Monday, May 23, 2011

Tool No. 9: Deal Better with Hard Times

As I write this, the airwaves are full of what seems like relentlessly bad news for the people in Japan in the wake of the combined impact of an earthquake, a tsunami and a crippled nuclear power plant.  And in Libya and Syria we are watching a handful of rebels take on deeply entrenched and deep-pocketed autocracies.  Even in the wake of an errant attack by their supposed NATO protectors, the rebels claim no animus.  Despite the loss of life of some of their number, they support NATO’s work on their behalf.

These are present examples of what is sometimes described as the capacity of the human spirit; the ability to get knocked down and then get up again.  This capacity is celebrated in song and story and film and television show.  It is a central story in the national mythology and it is also why boxing movies are almost always successful.

So, how do you develop this ability?  How can you make yourself more resilient?  How do you make sure, after having been put in life’s deep fat fryer, that it all comes back, except one table spoon?  These are the central questions in protecting your good mental health.

On the Live Your Life Well website, they suggest basic strategies for dealing with hard times:

¨      Write it out
¨      Tackle your problems
¨      Shift your thinking
¨      Get support
***
Does writing about a problem make it any easier to deal with?
I am a horrible diarist.  I keep buying different types of notebooks thinking that the right tool will inspire me to be more disciplined about capturing my impressions of the events of my life.  In reading through a lifetime’s worth of false starts, I find that I have had a particularly uninteresting time of it. When Seinfeld was on TV and everyone was marveling at a show about nothing, I remember thinking that I could keep a diary about nothing, but even I lost interest in that.
The Internet has provided a diarist something they haven’t had before and that’s an audience.  Sure, maybe your mom discovers your diary under your bed and learns the shocking secrets of being an adolescent, but a real audience of strangers was something most diarists got only when they left their notebooks on a bus and, even then, there was no feedback loop, no opportunity to learn if they, the readers, liked your stuff.  Now, depending on your tags, you have, in theory, the opportunity to reach the entire world.
Does the opportunity for feedback change the process of trying to work a problem out on paper?
I think the answer will be different for each of us.  In my own case, I think of writing for the web like writing for my teachers:  I try to be coherent, try to apply my best understanding of grammar (which is, I admit, highly fluid) and I hope only to get positive comments in response.
Clearly, journaling is a recurring element in a variety of therapeutic processes.  The mere act of committing pen to paper forces some measure of structure on to the content.  Letters, words and paragraphs follow in a linear sequence to document an idea.  And while my circumspect nature might wrestle with finding the “ideal” sequence and structure, for others—perhaps most—this is not an overriding concern.
I remember watching a documentary on Woody Allen where he described his writing process.  Like a great many writers before him, he made the point that stories are not written so much as they are rewritten.  At the time, I remember thinking that he could save himself so much work if he just thought a bit more carefully about what he was trying to say.
Since that time, I have done a lot more writing and have come to recognize the “truthiness” of what he said.  Sometimes, most times really, you have to get all of the pieces of a story out of your head in order to look at them and to figure out if they are any good.
This was a difficult and expensive realization to arrive at.  I think I’ve spent/wasted a great deal of time working out ideas before committing them to paper when I should have just started writing.  It sounds trite, but I really have only recently learned this:  ideas and, for that matter, solutions to problems never arrive fully-formed, they are more like a block of marble from which the idea must be carved. 
In trying to work out a problem, a block of an idea might drive you to your notebook or your keyboard, but it is in trying to explain it that it acquires any elegance.
The next step, the toughest step, in evaluating an idea, or any solution to a problem is to test it.
***
The second step in building resilience is by tackling your problems.
On the Live Your Life Well site, they advocate listing your problems and then identifying without judgment as many solutions as you can.  By not ruling any solution out in advance, you give yourself permission to consider every possibility.
This is particularly difficult for me as I have an active inner monologue and thoughts do not get a chance to dry before I have evaluated them and criticized myself for having had such a stupid idea in the first place.
I remember taking a design class in school and, because the teachers were so appalled at the general level of drawing talent in the class, they instituted a series of life drawing classes.  One of the exercises was what is called “gesture drawing” wherein you put pencil to paper and, while keeping your eye on the model, you try to capture their form while they are moving.
I found this very difficult to do because I wanted to keep checking my work.  I would fuss over trying to get the first line right that the exercise would be over before I had even started.
Problem solving is always easier for other people.  When dealing with personal issues, you lose the ability to see the forest and become completely absorbed by the individual trees.
My wife says I watch too much reality television.  She’s probably right.  But there is something very compelling about immersing yourself in other people’s challenges.  Whether they are making cupcakes or salvaging logs from riverbeds I find it equally engaging.  To me, problem solving is problem solving:  the process is the same, only the nouns change.
I was watching “Ax Men” recently and they featured a sequence in which one of the “aqua loggers” became so focused on recovering a sunken log that they caused their boat to sink.
It wasn’t that they did not properly evaluate the risk, or were somehow unaware that there was water pouring over their decks and into open hatches, they made the decision that the risk was offset by the potential for reward.  As it would turn out, their assessment was not accurate and the results are captured on video, but they took the risk.
Certainly they were frustrated to have lost their work boat.  As it turned out, they were close enough to shore that they were able to secure their craft and take their equipment off.  By their reactions, they seemed very equivocal, like this sort of thing happened every day.
On the same show and working the same stretch of water is another crew with a very different approach to dealing with difficult times:  they blame one another.
Theirs is a father-son operation and each believes that their work would go so much easier if the other would only shut up and listen to them.  Granted, they have not had their boat crippled by partially sinking it in water, but they have experienced just about every other possible failure situation and all of it punctuated by the Morse code like rhythm of bleeps to obscure their relentless cursing of one another.
I’m not sure they would have profited much from the journaling process, although perhaps having a camera crew following your every move serves the same purpose.
And as for problem solving, they seem ready to tackle symptoms, but cannot yet agree on what their problems might be.  For them, it would seem important to move on to the next part of the resiliency process.
***
Shift Your Thinking
I remember coming across a quote from the science fiction writer David Gerrold:  “One fact can change your whole point of view.  For instance, did you know that King Kong was a lesbian?”
If you accept his thinking, suddenly the story is transformed from a giant monster on a rampage story to a tragic story of unrequited love.  Those pilots trying to shoot Kong from the Empire State Building are transformed from heroes into villains and producer Carl Denham’s last words, “It was beauty killed the beast,” become much more resonant.
Changing your perspective can often improve your ability to respond to life’s challenges.  This is why people go on vacation.
I remember watching a program on the principles of magic and a demonstration where Lance Burton was explaining misdirection.  He demonstrated by throwing a tennis ball against a garage door and having his dog chase after it.  He would throw the ball and the dog would chase it and bring it back.
On one occasion, he mimed throwing the ball and the dog repeated his response and chased after a ball that wasn’t there.
By all appearances, the actions were identical only Burton never released the ball.  The dog had been trained to expect the ball and was therefore at a loss for what to do next.  He had every reason to expect there to be a ball and so responded as if there was one, even though he could not find it.
Not having a context for magical thinking—that we know about—the dog expected that there would be a ball and when there was none, he went to solve a problem that did not exist.  He assumed that the ball had gotten past him and not that he was being tricked.
We are just as gullible as that dog, just as easily misled by patterns and expectations.  And while we might not fall for such an obvious example, there are plenty of other examples from the world of magic where repetition is used to disguise the secret of the trick.
And what is perhaps most interesting is that our sophisticated brains will first try to explain away the effect and, when no satisfactory solution can be made to fit what we think we saw, the we are all too quick to accept that the demonstrator, the magician, has some special powers not available to the rest of us.
Nurturing the ability to break free of patterns of behavior and response is an important part of becoming more resilient.  This doesn’t mean that you have to completely blow up your life, or take up ballroom dancing.  It can be as simple as taking a different route to work or stopping at a different place for your morning coffee.
My wife’s grandmother was the very definition of resiliency.  I came away from my first meeting with her with the absolute certainty that she was someone who would only ever tell you the absolute truth, regardless of how it might make you feel.
Cancer had claimed her husband and had gone a couple or rounds with her as well.  This was never treated as anything remarkable, but in much the same way that people talk about the infamous “winter of ’78.”  She did not focus on having undergone a mastectomy, but rather on the benefit of subsequently having a convenient place to store her tissue. 
My wife tells the story of her grandmother buying a knit cap with the explanation that it would come in handy the next time she got cancer and the chemo made all of her hair fall out.
My dad, on the other hand, was not able to change his thinking.  He saw cancer as a death sentence and, when he got his diagnosis he became resigned to what he saw as the inevitable outcome.
The capacity to shift one’s thinking can be very powerful, but it is not always easy and it is not necessarily something you can do on your own.  Sometimes, you need help.
***
Get Support
When we were getting ready to move half-way across the country, my wife and I spent a lot of time cleaning our apartment so that we could get back our damage deposit.  While we were in the place, we got our first dog and, as puppies will do, he “claimed” different parts of the apartment as his own and was, for a while, almost prideful in his marking of his territory.
There was a lot of scrubbing and disinfecting and a lot of ammonia used prior to the landlord’s exit interview.
Because of scheduling, the walk-through was conducted after our departure and we subsequently learned that we would receive only a fraction of our deposit.  We were in our new place and almost a thousand miles out of town, but I was pretty steamed.  The apartment was cleaner than when we moved in and all traces of the puppy had been erased.  How dare we get anything less than a clean bill of cleaning?
A whole range of responses ran through my head up to and including small claims court.
At the time, our local radio station carried the nightly talk show of Bruce Williams.  Bruce has a tremendous radio presence, one that inspires confidence.  He talks to people who are thinking of starting a business, or who are having a property beef with their neighbors, or who are planning a cruise.  He doesn’t give advice to the love-lorn, or a forum to UFO conspiracies, he helps people navigate through life. 
One night, I heard him say that he would be staying late to answer calls off the air for broadcast at a later date.  I thought I would call and get his take on “puppy-gate.”
I dialed the number and, while on hold, fumed and fussed and generally thought of ways to justify my high dudgeon. 
And then it was my turn.
I laid out my case and, in what seemed like no time at all, it was over.  He pointed out that it would be virtually impossible for the landlord to distinguish the ammonia smell produced by our dog from the ammonia smell produced by Proctor & Gamble.  His advice to me:  let it go.
I’ve never been comfortable with that advice.  When people tell me to “get over it” my hackles go immediately to the upright and locked position.  It has always seemed to me to be dismissive of my experience.
This was the one time—and perhaps the only time—when such advice made sense to me.  I was half-way across the country with no hope of influencing my now former landlord to change her position and any action I could envision was just going to take time and money from me.  Letting go of the rope was the only sensible option.
And while it was not a response that came easily to me, a life-long grudge holder, I did.  And I really have not thought that much more about it until writing this.
***
I am not very resilient.  It would be a better finish to this piece if I were, but I’m not.  My apple cart is not so much overturned as it is relentlessly targeted by the vehicles in movie car chases.
We have all seen moments in movies when the good car chases the bad car through an urban environment with tires squealing and pedestrians jumping out of the way.  At some point, the pace of the scene slows as we watch a fruit seller, or some other street vendor, push their wares across the street and right into the path of the racing vehicles.  For variety, sometimes one of the vehicles will jump the curb and drive through a newsstand, or a parade, or some such obstacle creating massive chaos. 
I am forever cleaning up after car chases. 
But, then again, if I shift my thinking, I should take heart from the fact that I am still selling fruit, shouldn’t I?
--Graham Campbell
Associate Director

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Dear Me

Have you ever thought, "If I only knew then what I know now"?  


In this link to a blog post the writer, Erin, sends a letter to her younger self.