If it’s bad enough to arrive late to a party, it awful to arrive after the party is over.
I had heard of the television show “What Not to Wear,” the
TLC makeover show, but hadn’t quite gotten around to watching it… until last
night.
Then, fortuitously, I chanced on the final episode of the
ten year series and learned a few things that are worth pondering.
The show offered women simple makeovers. That is, makeovers
that involve fashion, hair and makeup. It did not offer the kind of cosmetic
surgery that can make a woman barely recognizable.
Those who are familiar with the genre of makeovers-- in the
past a staple of Oprah’s show-- know that often the transformations are so
radical that they are frightening. It often seems like a butterfly has emerged from a cocoon.
It’s worth mentioning, on theoretical grounds, that the show
did not try to make any of the women into some someone they are not. It did not teach them how
to adopt new personae. As host Clinton Kelly said on the finale, the show
wanted to show women at their best.
Being your best means being who you are. It does not mean
trying to trick people into mistaking you for someone else.
On the finale, WNTW paid visits to some of the women who had
had successful makeovers. And it threw a party for many of the show’s
participants in Las Vegas… to suggest that the women it had chosen to highlight were not exceptions.
As I was watching I was struck by the fact that
the experience of appearing on the show, of spending a few days buying a new
wardrobe and having a new haircut and new makeup had produced, for so many of
the participants, a radical transformation.
As I was thinking that a lot of
therapists would be thrilled to have such a good record of helping their
patients, lo and behold, one of the made-over women declared that her
experience was like “therapy.”
I gave myself a few, but not too many extra credit points
for insight.
One might think the comparison inapposite. The women who
were made over on the show were manifestly not mentally ill. And yet, most of
the people who present themselves for therapy are not mentally ill either. They
are often is distress. They might feel anguished or demoralized. Most of them
are not sick.
I would take it a step further. The Stacy/Clinton therapy
seems to have been more effective than most of what is on offer in
professionals’ offices.
The makeovers were not cheap, but they were not outrageously
expensive either. With an allotted
$5,000 the women were not shopping at Prada and Gucci. I suspect that their haircuts
would have been fairly expensive, but they would probably not cost more than an
hour of a senior therapist’s time.
So, how did these makeovers help so many people so quickly?
Therein lies a mystery.
Before appearing on the show, many of the women participants
had been sporting outfits that advertised their inner depressed states. I am
confident that a good psychiatrist would diagnose many of them as suffering
from a mild form of depression.
Often they had simply let themselves go. One woman had
chosen an absurd appurtenance as a signature: she tied a raccoon tail to the
back of her jeans and declared it a sign of her individuality. Many of the “before”
photos showed women who seemed never to have had a haircut and seemed never tried
to use cosmetics to look their best.
To the mind of a seasoned therapist, however, the WNTW
approach must have smacked of superficiality. It looked like a mindless effort
to change the outside without changing the inside, an effort to paper over
problems without getting at root causes.
Obviously, cognitive and behavioral therapies have
challenged this perspective. For that, they are routinely denounced for being
superficial. People who think of themselves as deep thinkers cannot—for all
their deep thought—grasp how something as superficial as a makeover can snap an
individual out of a mild depression and produce long-lasting benefits.
In many cases, makeovers are more helpful than long term psychotherapy
or psychoanalysis… but then again, long term therapy and analysis were never
designed to be helpful, anyway.
Take the concept of resistance. In psychoanalysis patients
are said to resist the darker truths that are lurking in their unconscious. According
to Freud they resist coming to terms with their fundamental desire to copulate
with their mothers.
Participants in the WNTW experience also resist. They fight
when Stacy and Clinton throw away all of their clothes.
In therapy an individual is supposed to get in touch with his
or her past. In WNTW an individual was supposed to throw away the past, to put
it out of sight and out of mind. And to do so without having any insight into
why she had accumulated such a dreadful wardrobe.
Moreover, where our therapy culture tells us all that we
should never judge other people, Stacy and Clinton were nothing if not
judgmental.
When the choice is between how you see yourself and how
other people see you WNTW is saying, significantly, that the latter is
vastly more important than the former.
It’s worth underscoring that when it comes to resistance,
the average human being will more easily accept that he wants to copulate with
his mother than that he has been walking around town looking like a fool.
Most therapists do not comment on their clients’
appearances because they know that if they did they would be encountering fierce
resistance… to the point of losing their patients.
Patients will happilyaccept that they have an Oedipus complex
or control issues, but they will rarely tolerate hearing that they don’t know
how to dress.
If someone tells you that you have been looking like a clown
you will immediately understand, not only that this has been going on for quite
some time, but that there is very little you can do in the immediate to erase
the impression. In many cases it is easier to denounce the messenger or ignore
the message.
As therapy, WNTW is based on a hoary Aristotelian concept:
the best way to get over a bad habit is to replace it with a good habit.
If the show’s participants had become so habituated to
looking bad that they did not even know that they were looking their worst, Stacy
and Clinton were at the ready to drag them, kicking and screaming out of their
bad habit and into some good habits.
Where far too many therapists believe that their job is to
help their patients get in touch with their worst, WNTW wanted people to be their best, at least
on the level of outward appearance.
Apparently, when you get in touch with your worst you do not
get better, either inside or outside. If you work at refashioning your
appearance, you are very likely to get better, both on the outside and the
inside.
The effectiveness of the Stacy/Clinton treatment depends on
the woman’s ability to keep with the program. It does not depend on her gaining
any insight into why she had been letting herself go.
WNTW seems to disprove the commonly held belief that we are
what we feel deep inside. The show was saying that we are the way we look to
other people. If we want to change for the better we should improve our
appearance and the way we conduct ourselves in public. It will produce a
palpable improvement in how we feel about ourselves.
[For the record, the same principle does apply to men. It
was the premise of an excellent makeover show called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.]
3 comments:
Sounds like Cary Grant. Archie Leach liked the character so much he played him for the rest of his life.
This makes sense on several levels. Often people will make some sort of change to get out of a "slump." The change will vary -- start exercising, change reading habits, etc. And often the change has nothing to do with the underlying problem. However, the fact that they are making a positive change of any sort can help cope with said issues.
I believe I first saw this research on your site. Hormones and all ya know....
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323608504579022942032641408
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