A Therapist's Treatise on Social Issues, Part 3: Anti-Fragility, Responsibility, & Locus of Control
Continued from part 2.
Not all stress is bad. “Good stress,” when positively embraced, helps build fortitude, endurance, wisdom, character, resilience, faith, and confidence. It fuels our drive to accomplish goals and improve our lives. It can inspire artistic expression, storytelling, and humor. Even adverse experiences over which we had no control can be turned into opportunities for such “post-traumatic growth.” Victims become victors. With the right alchemy, powerlessness yields a new level of empowerment.
Gravity strengthens bones and joints that must fight against its constant pull. Muscles grow when we place enough strain on them that they tear, so that they can rebuild themselves stronger. Our hearts become healthier through cardiovascular exercise that makes them pound uncomfortably in our chests. And we grow our intellects by challenging them. I believe the human spirit is no different. Not only are we not fragile; we are anti-fragile. We need to push against hardship.
Life on earth has never been easy. Not for the invertebrate ancestors of our distant evolutionary past; not for the hunter-gatherers we descended from; not for the farmers a few hundred years ago who survived plagues, famines, and droughts, or their city-dwelling cousins who knew nothing of indoor plumbing, electricity, or antibiotics. Not for the immigrants, the exiled, the persecuted, the enslaved. Yet somehow, those who came before us helped bring us to the conditions of here and now: relatively more safe and comfortable than at any point in history, with more abundant access to resources than even the kings and queens of yore. So safe and so comfortable, in fact, that we are free to complain about nearly anything without fear of execution.
Years of clinical work have deepened my appreciation for the pains and struggles hidden beneath even the most pleasant of masks. We all have our metaphorical lemons that life hands us. Part of my job as a therapist is to help clients make their own unique flavor of lemonade. I wouldn’t have survived my own history had I not found this ability within myself, and I see what a life-saver it is for so many resilient people. But some recent trends have me and many other thoughtful people concerned that our culture is simply teaching people that the appropriate thing to do with lemons is to throw them: at the people who handed them to you; at the lemon tree; at yourself, if you have more lemons than others; at the people who got oranges instead. It’s quickly becoming a sticky, slippery, sour, eye-stinging mess. This is not my approach.
When processing grief or trauma, there’s a time for everything. There’s a time to get mad at those who hurt you, a time to recognize unfairness, a time to feel how powerless you really were. There’s a time to affirm that what happened wasn’t within your control, and wasn’t your fault. However, something doesn’t have to be your fault in order for it to be your responsibility, if only in the practical sense that you are the one who now has the ability to respond and make what you will of things.
Ultimately, regardless of one’s religious views or lack thereof, and regardless of any other relationship with 12-step programs, the classic serenity prayer is good mental hygiene:
“…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; taking this world as it is and not as I would have it…”
At the end of the day, it is practical to improve that which we do have the capacity to affect in our lives, and try not to worry too much about the rest. We sometimes call this having an internal locus of control.
