One of the things you do in the book is to root exuberance in the natural world and our place in it as mammals.
If you've picked out a puppy as a kid, you know there's always a puppy under the chair quaking, and always a puppy with its tail wagging.
My last basset hound, Pumpkin, was morbidly shy. A wonderful animal, but wouldn't go near another dog or human. When she died, I got another. Named her Bubbles, because she is completely extroverted -- she sees a kid and goes bananas.
You're not going to make her shy and reticent. And you'd never make Pumpkin an extrovert. Just like you're not going to make a shy, anxious child into an exuberant one.
One of the problems with modern-day psychotherapy is that we're promising we can do that. You can't. Human society thrives because of that diversity. You [also] want to value people who are shy and anxious. You don't want to say, "You should be a hail-fellow-well-met extrovert." Why should they be?
You wrote this book partly during a time when you must have been feeling profound grief over your husband's death. (Richard Wyatt was chief of neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and died in 2002.) Was it difficult to write?
My husband got very sick about three years into [writing the book], so I wrote about half while he was alive and the last half after he died. It was a complicated time to write it. It was hard in the immediate months after his death.
My whole last chapter is about resilience and the fact that if you are naturally exuberant by temperament, you do naturally bounce back.
But resilience can be learned. Can exuberance be learned by those of us not genetically programmed for it?
You can learn resilience through cognitive psychotherapy. Do I believe for a minute you're actually making people more exuberant by doing that stuff? Absolutely not.
[With therapy] you're giving people a certain capacity to deal with difficulty, which is very different than putting in emotions or mood, or saying you can teach people to feel like they are fantastic or that life is fantastic.
I asked all my subjects, "Do you think exuberance is innate, learned, both?" They all said it was innate, which is consistent with the scientific literature. The feeling was you can squash exuberance out of people, but you can't put it in.
You can really discourage it in kids, and it's one of the reasons I emphasize play so much in the book. Especially in Washington, it's so competitive.
It can sometimes seem anti-play --
