Some people get especially exercised about particular words, passages or messages in children's books and criticize them vehemently. I have always had the view that children's books are critically important in fostering the love of reading but that you cannot indict particular words or even an individual book as bad or wrong. It all depends on the circumstances. But the extreme positions taken by some people have somewhat puzzled me. There is no research that supports that there is negative harm arising from the presence or absence of particular words on individual children.
I am guessing that the power of storytelling described in this passage by Haidt is what is being entangled with particular messages. In other words, it might be true that people telling stories can be transforming but it is the power of the telling that is transformative, not necessarily the story itself. However, accepting the premise of the power of storytelling, it then becomes easier to see why some people become so enraged about particular stories: They believe in the power but ascribe it to the story and not the storytelling.
In Lerner's experiments, the desperate need to make sense of events can lead people to inaccurate conclusions (for example, a woman "led on" a rapist); but, in general, the ability to make sense of tragedy and then find benefit in it is the key that unlocks post-traumatic growth. When trauma strikes, some people find the key dangling around their necks with instructions printed on it. Others are left to fend for themselves, and they do not fend as well. Psychologists have devoted a great deal of effort to figuring out who benefits from trauma and who is crushed. The answer compounds the already great unfairness of life: Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists. Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.
When a crisis strikes, people cope in three primary ways: active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem), reappraisal (doing the work within — getting one's own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and avoidance coping (working to blunt one's emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions).
People who have a basic-level trait of optimism (McAdams's level 1) tend to develop a coping style (McAdams's level 2) that alternates between active coping and reappraisal. Because optimists expect their efforts to payoff, they go right to work fixing the problem. But if they fail, they expect that things usually work out for the best, and so they can't help but look for possible benefits. When they find them, they write a new chapter in their life story (McAdams's level 3), a story of continual overcoming and growth.
In contrast, people who have a relatively negative affective style (complete with more activity in the front right cortex than the front left) live in a world filled with many more threats and have less confidence that they can deal with them. They develop a coping style that relies more heavily on avoidance and other defense mechanisms. They work harder to manage their pain than to fix their problems, so their problems often get worse.
Drawing the lesson that the world is unjust and uncontrollable, and that things often work out for the worst, they weave this lesson into their life story where it contaminates the narrative.
If you are a pessimist, you are probably feeling gloomy right now. But despair not! The key to growth is not optimism per se; it is the sensemaking that optimists find easy. If you can find a way to make sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too. And you can learn to become a sensemaker by reading Jamie Pennebaker's Opening Up. Pennebaker began his research by studying the relationship between trauma such as childhood sexual abuse, and later health problems.
Trauma and stress are usually bad for people, and Pennebaker thought that self-disclosure — talking with friends or therapists — might help the body at the same time that it helps the mind. One of his early hypotheses was that traumas that carry more shame, such as being raped (as opposed to a non-sexual assault) or losing a spouse to suicide (rather than to an accident), would produce more illness because people are less likely to talk about such events with others. But the nature of the trauma turned out to be almost irrelevant. What mattered was what people did afterward: Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.
Once Pennebaker had found a correlation between disclosure and health, he took the next step in the scientific process and tried to create health benefits by getting people to disclose their secrets. Pennebaker asked people to write about "the most upsetting or traumatic experience of your entire life," preferably one they had not talked about with others in great detail. He gave them plenty of blank paper and asked them to keep writing for fifteen minutes, on four consecutive days. Subjects in a control group were asked to write about some other topic (for example, their houses, a typical work day) for the same amount of time. In each of his studies, Pennebaker got his subjects' permission to obtain their medical records at some point in the future.
Then he waited a year and observed how often people in the two groups got sick. The people who wrote about traumas went to the doctor or the hospital fewer times in the following year. I did not believe this result when I first heard it. How on earth could one hour of writing stave off the flu six months later? Pennebaker's results seemed to support an old-fashioned Freudian notion of catharsis: People who express their emotions, "get it off their chests" or "let off steam," are healthier. Having once reviewed the literature on the catharsis hypothesis, I knew that there was no evidence for it. Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.
Pennebaker discovered that it's not about steam; it's about sense making.
The people in his studies who used their writing time to vent got no benefit.
The people who showed deep insight into the causes and consequences of the event on their first day of writing got no benefit, either: They had already made sense of things. It was the people who made progress across the four days, who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year. In later studies, Pennebaker asked people to dance or sing to express their emotions, but these emotionally expressive activities gave no health benefit. You have to use words, and the words have to help you create a meaningful story. If you can write such a story you can reap the benefits of reappraisal (one of the two healthy coping styles) even years after an event. You can close a chapter of your life that was still open, still affecting your thoughts and preventing you from moving on with the larger narrative.
Anyone, therefore, can benefit from adversity, although a pessimist will have to take some extra steps, some conscious, rider-initiated [conscious reason initiated] steps, to guide the elephant [the emotional, instinctive brain] gently in the right direction. The first step is to do what you can, before adversity strikes, to change your cognitive style. If you are a pessimist, consider meditation, cognitive therapy, or even Prozac. All three will make you less subject to negative rumination, more able to guide your thoughts in a positive direction, and therefore more able to withstand future adversity, find meaning in it, and grow from it. The second step is to cherish and build your social support network. Having one or two good attachment relationships helps adults as well as children (and rhesus monkeys) to face threats. Trusted friends who are good listeners can be a great aid to making sense and finding meaning. Third, religious faith and practice can aid growth, both by directly fostering sensemaking (religions provide stories and schemes for losses and crises) and by increasing social support (religious people have relationships through their religious communities, and many have a relationship with God ). A portion of the benefits of religiosity could also be a result of the confession and disclosure of inner turmoil, either to God or to a religious authority that many religions encourage.
And finally, no matter how well or poorly prepared you are when trouble strikes, at some point in the months afterwards, pull out a piece of paper and start writing. Pennebaker suggests that you write continuously for fifteen minutes a day, for several days. Don't edit or censor yourself; don't worry about grammar or sentence structure; just keep writing. Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way. If you hate to write, you can talk into a tape recorder. The crucial thing is to get your thoughts and feelings out without imposing any order on them — but in such a way that, after a few days, some order is likely to emerge on its own. Before you conclude your last session, be sure you have done your best to answer these two questions: Why did this happen? What good might I derive from it?
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