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Tony Gentry

A Self-Help Book that Actually Helped

Updated: Aug 10

Ten years ago, living through a dark night of the soul, I happened upon a book that changed my life for the better, a self-help book that actually helped. The book is Constructive Living by a psychologist named David Reynolds, distilling his Americanized version of two Japanese therapies, Naikan and Morita. Reynolds held up a merciless mirror to the troubled person I had become and recommended difficult exercises that actually, surprisingly, helped. From my journal back then, here is what I learned from a book that came along at exactly the right time:

 

Recognize that much of our society is predicated on supporting our fantasy lives. From an early age, we learn to live inside our heads, imaginatively, seeking immediate gratification and varied stimulation, driven by an ideal of happiness and independence that is impossible to sustain. Outwardly, we flit from tv to Internet, where these notions are reinforced; inwardly we create a fantasy kingdom in our heads that eventually is at odds with the reality of the world around us. When we run up against challenges to our imagined reality, we suffer mental anguish that may be labeled depression or anxiety or obsessiveness (Morita said “shinky”). And we typically treat those problems with medication that only increases our appetite for more of the same media, while offering a talk therapy that adds to our fantasy library the poorly remembered experiences of childhood. We are encouraged to build a melodrama of those memories, where those we loved were bad to us, and left us broken in ways we cannot fix. Reynolds indicts ALL of modern psychotherapy here, along with the psycho-medical model that supports it. There are all sorts of reasons drawn straight from the insights of SF geniuses like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard for a society to warp in this way.  (Most of them come down to money and power. Keep the masses sedated, naval gazing, forever grumpy and ineffectual, and you can have it all.)

 

Constructive Living (CL) proposes a straightforward yet radical personal solution to this crisis. In a nutshell, a person must humbly recognize that the richly configured world between his ears may be mistaken, and dare to compare that world to the actual world. We make that comparison through action. Instead of sitting back in procrastination, doodling, napping, fretting, Internet ranting, recreational or medicinal drug use, surrounding ourselves only with like-minded fools, living our sequestered routines that offer little challenge to our imagined selves, we dare to attend to the actual, actionable world around us.


One of the clever exercises Reynolds suggests is to take some time imagining a planet where one could live without ever being bored, one that includes all the variety of mineral, plant, and animal life one could want, one that offers sustenance and opportunity. The trick, of course, is that we live on that planet now, yet fail to appreciate it. That exercise leads to others:  sit quietly in the morning and transcribe bird calls; take 15 minutes to sketch a mundane everyday object; while sitting in your office map out the objects in your bedroom from memory; greet a stranger every day; do something nice for someone else secretly; pick up trash on the street; write a letter to your Mom and apologize for the trouble you’ve caused her (even if she’s dead) (you don’t have to mail it).


Each of these activities is designed to draw our attention outward, to provide an experience of the world’s actual reality, to lead us to question the orthodoxy of our fantasies.  And in doing so the Buddhist-derived recognition arrives that is the core of CL’s thought:  (1) we cannot control our thoughts and feelings, which flit through our minds like channels switching on a radio, so give up efforts to manage them through self-gratification, medication, etc.; (2) we can only control our behavior, not that of others, so focus on doing things, and with that doing attend to the way others react to what we do, learn from it, in order to adapt and live more in accord with others and with the world around us; (3) as you dare to do things, comparing what you do to how your action is greeted by the world around you, you gradually learn “what needs to be done” and make better choices that allow you to function more healthfully and helpfully in your day-to-day life; and (4) as you explore this way of testing yourself in the real world, you come to see what the sages have taught, that however much we may ruminate about the past or fantasize about the future, the only time we have in fact is right now. Think of the effort expended on guilt and recrimination for past wrongs! Think of the worry and fear driven by fantasies of future mistakes! We cannot go back and fix the past (we cannot even remember it accurately in all its richness and paradox), we have no crystal ball for future outcomes, what we have is our immediate selves armed with all our senses, intellect, and physicality.


Reynolds describes a plain-spoken lifeway that asks us to live deliberately in the present, for the sake of our sanity. That is his medicine and answer to neurosis. Finally, there is a Christian-like element (actually derived from Japanese Naikan) involved in this process, a reflective or devotional approach meant to inform our activity in the present. We are asked to choose a person, animal or object, and ask of ourselves three questions: (a) what has this given to me?, (b) what have I given back? and (c) what have I done to burden or hurt them instead? These questions are set up in direct opposition to typical reflective psychotherapy, which focuses on the wrongs done to us and the damage those wrongs have caused. Instead, we see that there is good and bad in all actions, that we too play a role in what happens to us, and that these interactions are the essence of growth and learning. We consider what we owe as a debt of gratitude to our parents, to our spouses and divorced spouses, to our pets, to our house and car, to the clouds in the sky. We reconcile through humility and pleas for forgiveness from others, rather than through guilt and recrimination. And as we pursue these reflections, we link them to positive acts done now. 


And there is always something to do. Even if your parents are dead, you can honor them (make a collection of old photographs, print out their memoir, give away their clothes, put flowers in the church in their honor, hang a picture in the living room, go to a nursing home and volunteer with other elders), as an act of gratitude. I love the whimsy with which Reynolds projects these efforts onto our pets and even everyday objects, asking us to reflect on what our coffee cup gives us, washing it and putting it away carefully with a little prayer of thanks. This sort of activity brings us back full circle to the original idea of attention. Attend to what is happening now. Strive to live in the present and in a state of awareness, humility, and openness to the ways the world responds to what we do, trust in the gift of ourselves, our flexible, intelligent, feeling selves, adapt to that response, choosing to do “what needs to be done” not in our fantasy world but in the real world where we live. This is not some hero, zen warrior, Christian soldier notion of the ideal man or woman. It’s something simpler and less grand than all that. It’s common sense.


Reynolds and his partners have published a number of Constructive Living guidebooks. These are the ones I've read. My favorites are the first two listed:


Playing Ball on Running Water by David K. Reynolds.

Constructive Living by David K. Reynolds

A Handbook for Constructive Living by David K. Reynolds.

Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection by Gregg Krech

 

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