, but both incur the cost of others and a cost to one’s capacity to connect deeply with one’s most valued goals and desires.
 
We found that grandiose narcissism is also related to a black-and-white view of others, seen in the endorsement of statements such as “As far as I’m concerned, people are either good or bad,” as well as an extreme view of themselves, seeing themselves as fearless and bold.
 
One meta-analysis found that those scoring high in grandiose narcissism are more likely to impose harshly perfectionistic demands on others, showing perpetual dissatisfaction with their perceived flaws.
 
Collective Narcissism: Defensive Form of In-group Positivity
 
In recent years, psychologists have been scientifically investigating “collective narcissism,” a defensive form of in-group positivity. People who score high on tests of collective narcissism believe that their in-group deserves special treatment and insist that their in-group gets the recognition it deserves. Just like individual narcissism, collective narcissism stems from the frustration that comes from the need for control and self-esteem and is an attempt to compensate for such insecurity.
 
In contrast, self-esteem has been linked to healthy in-group positivity, which is more likely to foster both in-group and out-group love. This is ultimately an uplifting message: just as it’s possible to have a heathy self-esteem, it’s possible to have healthy in-group love—where it feels good to be a member of your in-group and in which you have great pride for the genuine accomplishments of your group without constantly experiencing hypersensitivity to intergroup threat and hostility.
 
Addicted to Self-esteem
 
At the end of the day, I believe we shouldn’t ignore the seduction of power or pretend that this pull is not a part of our common humanity. But striving for power does not necessarily have to lead to destruction. Almost all humans strive for mastery and to make a difference in the world, but as Adler noted, we also have a striving for social interest. We have both strivings within us. Therefore, the question remains: How can we satisfy our self-esteem needs in the most authentic, healthy, and growth-fostering way?
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (2) - Vulnerable Narcissism

The research on vulnerable narcissism suggests that high levels of uncertainty about one’s worth as a human being often bring along with it hairpin triggers of shame and reactive hostility, avoidance of situations that may activate such triggers, grandiose fantasies of receiving validation and respect from others, a constant need for validation and attention from others (including feeling entitled to the attention of others and constant resentment for not being appreciated), a hiding of one’s felt needs and perceived weaknesses, an excessive need to help others in order to feel good about oneself, and distrust and cynicism about people’s true intentions.
 
While features of vulnerable narcissism may help in managing the overwhelmingly painful feelings of low self-worth and shame generated by rejection and early childhood abuse and can help minimize the chances that the abuse will ever happen again, vulnerable narcissism is linked to a host of beliefs, coping strategies, and attachment styles that ultimately inhibit health, growth, and integration. In our research, we found that vulnerable narcissism was associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, autonomy, authenticity, mastery, personal growth, positive social relationships, purpose, and self-acceptance in life, as well as a lack of trust in one’s thoughts and feelings, and a profound lack of a sense of self.
 
We also found an extremely strong relationship between vulnerable narcissism and reports of imposter syndrome. Those scoring high in vulnerable narcissism scored high on statements such as “I tend to feel like a phony,” and “Sometimes I am afraid I will be discovered for who I really am.” It’s less likely that such individuals actually feel fraudulent and more likely that they engage a “self-presentation strategy” that serves as another way of protecting themselves against the potential pain of rejection. By adjusting the expectations of others, they won’t feel as intensely ashamed if they do fail.
 
We also found that those scoring high in vulnerable narcissism have great difficulty reining in their strong impulses and taking constructive action on their own behalf. The defense mechanisms they tend to employ—harboring infantile and unrealistic fantasies, projecting responsibility onto others, being passive-aggressive in expressing their needs, apologizing for asserting their needs, experiencing somatic symptoms, isolating themselves from those who could offer support, suppressing emotions, reacting with anger when hurt or stressed, and engaging in impulsive behaviors such as eating to feel better and regain control—make sense for a vulnerable child trying to cope with intense pain and fear. But in adulthood, they prevent growth of the whole person.
 
From Vulnerability to Growth
 
Vulnerable narcissism need not be a barrier to growth. Any of us, regardless of our levels of these characteristics, can take charge of our lives and start to build a coherent and stable sense of self. A key way of overcoming severe self-esteem uncertainty is to shed the perfectionistic self-presentation. As one meta-analysis of the literature found, vulnerable narcissism is significantly linked to an obsessive concern over whether one is coming across as imperfect to others, as well as perceiving others as demanding perfection of oneself.
 
Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) can be immensely helpful in learning to regulate the intense feelings of rejection and shame we often feel and the irrational, negative thoughts that are floating around constantly in our heads. You really can “retrain your brain.” Steven Hayes, founder of the ACT approach to psychotherapy, has stated that an important outcome of ACT is “the ability to contact the present moment more fully as a conscious human being, and to change or persist in behavior when doing so serves valued ends.
 
Changing your self-limiting narratives about your worthiness, asserting needs in a healthy way, overcoming your avoidance of fearful experiences, and taking responsibility for your behaviors—these actions strengthen and stabilize the vulnerable self. The great irony is that the less you focus on whether you are worthy and competent, and take that as a given, the greater the chances you will consistently accept your inherent worth.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

The Two Faces of Narcissism (1) - Self-esteem vs. Narcissism

Too often, psychologists and people in the media conflate a healthy self-esteem with narcissism. Contrary to many people’s perceptions, narcissism and self-esteem have very different developmental pathways and outcomes in life. Those with a high self-esteem believe they are worthy and competent and strive for intimate, meaningful connections with others, but they don’t necessarily view themselves as superior to others.
 
The development of self-esteem and narcissism are also influenced by different parenting styles. Narcissism tends to develop in tandem with parental overevaluation: parents who raise children who exhibit high levels of narcissism tend to overclaim their child’s knowledge, overestimate their child’s IQ, overpraise their child’s performance, and even tend to give their child a unique name to stand out from the crowd. In contrast, high self-esteem develops in tandem with parental warmth. Parents who raise children who exhibit high levels of self-esteem tend to treat their children with affection and appreciation. They treat their children as though they matter.
 
Modern researchers have identified two unhealthy attempts at regulating the need for self-esteem: grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. When most of us think of the prototypical narcissist, we think of the grandiose narcissist: brash, boastful, noisy, and always demanding to be in the spotlight. However, psychologists have also identified a quieter manifestation of narcissism—vulnerable narcissism—characterized by extreme sensitivity to slights and a deep sense of shame over their grandiose desires that leads these individuals to despise the spotlight.
 
Those who score high in grandiose narcissism tend to be antagonistic toward others for reasons relating to their desire to increase their social status and dominance (instrumental social value). Their entitlement is linked to their belief that they are special and superior and therefore deserving of greater resources and treatment. In contrast, those scoring higher in vulnerable narcissism feel hostility and distrust in reaction to their negative ideas about themselves and others, and their response is often rooted in traumatic childhood experiences. Their particular flavor of entitlement seems to be more linked to a belief that they deserve special attention because of their fragility, not their superior characteristics.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Misconception about 'Maslow’s Pyramid'

Modern-day presentations of Maslow’s theory often leave out this critical notion of an integrated hierarchy and instead focus on the stage-like pyramid—even though in his published writings Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs.
 
Todd Bridgman and his colleagues examined in detail how the pyramid came to be and concluded that “Maslow’s Pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the sixties. From there, it quickly became popular in the emerging field of organization behavior. Bridgman and his colleagues note that the pyramid resonated with the “prevailing [post-war] ideologies of individualism, nationalism and capitalism in America and justified a growing managerialism in bureaucratic (i.e., layered triangular) formats.”
 
Unfortunately, the continual reproduction of the pyramid in management textbooks had the unfortunate consequence of reducing Maslow’s rich and nuanced intellectual contributions to a parody and has betrayed the actual spirit of Maslow’s notion of self-actualization as realizing one’s creative potential for humanitarian ends. As Bridgman and his colleagues noted, “Inspiring the study of management and its relationship to creativity and the pursuit of the common good would be a much more empowering legacy to Maslow than a simplistic, 5-step, one-way pyramid.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Life is Sailing

The pyramid from the sixties told a story that Maslow never meant to tell; a story of achievement, of mastering level by level until you’ve “won” the game of life. But that is most definitely not the spirit of self-actualization that the humanistic psychologists emphasized. The human condition isn’t a competition; it’s an experience. Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty. In this choppy surf, a clunky pyramid is of little use. Instead, what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat.
 
As we sail through the adventure of life, it’s rarely clear sailing. The boat itself protects us from seas that are rarely as calm as we’d like. Each plank of the boat offers security from the waves. Without it, we’d surely spend all our energy trying to stay above water. While even one plank is better than nothing, the bigger the boat, the more waves you can endure. Likewise in life, while safety is an essential foundation for feeling secure, adding on strong connections with others and feelings of respect and worthiness will further allow you to weather the storms.
Having a secure boat is not enough for real movement, however. You also need a sail. Without a sail, you might be protected from water, but you wouldn’t go anywhere. Each level of the sail allows you to capture more wind, helping you explore and adapt to your environment.
 
Note that you don’t “climb” a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid. Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you felt secure enough. This is an ongoing dynamic: you can be open and spontaneous one minute but can feel threatened enough to prepare for the storm by closing yourself to the world the next minute. The more you continually open yourself to the world, however, the further your boat will go and the more you can benefit from the people and opportunities around you. And if you’re truly fortunate, you can even enter ecstatic moments of peak experience—where you are really catching the wind. In these moments, not only have you temporarily forgotten your insecurities, but you are growing so much that you are helping to raise the tide for all the other sailboats simply by making your way through the ocean. In this way, the sailboat isn’t a pinnacle but a whole vehicle, helping us to explore the world and people around us, growing and transcending as we do.
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Shaky Foundation of Self-realization

In my career it has become clear that the more we have limiting notions of potential that are dictated by others (schoolteachers, parents, managers, etc.), the more blind we become to the full potential of each and every unique individual and their own unique path to self-actualization and transcendence. My research has convinced me that we all have extraordinary creative, humanitarian, and spiritual possibilities but are often alienated from them because we are so focused on a very narrow slice of who we are. As a result, we aren’t fulfilling our full potential. We spend so much time looking outward for validation that we don’t develop the incredible strengths that already lie within, and we rarely take the time to fulfill our deepest needs in the most growth-oriented and integrated fashion.
 
Indeed, so many people today are striving for “transcendence” without a healthy integration of their other needs—to the detriment of their full potential. This ranges from people who expect a mindfulness retreat or yoga class to be a panacea for their traumas and deep insecurities, to spiritual “gurus” abusing their positions of power, to the many instances of vulnerable people (especially vulnerable young people) seeking unhealthy outlets for transcendence, such as violent extremism, cults, and gangs.
 
We also see this at play among the many divisions we see in the world today. While there is a yearning to be part of a larger political or religious ideology, the realization of this yearning is often built on hate and hostility for the “other,” rather than on pride and deep commitment for a cause that can better humanity. In essence, there is a lot of pseudo-transcendence going on, resting on a “very shaky foundation.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

From Healthy Self-realization to Transcendence

During Maslow’s later years, he became increasingly convinced that healthy self-realization is actually a bridge to transcendence. Many of the individuals he selected as self-actualizing people experienced frequent moments of transcendence in which awareness was expanded beyond the self, and many of them were motivated by higher values. At the same time, Maslow observed that these individuals had a deep sense of who they were and what they wanted to contribute to the world.
 
This created a deep paradox for Maslow: How could so many of his self-actualizing individuals simultaneously have such a strong identity and actualization of their potential, yet also be so selfless? In a 1961 paper, Maslow observed that self-actualization seems to be a “transitional goal, a rite of passage, a step along the path to the transcendence of identity. This is like saying its function is to erase itself.”
 
Maslow believed that striving toward self-actualization—by developing a strong sense of self and having one’s basic needs met—was a crucial step along this path. As he wrote in his 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being: “Self-actualization . . . paradoxically makes more possible the transcendence of self, and of self-consciousness and of selfishness.”
 

- Scott Barry Kaufman, Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, 2020

Discipleship (2):Ask the Right Questions to Yourself

1. God, how can you be this good, to adopt me when I’m still unsorted? Practice the discipline of consciously receiving the new identity that comes from adoption. This may not come naturally to you, and you might need to really practice it! But by practicing, we can start doing away with the belief that we have to earn something to be “in.”

2. How am I doing loving the people whom God has placed in my life? What do you notice? What thoughts come up when you consider this question? Where is Jesus out ahead of you, having prepared good works in advance, that you should walk in them like Ephesians 2:8-9 describes? Where and how, this week, is Jesus calling you to love your friends and neighbors in concrete, practical terms?

3. Jesus, what are you speaking to me through your Holy Spirit? Learn to discern how you hear the leading of the Holy Spirit, as you read Scripture and as you listen for his whisper in everyday life. Try to make your response as concrete as possible. If, for example, you sense a need for more rest and greater margin in your life, don’t just say, “I’m going to live slower,” but rather, “I’m going to take three slow, prayerful walks around my neighborhood this week.” The more specific and concrete, the more helpful it is! 

- Bill Hull & Brandon Cook, The False Promise of Discipleship, 2019