Читать книгу The Woman's Book of Resilience - Beth Miller - Страница 9

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I WILL FIND PARTS OF THE PROBLEM THAT I CAN MANAGE

The truth mustdazzle graduallyor everyonebe blind

—EMILY DICKINSON

CONTROL has gotten a bad reputation. To say, “She is a control freak” or “What a terrible, controlling person she is” is to suggest that such a person should really loosen up! And yet, do you remember the Bop-Bag toy—the blow up toy that was painted like a man or a clown? He had big weighted feet so you could hit him again and again; each time, he would right himself. No matter how hard or from what angle you punched him, kicked him, hit him, or knocked him down, he would bounce back up and face you with his permanent grin. This toy is designed to give a child a sense of control. What an image of resilience. He bounces back no matter which position or how hard you punch him. It might be hard to imagine. But that bounce-ability is what successfully navigating the waters of adversity requires us to have. This step is about control. Real control and perceived control. A reasonable and discoverable degree of control. Because we need a degree of control in order to bounce back from hard times and to flourish as a result of being knocked down. Implicit in the very idea of resilience is that life is full of hardship, struggle, or tragedy Resilience is, in large part, about taking control after such difficulties.

You break off a relationship and watch all the pieces of your life take a different turn. More time for laundry and videos, yes, but what about the social events and vacations you will now attend alone? What about the sad look in friends' and family members' eyes, and what about the possible downward turn your esteem might take? What about the feelings of sadness, sorrow, anger, and grief? How intense and long-lasting might they be?

Someone close to you dies, and you know the experience of finality. You feel the daunting chasm of never being with that person again and all that that means—every holiday and meaningful event without this person and a chronic feeling of missing him or her. Your child starts taking street drugs, and neither of your lives is ever the same again. To be able to weather these storms and possibly grow from them requires a portion of control, the ability to see a problem or crisis or trauma as something that can be worked on, overcome, changed, endured, or resolved in some way. This is about knowing what is within your command so you can let go of what is not.

The control we need in order to be resilient is not about omnipotence or dictatorship; it is about a reasonable assessment of the environment. What has happened, and how much positive impact can I have for a positive outcome? How much of this task can I truly do something about? How can I manage my emotional reaction to keep things constructive?

The inner control needed is not about non-feeling or non-caring, it is not about repression or suppression; it is about having the ability to manage negative and troublesome emotions associated with the task or relationship at hand.

I am the steward of my own ship:

I can choose my own emotions and behaviors.

the perception of control

Recently I have come across research indicating that people who come into therapy believing that the outcomes of their life events were contingent on their behavior were three times more likely to experience successful outcomes in therapy than were clients who viewed events as being outside of their personal control. What intrigues me even further is that this reality includes people perceiving a semblance of control, even if they do not really have that much say in the matter. The very matter of perception can affect a positive outcome.

A woman I know went through months and months of agonizing fertilization treatments. The doctors and experts had given her and her husband very little reason to hope, but she persisted with every treatment feasible. She said she had always seen herself having a baby and she wasn't going to be discouraged by the experts. A short time after the medical teams had said there was nothing else they could do, this woman, with utter inner conviction, started drinking coffee again. She had remembered the caffeine positively interacting with her hormonal cycle, giving her the sense that she had more chance of ovulating and conceiving when she drank coffee. She became pregnant the next month. Was it the coffee? Was it her unwavering conviction that she would become pregnant? Was it a matter of time? Impossible to answer, but it seems reasonable to at least consider that, given the mind-body connection, her perceived control had some effect on the outcome.

How do people wrest an amount of control to help them cope and resolve hard issues? The rest of this chapter illustrates idea after idea showing people finding parts of the problem they could manage and handle. People controlling pieces of the whole picture:

Patricia is weary from supporting herself for forty years. She is looking forward to retirement in two years with great zeal, and she is finding it very difficult to show up at work effectively. She dreads Sunday evenings and drags herself to work each day until she realizes she is four dental appointments away from retirement and relaxes. Four dental appointments sound easier to wait for and muster through than two years of working 10-hour days.

Karen Duffy, cover girl and MTV actress, had a serious illness and a year of chemotherapy. She dealt with her condition a bit at a time. She told herself she would not be ill until the expiration date on the milk carton. She worked at staying well for that length of time—and then she bought a new bottle of milk with a new expiration date.

A San Francisco bartender, Fred Skau, was overwhelmed by the staggering amount of money needed to help his friends diagnosed with HIV. He put a glass jar on his bar, called Pennies from Heaven, and collected 60 million pennies over eight years.

And to deal with his emotions? “I have my times when I go out to the beach, kick the sand, yell at the waves, throw rocks, and get it all out. Then I go back and do what needs to be done.”

A colleague's grandfather was a farmer during the Depression. He owned land in the dustbowl of the Midwest and went through very rugged hard times trying to keep his family intact and fed during the country's devastating losses. And yet he says times are much harder now.

Why? Because at least he owned his own land back then. No one on the fifty-fourth floor of some building in some far-away city could take it away from him. He might not be able to bring in a decent wage from farming, but he could always grow enough food to feed his family. He believed that, as bad as things are, the wolf at the door or the landowner on the fifty-fourth floor does not have to have complete power or control over you or your life. You have to find what you can control, guide, direct, orchestrate, or negotiate for yourself.

Marcy graduated from college and looked forward to her blossoming career in public relations. Her dream was to own her own company. She was venturing out on her own, giving up being financially supported by her parents. She experienced sheer terror when she looked into the future and saw the need to support herself for the next twenty or thirty years. She began to feel overwhelmed having to work all that time, with only minor vacations for relief, and worried about being sick, being in a car accident, or not being able to support herself financially. By breaking things down, instead, she concentrated on creating a budget, using each day to network and build her support system, and put away a small amount each week for a “rainy day.”

Vladimir Horowitz, renowned pianist, said when he did not practice one day, he knew it; when he did not practice three days, his audience knew it.

Ellen Langer, Ph.D., a psychologist at Harvard University, found that the people in nursing homes who were required to dress themselves or choose which foods to eat had lower mortality rates than those people with comparable health who had all their needs taken care of by the attendants. She argues that nursing home life should be made more complex, not easier. “It's important for people to be in control of their lives, and the way to be in control is to be in the active process of mastering something.” Langer goes on to say, “If all you think about is how you're likely to fail at a challenge, you probably will. But if you ask yourself, ‘What are ten ways I could succeed at this?’ your chances of success are much greater.”

In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes:

We all hope that if we work hard and have a high holy quest, we will come up with something, a substance, a material, something or other that will—flash!—make everything orderly forever. But that is not the way it works…. We can have all the knowledge in the universe and it comes down to one thing: practice. It comes down to going home and step-by-step implementing what we know. As often as necessary, and for as long as possible, or forever, whichever comes first.

Calvin and Hobbes was a popular cartoon in many newspapers. Calvin, an adorable, devilish child, had an imaginary tiger friend, Hobbes, with whom he talked over all his problems. One time he told Hobbes:

Problems often look overwhelming at first. The secret is to break problems into small manageable chunks. If you deal with those you're done before you know it. For example, I'm supposed to read this entire history chapter. It looks impossible, so I break the problem down.

Hobbes responds, “You focus on reading the first section?”

“No,” responds Calvin, “I ask myself, ‘Do I even care?’”

Elizabeth told me about her experience in therapy and the appreciation she has for the time it takes to heal—realizing that “as it goes slowly so it goes genuinely” and she can count on it being solid and lasting. She says, “Something wicked happened when I was a child” and it planted a tiny seed deep within her. She forgot about the seed and the wicked deed and then, lo and behold, as an adult she finds a full-grown redwood tree within her, blocking out the sun, taking up way too much room, deeply rooted and using energy and resources for its survival, denying her the needed energy and space. She went on to describe the process required for cutting down a full grown redwood tree: “You cannot simply axe it—you need to begin by topping it, cutting back the branches, gathering the fallings and burning them, all in preparation for the final cutting away of the solid trunk. This takes time, patience, and hard work.” If you were given, all at once, all the food you will eat until the day you die, it would be overwhelming. Eating three times a day is manageable. A task at a time.

breaking it down

Many of life's events can be broken down into manageable pieces. Here are some examples.

When a project is very complex, break it down. Anyone writing a dissertation or a book, starting his or her own company, or raising a child can attest to this wisdom. Parcel out the problem into sections and figure in a reward and/or ritual after significant junctures are completed. Each little piece achieved will give you impetus to go on to the next.

If you are experiencing fear—a tight knot in the gut—imagine it parceled out into many little packages, each piece contained in itself. Disseminate the fear into manageable chunks and handle them one at a time. Do the same with any emotion.

If you are beginning an exercise program, remember to start slowly and build up. Beginning runners start out by stretching and limbering. They say it is best to begin with a short distance, add a bit longer run to each day. Once they get a rhythm established they can begin doing a little more each day. This is based on the principle of optimum performance: not wearing something or someone out but steadily building and becoming stronger each day.

When learning something new, start on a small scale and work your way up. A friend of mine bought a home with a full yard to landscape and maintain. She had never done any gardening before and didn't have a particular bent or talent. She believed that she should just know how to do this and should be able to manage it as well as anyone else. In truth, the project was overwhelming and daunting and stayed that way the entire fifteen years she lived there. She maintained the perspective of seeing the landscaping as the entire front and back yard, and she continued her belief that she should know how to garden (how hard could it possibly be?). As a result the yard did not look as she would have liked and she got minimal pleasure out of it.

When she moved into a city she had a tiny little planter box outside her living room window and a few large plants on the deck. She loves working these two places and cares for them both as if they were her flesh and blood children. She feels on top of their care. This small area was more manageable for her and allowed her the proper rhythm to learn how to garden.

Christmas clubs work on the premise of breaking things down into manageable pieces. By putting away a certain amount of money each month you have a sizeable chunk of cash in December to shop for the holidays without bankrupting yourself in one month's overspending. In that vein, a group of my women friends put away $120 every month for two years. We used the money to vacation in a villa in Italy for two weeks. The trip was extra delicious because it was all paid for before we even left our homes.

The model of recovery for addictions is based on one day at a time and distinguishing what you can control and what you cannot. The idea of never drinking a glass of wine again can lead to defiance and rebellion—too big a picture. Managing one day at a time quiets the restless mind and allows for minor successes leading to more success.

If you are trying to manifest a dream, remember that it can take time and lots of small steps to realize larger visions. I believe in dreams. Nighttime dreams that come to us with bits and pieces of information about ourselves and how we are in the world and daytime dreams that can forecast what we would like for ourselves. In either case it takes time to assimilate and absorb the unconscious into our everyday conscious life. It was fifteen years ago that I had a dream of one day practicing psychotherapy in a Victorian building. That was before any schooling—any paper written, any exam taken—and long before the arduous journey of years of internships and licensing exams. In fact, the process took so long I forgot I had imagined myself in a Victorian. I forgot until the sunny day recently when I looked up at my building in San Francisco and consciously realized I had my dream office.

A talk show host was interviewing a vegetarian restaurateur, and he was curious how to help people convert from cooking with meat to cooking satisfying vegetarian dishes. “Cook one new recipe at a time—cook a new meal once a month,” was the response from the expert. The talk show host laughed and said he understood the concept because “nobody lives in Manhattan—it's too damn big. Everybody lives in a neighborhood. I'm from the east side.”

It is extremely difficult to get our heads around horrific events or evil acts like war, slavery, and holocausts. Often they are too big and abstract to get hold of with any depth of meaning. And yet when we hear an individual story or detail the whole picture can become vivid and accessible.

Gary Paulson writes about his experience of running the famous dog-pulled race in Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod:

It is almost impossible to articulate the race as a whole. It can be broken down into sections, days, hours, horrors, joys, checkpoints, winds, nights, colds, waters, ices, deaths, tragedies, small and large courages. But as a whole, to say generally what the race is like, there are no exact words.

No exact words for the race as a whole. As most of these examples show, there are many, many times we cannot grasp the whole, especially when it entails something difficult. To be resilient, to stay in the game, and hopefully to see it through to a satisfying end, we need to see the pieces of the problem. These examples highlight how different people, in different circumstances, found a semblance of control over a problem, which in turn gave them a flexibility of resilience. An important theme throughout the examples is the attitude of “I can do this—I will find a way through the difficulty. I want to do this and I want to do what I need to do.” In fact, I purposely use the words I will to begin each spoke of the resilience process. Thinking about and applying the spokes this way indicates this attitude of self-determination and will power, implying a sense of control and beginning with an attitude of intention.

The sense of control discussed in this chapter is completely in the service of resilience.

The grandfather's pleasure at not being indebted to the anonymous man on the fifty-fourth floor did not mean he was immediately wealthy or not suffering the consequences of a collective depression. People still died from AIDS, Patricia needed to show up at work for the next two years, and Marcy had to learn to support herself. Control in the service of resilience is to make the situation and/or emotions manageable so you can, as the Bop-Bag toy, right yourself as many times as necessary while riding out the hard time, or righting yourself after the blow. It is not intended to control any outcomes; in fact, resiliency is not about outcomes. By its nature, resilience is pliable—not rigid. The bamboo, the willow, and the reed bend during a storm, and therefore the winds and rains will not buffet them; they bend and survive the storm. Control in the service of resilience implies we can choose to find the appropriate times to bend and we, too, can survive the storm.

exercise

MAP YOUR MIND

There is a process called mind mapping that helps break large and cumbersome issues into bite-sized pieces.

Begin by writing a subject—a project, relationship, job, emotion, issue, or goal—in the middle of a large piece of paper. What is it you are working on, what is the current challenge in your life? For example, you have just suffered a loss. Begin by writing this loss in the center of the paper. Draw a circle around the words, and then draw a line out from the circle. On this line, write your first thought. Draw out another line from the circle for your second thought, and so on.

Look at these thoughts. When you see these thoughts on paper, in front of you, you might think of more minute parts of the ideas. Draw additional lines out from the first ones, and write the details on these. Think of the middle circle (the problem or issue) as the tree, the lines leading out from it (your thoughts) are the branches, and the next lines (the details) are the twigs coming off the branches.

You are getting more and more detail. Now imagine yourself above this problem or issue, looking down at it. You will see the entire issue at once and what relates to what. (You can even use different colors for the trunk, branches, and twigs.)

You can do a complete second mind map devoted entirely to emotions and feelings if needed or desired.

Put your mind map in a place you will see it each day, and add to it as it seems appropriate. Reflect on how to use the information on the map to help you through the difficult time. This can be a way to break many things down and see the concerns, tasks, or emotion in easier-to-handle bits.