Bouncing Back

When I was 22 years old, I packed everything I owned into my little green Chevy Chevette and hit the road. I was bound for graduate school in the Midwest, and I learned a lot on that drive from Idaho to Kansas. I learned, for instance, that crossing the Rockies in a Chevette is not a great idea.

But I learned even more after I arrived. Given the down-home way it’s represented in movies, you wouldn’t think the Midwest could feel like an alien planet. It certainly felt that way to me. I had to re-learn everything I thought I knew, from what brand of ice cream to buy at the grocery store to what it means when the sky turns dark.

I almost left before I’d even finished my first semester of graduate school. One of my professors wrote, at the end of my very first paper, “Your thoughts are entirely vacuous.” And I was homesick–but not for my parents. Not even for their home, exactly. I just missed being in a place I understood. Where people didn’t laugh at me for asking completely logical questions. Like, for instance, “What is that noise?” (Answer: cicadas.)

What got me through that first semester was the knowledge that I could leave the same way I’d arrived. I could get in my car and drive back home. And because I knew I could, I never actually felt the need to do it.

This kind of thinking illustrates what psychologists call an “internal locus of control.” That means I think of myself as a person who controls my life, rather than someone controlled by her circumstances. In this particular case, it means I was thinking I can drop out of grad school. I was not thinking Grad school is just too hard for me.

There are many reasons why people don’t develop this sense of control. Not surprisingly, people who grow up in unstable environments tend not to feel like they can direct their own lives. But even those who grow up in chaotic circumstances sometimes end up learning how to bounce back from adversity.

According to Dr. George Bonanno, this isn’t a matter of character. It’s not about being tough enough to survive. It’s about our perception of those circumstances.

Bonanno coined the term Potentially Traumatic Event (PTE) to describe an experience that may or may not be traumatic. The sudden death of a loved one, for instance, can be devastating. If we use that death as an opportunity to make something good happen, however, it can end up being something we think of as a turning point, not a trauma. How the event impacts our lives depends on our perception of it, not on the event itself. That’s why it’s only potentially traumatic.

It makes sense that someone who hasn’t learned to think about adversity as potentially problematic might be injured by it. That future difficulties might be met with a sense of panic and helplessness, given those previous experiences, also makes sense. What I don’t understand is our cultural insistence on viewing adversity as a positive thing.

Take a moment to Google the word adversity. Look at the series of quotes that comes up in the Images tab. They all claim adversity is the maker of champions. Not a single one suggests that adversity has the potential to cause us harm.

But developmental psychologist Emmy Werner points out that too much adversity can actually tax our resilience. In other words, what doesn’t kill us doesn’t necessarily make us stronger. Even if we’ve demonstrated resilience in the past, we can exhaust our ability to bounce back.

And we all know this is true. If it weren’t, then those who grow up in the most difficult circumstances would always be the best equipped for success.

When someone you care about is going through a difficult time, is your first thought “How in the world is she going to survive this?” Or is it  “She’s so lucky! She’s going to be amazingly strong when this is over!” If you’re like me, the latter thought has never even crossed your mind. Yet we persist in treating adversity as something to be prized.

Any time I tell people the story of my first semester of grad school, I hear responses like “You’re lucky your professor did that–it probably made you work harder. And here you are today, a professor yourself.”

But what if, instead of telling me I was brainless, my professor had pointed out what I was doing wrong? Perhaps I would have become an effective graduate student earlier in my academic career. Maybe I wouldn’t have wasted my time calculating the number of hours it would take to drive home, if I drove straight through.

Adversity didn’t have to be my teacher. Kindness could have done that, too.

Rather than thinking of adversity as a positive experience, then, perhaps we should follow Dr. Bonanno’s lead. He argues that the key to bouncing back lies in re-framing the way we think about PTEs–learning to view them as challenges to be dealt with rather than threats to our well-being. I was doing something like that as I made my escape plan, coming up with one potential solution to the challenges I faced, though I decided against it..

When we think of ourselves as being in control, rather than being controlled, adversity becomes surmountable. That doesn’t mean it will always be easy to deal with–life puts us in lots of painful situations. But I’m going to try to  keep the words potentially traumatic in mind the next time I’m encouraged to view adversity as a blessing.