---
author: Big Think
date: '2025-12-26'
guest: ''
layout: post.njk
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFeFnMcgk1M
speaker: Big Think
tags:
  - resilience
  - adaptive-flexibility
  - coping-strategies
  - mindset
  - trauma
title: 韧性新解：适应性灵活性与应对困境的科学
summary: 本文基于临床心理学家乔治·博纳诺的研究，探讨了人类韧性的本质。演讲者指出，普遍存在的“脆弱感”文化趋势与个体内在的强大能力相悖。他提出了“适应性灵活性”（Adaptive Flexibility）的概念，认为这才是预测个体应对逆境能力的关键，而非固定的“特质”。文章详细阐述了“灵活性思维模式”（Flexibility Mindset）的三大信念（乐观、应对自信、挑战导向）以及“灵活性序列”（Flexibility Sequence）的三大步骤（情境敏感性、策略库、反馈）。此外，还批判了“统一效能谬误”（Fallacy of Uniform Efficacy），强调策略的有效性高度依赖于具体情境，并介绍了如何运用这些原则应对创伤和负面自我对话。
insight: ''
draft: true
series: ''
category: psychology
area: society-thinking
project: []
people: []
companies_orgs:
  - Columbia University
products_models: []
media_books:
  - 'The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD'
status: evergreen
---
### 韧性悖论：超越固定特质的适应之道

当前文化中弥漫着一种普遍的脆弱感，认为我们都相当脆弱。互联网尤其放大了世界的危险和有害之处，因为这些内容最能吸引我们的注意力。然而，我们有必要提醒自己，个体实际上拥有强大的内在力量。尽管有时这听起来难以置信，但关键在于允许自己“放松一些”（cut yourself a little slack），并暂时采纳这种信念，以便能够深入其中，努力向前生活。

**乔治·博纳诺**（George Bonanno）教授是哥伦比亚大学临床心理学教授，他的著作《创伤的终结：韧性新科学如何改变我们对PTSD的认知》（"The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD"）探讨了人类在面对极端逆境时的韧性。他指出，当研究人员开始确信他们识别出了“韧性轨迹”（resilience trajectory）这一真实存在的现象时，便在大量研究中得到了证实，包括超过百项由其他研究者独立完成的研究。

然而，一个核心问题随之而来：为何大多数人能够保持韧性，而有些人却不能？这个问题的答案比预想的要复杂。当我们衡量与韧性相关的、或与之并存的因素时，会发现存在许多不同的指标。公众和媒体中流传着一种“神话”，即存在少数“魔术特质”（magic traits）——例如“高韧性人群的三种特质”或“五种特质”。研究表明，虽然有许多因素与韧性相关，但它们都具有“小效应”（small effects），即它们本身并不能充分解释个体为何具有韧性。换句话说，即使一个人拥有积极思维、善于解决问题或擅长分散注意力等能力，这些因素也只能微弱地预测其在面对事件时是否能保持韧性。

博纳诺教授将此称为“韧性悖论”（resilience paradox）：我们可以识别出这些看似有助于韧性的因素，但它们却无法精确预测个体在未来遭遇困境时的表现。其根本原因在于，情境千差万别，每种行为或策略都有其成本与收益。那些我们认为能增强韧性的因素，甚至是我们应对逆境时的“首选策略”，也并非在所有情况下都有效。

因此，每次面对挑战时，我们都需要为当前特定的时刻和情境，找出最佳的解决方案和策略。博纳诺教授将这一过程称为“适应性灵活性”（adaptive flexibility），他也称之为“调节灵活性”（regulatory flexibility）。适应性灵活性是一套大多数人已具备的技能，并且这些技能高度可学。然而，即使拥有这些技能，我们也必须主动运用它们，这本身就是一种“工作”（work）。要完成这项工作，我们需要动机，并相信自己能够做到，否则我们甚至不会尝试。而“我终将度过难关”的信念——尽管承认当下痛苦、糟糕且影响生活——正是我们进行这项工作所必需的。

<details>
<summary>Original English</summary>
There's a kind of a cultural trend
toward thinking we're all
pretty fragile right now.
The internet has got us
focused on how dangerous,
how harmful the world is right now
by all the things that we
perceive that we're fed
because it gets our attention.
But I think that it's
good to remind ourselves
of how strong we actually are.
It can sometimes seem like a tough sell,
but it's really important to
cut yourself a little slack
and to allow yourself
to take on that belief
for a little while, at
least to let yourself dig in
and try to move forward with your life.
My name is George Bonanno.
I'm a professor of Clinical Psychology
at Columbia University.
My most recent book is
titled, "The End of Trauma:
How the New Science of
Resilience is Changing
How We Think About PTSD."
I'm known for identifying
and documenting human resilience
in the face of basically the worst things
that happen to people.
When we began to become confident
that we really had
identified something real,
this resilience trajectory
I've talked about,
we've identified it in
many studies at this point.
It's been identified
convincingly in the majority
and over 100 research studies
by other people than myself,
lots of other people.
So it's very much a real thing.
The big question then is why
are most people resilient
and why are some people not resilient?
That turned out to be a harder question
to answer than I thought,
because when we measure
the things that correlate
with resilience, the things
that co-occur with resilience,
we find lots of different factors.
The kind of a myth in the general public,
we see it in the media,
we see it in even in some
professional literature
is that there are a few magic traits.
The three traits of
highly resilient people,
the five traits of
highly resilient people.
It turns out there are many, many factors
that have been associated with resilience,
but they all have what
we call small effects.
They don't explain very much.
They only explain a little
bit of who will be resilient.
So in other words, if somebody
says, has positive thinking
or they're good at problem solving,
or they're good at distracting themselves
or whatever it is that they do,
that is something that
helps them to be resilient,
it turns out that that
only predicts a little bit
of whether or not they
will actually be resilient
when something happens.
I call that the resilience paradox.
We can identify these things,
but paradoxically, they
don't actually predict
who will be resilient the
next time something happens.
And the reason for that it turns out,
is because situations vary a great deal
and their are cost and
benefits to everything,
so these different factors that
we think make us resilient,
these different behaviors,
even the go-to things
that we think we use when
we are trying to cope
with adversity, they only work sometimes,
they work sometimes in some situations,
and they don't work very
well in other times,
even the things that we think
are kind of our best shot
don't always work.
So what that means is every
time something happens,
all of us, we have to work
out what's the best solution,
what's the best strategy
for this particular moment
right now, this particular
situation I'm in,
and I call that process of doing
that, adaptive flexibility.
I also called it regulatory flexibility.
Adaptive flexibility is
basically a set of skills
that most people have actually,
which is a good thing.
Most people have those skills,
they're also highly learnable.
But even if we have those skills,
we have to use the skills
we have, and that's work.
And in order to do that work,
we have to be motivated.
We have to believe that
we'll be able to do it,
otherwise we won't even try.
And that belief,
that idea that I'll get
through this eventually,
I'm not happy this happened,
this really sucks, this is
painful, it's ruining my life,
but I'll get through this eventually,
that's the belief that we
need in order to do that work.
We need to somehow think
we'll get through it.
</details>

### 灵活应对：思维模式与行动序列

为了践行适应性灵活性，个体需要培养一种特定的“灵活性思维模式”（flexibility mindset）。这种思维模式包含三个相互关联且相互促进的核心信念：

*   **乐观（Optimism）**: 这是一种相信“一切都会好起来”的信念或确信。它意味着相信未来会是好的，即使当下并不理想。这种心态在体育和其他生活领域都可见。
*   **应对自信（Confidence of Coping）**: 也称为“应对自我效能感”（coping self-efficacy），即相信自己具备一定的应对能力。大多数人确实拥有可以运用的应对机制，关键在于提醒自己“我能够应对”。
*   **挑战导向（Challenge Orientation）**: 也称为“挑战评估”（challenge appraisal）。它指的是将威胁性事件视为需要克服的挑战，并思考如何应对。当首次面对威胁时，我们自然会评估其严重性，但随后必须将焦点从威胁本身转移到如何克服它。过度关注威胁会导致麻痹。挑战评估意味着认识到“发生了什么，这里的挑战是什么，我需要做什么？”

基于这些信念，博纳诺教授的研究项目逐渐指向了三个关键组成部分，即他称之为“灵活性序列”（flexibility sequence）的三个步骤：

1.  **情境敏感性（Context Sensitivity）**: 当我们感到困扰或不安时，首先要停下来反思：“问题是什么？现在发生了什么？我需要做什么？”这关乎当下。许多人在极度痛苦时，会采取过于宽泛的视角，认为“这件事毁了我的生活”，这是一个难以一次性解决的巨大问题。我们需要将其分解。关注当下真正困扰我们的具体问题，例如感到焦虑，或者在某个特定地点会因过去的经历而感到焦虑。这些反应需要逐一处理。例如，如果睡眠不佳导致白天不快、注意力不集中，并引发对工作的担忧，那么需要聚焦于解决“如何睡得更好”或“如何在当下减轻焦虑”的问题。
2.  **策略库（Repertoire）**: 一旦明确了可解决的具体问题，就进入第二步——决定采用何种策略。之所以称为“策略库”，是因为每个人都拥有一系列个人策略，即我们知道如何做、过去曾用过的方法。我们从中选择。这就像打开一个工具箱，根据“我需要睡得更好”、“我需要减轻当下的焦虑”或“我需要找到不感到威胁的方法”等需求，选择当下最合适的工具并尝试使用。
3.  **反馈（Feedback）**: 这是序列的第三步，非常简单：监控我们刚刚采取的行动，并问自己：“它奏效了吗？” 尽管听起来简单，但这是关键一步，因为许多人在此处放弃。如果尝试某事无效，他们就认为“我无法应对”。这是一种危险的误解。实际上，我们应该回到“策略库”步骤，尝试其他策略。可能需要多次尝试不同的策略，直到找到有效的为止。或者，如果多种策略都无效，可能需要回到起点，从略微不同的角度重新审视问题，例如是否过于宽泛或找错了问题。

这个灵活性序列不仅为我们提供了应对挑战的工具，更重要的是，它教会我们关于自身“掌控感”（mastery）。我们能够主动影响事件，并随着时间推移解决问题。它告诉我们不必被动地任由事情发生。“时间治愈一切”固然有道理，但时间本身并不主动。我们可以主动介入，通过做决定、尝试不同方法来度过难关。即使尝试的方法无效，我们也能从中学习，知道“这个方法不行，我还有其他选择”。随着时间的推移，我们也会更了解自己的工具，更了解自己的感知方式，并能识别出在特定情境下哪些工具更有效，甚至将他人的经验纳入自己的“工具箱”。这使我们能成长为更有效能、更独立的人。

<details>
<summary>Original English</summary>
We call this the flexibility mindset.
There are three core beliefs
that seem to comprise
the flexibility mindset.
They're related and they
feed off each other.
One of them is optimism.
That's essentially a belief
or a conviction that
it's going to be okay.
The future will be okay,
this isn't good now,
but it will be okay in the future.
You know, you can see this in sports,
you can see it in many
other domains of life.
There are some athletes
who have all the skills in the world,
but if they don't have the motivation,
if they don't have the sense of purpose,
they're not going to perform well.
And you see this over and over in sports.
We need always to have that motivation,
that belief that I'll get
through this, I can do it.
So another one of those beliefs
is confidence of coping,
sometimes called coping self-efficacy.
And this is essentially a belief
that I have some ability to cope.
And most people do.
Most people have at least
some coping that they can do,
some behavior, some coping
mechanisms that they can use.
So it's a sense of reminding
ourselves, I can cope.
The third belief, the
third component of this
that appears to be part of the mindset is
what we call challenge orientation,
sometimes called challenge appraisal.
And that's when we think
of threatening events
in terms of the challenge at hand,
what we need to do to get through it.
You know, when we're first
confronted with a threat,
we naturally assess the threat
because we need to know
how bad something is,
but that at some point we have to shift
from thinking about the threat
to thinking about what we
need to do to get past it.
If we stay too focused on the threat,
we're paralyzed by that.
So the challenge appraisal is a sense of,
all right, what happened,
what's the challenge here,
what do I need to do?
Our research program
gradually began to point
to three key components,
three steps of what we now
call the flexibility sequence.
I pulled these together
for the first time in my recent
book, "The End of Trauma,"
and laid them out in some detail.
The first step,
and all three of these
come from our research.
The first step we call
context sensitivity.
And this is where we stop,
and we, when something is
disturbing us, we're upset,
we stop and we reflect and we
think, what is the problem?
What's happening right
now? What's the problem?
What do I need to do?
And this is really about the moment.
You know, one of the difficulties
we experience sometimes
when we're really upset by something is
we take a very broad perspective, right?
This thing happened, it's
ruining my life, it's horrible.
That's too big of a problem
to undo all at once.
We need to take it in pieces.
What's the problem at hand?
What's the problem in this moment
that's really bothering me.
It may be that I'm feeling anxious.
It may be that when I
go to this one place,
I get really anxious
'cause this is the place
where this thing happened.
It may be any number of reactions we have,
and we have to take these one at a time.
When we think about,
okay, I need to sleep,
the problem is I'm not sleeping well
and that's making me
unhappy during the day,
and it's making me have
trouble concentrating,
and then I'm worried about
my job, whatever that may be.
What do I need to do?
I need to focus on solving that problem.
How do I sleep better?
Or I need to focus on feeling
less anxious in the moment.
Once we've done that, we have
a clear problem we can solve,
we move to the second
step of the sequence,
which we call repertoire.
And here we decide on
a strategy we'll use,
we call it repertoire though,
because all of us have a
repertoire of personal strategies,
the things that we know how to do,
the things we've used in the past,
and we choose from that repertoire.
It's kind of like a toolbox.
We open up that toolbox
and we say, "All right,
I need to sleep better,"
or, "I need to feel a
little less anxious now,"
or, "I need to find a way
not to feel threatened
when I'm in this situation."
And we look in that toolbox
and we decide which of these tools
is going to be best to use right now,
and we try something out,
that takes us to the third
step which we call feedback.
And this is basically very
quite simple in a way.
We just simply monitor what we just did
and ask ourselves, is it working?
As simple as that may sound,
this is really a key step
because a lot of people give up here.
If they try something, it doesn't work,
they think, I can't deal with this,
I just can't cope with this.
I tried, you know, I
tried doing this thing
where I distract myself,
so I won't think about it.
I tried getting wrapped up in my job,
which really helps me a lot,
and I still kept thinking about it.
So I can't cope with this.
And that's actually a very
dangerous misconception, I think,
because what we need to
do in this situation,
and as it is laid out in
the flexibility sequence,
is we go back to the repertoire step
and we try something else,
we try another strategy.
And we might have to
continue trying strategies
several times before
something actually works.
Or if we've tried many strategies,
it may be that we have
to go all the way back
to the beginning
and think about the problem
in slightly different terms.
Maybe I'm focusing too broadly,
I'm focusing on the wrong problem.
What's the problem that
I can solve right now?
There's a lesson in all of this,
in these different pieces
of the flexibility sequence,
because not only does it
give us tools for dealing
with these challenges, these
aversive events we experience,
it also essentially is teaching
us about our own mastery.
We can actually do something
about these events.
We can actually work these
things out ourselves over time.
And it does teach us
really that we don't need
to simply let things happen to us.
There's a phrase, "Time heals all ills,"
and time does heal things,
but time doesn't, is in no
rush time, takes a long time.
So we can actually get in there
and work to get ourselves
through these events
in a way that we're making the decisions,
we're trying things out.
The good way to think about this is
even when we try something
and it doesn't work, we've tried it,
it's been our choice to try it,
and we know, okay, this isn't working,
let me see what else I have.
And over time, we also begin
to learn more about our tools.
We learn more about
how we perceive things,
we learn more about the tools we have,
and we can actually kind of think, okay,
this tool worked pretty
well in this situation
and now I know I have this tool,
and I saw somebody else,
I heard about somebody
else doing this other thing
maybe I'll try that in the future
I'll put that in my toolbox.
So there are a lot of ways
that we can grow as people
and become more efficacious
and more independent in a way
with these kinds of tools.
</details>

### 情境效能：策略的动态选择与自我赋能

许多人可能认为某些应对策略是普遍有效或普遍有害的，博纳诺教授称之为“统一效能谬误”（fallacy of uniform efficacy）。这种观念认为存在“黄金策略”，它们总是奏效，或者存在“不健康、适应不良”的策略，绝对不能使用。然而，研究表明事实并非如此。任何策略的有效性都高度依赖于具体情境。

例如，**正念**（mindfulness）本身是积极的，但它并非万能药，对于大多数人来说，它是一种日常辅助，而非解决所有问题的终极方案。同样，**社会支持**（social support），即向他人寻求安慰和建议，在许多情况下都有帮助，但并非总能满足特定问题的需求。博纳诺教授早期研究**情绪压抑**（emotional suppression）时，发现它曾被普遍视为“一概有害、一概适应不良”。但实际情况是，在某些情境下，压抑情绪可以非常适应。例如，在9/11事件研究中，一些父母为了不吓到年幼的孩子，不得不压抑自己重现的痛苦情绪。在战争等极端挑战下，有时需要暂时压抑情感以保持专注。甚至有研究表明，在某些社交场合，过度表现积极情绪可能会引起他人反感。因此，在许多需要保持冷静或避免冒犯他人的情境下，压抑情绪是必要的。

反之，那些被认为“总是健康”的策略，也并非总能奏效。例如，在某些情况下，即使是看似“不健康”的策略，如冲动行为，在特定时刻也可能起到意想不到的适应作用。这被称为“丑陋应对”（coping ugly），正如约翰·列侬的歌曲《Whatever Gets You Through the Night》所传达的那样，有时最直接、看似不完美的方法反而是当下最需要的。

这种对策略情境依赖性的理解，对于应对过去可能造成的创伤事件同样适用。即使是曾经严重影响生活、至今仍在造成困扰的事件，也可以运用灵活性序列来处理。我们不必将过去的创伤视为一个模糊、无法解决的整体（例如，“我被创伤了，生活被毁了，我无法出门”）。相反，我们可以像处理当前事件一样，将其分解为“当下时刻的问题”，并寻找可解决的切入点。

例如，一位因创伤而不敢出门的人，其核心问题可能演变为：“如何在感到脆弱和易受伤害的情况下出门？”解决方案是识别这个问题，然后寻找策略。他可以尝试告诉朋友自己有PTSD，并让朋友成为“安全屋”。尝试后，如果有效，就扩展应用。他可以尝试告诉朋友，然后出门，知道在感到不安时可以联系朋友。如果这种方式有效，他就可以逐步扩大活动范围，处理问题的其他方面。这个过程就是通过试错，关注反馈（“这是否奏效？”），不断调整，最终重新获得生活的主动权。

**自我对话**（self-talk）是强化这些灵活性原则的有力工具。虽然我们常进行消极的自我对话，但也可以将其转化为积极的工具。例如，为“灵活性思维模式”准备的口号可以是：“一切都会好起来的，我有工具可以应对”（乐观）；“我有应对的能力，我知道该怎么做”（应对自信）；“这很糟糕，我不想这样，但我需要做些什么来度过难关”（挑战导向）。对于“灵活性序列”，可以问自己：“现在发生了什么？我需要做什么？”（情境敏感性）；“我的工具箱里有什么？我能用什么来应对？”（策略库）。这种自我对话，本质上是与自己进行一场有建设性的对话，帮助我们聚焦问题，找到解决方案。

总而言之，当前文化中弥漫的“脆弱感”叙事，以及围绕“我们是破碎和脆弱的”这一想法滋生的产业，并非积极趋势。灵活性理念提供了一种反击，将我们重新置于“驾驶座”。认识到我们比自己想象的更强大，并允许自己相信这一点，是至关重要的。这并非否定我们经历的痛苦，而是强调我们有能力通过积极的尝试和调整来度过难关。正如卡罗尔·德韦克（Carol Dweck）的**成长型思维**（growth mindset）研究所示，将能力视为固定不变会导致放弃，而将韧性视为一个动态的、可以通过努力和尝试来达成（outcome）的过程，则能赋予我们更大的能动性和掌控感。通过拥抱灵活性，我们更有可能成功应对生活中的挑战。

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<summary>Original English</summary>
I think there's a kind of a general idea
that it's pretty easy to latch onto
that somebody might think
I've been traumatized
and it's really ruining my life
and you know, I just have
to limit my life now.
And there's nothing I can do about it.
It's just happened to me.
And there's a lot of helplessness
built into that idea.
And the flexibility notion,
the sense that we can actually get in
and change the way we're
experiencing the world,
the way things are happening to us,
the challenges we face,
I think gives us a lot more
efficacy, a lot more mastery,
a lot more sense of agency in
how we deal with these events.
I coined the term the fallacy
of uniform efficacy, but I,
because I see in the way people talk,
and I see this actually in
my own research discipline,
this idea that there's some behaviors,
some strategies that people
can use that are just golden.
They always work, they are
the perfect strategies.
And then there are others
that are just not healthy,
they're maladaptive,
don't do these things,
these things are unhealthy.
And in fact, that doesn't hold
up to the research at all.
So that the fallacy of uniform efficacy is
that any strategy is
always good or always bad.
And we find that there are strategies
that people like to use.
There are strategies that are healthy
and good strategies to use.
But in certain situations,
even the most unhealthy strategy
can actually be adaptive.
I call this coping ugly,
leads the idea that say something
like doing some impulsive
thing is not really healthy,
you know, you should behave,
you don't need to be
self-destructive here.
If you do something that once
or twice in certain situations,
it's actually can be
just what you need to do.
John Lennon wrote a song,
"Whatever Gets You Through the Night."
And that's exactly what
this kind of idea embodies.
By the same token,
the things that we think
are always healthy,
we should just do these things,
they're not always efficacious,
they don't always work.
Great examples are
something like mindfulness,
mindfulness is good stuff,
there's no doubt about that,
but mindfulness isn't always
going to solve a problem
unless you are maybe one of
the 18 people in the world
who can meditate all day long.
Most of us can't do that.
Most of us use mindfulness in
a kind of a daily way or what,
however anybody uses it.
That's going to help a lot
but it's not gonna solve every problem.
Social support is another one.
Turning to other people for comfort
and advice, that helps in many situations,
but it doesn't always help,
it doesn't always give us what we need
for a particular problem.
The way I actually got into a lot
of this flexibility research
was by studying emotional suppression.
I was doing research on
suppression at the time
that there were a lot of people
beginning to study this behavior,
but it had developed
this kind of reputation
as being uniformly bad,
uniformly maladaptive.
And there are plenty of anecdotal examples
that show that it, suppression
can be very adaptive
in some situations.
For example, in our 911 research,
parents who were with young children
told us in interviews that
they had to really suppress
all the emotions they were
re-experiencing at the moment
'cause they didn't wanna
frighten their children.
When you're in the midst
of a tremendously challenging situation,
like a war for example,
there are times when we have
to just simply bottle up
whatever we're feeling
because we need to remain
focused on what we're doing.
We need to concentrate.
There's some research
even about suppressing
positive emotions.
There have been some studies
where people winning awards,
people winning sporting events,
if the winners show too
much positive emotion,
other people actually don't like them
because they feel like
they're being inconsiderate
of the losers, the people who didn't win.
So in many social situations,
many dangerous situations
where we need to suppress
the emotions we feel.
Of course, in other situations,
that's not adaptive,
because in other situations
we need that information.
What are our emotions telling us?
So it really, like every strategy we use,
it depends on the situation,
it depends on the challenge
we're facing in that moment.
So often this simply comes
down to trial and error
and trying something, asking
ourselves, "Is this working,"
and if it's working,
great, let's keep doing it,
if it's not working, we
need to try something else.
Adaptive flexibility
and the flexibility mindset,
the flexibility sequence,
these concepts can also be
useful if we're thinking about
how to cope with something
that happened some time ago,
say a potentially traumatic event
that did cause us lasting harm
and is still causing us lasting harm.
In this case, we though have to focus
on using it the way we
use it for current events.
So if we think about a traumatic event
that really did upend our life
that we're still struggling with,
we tend to think of that event
and we will tend to
think of that event as,
in a sort of broad, generic way.
I was traumatized by this event,
it's changed my life,
I can't go out anymore,
I don't do the things I used to do.
my relationships are not so good anymore
because of this 'cause I'm
kind of in this broken state,
that's a problem that
can't be solved in one go.
It's too big of a problem.
But what we can do just like
anything that's happening
currently in our life is
we go through the steps of the sequence,
the flexibility sequence,
and think about it in terms
of what's the problem in the moment,
what's happening right now?
What is a piece of this
problem that's bothering us
and that we can address?
An example comes to mind of
someone I knew long time ago
who was traumatized to such a point
that that person never went out anymore.
They were worried that if they went out,
they would have a flashback
and be overwhelmed
and be somewhere out in public
in this sort of flashback,
you know, panic attack state.
So that became the problem.
How can I go out into the world
despite the fact that I am
feeling quite vulnerable,
quite fragile at the moment.
The solution was to first
identify that problem,
then to think about strategies
that might help with
that particular problem.
And that led to a gradual
kind of realization,
that person could tell friends,
had never told a lot of
friends that he had PTSD,
he could tell friends he had PTSD,
and then those friends could
be kind of safe houses for him.
So that was a step.
Try that out, how's that working?
Then again, so we go through
the trial and error process.
Let's try telling some
friends, "I have PTSD,"
and let's try then going out
and knowing that we can call them,
they agreed to this, that,
call them if I'm feeling upset,
that seemed to work really well.
I went out the other day, I tried this,
I felt a little uneasy,
I called my friend, I went over there,
I didn't have a flashback,
I didn't have an attack,
panic attack, but I was
able to feel like I could go
to safety if I needed it.
Okay, that worked. Let's
expand it a little bit.
And that person gradually developed a way
to get back out in the world
that gave him more confidence
in what he could do out in
the world that allowed him
to deal with some other
pieces of the problem.
So he broke it down that way
and took it one at a time,
tried to find the solutions
through the trial and error approach,
paying attention to the feedback.
Did it work? If it worked, great.
If it didn't work, try something else.
And that gradually allowed him
to give himself more latitude in his life.
He had tools to address
the pieces of the problem.
We can use self-talk both as a tool
and a reminder for how to use
the flexibility components
in our lives.
So self-talk is something we naturally do.
We condense what's going on in our mind.
You know, our mind's running all the time
and we sometimes condense
what's going on in our mind
into a few sentences.
We might say them aloud or we
might say them to ourselves.
Unfortunately, a lot of
self-talk we use is negative.
We might say to ourselves, "Ah, dummy,"
or something along those
lines, "why did you do that?"
But it can also be used positively.
And people do naturally
use positive self-talk.
The classic one word, "Yes, yes!"
You see this in sporting events,
you see it in other contexts,
people taking an exam or some context.
And that has been harnessed
in many different disciplines.
It's been harnessed in education,
it's been harnessed to
a great deal in sports
and in clinical context as well.
It's a way of condensing
what we're thinking
and to phrases that we can
use then to remind ourselves
and guide us through some behavior.
So for the flexibility mindset,
we might actually make a little chart
of these kinds of phrases.
In my recent book, "The End of Trauma,"
I have a little chart of
these phrases in the back,
but there's simple things like
for the flexibility mindset,
we can tell ourselves things
like, "It's gonna be, okay,
I have some tools to work with this,"
or for challenge appraisal,
so "It's going to be okay"
would be being optimistic about it.
"It'll be okay, the future will be okay,"
confidence in coping,
that would be something
along the lines of,
"I have some tools, I know how to cope."
And challenge appraisal
would be something like,
"Okay, this sucks, I
didn't want this to happen.
What do I need to do to get through this?"
For the flexibility sequence,
these are also quite simple
for assessing the context.
We can ask, we can say to ourselves,
"What's happening now,
what do I need to do,"
and that actually is quite powerful.
I've used this in my own life
when I'm struggling with something
and it's a little confusing,
I'm feeling upset,
and then sort of take a second back
and say, "What's happening,
what do I need to do here?"
And it really helps us
focus in on a core piece of the problem,
what is it that I need to do right now?
Once we do that, then
we, the repertoire stage,
we can just say "So what
tools do I have in my toolbox?
What kind of things can I
use here to cope with this?"
These are simple statements,
but they have a way of focusing our mind.
And when we're talking about
the flexibility sequence,
this is a kind of a dialogue.
A lot of self-talk are just
simply statements like,
"I'll get through this,
this will be okay."
But when we talk about
the flexibility sequence,
we're actually asking
ourselves a question.
We're having a dialogue with ourselves.
It's almost like having
ourselves in the room next to us
asking us these questions.
And it's simple and
easy and very effective.
There's a phrase that is often used
when my work is talked about,
summarized as, "You are
stronger than you think."
I'm a little leery of that
phrase because it's presumptive.
I don't know what anybody thinks,
but it is fair to say, I think,
there's a kind of a cultural
trend toward thinking
we're all pretty fragile right now.
I think that's more
and more been the case.
And I don't know exactly why it all is.
It has something to do with
the internet has got us focused
on how dangerous, how harmful
the world is right now
by all the things that
we perceive that were fed
because it gets our attention.
But there's also a lot of
industry that's sprung up
around this idea, the industry
that feeds off the idea
that we are broken and fragile.
And I think that's not a good trend.
And I think, as I've said,
the flexibility ideas
are kind of a counter to
that because it puts it back,
puts us back in the driver's seat.
But I think that it's
good to remind ourselves
of how strong we actually are.
It can sometimes seem like a tough sell,
this idea that you are,
you can actually get through something,
that you're stronger than
you might think you are
at the moment.
But it's really important to
cut yourself a little slack
and to allow yourself
to take on that belief
for a little while at least
to let yourself dig in
and try to move forward with your life.
And you can remind yourself
both that you are strong.
You can also remind yourself
of all the times you've
been strong in the past,
all the things you've got to.
You know, a little exercise
that I like to do is
to think back in my own life,
in the past when something
had really upset me
and something had led
me to feel like my life
was really going to take a dark turn
or some bad thing had happened
and then I got through it.
And I would love if
someone from the future
could have come back to me then and said,
"Hey, you know, you got through this
right when I was struggling
with it, you know,
you're struggling up, but you actually,
I know I'm from the future,
you got through this,"
and it's hard,
something that we don't
tend to believe at the time,
we tend to feel like this
struggle is means I am weak.
You know, there's a related literature
from the wonderful work by
Carol Dweck on growth mindset.
And that's the idea that if we think
that something is fixed,
a quality in us is fixed,
then we tend to give up.
If it looks like we're failing,
that means that we must not be good.
If it's fixed and I'm failing,
it means I must be bad at this.
But like many things in life,
flexibility is about trying,
it's about, it's about using the skills
and doing the work to
get through something.
So it's not, resilience is not fixed,
resilience is an outcome,
and the idea with a
flexibility is to get in there
and dig in and work to
get through something.
And when we do that, more often than not,
we do get through it.
If we think, you know, I'm doing poorly,
that means I'm broken,
we are not going to get
anywhere with that attitude.
The best we can do is to just
give ourselves the chance
to believe we'll get through a situation
and most of the time we will.
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