"At times our own light goes out
and is rekindled by a spark from another person. 
Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude
of those who have lighted the flame within us."
~Albert Schweitzer~

​​Now that's an empowering quote, isn't it? I talk about this with clients all the time, the idea of not minimizing the burden of responsibility, but being sure to look for the other side of the coin of the burden, the power and possibility of creating change for yourself.

As I talked about in the early post about DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy), it's about looking for the dialectic, the feeling and its' opposite.  In this situation, when you feel the burden of taking responsibility, first you give yourself the space to feel the feeling ("hmm, something's going on for me, let me pause and let myself feel it"), you name it (this is such an underestimated skill! Naming what we feel gives us the information we need to take action. "I'm feeling annoyed.  Or tired.  Or resentful.  Or bored.") and then you validate it (another superpower skill. Not judging what we feel. Letting it be what it is.). 

And once you've gotten clear about what you are feeling in this situation, then you look for its' opposite. What would be an opposite feeling of the burden of accepting responsibility in a situation?  LOL, I just googled "opposite of being responsible" and the top entry is "you do what you like and don't care what happens afterward."  

So the dialectic would be identifying both sides of what it means to accept responsibility, the annoyance, or boredom or resentment of it and also seeing the influence you have over the outcome when you choose (or don't choose) to accept responsibility. There is power and control that being responsible carries along with the burden. If I take responsibility for a choice, I can create a plan based on how it works best for me.

Let's use an everyday example of something I'm thinking of right now. It's time to think about dinner.

If I'm going to be responsible for preparing the meal, I feel the burden of that responsibility (I don't feel like cooking or thinking about what to fix or going to the store to get what I need to cook the meal. Get that part, yes?:-). So I take a moment to become aware of what I'm feeling, name the feelings and then validate those feelings in myself (yes, it *is* a hassle to do what needs to be done to have a nice meal.).

Now in this situation, I do care about the outcome (I'm hungry and I want to eat a healthy dinner) so the google entry about opposite (that I don't care about the outcome) doesn't really fit. So I look for another aspect of opposite, the power and control that accompanies the burden of cooking (well, if I'm the one who thinks about what to fix, and goes to the store and prepares the meal, I can have exactly the meal that I want, prepared the way that I like, with the ingredients that I like best.).

See? Now this doesn't magically mean that cooking is not a hassle, it just means that I'm in touch with both sides of the task, the burden of it, but also the power and control for the choice to be whatever works best for me.

So, that's all for now, I’ll leave you with this final quote and I’m off to get dinner ready. :-)

Wow. Isn't that wonderful?  All of it.  Of course the content. How a traumatic experience and what follows is unique to each person and at the same time universal to all of us.  How each in our own way, and yet also in a universal way, fall apart, break open, and lose something important and foundational to who we are and what we believe about life.  And then how we regroup, get up again, and move forward.  And I really resonate with the phrase, "building a roomier container".  That captures so much, doesn't it? We make room for the experience, to find a way for it to make sense in the larger scope of who we are and how we live.   Ties in so nicely with the previous post about resilience. 

Something else that really caught my attention was not just what she said, but  the way she said what she said.

As I've mentioned before, I love to read.  It's been one of my favorite things to do since I was a kid.  What I realize after reading this passage is that I usually focus on the content of what I read, the story, does it interest me, am I invested in the story, the characters?  I spend much less attention on how something is written.  Here with this passage, I am so taken with both, content and prose.  By the way, read more Mary Pipher.   Such a gentle, thoughtful, authentic voice.  
​
How about you?  Does this passage please you?  Do you have parts of books that do that for you?

Charles Krauthammer, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, died earlier this summer.  He was by no means a political kindred spirit of mine, but I was drawn to read more about his life.  I didn't know until recently that he was paralyzed in a diving accident when he was a first year medical student. With the help of many, but one professor in particular, he graduated from medical school and became a psychiatrist. He later became a political columnist.
 
The Washington Post opened their archives and I read some of his columns.  One he wrote about resilience.  In it, he talks about Roy Hobbs, the hero of Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural,” a baseball prodigy who tries to return to the game after being shot.

“No one knows why Hobbs is shot,” he wrote. “It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back.”

I have been thinking more about trauma and how it changes lives.  As Dr. Krauthammer says, "every life has such a moment.".  I have had mine. You have had yours.   I feel comfort knowing that, as Robin Roberts' mother told her when she was diagnosed with cancer, "everybody's got something".  Knowing that bad things happen to all of us, that it is part of the human condition, somehow feels better than isolating with the idea that it only happened to me.  

And I've been thinking about resilience too.  Here's a simple definition. Resilience is being able to become strong, healthy or successful again after something bad happens.  Bouncing back.  Getting back up and moving forward.   Resilience is understanding that the future will not be like the past.   

Learning from what's happened.  Perspective taking.  Staying flexible.  Adapting to the reality in front of you.  Remembering what matters to you and moving towards it.  Connecting with others, we are not alone.  

And at the risk of being a Pollyanna, life can be better on the other side of trauma.  While it can seem so bleak in the vortex of the emotions that swirl around a traumatic event, I have seen how the very awfulness of the event, how when everything you thought you could count on was suddenly not there, that upending of what feels like everything, can become the very thing that allows you to start again.  New and yet more you than you've ever been. Fresh but not naive. Wiser but not cynical.  Allowing experience to make us more of who we already are, that's resilience.   :-)