I was having breakfast with one of my kitchen table cabinet people recently, and we were discussing our life journeys and challenges when he asked me a question: “Why do people often make difficult situations more difficult?” I stopped eating, and thought to myself, now that is one great question. And I have no idea what the answer is at this moment.
Later that day, I remembered a phrase which has been attributed to paster Rick Warren, minister Will Bowen, and rabbi Yehuda Berg: “Hurt people hurt people.” The opposite of this phrase, for me, is that respectful people respect people. However, I don’t think life is that binary in reality.
Instead, I believe there is a continuum. Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012) writes that there is a conflict continuum with one end being artificial harmony and the other end being mean-spirited personal attacks. I have seen people on this continuum and neither end goes well for all involved.
This reminds me of what Stephen R. Covey once wrote, “When you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other. Therefore, if you decide to take responsibility for your circumstance, you automatically tap into the power of change.”
Upon reflection, I believe there is a difficulty continuum,. On one end, we have trauma, primary or secondary. On the other end, we have post traumatic growth. Each end of the continuum shapes us and our perception of ourselves and others. Both ends require a tremendous amount of work, focus and discipline.
When we are dealing with a situation that is difficult and people are making it more difficult, we must first recognize that we have picked up both ends of the stick, referencing the earlier metaphor. Then, we have to understand this continuum and take responsibility for our role and choices in the continuum.
Christopher Willard, PsyD in his book, How We Grow Through What We Go Through: Self-Compassion Practices for Post-Traumatic Growth (Sounds True, 2022), writes that there are four typical ways we respond to trauma and stress. I would say that these are also the four ways we typically deal with difficult situations. The first way is to fight. As he explains, “When we fall back on this response, we react with physical or relational aggression or irritability. Sometimes, when we blame ourselves, this flips into aggression toward ourselves in the form of self-harm or risky behavior.”
The second way is to flee. As he notes, “Over time, avoidance can hardwire itself into ongoing anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, and more. Avoidance may also manifest as running toward high-stimulation distractions, addictions and compulsions.”
The third way is to freeze. In this response, he says that one can choose to “hide or camouflage yourself, and try not to be noticed. Perhaps you play dead and give up, waiting for the attack to be over. Hypoarousal may become deliberate avoidance or unconscious dislocation over time. For many from marginalized groups, standing out may feel or be especially dangerous, and this kind of response is truly adaptive for physical, emotional, and financial safety.”
The fourth way is “faint or flop.” As he explains, “giving up protects us from lasting trauma in a different way, with ‘learned helplessness’ - a feeling that we have no control or power over our fate. This can wire our brains into depression, a slow giving-up on ourselves and the worlds, or avoidance strategies like blunting the experience with addiction.”
When it comes to people making difficult situations more difficult, I believe we have seen all four of these choices on a regular basis. Sometimes, we even choose them, consciously or unconsciously, ourselves. The difficulty continuum reflects the nexus of our past experiences of trauma and emotional pain, and our current reality.
In my experience, when hurting people choose to hurt people, they may not be aware of how much they are hurting. They just feel things are chaotic and so, for them, the only logical choice is to respond by fighting and seeking control of the conscious or unconscious pain they are experience. As Margaret Wheatley shared so long ago, “When confronted with an unknown, we default to a known.” Their default choice is to fight and defend.
But, I believe there is a deeper element that is going on underneath this default choice, namely the presence of perfectionism, shame, and vulnerability. Brene’ Brown in her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead (Avery, 2012), defines perfectionism as a “self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgement, and blame.” As she continues, “Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because perfection doesn’t exist. It’s unattainable goal. Perfectionism is more about perception than internal motivation, and there is no way to control perception, no matter how much time and energy we spend trying.” In short perfectionism is a defensive move to minimize the pain of blame, judgement and shame.
Shame, on the other hand, notes Brene’ Brown, “is universal and one of the most primitive human emotions that we experience. The only people who don’t experience shame lack the capacity for empathy and human connection.” As she continues, “… shame is the fear of disconnection…. Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
Finally, Brene’ Brown defines “vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” As a result, many people equate vulnerability as a sign of weakness. They “confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities.”
Nevertheless, Brown explains that “vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable but they’re never weakness.” As she continues, “Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And yes, we’re taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.”
Given this thoughtful information on the interconnection between perfectionism, shame, and vulnerability, I believe many people choose to make a difficult situation more difficult, in part, because it protects them from dealing with these deeper issues and feelings. Their default choice provides them with the illusion of invulnerability and strength.
Furthermore, from their perspective, they have protection from having to change. The only person who has to change is the other person in the difficult situation. They are the source of all the problems while the “protected” person is doing just fine. They see no need to be vulnerable, open, or receptive to what is happening around them or within them.
Recognizing what is happening from a holistic and inclusive perspective, we have to think carefully about our own choices during a difficult situation. Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler in their book, Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High (McGraw-Hill, 2002), write “that the only person you can directly control is yourself.” Therefore, we have to be highly mindful of our own choices. We can not be successful if we choose between silence or aggression, or between winning or losing. Neither pathway will help us achieve shared meaning, clarity and understanding.
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge our own, conscious or unconscious, default choices. Doctors John and Julie Gottman point out that these choices often fall into four categories, namely criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. With criticism, we verbally attack or blame another person’s character. With defensiveness, we “victimize ourself to ward off a perceived attack or to reverse the blame.” With contempt, we attack another person’s “sense of self with insulting or abusive language that communicates superiority.” And finally with stonewalling, we withdraw “from interaction to avoid conflict and convey disapproval, distance, and separation.” These four possible default choices make compromise or progress impossible. They also make all involved very unhappy, and do not lead to respectful, compassionate, and honest dialogue.
And this all brings us back to our own choices during a difficult situation. I have come to believe that our first choice must be resilience. It is a powerful choice and a complex one at the same time.
Brene’ Brown in her book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House, 2021), writes “Fifteen years ago, when we first introduced a curriculum based on my shame resilience research, we asked participants in the training workshops to list all of the emotions that they could recognize and name as they were experiencing them. Over the course of five years, we collected these surveys from more than seven thousand people. The average number of emotions named across the surveys was three. The emotions were happy, sad, and angry.”
When I first read this research, I was stunned, embarrassed, and blown away by the implications of it. As Brene’ Brown continues, “Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning and self-awareness…. Language show us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.”
Our language gives us the capacity to work through difficult situations. Our depth of emotional literacy and intelligence is vital to moving from trauma to growth. For when we comprehend this, we recognize that the capacity to be resilience is an outcome of important choices over time.
One of the first choices is to cultivate inner stillness. In the middle of difficult situations, many frame up this choice as giving up. However, John Paul Lederach in his book, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (Oxford University Press, 2005), writes that “stillness is not inactivity, It is the presence of disciplined activity without movement…. Stillness requires a commitment of patience and watchfulness. Its guideposts are these: Slow down. Stop. Watch what moves around you. Feel what moves in you.”
When we choose to have regular, if not daily practice, of cultivating inner stillness, we can then tap into it during difficult situations. Ryan Holiday in his book, Stillness Is The Key (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019) writes, “We must cultivate mental stillness to succeed in life and to successfully navigate the many crises it throws our way.” When we do this, he explains that we connect with “the power of patience, alternating confidence and humility, foresight and presence, empathy and unbending conviction, restraint and toughness, and quiet solitude combined with wise counsel.” Then, like Lederach notes, we are able to slow down, think deeply, and choose consciously how to proceed. It gives us the capacity to act with courage and to be brave in the midst of difficulty.
The second choice is build and maintain connections rather than to choose fear, rejection, or disconnection. As a workshop participant told me many decades ago when dealing with difficult life situations, “you need to make friends before you need them.” When we choose to build and maintain this network of connections, it gives us support, perspective, and insights during challenging times. Brene’ Brown explains, “Connection is why we’re here. We are hardwired to connect with others, it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.”
The third choice is to recognize that most people are doing their best with the information and experiences they have lived through over time. When we start from a foundation of this truth, we can choose to do the work of forgiveness and compassion. As Fred Rogers in his book, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important things to Remember (Hyperion, 2003), writes, “The first time we required forgiveness, we probably did something we shouldn’t have when our closet grown-ups thought we should have known better. We made someone angry. We were to blame. What did the first brush with blame begin to teach us? If we were fortunate, we began to learn that ‘to err is human.’ Even good people sometimes do bad things. Errors might mean corrections, apologies, repairs, but they didn’t mean that we, as a person, were a bad person in the sight of those we loved. The second thing we learned (if we were fortunate) was that having someone we loved get mad at us did not mean that person had stopped loving us; we had their unconditional love, and that meant we would have their forgiveness, too.” When we choose forgiveness and compassion, we are choosing not to create more trauma and difficulty, but instead to choose a pathway to building understanding, grace and forgiveness.
Still, we must remember that during difficult situations, we can not move away from uncertainty, risk, and feelings of vulnerability. They are all normal outcomes of life. We also need to remember a key insight shared by Brene’ Brown in her book, Daring Greatly: “We can’t give people what we don’t have. Who we are matters immeasurable more than what we know or who we want to be.” Both of these are important insights and require tremendous discipline to keep them in mind as one moves through challenges of various proportions.
Finally, I am reminded of something Mr. Rogers wrote many years ago: “In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.” During difficult situations where people are choosing actions that result in the situation becoming more difficult and more complex, there will be many questions, and, at times, limited answers or solutions. Still, when we choose to cultivate inner stillness, when we choose to build and maintain our connections, and when we recognize that most people are doing the best they can with the information and experiences they have lived through over time, we then can come into a difficult situation with an open mind and an open heart, willing to listen and be present to the other person, making our choices from a conscious and thoughtful place, rather than a reactive place. As Rachel Naomi Ramen, M.D. wrote years ago, “Suffering - whether physical, emotional, spiritual, or as often the case, all three - can be a doorway to transformation.” Let’s walk together through the doorway to transformation and discover what is on the other side.
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