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