Some years ago I asked to talk to an African American man who had written a number of pieces in the local paper. In my email I said that although I had two Black sons in law and had Black men occasionally come to my office, I often felt that I was missing something important about the Black subculture, namely how Blacks actually engage in conversation, friendship, and intimacy. Intimacy is the heart of any good therapeutic alliance between therapist and patient. I was to meet him in a local café. I had been interested in some of the things he had said about his work, which was essentially with primarily Black kids. When I entered the café, he waved at me and invited me to come to the table where he was sitting with a friend/colleague (who happened to be White) with whom he had been working for a few years. As I approached the table and had not yet sat down, he volunteered something that has stuck with me since our meeting although I have not had contact with this man since. He said something like, “I want to start by saying that you look confident and a man who is thriving in life. If you want to know that your very appearance suggests thriving and it is off-putting. I have lived in an environment that has been one of surviving, not thriving.” I was not offended by his comment, but I did take a figurative step back from the conversation because I had never heard of the difference between thriving and surviving, and I immediately knew that I had not been raised in a survival context. This matter of surviving has continued to be an important aspect of my understanding people, to some degree the subcultures of America like the African American culture, but in a larger context of how many people engage life: they are surviving. Let’s look at the whole business of thriving and surviving that people do. There are many people who survive terrible ordeals, like physical illness or even war, but my focus will be primarily on people who survive through emotional challenges.
People who are surviving
- People with physical limitations
- Blindness
- Debilitating illnesses like cancer and heart disease
- Physical disabilities
- People with household difficulties
- Financial limitations or challenges’
- Deteriorating living quarters
- No living quarters
- People who interpersonal difficulties
- One partner is seriously physically limited
- One partner wants out of the relationship
- One partner is unfaithful
- One partner is addicted to some behavior or chemical
- Partners have substantially different religious/philosophical orientations
- Partners have a cognitively impaired child, which causes them to frequently be at odds with each other
- Partner one does not like the biological family of partner two. Makes Christmas celebrations difficult
- And many other difficulties that people need to manage by surviving
People who are surviving personal matters
- Jack is unable to conquer his addition to one of the following: alcohol, drugs, food, promiscuity, gambling, video game playing, other screen time, working, playing, toxic relationships, or sleeping (too much or not enough)
- Marge is generally not happy with herself. She thinks she is stupid.
- Peter is not happy with himself. He thinks he is smarter than everyone
- Both Marge and Peter are lonely
- Stan continues to pine for the woman he thinks he should have married, a feeling that makes life difficult for him and secondarily and unconsciously for his wife
- Dad doesn’t really like his son. Thinks that he is too much like his wife
- Mom really favors daughter # 1 over daughter #2 because she is more like #1
The ways people survive these difficulties
In a nutshell, they avoid them. The essence of avoiding these difficulties means that they avoid the feelings associated with these difficulties. When they don’t finish the feelings associated the challenges, these feelings stay with them. These feelings then become repressed. It wouldn’t be so bad if these feelings stayed repressed but that is not what happens. The feeling show themselves in things they say or do. When they are speaking or doing something that is a result of not having felt through these feelings, they are accommodating. Very likely, they are not aware that they are accommodating. What happens is that the things they say or things they do are coming indirectly from the repressed feelings without their conscious knowledge. It just “feels right” to say something or do something that may seem quite odd or offense to other people. What are the things that they do to accommodate?
Accommodation
Depending on the individual, the subculture that they live in, the people they live with, the work they do, they play they do, or the any environment where they live, there are many possibilities of accommodation including:
- Being distrustful of everyone
- Being dishonest, or at least easily dishonest when they run into some kind of challenge
- Fall into some addiction, chemical or behavioral
- Become isolated. Introverted people tend to isolate
- Become very active. Extraverted people tend to talk a lot
- Fall into depression
- Fall into a generalized anxiety
- Take some kind of radical action
- Take some kind of radical philosophical or religious orientation
To avoid these unfortunate accommodations, what can people do to move from surviving to thriving?
Positive coping mechanisms
- Without a doubt, the most important thing for a person to do when he or she has faced with the trauma that caused the person to survive is to face the trauma and understand that they were in a dangerous or untenable situation and they did what they needed to do to survive. This takes away the false guilt of being a bad person.
- Grieve the loss of what happened. This is easier said than done. It is hard enough to face the violence of sexual abuse or any other kind of abuse. It is much harder to face traumata that occurred over a longer period of time or traumata that occurred to one’s family or one’s heritage. How will Palestinians cope with the trauma of being assaulted? How Israelis cope with their traumata? How will Black people face the trauma of slavery that occurred for 300 years and the aftermath of racism for another 100 years?
- Most people need a confident, which could be a good friend, family member, therapist, or clergy person to do this kind of grief work.
- Slowly replace surviving words and activities with thriving activities.
- Being more honest
- Being more trusting
- Taking a chance with some activity like work school, friends
- Facing and overcoming addictions whatever they may be
- Finding a community of people who have moved from surviving to thriving
I wish you a time when you can achieve a life of thriving, which of course, will be imperfect. It will also be more honest, graceful, and peaceful. But it will also be sadder as you see that you lose things every day and have disappointments every day.
And I wish you a wonderful holiday season.