The Beethoven Factor

Book Excerpt: CHAPTER ONE

1 A Life Fully Lived

?You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ?I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.??   ?Eleanor Roosevelt

Lessons from a Lucky Dog

     When I was dying of cancer, I often read the classified ads. Reading about the ordinary, simple daily issues of life seemed to offer some comfort and hope that perhaps someday I would be free enough from my pain to become concerned about such often silly and mundane things. One ad caught my attention and caused me to reflect on the nature of positive psychology?s thriving response, our innate ability to flourish through and often because of the trauma in our lives. It read, ?Lost Dog. Blind in left eye, one ear, no tail, patches of hair missing. Recently hit by a car. Answers to the name Lucky.?
     I laughed to myself as I thought about the contradiction between the poor dog?s name and his life experiences. As a reflected on his plight, I began to think there might be some wisdom to be gained from this simple ad. I thought about the strange paradox that this dog had gone through a series of terrible experiences yet was lucky enough to be loved and longed for by his owners. I wondered if he was aware on some level of the value of his living because he had endured so much. Did he know he was lucky just to be alive and to be missed? I wondered if he could know in some dog-consciousness way that he had been more fortunate than most dogs to have a family who helped him through so many problems. This dog had been through the mill but had apparently been ready and willing to get on with life. He was at the very least a survivor.
     I kept the ad on my bed stand for weeks and I still have it. One day when my nurse was about to throw it away, I decided to call the number in the ad to see if the dog had ever been returned to its owners. I was reluctant to call for fear I would only upset the family if the dog had been lost for good, but I made the call anyway. A little girl?s voice answered and I asked to speak to her mother or father. She said, ?If you?re someone else calling about Lucky, we already have him back. He?s fine and playing with us.?
     The mother came to the phone and I explained who I was and from where I was calling. She expressed her concern for me and reassured me that Lucky was ?a very lucky dog and is really thriving [her word!] on all the attention he?s getting.? She added, ?You should know that his name before all of his problems was Ralph. We changed it when he kept coming through all his troubles and seemed happier than when he was just a Ralph.?
     I reflected for hours about what this woman said. I thought how in a strange way with which I was still mentally grappling, I too was lucky. I certainly didn?t feel lucky to have cancer, but even at the worst of times I felt a delightfully baffling sense of being more authentically and intensely alive than when I was consumed in my busy career. I felt fortunate to feel an even deeper love for and from my wife and family, a love I wonder if enough of us fully realize until there is very little time left to savor it. I told myself then that I would be sure to tell this story in the book I hoped to write about the thriving response.

Six Reactions to Life?s Challenges

     To learn more about thriving, it is helpful to first understand its place in the cycle of our response to the challenges in our lives. Since the 1980s, psychology has been studying the stress, relaxation, survival, recovery, and more recently the resilience response. In the late 1990s, a sixth response was identified by positive psychology: our natural thriving response, defined as stress-induced growth.
     Here are six human responses to the stress and strain of life:

?  When we perceive a life event that goes beyond our presently conceived capacity to cope, our stress response kicks in. Unlike the following five responses, this one is automatic. Because our brain?s primary mission is to keep us alive, it sends us into our primitive ?fight-or-flight? mode without much mental input from us. All but our basic survival body systems shut down, and we enter a generally catabolic or ?energy-burning? lifesaving mode.

?  Several years ago, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard University described the opposite of the stress response, a natural human response he called the relaxation response. When we intensely mentally focus, meditate, or pray, our metabolism slows down, our blood pressure drops, our heart rate lowers, and our brain calms down and enters a less aroused and agitated state.

?  A third response to life?s challenges is survival. When we are under severe stress and threat, mechanisms in our body and brain go into lifesaving action. The brain shuts down the body systems we don?t immediately need and activates those systems we must have to stay alive and survive an immediate threat.

?  A fourth response is recovery. During this response, the body?s systems return to balance and the damage done by its prolonged warlike state begins to heal. If we are truly recovering, we may even experience the relaxation response.

?  A fifth response, resilience, involves completed recovery and full return to a ?pretrauma? state. The person is no worse off for the wear and tear and is able to function again in ways that may surprise those who have not experienced such trauma. Resilience is the body?s and mind?s capacity to bounce back completely and unharmed from the trauma they have endured. Our physiological immune system makes it possible for us to repair ourselves and return to our prestress level. Resilience is essentially getting back to our normal state and a level of functioning typical of most people who have not been under stress.

?  A sixth response, and the focus of this book, is the thriving response. This response allows us to bounce back beyond normal and to function stronger and more joyfully than we did before our trauma. It occurs because we have a powerful psychological immune system that acts in much the same way as our physiological immune system. This system has its own set of rules and ways of dealing with the emotional ?antigens? that can ?infect? our consciousness.

Our sixth response is a ?tend-befriend-comprehend? reaction to life?s challenges that allows us to go beyond the stress, relaxation, survival, recovery, and resilience responses. It is much different from the more familiar ?fight-or-flight? way of dealing with stress. You will learn later that one of the distinguishing ?features of thrivers is that they seldom either fight or take flight when a crisis strikes. Instead of fighting, they know when to quit and move on to other goals and interpretations of their situation and life in general. Instead of taking flight, they more fully engage in life. Rather than trying to escape, they reconstrue their situation and look for new ways and places in their lives to more fully engage. Rather than relaxing, they go into mental and emotional action and go toward or sometimes around instead of retreating from their challenges. They are heartened by their memories of their most loving and cherished connections even if their stressful situation distances them physically from them.
     They become ?consciousness creators? in the sense that they decide what will or will not be on their minds and do not reactively surrender their consciousness to the negative power of whatever is happening to them. Perhaps most important of all, they know how to be enlightened quitters who can withdraw from their struggle and select a new goal within a different life perspective.
     Thrivers are characterized by their high mental alertness, emotional responsivity (not just ?reactivity?), and their spiritual engagement through their quest for meaning in their crises. Once trouble happens, thrivers become more like students and philosophers than patients, victims, or warriors. They are made stronger by their adversity because they keep learning from it and are engaged with it long enough to thrive through it or seek new goals and objectives. Rather than just trying to get past or cope with the stressors in their lives, they look within their problems and themselves to create new ways of explaining and enjoying life.
     Charles Carver, professor of psychology at the University of Miami, is a leading researcher studying our sixth or thriving response. He offers a technical definition for this response that distinguishes between resilience as essentially a process of recovery and thriving as a ?better-off-afterward? style of dealing with severe stress. He defines someone who thrives as a ?person who experiences the traumatic or stressful event and benefits or gains in some way from the experience and can apply that gain to new experiences, leading to more effective subsequent functioning.?
     The key phrases in Carver?s definition are ?benefits,? ?gains,? and ?more effective subsequent functioning.? Thriving is getting stronger because of our trials and tribulations. It?s developing a new explanatory system, a new way of disputing our own pessimistic interpretation of what is happening to us that allows us to maintain an upward psychological trajectory. If another person unfairly accuses us of something, we gather information to dispute the challenge. Developing a new explanatory system is a creative form of personal disputation that allows us to come up with new ways of viewing our situation. As Carver points out, thrivers apply the gain they seemed to make through their strife to enhance their dealing with future experiences in their lives. Fortunately, we can learn to apply what these thrivers learned to our own lives without going through the pain they endured.

How Alive Are You?

     Are you alive? If you answered, ?Of course!? think again. Do you feel so vibrantly alive that you are regularly moved to tears of joy by the simple grandeur of ordinary things? Do you laugh to the point of tears several times a day? Do you smile contently with eyes in full squint and feel your heart warmed when you think of how loved you are and how others know you love them? Does it seem that you are so vibrantly full of life that you feel almost invincible? This is how thrivers feel.
     You will be reading in the following chapters about a group I came to call ?the invincibles.? They were men, women, and children I met at my lectures around the world, patients who came to a clinic I founded in the Department of Psychiatry at Sinai Hospital of Detroit, and my fellow cancer patients I met while undergoing my bone marrow transplant for Stage IV lymphoma. All these people had done much more than survive or recover from almost unimaginable life traumas; they had managed to thrive because of them.
     Many of the cancer patients who did not survive still seemed to thrive before they died. They became much stronger on all levels than they were before their adversity, and applied the emotional and mental gains they had made during the course of their cancer to the course of their dying. They often seemed much more fully alive than many of the distracted and hurried people who visited and cared for them. They knew when to fight and, perhaps more importantly, when to disengage and move on to other life meanings and goals. They radiated an invincibility that offered perhaps the greatest assurance and comfort any of us could hope for, the fact that we are capable not only of amazing resilience but also of thriving through our tribulations to give our living and even dying meaning and therefore more manageability.
     You can learn the lessons from these thrivers and apply them right now to have a more authentic, vibrant daily life. You can learn to see, hear, feel, smell, and touch the world with the joyful intensity that thrivers do. You can relate to your loved ones with the urgent caring of a thriver even before you are faced with the possibility of not being about to hold and hug them again.
     One of the thrivers I interviewed for this book was a 67-year-old grandmother. She had suffered a severe stroke that had left her speechless and able to walk only with the assistance of a cane in each hand, and even then only with great difficulty. Her story illustrates the thriving response.
     While visiting her daughter, she had watched helplessly from the front porch as her four-year-old-granddaughter had darted into the street and was killed instantly by a speeding drunk driver. Unable to shout a warning, she had seen the inevitability of the tragedy but could do nothing about it. It took her what seemed like an eternity to join the others sobbing at the side of the fallen child. Unable to voice her horror and grief, she could only sob uncontrollably.
     Even after such a dreadful experience, this grandmother seemed to have a zest for living that her family said was more than she had shown even before her stroke. She remained active in campaigns against drinking and driving, and volunteered at her church in the day-care center. After she had responded in a frail handwriting to all of my questions, she added a note. It said, ?I hope you don?t feel sorry for me. I am a very lucky mother and grandma. My memory and love for my granddaughter are so very strong. She is always in my heart, a heart I think is stronger now because it was so terribly broken.?
     Positive psychology suggests that even when we are not fully aware of it, our natural psychological immunity is trying to keep us on an upward psychological trajectory. The lessons from the thrivers teach us how to tune in to that inner positive momentum to enhance and even accelerate our generally positive life course. Fortunately, we don?t have to go through a crisis to learn how to thrive through and because of one. We can study the reactions of those who have dealt with crises in their lives and start applying their wisdom and experiences to the daily mini-crises and nagging aggravations that we too often allow to rob us of a fully authentic and joyful life. We can gain momentum for our upward psychological trajectory by learning what positive psychology has learned about thriving.
     When crisis strikes, my interviews and research and the research of others indicate that we experience a crisis cycle (see figure 1). This cycle incorporates the five human responses to stress listed above. One of these five phases in the crisis reaction cycle is the thriving response through which we can turn a crisis into a ?consciousness catalyst? for a happier and more energized life.

The Kindling Reaction (Worsening)

     When crisis strikes, most of us tend to react by first adding our own emotional fuel to the fire of distress. Even though Benson?s relaxation response is always an option when we?re under pressure, most of us are too stressed by the pressures of the present moment to try it. Instead, we react like kindling wood being added to a fire. At least for a while, we think in ways that cause our problems to heat up and become more intense. We become angry and even aggressive. We blame others or degrade ourselves and throw at least a mild mental temper tantrum. We become our own and our problems? worst enemy. Problems not only ?happen to us? but we start happening to them through our overreactive catharsis, or what psychologists call ?venting.?
     Popular psychology teaches us that we will feel better if we ?vent? or ?get it all out? when we are frightened, upset, or angry, but research says differently. Just as junk food tastes good but is not good for us, venting makes us feel temporarily good. In the long run, however, it is terrible for our health. Catharsis is seductive because it gives us some quick, temporary relief from the tension we experience, but venting eventually takes a toll on our psyche, our body, and everyone around us.
     The one thing we can be sure of when we let all our anger or negative feelings out is that we will become even angrier and end up making ourselves and others feel worse. Psychologist Diane Tice studied 400 men and women and the strategies they used to escape their foul moods. She found that ?venting? caused anger and other negative feelings to worsen and last longer.
     We are not hydraulic steam machines that need to have our pressure released to prevent explosion. Thrivers learn this fact of life and tend to severely reduce their venting as their lives go on. Under pressure, the first thing they do is nothing. Instead, they reflect and try to construe their way through their challenges. In place of ?letting it all out,? they work on trying to figure things out. They don?t curse the world; they try to discover new ways of construing it.
The act of construing is the process of mentally interpreting and framing life events in our own way. One of our most distinguishing and powerful human traits is our innate ability to interpret and assign meaning to what happens to us, to focus our attention where, when, as deeply as we decide, and to be the masters of the content of our consciousness.
     Positive construing is the opposite of worrying. When we worry, we are most often in at least a mild version of our stress response. Psychologist Thomas Pruzinsky defines worry as ?a state in which we dwell on something so much it causes to us become apprehensive. Worry is the thinking part of anxiety.? Thriving is the mental and emotional opposite of worrying because it involves construing a way out of and beyond a real and existing problem, not ruminating about what may be in store for us. Thriving is a way of thinking that reflects the statement by author James A. Garfield, ?I have had many troubles in my life, but the worst of them never came.?
     Author A. J. Cronin wrote, ?Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow; it only saps today of its strength.? Worrying is one of the most mentally exhausting things we can do. It is like racing the engine of our car when it is in neutral gear. Thrivers seem to remain strong-willed and strong-minded because they seldom worry. If they do, it is in the form of presenting themselves with options and looking for strategies, not just making a mental list of potential disasters. They do not allow their mental energy to be drained away by ruminating about what might happen, and instead focus on construing ways to deal with what is happening. Author Arthur Somers Roche wrote, ?Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.?
     Research on the kindling response and its underlying worrying shows that they are functions of the lower emotional parts of our brain. They are emotional and mental evolutionary leftovers that can help when they come in small doses that end with an adaptive strategy for dealing with a problem but not when they dominate our thinking. Our primitive forebears who worried the most tended to be more vigilant and more likely to survive, but our modern world has elevated worrying to an art form or kind of mental hobby. When we refer to ?multi-tasking,? worrying is usually one of the tasks that drives us to keep going for fear we might fail. We ruminate about ?what if or what?s next ? so much that we miss out on ?what?s happening now? and the opportunity to enjoy, learn, and grow from it.
     If they worry at all, thrivers do so quickly and efficiently. They pay attention to any negative thoughts and check them for hints as to what to avoid or do, but then they move quickly beyond them. One of the thrivers was a psychologist who had recently discovered the research data on thriving. She said, ?I worry, but what worries me most is when I start worrying about worrying. I used to worry that I was worrying or even worry that I was not worrying enough. It sounds stupid and funny for a shrink to say that, doesn?t it? Now I do what I call wiser worrying. I don?t go round and round about a problem. For me, a worry is like a memory or reminder. I think about it and then try to figure out something to do about it. For me, a worry is an alarm to do something or figure something out. I think most worrying is being nervous about the future and frightened by the past, so I want to pay more attention to the now. Worrying really takes you out of the present, which is where you need to be if you?re going to solve a problem. I think I?ve become a wiser worrier lately. I think and then try to come up with a new way of thinking.?

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