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
