Session Seven

Embracing Your Spiral

Objective:
Unlearn one-and-done indoctrination
that breeds instability.

Pivot toward resilience.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be
able to give birth to a dancing star.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

T
he inner workings of the human mind are a source of great fascination and debate from social science laboratories to coffee shops. We are in hot pursuit to figure ourselves and each other out. A lot of forces dictate behavior, and endless theories try to explain why we do what we do. It’s exciting and a bit overwhelming. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you find a new contingency or contradiction. Like young Jedis, we have our work cut out for us.

Resilience has become the hot topic of today. You can barely enter a parenting, business, or school conversation without hearing about it. Some resilience researchers worry that we’re asking narrow questions about individual behavior and overlooking social context. They’re working to elevate the conversation to include systems analysis. Mindless banter about resilience can reinforce one-and-done framings.

Using social network analysis theory, an interdisciplinary research team comprising Jessica Shaw, Kate McLean, Bruce Taylor, Kevin Swartout, and Katie Querna point out that most of our stories of resilience are conjured up through the lens of highly romanticized, individualistic, against-the-odds ideals. We can’t get enough of rags-to-riches and setback-to-comeback stories, but we rarely stop and look at why they were necessary at all.

The authors make the point that hyping displays of hardiness and intelligence while pretending the social context creating the need for these traits to begin with are irrelevant reinforces something’s-wrong-with-you thinking. This approach fits with the popular one-and-done theory about trauma, performance, and relationships: If you haven’t followed a straight and narrow academic or job path, you’re bound to fail. If this happens to you, you’re done. If you don’t do well in school early in life, you’re screwed. If you’ve had a string of bad relationships, you’ll never find love. If you’ve messed up, it’s because you’re an idiot. We’re not trained to look at the chaos around us to understand its push and pull on our lives. We think that we’re unstable, not the forces themselves.

Factor in the Forces

So many factors influence our growth and development. Everything that happens to us and around us can alter the course of our lives. We try desperately to function seamlessly within a predictably unpredictable environment. We set out to find balance, only to be chewed up and spit out by life. Homeostasis comes and goes, and if we blink, we often miss it.

The deeper we peer into the black hole of human analysis, the more we realize how many forces are at hand. It’s tempting to hail one explanation as the be-all and end-all. Even though taking one precise position might help us chill out temporarily, doing so can limit our capacity for growth. Ambiguity is hard to sit with. But when we tune into the forces at hand, we open up to letting disarray serve as our teacher, not our enemy. As Greek mythology put forth, “Chaos was the first to exist.”

Early-twentieth-century physicist Henri Poincare called this dynamical instability. His chaos theory suggests that no matter how out of sorts things might seem, they rely on an underlying order. Unpredictability is more predictable than you’d first think. Chaos isn’t random. Everything happens for a reason, but as much as our minds are on constant meaning-making missions, feeling settled within chaotic conditions is still incredibly tricky.

In 1963, MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz revealed discoveries about the universal forces of predictable unpredictability. Much to the delight of the science community, he helped overturn prior notions of the universe as linear and deterministically sequenced. His “butterfly effect” theory explains how the timing of the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one region can set off a tornado in another.

Lorenz’s weather-pattern simulations showed how the tiniest shifts lead to big-time consequences. His work illustrates just how much we need to factor into life’s equation. A lot of unseen butterfly flaps in our lives affect our resilience.

Given how complex life is, you’d think that the last urge we’d give into would be locking down on oversimplified answers to complexity, but we do it all the time. That’s because we haven’t been taught how to interpret all the forces at hand.

Force #1: Universal Chaos

We pine for order, but life is not orderly. Across time and space, and within every community that’s ever existed, complexity and chaos are mainstays, part of nature. As a civilization, we’ve advanced significantly, but there’s still problems to address. Disarray becomes the birthplace of inquiry. Disorder nudges us to ask questions and work to figure out what’s going on.

Our quest for meaning-making has led to a lot of revelations, and even more debate. Every side searches for absolutes. All groups and affiliations—whether social identity, scientific, religious, cultural, or otherwise—claim to have the secrets for a successful life (and even their version of the afterlife). When we cling to one lens alone, we shut out additional possibilities for holistic thinking. Much is known, but even more is unknown. No single organizing framework gives us all the answers. There are always contradictions. But we still tend to gravitate toward cookie-cutter theories instead of embracing ambiguity. When this happens, we miss being able to adopt an integrated view of resilience that would account for chaos and help spur on greater agility.

Force #2: Primitive Instincts

Territory is at the heart of all conflict. As creatures wired for survival, our animalistic tendencies to self-protect and preserve are powerful forces of nature. They dictate our entire repertoire of actions. We’re constantly on the hunt to satisfy our desires for food and sex, and to guard our tribe and turf. When something threatens any of these domains, we don’t take it lightly.

Primitive instincts drive behavior. They all trace to self-protection. National wars. Class wars. Racial divides. Isms. Family feuds. Conflicts of all sorts. Do it my way or else. Don’t step over the line. Don’t get up in my grill. Keep your hands offa her. Our sociopolitical pissing contest is another case in point. All conflicts relate to protection of the primitive: My country. My identity. My way. My body. My guns. My house. My yard. My rights. My freedom. My peanut butter cup. Excessive self-protection can be harmful to individual as well as collective resilience.

Force #3: Social Conditioning and Generational Norms

Social constructions beckon us. From day one, we’re handed off a code of behavior from prior generations. Our gender, social class, race, and family of origin’s belief systems script precise parameters for how we’re supposed to maneuver life. Humans are not acknowledged as the multidimensional beings we are. Then it gets confusing because so-called norms change by the second, and we end up straddling the fence between what we’re expected to be and who we really are.

The rapid changes in society have huge implications on us. We experience identity crises and role conflicts, with epic tugs of war between our constructed and actual selves. At the time of this writing, it’s a bit confusing since the pendulum has swung so dramatically toward monumental shifts in norms with relationships, work, communication, sexual liberation, and everything in between.

Role Conflict

Academic Definition

A perspective within the disciplines of sociology and social psychology suggesting that people act out roles that are socially defined. A person who is expected to simultaneously carry out multiple contradictory roles experiences role conflict.

Street Definition

When you’re expected to be a certain way, but you feel like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. #contradiction

There are more ways of communicating, work options, gender identities, relationship arrangements, and family structures than there are Dunkin’ Donuts in Boston. Expectations are often cobbled from a mix of the past and present, leading to friction and confusion over “right” versus “wrong” ways of doing things. We struggle through identity crises and role conflicts as we work to free ourselves from tradition and maintain it at the same time. The choices are exciting and disruptive.

Force #4: Developmental Perspective

Going through life’s stages is like an epic game of whack-a-mole. You manage to take care of one problem; another pops up. The moles taunting you in your twenties are different from the ones from your teens, as well as the ones who will pay you a visit later down the road. Each season of life brings its own patterns, which simultaneously tax us and deliver unique opportunities. Age and stage have huge effects on our resilience.

We can be highly mature and evolved in some senses, and then feel regressed and infantile in others. This is known as asynchronous development, meaning we can be rock stars in some regards and feel like hot messes in others. Our brains are sometimes ahead of our emotions and vice versa.

Crises don’t just happen at one chronological age, such as midlife. We are apt to hit many crises along the way as we shed skins and take on new identities as we age and evolve. These disruptions of trying to negotiate who we are and what we want from life happen continually throughout our life span.

In the face of trials, we can be spun around and sent back to face moles we thought we had whacked. It might feel like you’re back to square one, but that would discount all the learning and new skills you’ve acquired along the way that help you meet present challenges with new resolve.

Life is unpredictable in many senses, but we can always count on change as a mainstay. We’re constantly required to adapt. Each phase of adaption presents us with unique developmental tasks that pop up and grab our attention. Some of the moles we face at certain junctures are relatively predictable. Others may startle us. We weren’t expecting how hard it would be to take on a new job, endure the loss of a loved one, end a relationship, move to a new area, or start a new venture. Development is a continual process throughout our life span. Moles are always on the prowl. We can’t eliminate them, so we have to decide how to outmaneuver them.

Embrace Your Spiral

From an early age, we’re taught that life moves in a linear fashion, that A + B = C, and that if we do X, then Y will naturally result. We soon realize that life is anything but formulaic, and we need a new way of thinking about movement.

Mentalligence encourages us to spiral up. An ancient symbol of forward progress, the spiral itself is emblematic of agility.1 Spirals inspire us to focus on the potential for progress, even while we’re spinning and it seems like all hell is breaking loose. Spirals by their very nature demonstrate momentum, power, and hopefulness, even within chaotic conditions. They help us move from mindless reactivity to mindful presence with the forces of life.

Spirals reveal the possibilities for growth, even smack in the middle of life’s simultaneous chaos and order. Since waaay back, as in pre-smartphones, pre-internet, pre–running water, and pre–paved roads, spirals have represented the journey of life. Attributes such as progress, evolution, initiation, centering, expansion, awareness, connecting, and development are all associated with them. Maybe spirals strike a chord because they’re part of our very essence. Check out your fingerprints. Spirals. The sunflowers in your garden. Spirals. Look inside your midday apple: spiral. Even the galaxy we live in is a spiral.

In many cultures, spirals are associated with the divine feminine, the womb, and goddesses. Check out primitive rock carvings, Celtic art, Native American petroglyphs, African art, Japanese rock gardens, and Peruvian Nazca lines. Spirals all over the place.

While spirals have long been held sacred, not all spirals are constructive. They can be powerful in dangerous ways, too, as with tornadoes. These funnels fueled by air spirals can produce up to 500-mile-an-hour winds. Not as cute as a little innocent snail, for sure.

On the human behavior side of things, psychology’s legendary spiral reference has always been the downward spiral. It’s the infamous descent to rock bottom that we’re taught to avoid at all costs—the one we’re incessantly warned to believe will wipe us out, just because life is messy and hard.

As a result, we often struggle to trust the process. We numb out instead of realizing that we’re designed to return to homeostasis, even after our worlds have been thrown off-kilter. For many of us, it’s not a matter of poor memory recall. We just weren’t taught correctly in the first place.

Historically, we’ve approached our understanding of loss of control as a personal or moral failing, not as a natural response to environmental chaos. Our narrow paradigms cause us to draw the conclusion that when things go wrong for us, we’re automatically on the downward path. Right from the get-go, life plops us front and center within a chaotic universe, and our life journey becomes about how we ride out the storms and embrace our unique spirals.

The way we approach the storms of life depends on many factors. Along with primitive instincts, social conditioning, developmental stage, and generational perspective, our cumulative experience with turbulence directly influences our behavior.

All of us are subject to various forms of adversity as the seasons of our lives unfold. Whether cloudy days, rainy patches, torrential downpours, or full-out tornadoes, each of us develop behavioral patterns in response to life’s intense conditions. Once we’ve endured endless storms, a variety of reactions can result. Sometimes nothing seems to phase us because we’re so used to turmoil. At other times we clamor at the thought of one more gust bearing down upon us.

Tune In to Identify Storm Approaches

The constant twists and turns of life can help us build agility, but they can also shake us so badly that we do everything possible to avoid being exposed. Sometimes we’re open to experiencing the forces at hand; other times we want to batten down the hatches. There are endless ways we can approach storms, and it helps to think about the main responses that we choose to either cultivate resilience or disrupt it.2

No matter where we find ourselves on the storm response spectrum, we all face dynamic instability—but it doesn’t mean that we are one and done when we’ve weathered hard storms. In the face of chaos, unlearning and pivoting are vital to help us keep our spiral moving up. Just like the timing of a butterfly wing flap, the new insights we develop can dramatically change the course of our lives. A lifelong learning mind-set can provide the gumption we need to keep progressing. With all the pending storms on the horizon, we need to tune in to see how we can become more resilient.

Become a Forever Learner

The research question driving my entire study was, “What contributes to student identity and resilience?” Two of the predominant codes that ran consistently through my research were empathy and community. The majority of my students originally bought into the prevailing thoughts about one-and-done so-called failures. But then they tuned into the fact that the compromising moments in which their lives seemed to have spun out of control were the very ones that helped them develop empathy and find community. As Poonam put it,

My family has high expectations for me to come to study and end up a doctor. When I arrived to the U.S. I thought this was my dream—my destiny. I was miserable and was only sleeping like three hours a night. I fell into a pretty bad depression and stop communicating to people. I thought I was all done, and I didn’t want to face life anymore. My family’s expectation for me started to really bother me. I love them, and they love me, but I didn’t want to have to keep looking, you know, for some kind of perfect path that doesn’t exist. I just wasn’t happy. I started volunteering at a nonprofit and fell in love with the work. It was healing, because in a lot of ways the stuff people were going through was the same as me. I had a big heart for them and realized that if I hadn’t gone through my own low moments, I wouldn’t have really understood them like I do.

Mikhail had a similar realization about arriving at a place of greater empathy and connection:

Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to go through all this. But it really helps me put myself in someone else’s shoes. I used to be so embarrassed about myself, thinking I had messed up royally, and that I was way behind everyone else. A lot of my friends had already graduated college and some even had kids. It seemed like everyone had their life together except me. But they all come to me for advice, I think because they know I won’t judge them, and I also think that the things I’ve gone through have taught me a lot of lessons that make me who I am. I think the crappy moments ended up teaching me more than other things that are supposed to make you smart. Now I see it differently. And I’m not afraid to talk about it anymore. I think my openness has helped people open up, too. I think as soon as you get to know someone, you realize that most people are feeling like they could do better, but life is just life and we all end up getting to the place we’re supposed to go.

When we face trials, we develop a newfound appreciation for human hope and healing. We understand life isn’t black-and-white, and challenges aren’t of simple origins but a mix of complicated factors. Going through difficulties is humbling, but chaos is a denominator we all share and has the potential to bind us together in our common humanity. Difficulties allow us to recognize that while certain points in our development can be completely out of control, we can still be okay. We learn by experience. Loss, letdowns, and change are our best teachers. We are not epic failures when things don’t go as planned.

The outcomes of our experiences are very seldom what we expected. We show up to our classrooms, jobs, or new places thinking we are here for one certain reason—to gain one particular thing. Then things don’t go as planned. We beat our brows for a while. Sometimes we even feel sorry for ourselves. We ask why. We struggle to make sense. Eventually, we start to shift our attention to all the learning and growth that transpired. And we realize it didn’t happen in spite of, but because of, the disruption.

It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve had similar moments where you’ve tuned in to how challenges have cultivated resilience, empathy, and community for you. This comes from seeing that learning is everything and everything is learning. See if you can relate to the mind-sets and behaviors of a forever learner that came out of my research findings:

It takes time and intention to understand how to welcome these teachers in our lives and pull something useful from the lessons they offer. Our instinct is to resist. Not until we look back do we realize how much we’ve grown in the face of chaos. Reflecting in such a way helps deepen our appreciation for our so-called failures just as much as our so-called successes. Reflection helps us get to a place of new stability and resilience, one that helps us know we are never one and done, even when chaos is enveloping us.