Читать книгу Take Control of Life's Crises Today! A Practical Guide - Robert Haynes H. - Страница 7

Think for a few minutes about a crisis you have experienced in your life. How did you react? Were you able to remain calm and think clearly about the steps you needed to take? Was your response effective and systematic, or were your thoughts in a jumble and your actions disorganized with tasks being started and then abandoned? Did you freeze, or panic and feel as though you were “coming apart at the seams”?

How you have reacted in the past provides a benchmark for what you are likely to do in future crises. Hall of Fame Pro Football star Michael Irvin said he tries to live by his late father’s philosophy that “Greatness lies in your ability to overcome.” What about you? Are you able to overcome in the face of adversity—in the midst of a crisis?

How I Foolishly Crashed My Trailer

It was an idyllic setting—a camping spot nestled in the Jeffrey Pines not more than 10 feet from the creek. The late snowfall had resulted in an unusually high runoff in all the rivers and creeks, and this particular creek was no exception. It offered good fishing and soothing sounds—no sleep-aid sound machine needed! What a peaceful, fun vacation.

As we were getting ready to leave, friends gathered to help us hook up our fifth-wheel trailer and to bid us farewell. It was, quite frankly, a tight spot to get out of, and I was nervous about how it would go. I was also slightly distracted from my normal routine due to chatting and joking with friends. My wife and I had performed this routine at least 1,000 times in over 100,000 miles of towing a trailer without incident. I signaled Cheryl to pull the truck and trailer forward so we could complete the job and heard a loud scraping noise and then another loud clunk and crash in sequence.

The campground fell silent! In disbelief, I watched the front of the trailer crash down on the truck’s rear fenders, which now looked something like crumpled tissue paper. “Holy cow, what happened?” I thought. “How could that be?” I froze as did everyone else. Dozens of thoughts raced through my head in a matter of seconds: What caused that? What did I forget? Is the trailer ruined? Maybe the truck is too! How will we get home? Oh my gosh, is someone under the trailer? The human brain is like a computer trying to analyze and process what it is observing.

Then our calm, level-headed friend Bill said, “You’re alright. Let’s just get the trailer jacked up off the truck.” That was the direction I needed. Finally, I could feel myself begin to think about my plan of action and how to proceed with this mess, but my response was slow because I kept thinking “What had I done wrong?” With Bill’s encouragement, I was able to put my plan in motion: stabilize the trailer with wheel chocks, lower the front landing legs, and raise the trailer off the truck. Eventually, we were able to reconnect the trailer to the truck hitch.

It was a sobering experience to say the least. I pride myself on being extremely cautious when it comes to trailer safety. I check and recheck everything ad nauseam. I told the camp manager, who is a former truck driver, that I check every time I hook up, but I had failed to check this one time. He replied with a wry smile on his face, “I guess this time you should have checked too.” Also, by now our small group of friends had grown to nearly 20 RVers who had come to view this fiasco.

No one was hurt, the trailer was undamaged, the truck got repaired, and Cheryl and I and our friends have new camping stories to tell. But in the first minutes following this accident, I had experienced shock and disbelief, anger at myself, questioned how this could have happened, felt a desire to just walk away and leave the whole darn thing, humiliation as the crowd of strangers grew, and finally some semblance of an action plan to recover from this crisis.

Reacting, recovering, and quickly developing and implementing an action plan can be difficult in a crisis. I realized I needed to practice how I might better handle such crises in the future. Specifically, I wanted to work on being less immobilized by questioning myself about what had happened and more able to quickly assess the situation and move to the action or problem-solving phase, just as Bill had done.

Life Is Full of All Kinds of Crises

Let’s think for a minute about the range of crises that we encounter in our lives. Can you imagine yourself in any of these scenarios?

•Erica has been unhappy in her marriage for years and has finally gathered the resolve to move out on her own with her three children. She knows it will be a financial and emotional struggle to make a comfortable life for herself and her children. She struggles with self-doubt—that nagging self-talk about whether this is the right thing to do—but moves ahead with her plan. She seems to experience two steps forward and one step back every day, but Erica is confident and happy for the first time in years.

•Josie’s husband died a month ago after a difficult year-long battle with cancer. She feels a sense of relief for her husband as this ended his suffering, but she doesn’t know where to go with her life now that her husband of 42 years has passed. Josie feels empty, sad, and lost without the responsibility of caring for her husband.

•Derrick can’t wait for tomorrow when he will finally marry Anita, the love of his life. Eight months of planning have led up to this day, and Derrick is thinking about what the wedding means to him. He is wondering—is Anita really the love of my life? What if I’m not ready for this commitment? Maybe we should have waited a few more months. It’s too late for these doubts now, and Derrick feels there is no turning back or he will disappoint Anita and their families and friends.

•Emily is 16 and feeling pressured by her boyfriend to have sex with him. She feels she is mature enough to make this decision, but what is the right choice? She loves her boyfriend, so she thinks it would be okay to become intimate with him. But she is scared, wondering what it will be like, wondering if it will change their relationship, wondering if it really is the right thing to do.

•Sophia lives in a rural area in the Northeast. Superstorm Sandy’s torrential rains flooded her modest two bedroom home, and she and her dog had to evacuate and are currently staying in temporary shelters. It will be several days before she can go back to her home to survey the damage, but she is preparing herself for the worst. At 51 she can’t imagine starting all over again, but she begins to think about where she will live and how she will rebuild her home and her life.

If you have been in a similar situation, how did you manage your response? What were you thinking? What were you feeling? Were you satisfied with the way things turned out and how you moved forward? Were you able to overcome?

Over the course of your life you will experience several types of crises with varying degrees of severity. Some may seem more manageable than others. The major crisis types are listed in the table. Perhaps you can identify examples for some of these crisis types from your own life.

CRISIS TYPES
Human Caused	Acts of Nature
Anticipated Event	Unexpected Event
Brief Consequences	Long-term Consequences
Occasional Event	Recurring Event

Human caused events include marriage, divorce, problems with children, school shootings, job interviews, auto accidents, crime, and the like. Acts of nature are beyond our control, such as floods, earthquakes, or a flat tire. Human caused events seem to involve more self-doubt, guilt, and anger than do acts of nature. We react differently to someone injured in an auto accident caused by the carelessness and negligence of another driver than to someone injured in a tornado or an earthquake. For the careless driver, we might feel anger, assign blame, and want revenge. Robbery victims often experience feelings of helplessness and vulnerability along with depression and hopelessness. It is important to identify the source of these crises, and how various kinds of crises affect us.

An unexpected event brings about the most psychological and social disruption. Anticipated crises, such as upcoming financial difficulties, provide an opportunity for us to plan our strategy in advance. Brief events, such as worry about an annual physical exam, are quickly resolved. But a diagnosis of cancer at our annual exam becomes a very stressful long-term crisis that is much more difficult to confront. We all face occasional minor crises in our day-to-day lives, but if these brief events are recurring—such as the neighbor’s dog barking every night to interrupt your sleep—minor crises can become increasingly disruptive.

A seemingly minor crisis might affect an individual significantly, but a major disaster may not. Crisis responses are individual, and some of us have developed better coping responses and can react in a positive way to resolve the situation more quickly. Although even a minor mishap may feel like a major crisis to some of us, it is safe to say that crises involving injury or death have the greatest impact on us. In addition, the closer we are to the crisis situation and to the people involved, the more frightened and traumatic our reaction will be. Seeing the destruction from a tornado in another state on TV has less impact on us than watching the tornado pass close by and destroy a neighboring community.

How Do Children React to Crises?

Children react to crises differently than adults, but like adults, their reactions are highly variable from child to child and from event to event. Their reactions can be immediate or delayed. Common responses are a loss of trust and a fear of the event recurring. Children don’t have the ability to conceptualize distance, so they may feel vulnerable and stressed when hearing about a crime or a natural disaster that occurred hundreds or even thousands of miles away. If a child watches the television news that describes a series of kidnappings and murder in a distant state, or even another country, the child may be fearful that this could happen to her or him. Many children across the country were traumatized by the 9/11 attacks in New York City—they felt as though it had occurred in their neighborhood and believed that the same thing could happen to them even at home.

A young child’s reactions to a crisis are strongly affected by the parents’ reactions to the event. If you show a great deal of emotion and fear, chances are your child will too. Children display a range of behaviors as a result of fear from crisis events, including becoming clingy, regressing to behaviors of a younger age, nightmares and sleep disturbances, social isolation, school difficulties, poor concentration, physical complaints, constantly reliving the event, and more. (See Chapter 7 for detailed information on preparing your child to cope with a crisis.)

Factors That Influence Your Crisis Response

Your current life situation and current level of stress will influence how you cope with a crisis. Stress reactions to a crisis involve physiological, emotional, and cognitive components. If you are in the throes of a divorce, facing bankruptcy, and dealing with your child’s behavioral problems at school, you will be much less effective in handling a new crisis than you otherwise would be. We live with increasing stress today, from economic stressors to world events. On top of that, people just seem busier in their lives and have less time to relax and replenish the energy needed to handle life’s demands. In general, the more stressors in your life, the more difficult it will be to cope effectively with crises.

If you experienced a crisis in the past, a similar kind of crisis may awaken previous reactions. The victim of a hurricane may show strong emotions when exposed to even the slightest wind and rain. Depending upon the severity of the crisis, some individuals may lose their equilibrium about life. Conversely, you may have learned how to cope effectively with a situation that will help you in the future.

If you have been successful in the past and believe you will be so in the future, that expectation most likely enhances your ability to succeed simply because you have the experience and success to back it up. When the high school softball team members know that their team has not beaten their cross-town rival in 10 years, they may expect to be defeated again. But if they have beaten them on occasion and know it can be done, their belief that they can succeed may affect the outcome. Do not underestimate the value of self-confidence.

Oftentimes, our mind tries to tell us that there really is nothing wrong as we seek to “normalize” a situation. You might see someone holding up a convenience store attendant but think it must just be a stunt—some friends trying to surprise the attendant. When a crisis occurs, it can take some time for the situation to “sink in” that this is really happening. The more quickly and accurately you can identify what is happening, the more quickly you will be able to formulate a plan to manage the situation.

Common reactions in a crisis are disbelief, disorientation, and feeling disorganized. Most people are able to overcome those feelings and do what they need to do, but some 10–20 percent of individuals become immobilized and are unable to act or respond. Generally, this occurs in more serious crises.

We all have experienced the fight or flight reaction—heart rate increases, breathing rate increases, muscle tension and blood pressure increase, and vision and hearing become sharpened. This is the body’s emergency response system, but in today’s stress-filled world, this stress response may be activated many times a day, leading to fatigue, exhaustion, an inability to cope, and eventually to physical problems such as headaches, illness, and even heart attacks. It isn’t quite as useful today as it was in earlier times where our ancestors needed to fight predators or flee for self-protection. We experience the fight or flight response when we have a near miss in the car, walk into the job interview, or walk to the podium to give a speech. Every stressful event uses up valuable energy from your personal fuel tank. Eventually you will run out of fuel and shut down just like a car with an empty gas tank. Effective crisis management will help you make this fight or flight reaction work for you as a mobilizing force and limit the amount of time this system is activated and the amount of fuel you use for these events. As your brain determines that the crisis is over, it sends signals to the body that cause heart rate, breathing, and blood flow to the muscles to return to normal levels. Your own inner self-talk can affect this physiological process in your body.

Because of our genetic makeup, some individuals are more strongly and immediately affected by crises and stressors in life. Some people have a short form serotonin gene, which makes one likely to react more strongly to a threat or crisis. Those with the long form of this gene are able to deliberate more about whether the threat is serious. It is nearly impossible to determine whether your reactions are a result of genetics, learning or some combination of those. Regardless, I believe you can learn a new system of responses.

Time distortion occurs in a crisis. You hear people talking about how the earthquake seemed as though it lasted an hour when in fact it was 30 seconds. Even that difficult conversation you are having with your teenager about coming in after curfew seems to go on and on when in fact it only lasted a few minutes. Crisis situations slow down our sense of time.

Our thinking and problem-solving abilities may be reduced by as much as 80–90 percent in an extreme crisis. No wonder we find ourselves saying after a car accident, “I didn’t know what to do first, whom to call, or what to say.” Most times in a crisis we react with emotion—fear, anger, disbelief—and our thinking processes take a back seat. It is important to recover as quickly as possible to get our thinking working for us so we can manage the situation. People who are unable to recover quickly from their emotional response, may need a long time to figure out what they need to do to manage the situation.

As we successfully manage our crises, we develop strength and confidence in our ability to handle future crises. Likewise, if we are overwhelmed by crises on a regular basis, it is more likely that we will not be able to handle future stressors and will feel overwhelmed. Psychologist and author Don Meichenbaum believes we can learn, practice, and apply coping skills to inoculate ourselves to crises and stressors. He coined the term “Stress Inoculation Training,” or SIT, to describe this method of developing tolerance to stress. SIT involves learning about stress and your own response to stressors, acquiring skills for coping and then rehearsing or practicing those skills, and finally applying these learned skills across increasing levels of stressors. SIT is a comprehensive therapeutic approach that has been used with considerable success.

So what does this all mean for you? First, you should expect some kind of emotional reaction, and second, you can expect to recover with time. A lot has to do with how you have been able to manage yourself in the past, how you perceive the situation, and how well prepared and practiced you are to handle the current situation. Life presents us with daily crises—some big ones and many small ones—and this is the practice ground on which we will learn how to cope and be prepared for the larger crises that will come along.

We all experience crises in life and we react differently, but we can identify some common patterns. It helps to be able to identify the type of crisis you are experiencing and to understand how you are reacting and what you are telling yourself about the crisis. The next chapter will help you assess more specifically how you handle various crisis situations as you identify what you need to learn to be better able to cope with crises.