Mc Gowan 2006 The Hidden Side Of Happiness Psychology Today

Hidden ROES TRANSFORMED BY TRAGEDY: THEIR STORIES TURN OUT TO BE TRUE. ASURE ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR. A RICH, REWARDING LIFE OFTEN REQUIRES A ;N MCGOWAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY KARJEAN LEVI

HURRICANES, HOUSE FIRES, CANCER, WHITE-WATER RAFTING

accidents, plane crashes, vicious attacks in dark alleyways. Nobody asks for any of it. But to their surprise, many people find that enduringsuch a harrowing ordeal ultimately changes them for the hetter. Their refrain might go somethinglike this: "I wish it hadn't happened, hut I'm abetter person for it." We love to hear the stories of people who have been transformed by their tribulations, perhaps because they testify to a bona fide psychological truth, one that sometimes gets lost amid endless reports of disaster: There is a built-in human capacity to flourish under the most difficult circumstances. Positive reactions to profoundly disturbing experiences are not limited to the toughest or the bravest. In fact, roughly half the people who struggle with adversity say that their lives have in some ways improved. This and other promisingfindings about the life-changing

[THE HUMANITARIAN]

Bobby Muller A BULLET TRANSFORMED HIM FROM BAD-ASS MARINE TO PEACE ACTIVIST.

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HEN HE WAS a young soldier fighting in the Vietnam War, says Bobby Muiier, he was well on his way to becoming "an asshole, an arrogant, bad-ass Marine," Instead, at the age of 23, he was shot through the chest in battle and paralyzed. On that day in 1969, Muller was sure he was not coming back. "This is key: I absolutely experienced dying," he says. "My last thoughts were, 'I'm gonna die. On this shitty piece of ground. I don't fucking believe it!' The aloneness of it, the finality of it. the irreversibility of It, I absolutely, completely got it." He woke up on a hospital ship, shocked to be alive. The bad news that he would be paralyzed did not faze him; nor did the entreaties of a hospital psychologist to "cry to mourn the loss" of half his body. "I said to her, 'Why do I gotta cry? I'm ecstatic that I'm here, because I shouldn'tbe here! I got dealt back into the game!'" Since then, the 60-year-old former lieutenant has founded, among other organizations, the Vietnam Veterans of America; the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation; and, with a friend, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Like other Vietnam vets who felt betrayed by their country, he says he was

angry, depressed and confrontational In the years following his return from the war, and on a "trajectory to die." So why did he achieve great things while others got lost in alcohol and drugs? Multer insists he is different only in circumstances and luck—family, education, social support, the love of a woman. But in person, he radiates righteousness and force of will, and his single-minded focus on the larger significance of what he's doing becomes obvious. He says the key to thriving after trauma is in truly confronting mortality. "Once you realize your life is a flickering flame, you become desperate to find meaning and tie into something bigger and more profound. That's about doing good, that's about love, that's about service in the fellowship of man." —Cecilia Capuzzi Simon

"My last thoughts were, 'I'm gonna die on this shitty piece of ground.'"

effects of crises are tbe province of tbe new science of post-traumatic growth. This fledgling field bas already proved tbe trutb of what once passed as bromide: What doesn't kill you can actually make you stronger. Post-traumatic stress is far from the only possible outcome. In the wake of even the most terrifying experiences, only a small proportion of adults become chronically troubled. More commonly, people rebound—or even eventually thrive. Those wbo weather adversity well are livingproofofoneofthe paradoxes of happiness: We need more than pleasure to live the best possible life. Our contemporary quest for happiness has shriveled to a hunt for bliss—a life protectedfrombad feelings, free from pain and confusion. Tbis anodyne definition of well-being leaves out the better half of the story, the rich, full joy that comes from a meaningful life. It is the dark matter of happiness, tbe ineffable quality we admire in wise men and women and aspire to cultivate in our own lives. It turns out that some of the people wbo have suffered the most, who have been forced to contend with shocks they never anticipated and to rethink the meaning of their lives, may have the most to tell us about that profound and intensely fulfilling journey that philosophers used to call the search for "the good life." This broader definition of good living blends deep satisfaction and a profound connection to others through empathy. It is dominated by happy feelings but seasoned also with nostalgia and regret. "Happiness is only one among many values in human life," contends Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. Compassion, wisdom, altruism, insight, creativity—sometimes only the trials of adversitycanfosterthese qualities, because sometimes only drastic situations can force us to take on the painful process of change. To live a full human life, a tranquil, carefree existence is not enough. We also need to grow—and sometimes growing hurts.

Xi.1 d d d l i\. room in Queens, New York, 31-year-old fashion designer Tracy Cyr believed she was dying. A few months before, she had stopped taking the powerfijl immune-suppressingdrugs that kept her arthritis in check. She never antic-

ipated what would happen: a withdrawal reaction that eventually left her in total body agony and neurological meltdown. The slightest movement—trying to swallow, for example—was excruciating. Even the pressure of her cheek on the pillow was almost unbearable. Cyr is no wimp—diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 2, she'd endured the symptoms and the treatments (drugs, surgery) her whole life. But this time, she was way past her limits, and nothing her doctors did seemed to help. Either the disease was going to kill her or, pretty soon, she'd have to kill herself. As her sleepless nights wore on, though, her suicidal thoughts hegan to be interrupted by new feelings of gratitude. She was still in agony, hut a new consciousness grew stronger each night: an awesome sense of liberation, combined with an allencompassing feeling of sympathy and compassion. "I felt stripped of everything rd ever identified myself with," she said six months later. "Everything I thought I'd known or believed in was useless—time, money, self-image, perceptions. Recognizing that was so freeing." Within a few months, she began to he able to move more freely, thanks to a cocktail of steroids and other drugs. But as her physical strength came back, she did not return to her old way of being as a feisty, demanding, "Sex-in-the-City, three-inchstilettos-and-fishnets" girl. Now quieter and more tolerant, she makes a point of beingsubmissiveinaturn-the-other-cheek kind of way. Cyr still takes a pharmacopoeia of drugs every day, but she says there's no question that her life is better now. "I felt I had been shown the secret of life and why we're here; to be happy and to nurture other life. It's that simple." Her mind-blowingexperience came as a total surprise. But that feeling of transformation is in some ways typical, says Rich Tedeschi, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who coined the term "post-traumatic growth." His studies of people who have endured extreme events like combat, violent crime or sudden serious illness show that most feel dazed and anxious in the immediate aftermath. They are preoccupied with the idea that their lives have been shattered. A few are haunted long afterward by memory problems, sleep

A FRIEND IN NEED Intense distress after a sudden crisis is normal, and does not prohibit people from ultimately getting some benefit from the experience. Recovering and growing doesn't mean suppressing these responses but instead gradually incorporating them into a new perspective on life. Not everyone is going to find a good side to a crisis, but you can help foster this process in a friend or family member: • Know that full-blown posttraumatic stress disorder is relatively rare. Even among those who were in the World Trade Center on Sept. n, or were injured in the attacks, onty about one-quarter later suffered from the syndrome.

Our contemporary quest for happiness has shriveled to a hunt for bliss—a life protected from bad feeling, free from pain and confusion.

• Don't force people to talk if they don't want to. It's natural to process a traumatic experience in short stints; in between, they may seek out friends and family in order to escape thinking about it • Support people in their efforts to cope with strong feelings, and don't be surprised if they say some strange things. "You have to meet people in territory in which they are exploring a new way of understanding life," explains Rich Tedeschi. • Don't urge your friend to move on—instead, help her tolerate her emotions. Distress can be a catalyst for change, and processing pain may be essential to deriving meaning from a life-shattering experience. Don't shut it down. "Help them manage it so they can think straight without going numb," suggests Tedeschi. • Give your friend or relative a lot of time to recover, and help him or her maintain hope that things will eventually get better.

trouble and similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. But Tedeschi and others have found that for many peopleperhaps even the majority—life ultimately becomes richer and more gratifying. Sometimes, as with Cyr, the change hits like aboltoflightning. W.Keith Campbell, a professor of social psychology at the University of Georgia in Athens whose research focuses on the self, calls this phenomenon "ego shock." He has found that a serious blow to self-esteem can temporarily freeze normal psychological protective mechanisms. The way we react to a sudden ego threat (a public rejection, a professional failure) is often to go numb: Just for an instant, time stops, the mind goesblank and the world suddenly seems unfamiliar. Campbell believes something similar happens to many people wbo experience a terrifying physical threat. In that moment, our sense of invulnerability is pierced, and the self-protective mental armor that normally stands between us and our perceptions of the world is torn away. Oureverydaylife scripts—our habits, selfperceptions and assumptions—go out the window, and we're left with a raw experience of the world. The phenomenon is akin to what Zen Buddhists strive to attain in meditation or what people report about religious rapture. Colors become more vivid; ordinary objects seem suddenly beautiful. It's an experience of sublime bewilderment tinged with fear—the old-fashioned meaning of awe. "When you take the self out of the picture, sometimes the world emerges as more powerful, as wondrous," he says. "It's this openingexperience: 'Oh my god, look at this world.'" In her moment of desperation, Tracy Cyr was struck by this feeling of euphoria. "You see the truth of things, and you can't help but be in wonder, in glorious wonder," she says. "Everything is OK. Everything is perfect and good. There's absolutely nothing to fear." After such a shock, people often say that their lives are transformed involuntarily and that their old values or habits evaporate in an instant. Campbell found tbat more than half of tbe people in his studies who had experienced an ego shock said that it ultimately had positive long-term effects upon their lives. "Really negative events have the ability to shake up the status quo

The ability to coiTie to

terms with a new reality is what distinguishes those who grow through adversity from those who are destroyed by it.

in your life, which opens the door for change," says Campbell. "You could become a depressed, despairing drunk—or you could become a much better person." Still, actually implementing these changes, as well as fully coming to terms with the new reality, usually takes conscious effort. Being willing and able to take on this process is one of the major differences between those wbo grow through adversity and those who are destroyed by it. Crises challenge our deepest beliefs: that bad things don't happen to good people, that life makes sense, that we have control over what happens. Tedeschi describes them as seismic, because they overturn basic assumptions upon which life is built. Afterward, a new framework must be constructed. "That's no small thing," he observes. "It requires some people to make big changes not only in how they think but in what they do and in how they choose to live." Broodingover what happened—in other circumstances a dangerous warning sign of depression—may actually be essential to the process of growth. Notably, the people who find value in adversity aren't the toughest or the most rational. Instead, they tend to be ordinary— neither the best- nor the worst-adjusted. What makes them different is that they are able to incorporate what happened into the story of their own life. They are willing to undertake the painful process of rethinking who they are and givingup an old script that no longer applies. "Maybe one of the keys [to growth] is the capacity to admit that you've been changed by experience," says King. "Which means admitting tbat you're vulnerable, and admitting that there would have been good things about your life if you hadn't had to go through those negative events." Eventually, they may find themselves freed in ways they never imagined. Survivors often say they become more tolerant and forgiving of others, capable of bringingpeace to formerly troubled relationships. They say that material ambitions suddenly seem silly and the pleasures of friends and family paramount—and that the crisis allowed them to reorganize life in line with the new priorities. For Arizona senator John McCain, a terrible experience gave him one lasting benefit: confidence in his own priorities.

Captured in the Vietnam war, he spent five years as a prisoner of war, enduring torture and solitary confinement. Now, 30 years later, he has a reputation as a maverick who is willing to take a stand. "In my case, what made life easier is that I now know the difference between what's important and what isn't," he says. "That is a gift: having the confidence to know that you clearly see the difference hetween right and wrong, hetween principle and pragmatism." His recent book C/iaracrer/sDestmy profiles a procession of historical figures—from Sojourner Truth to Winston Churchill—who he believes exemplify this quality. People who have grown from adversity often feel much less fear, despite the frightening things they've heen through. They are surprised by their own strength, confident that they can handle whatever else life throws at them. Like Tracy Cyr, many also feel transformed by a sense of deep compassion for and connection to others that is intensely rewarding on its own. "People don't say that what they went through was wonderful," says Tedeschi. "They weren't meaning to grow from it. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect, what they gained was more than they ever anticipated." Some researchers, amongthem psychologist George Bonanno of Columbia University's Teachers College, suspect that post-traumatic growth may be primarily wishful thinking. He argues that resilience-the ability to return to normal after trauma—is commonplace, but suspects that people who say they've surpassed their old selves and changed for the better may be unconsciously trying to make the best of a terrible experience. Growth through adversity "is anice idea, but I don't see the data for it," Bonanno says. People may say that they've become better or happier, but "anyone who studies humans finds out that we often don't know how our own minds work. We do a lot of backpedaling." Tedeschi counters that survivors aren't kidding themselves; on the contrary, they have become more acutely aware of the dangers of everyday life and less deluded about their own immunity to disaster. "These are not naive people," he says. "They know now, based on what they've been through, how tough things can be."

[THE EXPLORER]

Jerri Nielsen SHE WAS TRAPPED AT THE SOUTH POLE WITH CANCER-AND IT WAS WORTH IT. MERGENCY ROOM doctor Jerri Nielsen was 46 when she took a job at the South Pole as the American research station's physician. Nielsen, who was escaping both the aftermath of a bitter divorce and the frustrations of bureaucratic medicine, loved the harsh simplicity and the camaraderie of life on the ice.

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But a few months into the pitch-dark winter, she realized that she had breast cancer. Trapped by temperatures so low that no plane could land, Nielsen thought she might die before the spring. With no alternatives, she performed a needle biopsy on herself and trained her co-workers to give her chemotherapy. Finally evacuated to the United States, Nielsen endured a mastectomy multiple surgeries, complications— and most recently, the discovery that her cancer

hascomeback.

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"My experience at the fc-^aags-av ..ar > Pole had to do with accepting things that most people fear most deeply and coming to feel that they need not be feared. It certainly had far more to do with peace and surrender than it did with courage. Being 'on the ice' was a great good fortune: It created a much greater clarity for me about what was essential in life, t'm not afraid of death. I've come to accept it as being part of life, and I think I've come to accept it earlier than my years because of what's happened to me. "[When I learned the cancer had metastasized to my bones], after about three weeks of going through a kind of terror, I felt the most incredible peace come over me. Now I am very happy, and excited about going forward with my life. The metastatic disease is now just another part of me, another thing that has happened to me. "The things that make you strong, and make you feel as though you've accomplished something, are not the easy ones; it's the things you had to work and struggle through. Those are what give us our depth—that make us not just gray and plain and nothing, but give us depth and texture and longing. "I believe you're always much better off knowing what the real truth is. I think it's only then that you can come to grips with your illness, or with any difficult situation. Some people call this process 'mourning.' I prefer to call it tiring of the fear and the depression and the denial, and the fake optimism, and the irritation of it all—and just saying: 'Hey, I'm tired of feeling bad about this; now i go on.'" —Marion Long

[THE WALKING INSPIRATION]

Craig DeMartino A 96-FOOT FALL SHATTERED HIS BODYAND GAVE DEMARTINO A NEW PURPOSE.

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RAIG DEMARTINO LOOKS like all the other cheerful fathers spending a family weekend on the slopes in Winter Park, Colorado. But for him, trying to walk steadily in boots poses an extra challenge. Where his right leg should be, he has carbon fiber, plugged into a steel-and-titanium skiing foot. Four years ago. DeMartino was 96 feet up a cliff, about to begin a rock climb. He heard his climbing partner shout that their safety gear was anchored. But he heard wrong. As he kicked back from the cliff face, his rope slipped through its hook, and he plummeted to the rocks below. Upon impact—foot first on granite—his boot soles exploded, and his feet and ankles shattered. A powerful shock wave moved up his body, snapping his back

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^^ survived, but doctors fused his spine to prevent it from collapsing, and he is always in pain. He can barely feel his left foot, so when he walks, he has to look down to make sure he's on solid ground. His right leg was a lost cause—a year and a half after the fall, it had to be amputated below the knee. Still, DeMartino says some parts of his life are better. Before, he was focused on his ambitions as a professional photographer and climber. After his accident, he began to invest in helping other survivors be physically active. "The accident took climbing away, and I thought, 'Who am I now?' I didn't want to be the handicapped guy." Fewer than half of amputees are physically active, but he was determined to change those statistics. He has a prosthetic skiing foot that doubles for cycling, Another, designed to be wedged into crevices, works for climbing. "It's huge for people to see me climbing, cycling or skiing," says DeMartino. "They see the reality." He's now on call for other accident victims in the Denver area, helping them understand what to expect. Since he can't predict day by day how well he'll feel, he's learned to focus on what he can accomplish immediately, which means he thinks more about what he has, and less about what he plans for the future. "I used to plan years in advance," he says. "Now I plan what I'm having for iunch." —Aiyssa Katz

"I thought, 'Who am I now?' I didn't want to be the handicapped guy"

Thankfully, are rare. Most people go through only one in a Hfe time, or maybe none at all. But extreme experiences have analogues in ordinary life. An overpowering but welcome change like a major promotion or religious conversion can provoke a milder version of the transformation that crises often initiate. As with a major ego threat, a positive change can loosen the sense of identity. "Any time a person is in that freefall situation where the self isn't yet attached to what you're going to do next, there's a really good opportunity for personal growth," says King. Emory University psychiatrist Gregory Berns contends that the need for experiencingthis kind of rapturous limbo maybe huiltintothebrain. Berns, who studies the neurobiology of pleasure and motivation, says that because our brains respond to changes in inputs and information, we search for intense challenges, situations where the outcome is not yet known or even clear. He speculates that the feeling of satisfaction, which we all seek, is in part generated by the stress hormone cortisol's effects on the dopamine system. The upshot, he writes in his recent book Satisfaction: "The road to satisfying experiences must necessarily pass through the terrain of discomfort." He points to extreme endurance athletes who push themselves to their physical limits for days at a time. They cycle through the same sequence of sensations as do trauma survivors: self-loss, confusion and, finally, a new sense of mastery. For ultramarathoners, who regularly run 100-mile races that last more than 24 hours, vomiting and hallucinating are normal. After a day and night of running without stoppingor sleeping, competitors sometimes forget who they are and what they're doing. But the feeling of mastering extraordinary difficulty makes up for it, reports Honolulu businessman Randy Havre. Havre, 51, found this feelingnear the summit of Mauna Kea nearly 10 years ago. He was nearing the end of a 44-mile race that took himfromsea level to the top of the volcano—a vertical ascent of 13,766 feet. He was on his way to setting the unofficial world record for that climb, but the high elevation was starting to get to him.

"When you get to about 10,000 feet, things tend to get a little weird because of the swelling and pressure on your brain," he says. "Above that, it gets exponentially weirder. I remember bustingoutcryingat 12,000 feet. But if you can finish these things, you know: Hey, I can get through this stuff You were able to hang in there, and you're stronger for that." For a more common example of growth through adversity, look to one of life's biggest challenges: parenting. Having a baby has been shown to decrease levels of happiness. The sleep deprivation and the necessity of putting aside personal pleasures in order to care for an infant mean that people with newborns are more likely to be depressed and find their marriage on the rocks. Nonetheless, over the long haul, raising a child is one of the most rewardingand meaningful of all human undertakings. The short-term sacrifice of happiness is outweighed by other henefits, like satisfaction, altruism and the chance to leave a meaningful legacy. Childrearing and family relationships do dual duty: They bring us joy, and they also push us to grow and develop. In psychologist Laura King's terms, they foster both happiness and ego development, which she has identified as the dual components of the good life. In this context, ego development essentially means the ability to think about life with complexity, to be self-reflective and introspective. Plenty of people are mature, wise, lead meaningful lives—and are also miserable. (Think of Kierkegaard if you have any doubts.) Growth isn't an automatic ticket to the good life. But those who are both mature and happy are the ones who have tapped into the highest kind of human potential. Gettingto that point may require coming to terms with some kind of loss. It might be severe, as in the case of a major life trauma, or relatively common—fiunking out of school, having a marriage collapse. In King's studies of parents of children with Down's Syndrome, those who scored highest on scales of both maturity and happiness were willing to admit that they had not been able to lead the life they'd always hoped for, and yet were fully committed to the life they currently led. They tended to have aself-deprecatingsense of humor with a forgiving attitude about life. Many evince a bittersweet appreciation for their

There's enornnous freedom vyhen you find yourself outside of what you always expected to happen.

lost selves—a kind of nostalgia for who they once were and what they once believed life was all about. "Some of these people are livingwhat they thought of as the worst-case scenario," says King. "And it turns out tobe their best possible life. There's enormous freedom when you find yourself outside of whatyou always expected to happen." A balance between regret and contentment appears elsewhere as a hallmark of successful survival. Psychologist Jack Bauer, of Northern Arizona University, and Columbia's Bonanno interviewed people six montbs after they had lost a spouse in midlife and tallied the number of positive and negative comments each person made about the lost relationship. Those who initially generated about five upbeat remarks for each critical comment adapted best and were functioningniost smoothly two years later. People who had only negative things to say were not doing so well—but neither were those with only positive assessments. The widows and widowers who ultimately adjusted best to loss were those who could admit to the difficulty and sadness of the situation without being overwhelmed by it. "It's a growth-oriented attitude," says Bauer. "It allows you to take into consideration life's difficulties, while keeping in mind the rosier bigpicture." The capacity to simultaneously embrace both loss and growth is an ordinary part of life—acomplex, poignant emotional state that is perhaps the greatest reward of maturity. "Even positive memories of the past are bittersweet," says Laura King. "My little boy is now two years old, and I can already see his babyness slipping away. There's an incredible richness and warmth about those memories—but also sadness, knowing that they're tied to a particular time in your life and that you'll never have those experiences again." Ultimately, that emotional reward can compensate for the pain and difficulty of adversity. This perspective does not cancel out what happened, but it puts it all in a different context: that it's possible to live an extraordinarily rewardinglife even within the constraints and struggles we face. In some form or other, says King, we all must go through this realization. "You're not going to be the person you thought you were, but here's who you are going tobe instead—and that turns out to be a pretty great life." PT