The work of Dr. Shelly Gable shows that when an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someon… - Martin E P Seligman

Good science requires the interplay of analysis and synthesis. One never knows if basic research is truly basic until one knows what it is basic to. Modern physics came into its own not because of its theories — which can be enormously counterintuitive and highly controversial (muons, wavicles, superstrings, the anthropic principle, and all that) — but because physicists built the atomic bomb and modern nuclear power plants.

The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.

Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone.

Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book — that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers — demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

If you want to blame your parents for your own adult problems, you are entitled to blame the genes they gave you, but you are not entitled — by any facts I know — to blame the way they treated you.