The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M. Scott Peck, 1978
Why do some people grow through difficulties while others go round in circles for years? The psychiatrist Scott Peck saw the answer in how we treat pain: we hide from it or go through it. His book sets out four simple tools of discipline, explains why being in love is not yet love, and offers a road that few people walk.
Who it is for
For those who are tired of putting off what is hard, of blaming circumstances, and of waiting for life to become easy, and for those who want to understand how love differs from being in love.
As soon as we truly learn that life is difficult, as soon as we really understand and accept it, life is no longer difficult.
Life is difficult
Picture a morning when everything goes wrong. The car will not start, an unpleasant conversation awaits at work, and at home the chores pile up that never get done. Inside, resentment grows, as if someone had broken a promise that life would be easy. M. Scott Peck, an American psychiatrist who for many years saw people in a small town in Connecticut, opens his book with a sentence that cancels that promise: “Life is difficult.”
For Peck this is not a complaint but a relief. He calls this idea one of the greatest truths, and notes that most of us do not see it. We complain almost without pause about our problems, aloud or to ourselves, as if life were obliged to be easy. Problems cause pain, so we hide from them: we put them off, pass them to others, pretend they are not there. In the author’s view, the attempt to escape legitimate suffering lies at the root of many troubles of the soul. The pain we run from does not go away, while the pain of a decision passes and leaves us stronger.
The book came out in 1978 and is built as a path. First comes discipline, that is, four simple tools for solving problems. Then love, which Peck defines quite differently from how we are used to. And all of it is for the sake of growth, without which, in his view, life stays where it is. Here you will meet a woman who ate her cake in the wrong order, a sergeant who blamed a whole island for his troubles, and Peck himself, who once did not want to brake on his bicycle.
If you are opening this book in a difficult period, that is already a good sign. You are not turning away from the problem; you are looking for how to deal with it. That is where the road begins, the one which, as Peck believed, few people walk.
The icing eaten first
One day a woman of about thirty came to Peck, a financial analyst. She complained that she constantly put off tasks at work, and long talks about her past and her relations with her boss changed nothing. Then Peck asked an unexpected question: did she like cake? She did. And what did she like more, the sponge or the icing? Of course the icing. And how did she eat a piece of cake? The icing first.
It then turned out that her working day was built the same way. For the first hour she spent on the most pleasant part of her work, and for the remaining six hours she struggled with what she disliked. Peck suggested reversing the order: take on the unpleasant task in the first hour, and spend the remaining six hours calmly doing what she enjoyed. One hour of displeasure and six hours of pleasure, he reasoned, are better than one hour of pleasure and six hours of torment. According to Peck, she tried it and stopped putting things off.
Peck calls this technique delaying gratification: first meet the pain and go through it, and receive the joy afterwards. For him this is the first tool of discipline. It is like washing up after supper. If you wash the dishes at once, it is ten minutes of reluctance and a free evening. If you leave them, the pile of plates will remind you all evening and take more strength than the job itself.
Where does the ability to wait come from? Peck believes it grows from a sense of one’s own worth. A child whose parents gave them time and loved them feels that they matter. And since they matter, they look after themselves, their time and their future. Someone who does not value themselves easily trades their hours for the momentary.
Try looking at your own day the way Peck looked at his patient’s cake. Where is your icing, and where is your sponge? Tomorrow start with the most unpleasant task, even for just one hour, and notice what the rest of the day becomes. A common mistake is to wait for the right mood. It usually comes after the hard part, not before it.
About the author
Morgan Scott Peck (1936-2005) was an American psychiatrist. He served as an army psychiatrist, including on Okinawa, and then for many years had a private practice in Connecticut. “The Road Less Traveled” was his first and best-known book.
All books by this author: M. Scott Peck
Terms from the book
- Connecticut
- discipline
- Okinawa
- transference
- grace
- residency: The several years of training a young doctor undergoes after medical school, working in a clinic under experienced colleagues and mastering the speciality.
- Badgley: Mac Badgley, head of the outpatient psychiatric clinic where Peck trained as a psychiatrist. Peck believed that one short answer from Badgley changed his attitude to responsibility.
- neurotic: In Peck’s book, a person who takes on too much responsibility and blames himself or herself even for what does not depend on them. This is the author’s working description, not a diagnosis.
- character disorder: For Peck, the opposite of neurosis: a person takes on too little responsibility and considers that others or circumstances are to blame for their troubles. The term comes from the psychiatry of his time and is used in the book as a description, not as a label.
- ego boundaries: The sense of where I end and another person or the world around begins. An infant does not yet have them; they take shape gradually. An image from the book, not a medical term.
- passive dependence: For Peck, a state in which a person is so busy being loved and cared for that they never get round to loving. A description by the author, not a diagnosis for the reader.
All terms
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