Resilient in the face of Trauma

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don’t have dire reactions to events such as those are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as “absent grief.” But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma. The loss of a parent or spouse is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise.

But as one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.” Instead, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience

Why do most of us shake our heads in disbelief when an athlete who has been through several grueling years of chemotherapy tells us that “I wouldn’t change anything,” or when a musician who has become permanently disabled says, “If I had it to do all over again, I would want it to happen the same way,” or when quadriplegics and paraplegics tell us that they are pretty much as happy as everyone else? The claim made by people who have experienced events such as these seem frankly outlandish to those of us who are merely imagining those events—and yet, who are we to argue with the folks who’ve actually been there?

The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling into Happiness

Unrolling a Person

Development is an interesting word derived from a linguistic root meaning “rolled” or “folded.” An envelope is a folded sheet of paper, and to develop is to “unroll” something that has been heretofore so tightly rolled that we could not see what it really was. After the child has grown up, we can say that she was that way from the very start. But when she was a child, it was anyone’s guess how she would turn out.

The particular individual is an entity that is both utterly unique and profoundly like others. In this paradox of sameness and difference, we are like leaves on a tree or waves on the ocean.

The path of development is the fishtailing course we follow as we let go of what we have been and then discover a new thing to become—only to let go of that in time and become something new. This is the Way of Transition, the way or path of life itself, the alternating current of embodiment and disengagement, expansion and contractions.

William Bridges, The Way of Transitions

Give your love to the person he is now

Before we decide to give our love to a person, we should answer this: Can I be happy with this: Can I be happy with this person if he never changes? Too often we love an imaginary figure rather than the real thing. After we are married, we will get him to slim down. We know we can talk her into wearing contacts once we have settled down. We can live in the Midwest for a couple of years, but then I’ll talk him into moving to the coast.

But what if he doesn’t change? Can you live with that temper? Are you content to live a sedentary life? What if he doesn’t change his mind about children?

Give your love to the person he is now, not to the prince you hope he will become. We all know examples of people who have changed drastically after marriage. However, don’t count on it. It is possible the change may be the opposite of what you hoped.

William Coleman, Engaged

New Endings

Real change starts with endings, not beginnings. Change begins with ending something. If you can’t decide what to do next or which direction to go, perhaps it will help to rephrase the question this way:

What do I want to end? What am I willing to end?

Change is not just about starting something new. It’s about bringing something to a close.

Stephen Goforth

Learning Wisdom

Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you know about the world. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and even deny it) and then you return to a new relation with it.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Resisting change

We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can’t accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed. We also resist transition because it takes longer (often much longer) than change, and so it leaves us in limbo—or in the neutral zone, as I prefer to call it—while a replacement reality and a new self is gradually being formed.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Labels can be People Shortcuts

Labels are shortcuts. They allow us to easily dismiss the people we associate them with. They give us an excuse not to invest in others because we think we already know them. We avoid treating them as people.

If you ask a blind person what he would like more than anything else in the world (aside from regaining his sight) you’ll invariably get an answer like this: “I want people to accept me as a person in spite of my handicap. I don’t want to be defined as a blind person. I want to be known first as a person — a person who happens to blind. 

What the blind person is asking sounds like something from the Sermon on the Mount”: “Don’t label, and then you won’t be labeled.”  

Labels not only can be turned outward, but they can also be turned inward. Labeling ourselves can propel the user down a pessimistic spiral. “I can’t tell good jokes at parties” soon becomes “I’m no fun at parties” and eventually “People don’t want me around.”  

People who overeat soon find themselves saying, “I’m the kind of person who overeats.” Or it might be, “I’m the kind of person who has to keep smoking.” The shift toward letting a label become our identify is a subtle but damning shift. The label becomes a shortcut way to deny the possibility of change.

Stephen Goforth

Using Peer Pressure to our advantage

In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful... Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people's transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier… When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real.

Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Status quo Bias

Should you stay or should you go? Status quo bias is our tendency to, when presented with a choice, prefer the current scenario as opposed to making a change. You can account for this natural bias by reversing the situation and the direction of change.

Status quo bias stems from a variety of human tendencies. A natural fear of change, our preference for familiarity, and laziness, all contribute. It's not our friend, either: Status quo bias contributes to many poorly thought decisions (like our tendency to overspend on big purchases).

Consider this: would you take a $13,000 wage increase to relocate to another city? Most people would say no. Yet consider the opposite: If you were living in another city, would you take a $13,000 wage decrease to move back to this one?

You can apply this reversal heuristic to smaller decisions, too. For example, instead of wondering whether you should spend a dollar for a chocolate bar, you could ask yourself whether you'd be willing to receive a dollar for skipping a chocolate bar for the day.

This quick reversal is a simpler version of the Reversal Test, a mental tool philosophers use to account for status quo bias.

Herbert Lui writing in LifeHacker

Adapting to Change

Understand the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present movement. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war, Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

Making exterior changes to avoid internal changes

Some people make changes so they won’t have to make transitions. They walk out on their marriages, but take along the attitudes toward partners that destroyed their marriages. Or they continue to search for “someone to take care of me” after they quit their jobs because their bosses are not interested in playing that role. Or they move because their town doesn’t have any “interesting people” in it—only to find that their new town doesn’t either. Such people may claim that they are “always in transition,” but in fact they are probably never in transition. They are addicted to change, and like any addiction, it is an escape from the real issues raised by their lives.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Process of Transitions

Change is a situational shift.

Getting a new boss is a change, and so is receiving a promotion or losing your job.

Moving to a different house is a change, and so it remodeling your house or losing it in a fire.

Having a new change is a change for everyone in the family—including the new baby, who was pretty well situated before all the change too place.

And, of course, losing a loved one is a change—a huge one.

Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative “neutral zone” when things aren’t the old way, but aren’t really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Day Pain Died

The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine.

Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.

The "eureka moment" of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one.

Mike Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven

The one-sided Cycle

The ancient wisdom from Ecclesiastes that tells us that there is a time for living and dying. East and West have traditionally taken opposite positions in relation to this cycle. Eastern religions have traditionally embraced the letting-go that characterizes the ending aspect of the cycle. Western thought, on the other hand, has tried to get the most out of the other aspect of the cycle—the identifications, the embodiments, the actualizations that are associated with the transition phase of beginning again in a new cycle. This approach makes an ending into a breakdown and even a failure. To be fair, the East has its own one-sidedness too. It identifies with letting go and ending, and all the things that are produced by beginnings are dismissed as illusion. The letting go is no longer a dynamic process but a state of detachment.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Illusion

Self-evaluation involves interpretation. We’re all heard the studies showing that the vast majority of us consider ourselves above-average drivers. In the psychology literature, this belief is known as a positive illusion. Our brains are positive factories: Only 2 percent of high school seniors believe their leadership skills are below average. A full 25 percent of people believe they’re in the top 1 percent in their ability to get along with others. Ninety-four percent of college professors report doing above average work. People think they’re at lower risk than their peers for heart attacks, cancer, and even food-related illnesses such as salmonella.

Most deliciously self-deceptive of all, people say they are more likely than their peers to provide accurate self-assessments. Positive illusions pose an enormous problem with regard to change. Before people can change, before they can move in a new direction, they’ve got to have their bearings. But positive illusions make it hard for us to orient ourselves – to get a clear picture of where we are and how we’re doing.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

A Time of Nothingness

The problem is not that we don’t want to give up a job or a relationship, or that we can’t let go of our identity or our reality. The problem is that before we can find a new something, we must deal with a time of nothingness. And that prospect awakens old fears..

William Bridges, Transitions

Renewal Happens

Renewal comes neither by taking a rest nor changing the scenery, nor by adding something new to our lives, but by ending whatever is, and then entering a temporary state of chaos when everything is up for grabs and anything is possible. Then we can come out of what is really a death-and-rebirth process with a new identity, a new sense of purpose, and a new store of life energy.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Prose and Poetry of Change

The principal prose skill is finding your own voice. It is discovering how to be present in the experience of listening. It is listening deeply and experiencing just as deeply. There are prose elements to leading and living.

But similarly, there are poetry elements. Poetry is what illuminates your life. Poetry is what fills the small silences. Poetry is what brings you to meaning. Poetry is what touches the small fibers of who you are.

If you live a life of pure prose, you will live a linear and an effective but not an illuminus life. But if you can some how merge poetry and prose, you have the potential as a person and as a professional to be remarkable.

Roger Fransecky

A step into authenticity

Transition may not be simply a step toward an outlook that is more appropriate to the life-phase that we are actually in. It can also be a step toward our own more authentic presence in the world. That would mean that we come out of a transition knowing ourselves better and being more willing to express who we really are, whenever we choose to do so. It would also mean that we are more often willing to trust that who-we-really-are is all right—is valid and a person capable of dealing with the world.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Self-renewal and Failure

The self-renewing man is versatile and adaptive. He is not trapped in techniques, procedures, or routines of the moment. He is not the victim of fixed habits and attitudes. He is not imprisoned by extreme specialization.  

For the self-renewing man, the development of his own potentialities and the process of self-discovery never end. It is a sad but unarguable fact that most human beings go through life only partially aware of the full range of their abilities. By middle-age, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves. How long is it since you have failed at anything? If it is long, you are in poor shape. If you are sufficiently adventurous, sufficiently willing to try new things, you will stumble fairly often.  

John Gardner,  published in the Saturday Review XLVI, Jan. 5, 1963