Peanut Butter: Able, Worthy and Wise
Three Qualities of Helplessness and Resilience;
The Importance Of Resilience as We Age
Too often, we are engaged with who we are not by aspiring to be better, and by hiding past pain. We go to great efforts to live up to our autobiography.
I think resiliency is an inner quality. It reflects our understanding of our own ability, worthiness and wisdom. We develop this understanding when we are engaged with who we are. Our autobiography is not tainted by faerie tales, but rather reflects us and details how we are able, worthy and wise.
My son struggles to open a jar of peanut butter. He re-grips it and twists. He tries again. He wraps the jar in a dish towel, squeezes the top until his knuckles pale and twists with all his might.
I see his jaw clench, his triceps, biceps and forearms bulge, and his head shake with strain and effort. Youth has such power.
He bangs the jar on the marble counter. I worry for the glass. He picks up the knife and whacks the top. Whack! Whack! Whack! I cower with each blow.
Blood drains from his face as he wrenches at the jar. His hands are slick with sweat. He cannot hold his grip.
He hands me the jar.
First he used his innate skill, then he used his knowledge, and now he uses his father. These are our three domains of living - achievement, social relationships and knowledge (ASK) - do, bond, know.1
Developments in neuroscience suggest each domain has distinct systems for the associated emotions. Pyschology (for example, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory) suggests an autonomous person has three basic psychological needs - competence (achievement), relatedness (social relationships), and harmony (acting with your sense of self).2 These three domains are reflected in the dimensions of morality found in a society of autonomous people - autonomy (achievement), community (social relationships) and spirituality (knowledge).3
Even most self-help style advice easily falls into these three domains - Getting Things Done, How To Win Friends And Influence People, Google. In fact, self-help as a category would represent aspirations associated with knowledge.4
Is my son hurt by his failure? I wonder. What would happen if I told him I can’t, or worse, I couldn’t be bothered? How would he handle it?
I know well enough of coping skills. For example, my son could find better tools, more help, or even learn how to bang the knife at an angle to the lid. He could decide he would rather have a bowl of cereal. He could walk away, deny his hunger, think nothing more of this failed effort and pick a fight with his brother.
What about helplessness skills? What if I said to him, “You need to learn to be self reliant.” Would he decide to strain with the jar day-after-day until he grows stronger? Would he google how to open a tight lid? Would he cultivate brawny friends expected to help in a pinch?
These examples represent one type of helplessness skill, finding external resources and solutions. But do they demonstrate resilience? Or are the attempts compensation for weakness, isolation and ignorance?
Bad things do happen. We are made to feel unable, unworthy, misguided - in a word, pitiful.
We bury ourselves with thoughts like, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one should love me,” “God has abandoned me.” These thoughts correspond to failure to do, failure to bond, failure to know. Furies embody the pain caused by these archetypal scripts.
How do we help the pitied? We tell them what to do.5
When we feel self-pity, we mask our own helplessness and bury our pitiful Furies underneath grand ambition. How else can a failure become a person to be admired? Imagine these New Year’s resolutions: “I will become more accomplished,” “I will be nicer,” “I will meditate, pray, attend church religiously.”
We try to out-achieve our greatest fears. We are driven by Furies, all the more intensely so for the repression and denial. It is a force which achieves great external reward because of internal suffering. In an evolutionary sense, it is highly adaptive - how ironic!
Is resilience nothing more than compulsive achievement? Is mindfulness nothing more than a determination not to be angry? Is happiness nothing more than an optimistic outlook? The answer would be found in the way pity relates to compassion.
I open the jar and hand it to my son.
He will grow strong and smart. For him, the peanut butter jar will become less of an obstacle in the future.
My son will thrive for the next twenty years. The power of biological, neurological and psychological change combined with bounty of fresh experience will provide resources against all but the most traumatic hardships. He is programmed to be grow over his wounds. Sometimes, we mistake this quality for resilience.
For me, I won’t get stronger. I might not get smarter. Over the next ten years, the opposite is more likely. Resilience becomes even more important to cultivate as I get well past my thirties.
The maladaptive defenses I developed in my youth no longer serve me. In fact, it is fair to say they caused inconceivable damage. These defenses hide stories and make me rigid and brittle.6
My son will grow over his new wounds, but growth no longer papers over my old failings. Without resilience, I might wither in the face of the bulk I have accumulated through the years.
Our mind generates the first draft of our autobiography from the compulsion to make sense and feel in control, the sketchwork of initial recollections, and the assumptions generated from our biases, scripts, beliefs, schemas, our unchallengable doubts and certainties - even our personality.
How realistic can this draft be? For most stressful events, we spend time making sense, fleshing out a realistic story and moving on. Our final draft is marked by resolution.
When we endure hardship without resolution, we stop drafting as soon as we can. Reliving the story only reminds us of failure and helplessness. Instead, we identify with the pleasant story designed to hide the pain. Our autobiography favors the tales of who we are not. We practice defense, not resilience, and grow brittle.
Resilience is the counterpoint to helplessness just as the spirit is born of suffering. How many pious youth do you know? How many fully-grown folk are besotted by spiritual yearning?
The raw material for this yearning is the unresolved experiences hidden under our defenses. We extrapolate and see our world as capricious and hostile, and ourselves as weak, isolated and ignorant. We suffer in this hostile world and want salvation.
Is the effort to slake such yearning yet another grand resolution and another opportunity for achievement? Does salve come from some external source of new ability, new community, or new spirituality?
Too often, we are engaged with who we are not by aspiring to be better, and by hiding past pain. We go to great efforts to live up to our autobiography.
I think resiliency is an inner quality. It reflects our understanding of our own ability, worthiness and wisdom. We develop this understanding when we are engaged with who we are. Our autobiography is not tainted by faerie tales, but rather reflects us and details how we are able, worthy and wise.
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”Knowledge” and “know” sound rather prosaic as a domain of living. The domain of knowledge is about sense-making on many different scales. At its largest scale, this domain is highly spiritual. Emotions of knowledge would include sensations such as epiphany and awe. ↩
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Deci and Ryan, the two principle developers of the self-determination theory have yet to explore autonomy and spiritual pursuits although recent research is addressing issues of mindfulness. Conflated with their concept of autonomy is a notion of harmony. It would be fascinating to see research on the issue of autonomy and the pursuit of harmony.
For more information. Deci EL, Ryan RM. Facilitating optimal motivation and psychological well-being across life’s domains. Canadian Psychology. 2008;49:14-23.
As this note suggests, I have twisted SDT somewhat because of the ambiguity associated with the idea of autonomy: autonomy represents the individual, and also indicates a quality of harmonious living. ↩
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Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C, Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "Big Three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the "Big Three" explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119-169). New York: Routledge. ↩
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The emotion systems which animate our human nature are organized along three dimensions achievement, social relationships, knowledge - for the acronym “ASK.” These systems are displayed along the entire spectrum of organized experience - behavior, the individual and even the broadest theory of man. Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate breaks down the politics of de-natured man by focusing on three flawed theories - the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine - which correspond to autonomy, community and spirituality. I find The Blank Slate a tremendously powerful anecdote (a well-developed, worthy-reading, 500-page anecdote). It is fair to say my emotional response to his insightful argument well reflects the emotions of knowledge. My choice for organization finds conflict from two directions. E. O. Wilson’s idea of ‘consilience’ argues there is a grand, unified construct underlying these categories. Pinker’s biological conception of complex human nature argues there are many individualized aspects of human nature which undermine the validity of abstraction. I tend to favor Pinker. ↩
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We might provide aid, rather than advice, to someone we sympathize with, but whoever heard of self-sympathy. Our identification with a person of failure ranges from revulsion to pity to sympathy to compassion. When our identification turns positive, our emotions stretch toward gratitude then admiration. On one end is contempt and on the other is the reverence associated with admiration. It is a stretch to directly associate pity with ‘do,’ sympathy with ‘bond’ and compassion with ‘know,’ but as a metaphor, it works rather well. For a related discussion: Haidt J, Morris JP. Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2009;106(19):7687-8. ↩
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Genes would have it that youth is blessed with resilience and the fully-grown are rendered brittle, rigid and at great risk of traumatic hardships. Us fully-grown folk might as well die off while we struggle to provide for the well-being of the next generation. ↩
Cole Bitting
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Reader Comments (3)
"Is the effort to slake such yearning yet another grand resolution and another opportunity for achievement? Does salve come from some external source of new ability, new community, or new spirituality?"
I think this is the disease of our society - always looking outside ourselves for the salve to ease our wounds and pain. I agree that:
"I think resiliency is an inner quality. It reflects our understanding of our own ability, worthiness and wisdom. We develop this understanding when we are engaged with who we are."
These are profound statements. There are many ways we can do this. I think of all the people who have suffered under tremendous terror - concentration camps, wars, etc. and some of their abilities to be resilient by finding it inside.
I know it is very difficult for many people to understand their autobiography with much of it unconscious - projecting and transferring their pain on to others. It is those that seek it that will continue to make progress, however slow or fast. It is the hardest work of our lives, from the simplest of methods.
Great post - very insightful and important!
I'm including it in a listing of posts in my blog on Friday to encourage others who are making resolutions.
Thanks,
Anne
Thanks so much for the generous compliments. They make me blush. Your support of my writing is awesome!
I have yet to write directly about the notion of 'when we are engaged with who we are.' I am shadow-boxing the concept. It is a sturdy idea, able to bear the weight of conscious choice and provide some of the qualities of resilience and well-being we all seek.
Pretty nice blog you've got here. Thanx for it. I like such topics and anything that is connected to this matter. I would like to read more soon.
Truly yours