I would rather walk with a friend in the dark than alone in the light.
—HELEN KELLER
People rarely recover from accidents such as Amanda Wigal’s.
On a morning in June 2007, Bartlett Lake was buzzing with jet skiers and wakeboard boats as Amanda’s crew of urbane Sea Ray shipmates sunned on the deck. Music wafted through the air, ricocheting from hip-hop to country to rock.
The captain of the party boat, Amanda was in her mid-twenties, small and slim with dust-colored hair that framed high cheekbones and kind eyes. Her outgoing personality, in company with her openness and natural beauty, charmed nearly everyone she met. To know Amanda was to love her.
Amanda’s fiancé, Jeremy, maneuvered the boat into a small cove and anchored it. Amanda brought out sandwiches, and someone opened the cooler. When the day got too hot, they all stripped down to their swimsuits and jumped into the water underneath a vast Arizona sky. Jeremy attached the inner tube to the back of the boat. It was big and yellow, with twin handles. Amanda swam out to the tube and pulled her slight physique inside it. She turned and faced the sky, resting her legs against the inner tube so that only her feet touched the water. She squinted into the sun and waved to Jeremy, who was standing at the wheel of the boat flashing a confident grin, his hand on the throttle. Amanda gripped the inner tube handles in anticipation. The speedboat propeller burbled the placid water to life. Then the boat took off, tugging Amanda’s inner tube behind it. The flurry of wind and speed made Amanda feel invigorated and alive.
From the periphery, Amanda noticed a big white vessel cruising on the wrong side of the lake. Maritime rules controlled unmarked water lanes, dividing the lake like a multilane two-way highway. But not everyone knew the rules, and this misguided cruiser was coming toward them. Jeremy, who had a lot of experience on pontoons and speedboats, noticed the oncoming traffic, too. Thinking quickly, he veered the speedboat away, but he miscalculated, turning a fraction of a moment too late. The speedboat arched away from the cruiser, but Amanda’s inertia swung her into the oncoming vessel. Her head slammed against the hull so hard that the blow knocked her unconscious and sent dark blood cascading into the lake.
A helicopter airlifted her to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition. Comatose, she was later moved to St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center. During her first critical days in intensive care, nurses noted that a seemingly endless pageant of people filed in and out of Amanda’s room. Friends from every part of her life came to see her as she fought for her life. They stayed by her side every day, held her hands, and told her how much she meant to them. “We love you,” they said. “You can make it!”
Jeremy wasn’t so sure. The neurologists said that Amanda was brain dead and would not recover. The accident replayed in his head with pristine clarity as he searched for any way out of what had happened. But every version of the story ended with Jeremy pulling his fiancée from the water with blood rushing out of the gash in her head. In the pale light of her hospital room, his bride-to-be looked as though she were sleeping. Though she had been beautiful, the accident and the weeks-long coma had altered her loveliness. Her skin was as white as the hospital gown that covered her. Her face was buried in heavy bandages. She was intubated, and her breathing was thin and even.
For Amanda’s friends and family, it must have been hard to reconcile this version of her with the vivacious person they knew—the free-spirited college sorority girl, the spontaneous postgrad who was all in for flirty poolside weekends and sprees to the slopes of Utah and the shores of Puerto Vallarta. Amanda was the first person to admit she wasn’t goal-directed. She was young, and she had her whole life ahead of her. She lived in her grandparents’ old condo, which was fully paid for, so discretionary income funded getaways and nights on the town, where she drank with her friends, frequented clubs, and danced. Her friends had nicknamed her Chatty Cathy because all the guys talked to her. Now Amanda might not ever talk again.
Weeks with little change in her condition forced her family and friends to reach an impossible conclusion: Amanda was lost. Neurosurgeons informed them that keeping Amanda alive was only postponing the inevitable. Previously encouraging, upbeat visits turned into opportunities to say good-bye.
At which point, Amanda woke up.
Doctors tend to call cases like Amanda’s miraculous because of their extremely infrequent occurrence. It’s not every day that people with injuries as serious as Amanda’s open their eyes again. But we want to avoid painting a picture of supersurvivors as supermen of sorts, who can overcome even death. Amanda certainly doesn’t regard herself this way. As we will see, she exemplifies many of the inner resources we celebrate in other chapters, such as grounded hope and a strong sense of personal control. But she doesn’t credit these characteristics with her eventual supersurvivorship. Indeed, given her comatose state, marshaling inner resources may not be what brought her back from the brink. For that we should look outside of her, to the love and care she received from others.
“Amanda was always outgoing and had more friends than she knew what to do with,” says Iris Wigal, Amanda’s mother. “She was never one to sit at home. She liked being a part of something, liked being involved.”
And perhaps this is precisely what made the difference. Amanda would later speculate that, even through the opaque fog of her comatose state, she was somehow aware of the presence of her loved ones in the room with her. Although medical science can’t say for sure, Amanda might not have survived without the support of all these people. “I couldn’t believe how many people came to visit,” says Amanda. “My friends, my mom’s friends, people who grew up with me, people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Without them, who do you have to recover for?”
According to dozens of studies, the people in our lives really matter. Psychologists Kathryn Herbst-Damm and James Kulik, for instance, wanted to find out if social support really could make a difference in cases where life and death were at stake. In a 2005 study published in the journal Health Psychology, they followed two hundred and ninety patients from the moment they were admitted to hospice care to the time they died. These were very sick people; hospice is normally offered only to those with no more than six months to live. Most hospice organizations couldn’t function without a core group of volunteers available to visit patients to provide emotional and practical support. About a third of the patients in this study specifically requested and received visits from just such volunteers, while the remaining two-thirds didn’t.
The care and dedication that hospice volunteers display as they accompany people in the final stage of life make them nothing short of angels. But they’re not angels of the supernatural sort, and they don’t possess superhuman healing powers. That’s what makes the results of this study all the more intriguing: The rate at which the patients who were visited by volunteers passed away was almost a third that of those who were not visited. The lives of the former lasted more than two and a half months longer, an eternity to someone hoping to live long enough to witness the birth of a grandchild or to celebrate one last Christmas.
This isn’t an isolated finding. In a much larger study, published in 1997 in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a group of researchers headed by Brenda Penninx followed nearly three thousand people for almost two and a half years, investigating the connection between social support and mortality as part of the ambitious Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam. The random sample was drawn from municipalities all over the Netherlands, was stratified by age and sex, and included ordinary adults, living at home, who ranged in age from fifty-five to eighty-five. In short, it was the kind of high-quality study you’d do if you wanted firm answers to big questions.
The researchers assessed the amount of social support in people’s lives in a number of ways, including whether they were married or had a partner, their total number of friends and family, and the participants’ personal assessments of the quality of support received. But the most important factor appeared to be the emotional support itself. Twenty-nine months later, they accessed public records to track mortality, expecting some portion of the participants to have died naturally from conditions ranging from heart disease or cancer to accident or simply old age. They found that those study participants who received moderate to high levels of emotional support were about half as likely to have died than those who received lower levels of support. About 13 percent of people with low emotional support had died, compared to only about 6 percent of people with moderate to high emotional support. So, social support may help people literally survive—an important prerequisite for being a supersurvivor of course.
On the psychological front, many studies have shown that aspects of social support appear to provide a buffer to the emotional effects of trauma and other negative circumstances, helping to protect some people from mental health symptoms that haunt others. It’s also one of the predictors of posttraumatic growth, the tendency of some individuals to find benefits in the aftermath of tragedy.
We’ve already met supersurvivors who have acquired, and relied upon, the support of many. Asha Mevlana, in her post-cancer journey to become an internationally renowned musician, has amassed thousands of supportive fans all over the world, who have in turn bolstered her emotionally. Paul Rieckhoff couldn’t have gained the support he needed to start the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization without the national exposure that enabled him to rally hundreds of thousands of veterans and followers to action. Even Alan Lock, who traversed, blind, the second-largest body of water in a rowboat, did so with the love and support of friends and family, who gave him the strength and encouragement to succeed.
None of these people claimed they became supersurvivors on their own.
But isn’t there a dark side to relying on others? Relationships can be less than perfect. Sometimes people disappoint us, distance themselves, or turn their backs. At first Amanda Wigal’s story seems simple, but like all aspects of posttrauma recovery, there’s so much more just under the surface.
Amanda’s visitors liked to bring her gifts, flowers, get-well cards, magazines, and books. When she opened a magazine, words swam on the page. The meaning of the letters, somehow familiar, was missing. Amanda’s memory was foggy. The flotsam of names, faces, and places floated in her mind, unanchored to meaning or context.
Visiting hours at the hospital began early. Each day, people with familiar faces, recognized from some murky place and time, appeared in her room. They spoke to her. Sometimes she replied. Words spilled from her mouth in a gush of broken sounds. Her responses elicited confusion. Her brain was a broken machine, its wires frayed, its mechanisms unhinged.
Today, what Amanda does remember of her time in the hospital comes to her in cockeyed scenes. “I asked a nurse to dial my mother’s phone number,” says Amanda. “When she answered, I told her I was stranded on the side of I-17 and she had to come pick me up. I packed everything and waited for her to come get me.”
And some of these memories, says Amanda, weren’t memories at all but the effects of medication generating dreams that spilled into her reality, dreams such as one of the hospital staff killing patients and putting the bodies into beds.
Then there was the morning Amanda woke up in the wrong bed, in the wrong room, in the wrong building. The right half of her body was still weak when she stumbled out of bed, balancing herself against the rail. Tiptoeing past the nurses’ station, she edged along the wall without stumbling once. At an elevator bank, she pushed the Down button. She’d leave the floor and find a phone. But whom would she call? My mom, she thought. I’ll call my mom and tell her where I am. But where was she? It didn’t matter; her mom would find her, would straighten things out, would set things right. As the door opened, a hand touched her shoulder. Amanda turned and said something. It came out in French, a language she had studied in college. This was how Amanda learned she was in a secure unit at Barrow Neurological Institute, and that she wasn’t going anywhere. She attempted a half dozen other escapes, but never got far. Security attached a bracelet to her ankle that sounded an alarm if she left the floor. When that didn’t stop her, they strapped her to beds and wheelchairs.
Amanda’s increasing cognitive abilities were a mixed blessing—good enough to attempt escapes but not good enough to realize that escape wasn’t necessary. The friends who had once poured into her room to wish her good-bye now had no idea how to help her. What could they say? What could they do? It was strange. When she was presumed dead, it was easy for friends to support her. Now that she was alive, friends were barely around.
“I watched Amanda’s social support drop off completely,” says her mother. “It was hard on Amanda after the accident because the dynamics of her relationships changed. To all of a sudden lose them—it hurt her deeply. I wanted to convince people that she wasn’t going to be any different now than the girl she was.” But the around-the-clock care she required, and the years of intense rehabilitation ahead of her, meant that Amanda was different now.
Even her fiancé, Jeremy, faced uncertainty about how to connect with her. A few weeks earlier, at a surprise party at the Fox Sports Grill, where they’d first met, he had fallen to one knee and proposed to her in front of all their friends. Now he was faced with the possibility of, at best, taking care of a severely disabled woman for the rest of her life. He found himself in the most difficult situation of his life, and he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t considered turning around and leaving.
Amanda isn’t alone in her experience of diminishing social support. Decades of research have documented a complex dance between sufferers and helpers following tragedy. The first step goes something like this: Shortly after a disaster, people line up to offer support in a great outpouring of empathy and assistance. This can be seen clearly in almost every natural disaster of the last century. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that killed more than two hundred thousand people in Haiti and displaced more than a million others, people and organizations around the globe reacted generously and heroically. Governments pledged more than five billion dollars in aid, and humanitarian workers poured into the beleaguered country.
Psychologists Krzysztof Kaniasty of Georgia State University and Fran Norris of Indiana University of Pennsylvania have spent more than two decades exploring how the help that people offer in the aftermath of tragedies impacts victims. Writing in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, they have called this the “heroic phase” of disaster support, and it seems to happen following virtually every collective tragedy.
But organizations and individuals simply don’t have the energy or resources to keep up such heroics forever. After a time, people cut back on the amount of assistance they give, whether it’s monetary, practical, or emotional. When the need is great, this can leave important jobs undone. According to CBS News, six months after the Haitian earthquake, 98 percent of the rubble remained uncleared. With little transitional housing built, the number of people living in tents and makeshift shelters in relief camps had risen to a shocking 1.6 million. Even a year later, a report published by Oxfam noted, “Despite the success of emergency lifesaving aid after last year’s earthquake, long-term recovery from the disaster has barely begun.” And, infamously, the cholera outbreak that was likely inadvertently carried to Haiti by UN peacekeepers in October of 2010 remains difficult to stem, despite continued efforts years later.
The reality is that victims received a lot of support in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. Billions of dollars were disbursed. Thousands of good people traveled to Haiti to lend a hand, some of whom remained there for years. As the Oxfam report mentioned, this support saved countless lives in the immediate aftermath of the quake. There certainly were problems: help was sometimes slow to arrive, was misdirected, or was not offered in the ways needed. But almost no amount of support could keep pace with the level of need the Haitian people were experiencing, a disheartening and frustrating reality for victims and aid workers alike. One aid worker, Quinn Zimmerman, expressed these feelings on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Commenting on the source of his frustration, he said, “I think the combination for me was the realization that no matter how much I tried to help here, or I’ve tried to help here, and continue to try to help here, there’s no way that I can fix this place.”
This drawing down of social support isn’t unique to Haiti. It’s a predictable stage in most disaster-relief scenarios, according to Norris and Kaniasty. “The initial period of intense affiliation, heroic sacrifice, and altruism eventually gives rise to the harsh reality of grief, loss, and destruction,” they wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1996, years before the Haitian quake. Good Samaritans are only human. Despite the best of intentions, there is only so much they are capable of doing, and there is only so much emotional energy available to invest. It’s hard to be heroic all the time.
So, despite the enormous level of support they’ve actually received, survivors can be left with the perception that nobody cares. These two predictable stages of social support led Kaniasty and Norris, among others, to question the findings showing that social support was psychologically helpful. They wondered if earlier research had conflated received social support with perceptions that social support would be available in the future, if needed. Disaster victims may perceive that future support will not be available, even though they have already received enormous amounts of support. If these two aspects of social support could be teased apart, the researchers wondered, which one would really be helpful for victims?
To help answer this question, Norris and Kaniasty interviewed 498 adult survivors of Hurricane Hugo six months after the category-four storm devastated large areas of North and South Carolina in 1989, killing 33 and forcing tens of thousands of people into temporary shelters. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, was famously criticized for its slow response to this disaster. Nonetheless, helpers from across the country showed up en masse to lend a hand. The Red Cross and the Salvation Army both offered funds and aid workers to assist victims of the storm. Two hundred million dollars in federal aid and other disaster-response measures, such as temporary housing assistance, were mobilized in the region.
Six months after the disaster, in addition to asking questions about the degree to which victims’ lives were concretely impacted by the trauma through losses and injuries, the researchers asked the victims about the kinds of support they had actually received from others, and their perceptions that such support would be available in the future should they need it. The results seem discouraging: the more severe the victims’ losses and injuries, the less support they perceived would be available to them in the future. Kaniasty and Norris have dubbed this the perceived social support deterioration effect. Strangely, aid organizations say that the situation is just the opposite: their policy is to offer the people with the greatest need more help than those who haven’t been as severely impacted. But that’s not what the victims perceived.
Some of Kaniasty and Norris’s additional findings may shed light on this alarming disconnect. They found that the actual level of support received by victims in the aftermath of the disaster didn’t seem related to those victims’ emotional well-being. Instead, the victims’ subjective perception that support was available strongly predicted their emotional well-being. So, even if people actually once received a lot of support, they might perceive that it is not now available or that it would not be in the future, and this perception is what really seems to matter in terms of victims’ emotions.
These results point to an intriguing truth that cuts across many areas of psychological research: reality and perception are two separate things, and they’re not always as related as you’d think. It’s not that they’re not related at all. It’s just that, in this case, the relationship isn’t very strong. Depending on how these two things are measured in different studies, the relationship ranges from moderate to virtually nonexistent.
As we’ve mentioned, Good Samaritans’ efforts tend to fade with time. So even though victims have actually gotten a lot of support, they’re sometimes left with the very realistic perception that it won’t be available in the long term. Other times, support is in fact still available even though people might not perceive that it is. Science can’t yet provide a firm explanation for why this disconnect between reality and perception occurs. But one of the most intriguing hypotheses is a kind of contrast effect: no matter how much actual support is offered, it’s often outstripped by the amount of support needed. This certainly was the case in Haiti. So even if support is continuously available, the gap between what aid workers are capable of doing and the amount of need that is still present seems huge, leaving victims to perceive that real help simply isn’t available.
To be clear, we aren’t saying that people’s heroic support efforts in the aftermath of tragedy are useless. These efforts often literally save people’s lives by providing needed medical care, food, shelter, and services. We’re also not saying that victims are ungrateful for the help they receive or are overly needy, or that aid organizations shouldn’t try harder to meet victims’ needs. The victims are in legitimate need because they’ve suffered unthinkable events. But this legitimate need can be so large that no supportive efforts could ever fully meet it. This isn’t the victims’ fault; it’s the result of a set of horrific circumstances. The concrete support efforts offered in the aftermath of tragedy, however, don’t seem as effective as one might expect at buffering victims from the emotional impact of the trauma. Instead, what seems more effective in this regard is victims’ perception that support will continue to be accessible when it is needed.
So survivors often face a double challenge. First, they must confront the stress associated with living through a horrific event. But second, and perhaps equally as difficult to stomach, they must face the perceptions of estrangement and isolation that so often slowly creep up afterward.
Amanda encountered many of the same obstacles that disaster victims face: her friends distanced themselves after their initial outpouring of support; her needs seemed just too great for them to bear. Despite this situation, it may seem odd that Amanda never felt the sense of estrangement we’ve been discussing. When you ask her how she survived, how she bounced forward and ended up becoming more than she thought she ever could be before the accident, she claims it was due to unwavering social support. She remained confident that social support would always be available. Of all of the many disconnects that now made up Amanda’s world, this divide was the widest and the most perplexing to bridge.
Though it seemed innocuous to her at the moment, the mishap with the desk drawer would confront Jane McGonigal with many of the same challenges that Amanda faced.
For the past decade, McGonigal had immersed herself in researching virtual game play. A doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, her focus was on the real skills and abilities that gamers were building that could transfer to real-life contexts and real-world problem solving.
McGonigal, a brilliant researcher and game designer who doesn’t look or act like the stereotype of a Silicon Valley tech geek, manages to project intellectual sophistication without stuffy pretense. She wears a lot of sparkles, glitter, flashy boots, lightning bolt earrings, and other superhero jewelry. Combining the looks of a pixie with the mind of Einstein, she’s disarmingly direct, quietly thoughtful, and deeply curious about people.
Her doctoral studies concerned the cross section of computer science and psychology. The work required her to spend a lot of time in her own head, which was fine because, despite her spunky appearance, she’s a natural introvert. “I don’t hang out with people very long before reaching my limit,” she admits from underneath ringlets of blond hair. “I wouldn’t normally answer my phone for friends. I’ve always lived in my own head. I could be jogging and pass my own mother without registering her.” This isn’t hyperbole. Jane often jogged through the streets of her home in San Francisco, removed from people and distractions, her thoughts singularly focused.
She jogged so much that her leg muscles became more powerful than she realized. So one day, when she bent down to refill her printer’s paper tray, she stood up fast, and with full explosive force catapulted her head into an open cabinet. The impact propelled her brain against the top of her skull. An hour later, she was laid out, nauseated, dizzy, and disoriented. She’d given herself a concussion, usually a mild and temporary brain injury. The doctors told her the symptoms would last for up to three weeks. Until then, she would need to take it easy and give her brain the chance to heal.
But it didn’t heal. A month passed, and she was not getting any better. “I knew something was wrong,” she remembers. “I could read and write and speak, but my thinking felt compressed, and pretty soon my head would hurt to the point that I’d start to black out. I couldn’t think about complex things anymore, and I’m a cerebral person.”
Normally a happy and upbeat woman, McGonigal was now met with crippling depression. She had always been a super-high-achieving person. In the first half of 2009, at age thirty-one, she had launched two games and was writing a book. Productivity was crucial to her, and her mind was accustomed to working fast. After the accident, her functioning plummeted.
McGonigal found herself experiencing unexpected feelings of isolation. She looked completely normal from the outside, so friends treated her the same as always. Nobody seemed to get what was happening inside her skull. For the first time, aloneness didn’t feel good to her because it meant she couldn’t find the support she needed. She wondered if anyone could understand what she was going through, if anyone would ever truly be there for her in her growing fear and uncertainty.
Even more frightening, she was beginning to experience suicidal thoughts. The top of her building, forty-three stories above the city, offered a spectacular view, but McGonigal stopped going to the roof because she was afraid she would jump. It was day thirty-four since her concussion when she realized she had to do something about her suffering.
She needed people to bring her out of her head. The problem was she had groomed all her friends to be hands-off. “I needed people to connect with me in a different way,” she says. “When someone’s had a trauma, people don’t know what to do or how to act.” For instance, friends brought her bottles of wine, but she wasn’t allowed to drink. They’d take her out of the apartment for coffee, but she wasn’t supposed to have caffeine. She couldn’t leave the apartment anyway without getting nauseated and feeling as though she would black out. It wasn’t their fault. Most people wouldn’t know what to do for someone in this situation. “I’d have to retrain them to be what I needed,” she says.
In response to her pain, McGonigal began drafting the concept for a video game she called SuperBetter. It worked on a now-familiar premise. The science demonstrates that positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of our facing an extreme challenge, she explains. “Instead of being weakened by our obstacles, we could grow stronger.” McGonigal believed that, with the right tools, people could use these obstacles as a springboard to unleash their best qualities and lead happier lives.
Players are trauma survivors. After signing in, the game prompts them to choose from a series of real-world quests designed to build what McGonigal calls social resilience. The quests are purposely easy and achievable, such as shaking someone’s hand for a couple of seconds or sending someone a quick text message. SuperBetter encourages players to invite real-world allies (friends and family members) to the game, and these allies in turn send the players on more reality-based quests. For every successful quest, SuperBetter rewards players by increasing their resilience score, which measures physical, social, mental, and emotional resilience. The game also provides a forum for players to reach out and make new virtual allies—other players across the globe fighting the same foes, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, chronic illness, and severe abuse.
McGonigal had come to much the same conclusions that Kaniasty and Norris did in their research. Examining life after her head injury, she noted her tendency to feel alone, even when she had the full support of her husband and friends. On a personal level, she was noticing the social support deterioration effect, and it was impacting her well-being in profound ways. She yearned for a community of supportive people—people who really understood what she was going through and who would be there for her through thick and thin. For this, she would need to help her friends and family feel more comfortable with what she was going through and provide them with a concrete way to help her.
When SuperBetter first came online, it was slow to develop. But as people populated its virtual community, they began to connect and care for one another in real life. A player with acute myeloid leukemia used the game to maximize his quality of life through quests that made sure he got up, got dressed, and left his apartment every day to make one new memory. After playing the game for several weeks, a computer programmer in San Francisco revealed to a few friends and family members that he was suffering from depression and invited them to be allies, making him feel closer to and better understood by them.
McGonigal, too, was a SuperBetter player. “I had a notebook, and my husband kept a rudimentary scoring system and a list I wanted my day to include: creativity, showering, eating. I’d get three points for walking around the block. I called people to give them a concrete thing to do. It was better than saying, ‘I’m messed up and I need your support.’ Most people wouldn’t know what to do in that situation. ‘Just call me at night, for five minutes and ask how I’m doing.’ My sister would say, ‘Sit by window and see what you see.’ ”
With dozens of such interactions and tasks, even as small as many of them were, she began to realize that she in fact was not alone. Through the game, she began to perceive that support was available when she needed it.
Her experiences again echo Kaniasty and Norris’s observations. In Current Directions in Psychological Science, they write that “beliefs of being reliably connected to other people will shield victims from experiencing intense distress.” McGonigal discovered that a virtual sea of support was available for her to dip into, even though she previously perceived that she was in the midst of a desert. She found a way to prove to herself that people were there for her and would reliably continue to be.
There are important differences between Kaniasty and Norris’s work and McGonigal’s efforts. Kaniasty and Norris study large-scale communal disasters, whereas McGonigal is primarily concerned with how individuals cope with personal traumas. Also, Kaniasty and Norris simply observe how victims perceive the availability of social support in the aftermath of tragedy; McGonigal was trying to change those perceptions. Either way, it appears that the divide between reality and perception can be bridged.
Amanda and her mother, Iris, had always been close, but their relationship took on an even deeper meaning following the death of Amanda’s father when she was twenty. After that, Amanda and her mother promised to be there for each other, however unimaginable the situation.
For thirty-three years Iris had been an elementary school teacher, but now she was retired. After Amanda’s accident, instead of teaching ten- and eleven-year-olds, she worked with Amanda, who often seemed like a toddler herself. Iris placed flashcards with basic mathematical problems in front of her daughter. “Can you add these numbers?”
Jeremy helped in the effort, too. One afternoon, while he was doing the laundry, he noticed Amanda curled up on the sofa, contemplative, her body dappled in sunlight. “Hey there,” he said, sitting down next to her. She registered a tiny smile. He handed her a shirt. She folded it, and then another, stacking them in neat piles. “One, two, three . . .” Jeremy said, counting the shirts out loud with her. She counted along. Though Jeremy didn’t know it, he was taking a page from Jane McGonigal’s playbook. Sometimes, at dinner, he quizzed Amanda on the color of the foods on her plate. In the car on the way to rehab, he drilled her on words that started with certain letters.
Even though Iris and Jeremy were patiently encouraging, Amanda knew how disabled she was, how long it took her to come up with each number and each word. She ached to get back to being the same bright, fun-loving woman she was before the accident. But every mental and physical struggle convinced her that this might not be possible, at least not completely.
Amanda moved in with her mother because she couldn’t be left alone to take care of herself. “Recovery took about a year,” Iris remembers. “I monitored everything. We made schedules for her day: get up, get dressed, brush your teeth. She had homework from the rehab clinic—detailed homework. She’d have questions for me. I’d double-check her answers and sit with her when she worked. Her math skills were gone. I mean, this was the girl who skipped two math levels in the third grade!”
Amanda had sustained an injury to part of her frontal lobes. Among the things she initially lost were specific memories of her life before the accident. She didn’t remember, for instance, that she had been a sales manager at a small promotional products company. She didn’t remember that the job was less than professionally satisfying, or that she had decided to jump ship but changed her mind when the owner announced he was retiring and offered to sell her the company. So after regaining her ability to communicate, Amanda unexpectedly learned that she was the owner of a small Scottsdale business called Brandables.
Partly to assume Amanda’s loans and partly to provide her with a tangible goal for which to strive, Iris had taken over the day-to-day management of the company. “There was a sense that, as long as the company was waiting for Amanda, she would work hard to get back,” Iris says.
Before the injury, Amanda’s identity was not tied to the company to the extent that the latter might be used as a carrot for her recovery—not by a long shot. Iris was right, though. After the injury, getting back to Brandables was vital for Amanda. The company now represented a tangible goal to inspire her physical and cognitive recovery. Sometime between the boating accident and learning to function on the most basic human level, Brandables had become something more than just a job. It had become Amanda’s lifeline.
“I knew people with my injury can’t go back to their old lives,” Amanda admits. “We have to make considerable adjustments.” But she’d wanted badly to get back to a place where she could at least be independent and run Brandables, and she worked every day to get to that point. “The doctors said her recovery was astonishing,” her mother remembers with a smile. “To see where she’d come from to where she was now. She was airlifted in; they said she was brain-dead. They told me to take her off the machines. She was ninety percent back to fully functioning. She got back to the company. It was a proud moment.”
But it turned out to be far from ideal. In July of 2007, when Amanda slipped into a coma, the U.S. Commerce Department was showing economic growth, low unemployment, and rising wages across the country. Amanda returned to consciousness to find a new world paradigm. In the weeks she’d been comatose, the global economy had gone dark. Over the months, while she was regaining what she’d lost in the blink of an eye, stock and real estate prices plummeted. By December, Amanda was learning to speak again, and the labor markets were shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Only three U.S. markets had lost more jobs than Greater Phoenix. High-end vendors folded, top restaurants shuttered their doors, and the area’s trendiest spots failed. Shopping centers, at capacity two years ago, were down to a fraction of their occupancy. Of the fifteen suites in the complex where Brandables was situated, only five were now occupied. Like many companies, Brandables was suffering, too. So now Amanda was facing not only cognitive deficits, but also seemingly insurmountable economic deficits.
“I wanted Brandables to work. I needed it to, in fact,” Amanda recalls with a note of tension. “I didn’t give up on my rehab. How could I give up on my company?”
First, she did the painful math. The company simply didn’t have the funds to continue paying its employees. As excruciating as it was, to make Brandables work, she would need to lay them off. In solidarity with this difficult decision, she stopped paying herself altogether. “I wasn’t going to let the business go down without a fight. I couldn’t keep the lights on, conduct business as usual, and still make a profit,” she says. It was at this moment she realized that if she was going to stay in business and rebuild the company from the ground up, she was going to have to stop paying her mother, too.
Amanda found herself surrounded by lifeless racks of apparel and promotional samples in a silent two-thousand-square-foot office. She walked to the desk where her mom once sat, Iris’s candy dish still on display. She passed empty cubicles and wandered through a short walkway into her warehouse, wondering how she was going to fulfill orders on her own.
Her memory was still weak, so she had to organize herself in such a way that clients’ orders were always visible, otherwise she would forget about them. Sticky notes papered the walls. Whiteboards hanging in the hallways told Amanda about orders she had currently in process—those waiting for screen printing, embroidery, invoicing, or shipping. She operated the packing stations, hauled herself to trade shows, and became a member of the local chamber of commerce. But keeping up this pace on her own exhausted her and began doing her more harm than good.
“I couldn’t let her fail,” Iris says. “She’s my daughter, and she will always be my daughter.” So one morning, Iris quietly took up duties behind the sales counter. She would never ask for a paycheck. “I never claimed to have Amanda’s business sense, but I had common sense. I didn’t want to lose our bond.”
Although Amanda had lost the support of friends and now walked the nearly vacant halls of a once-thriving business, she never once felt abandoned. “The funny thing was,” she says with a reflective chuckle, “I never once sensed I was alone.” To understand this, it’s necessary to reflect on the distinction between actual social support and perceived support. Earlier we noted that it’s possible to perceive that social support isn’t available despite having received a lot of it. It’s also possible to experience the opposite; Amanda perceived that she was immersed in a sea of support, even though most people objectively would say she was walking through a virtual desert. Perhaps this perception was due to the reliable efforts of Iris and Jeremy. No matter how many people peeled away from Amanda’s life, she believed that her mother and fiancé would always be there for her. This bolstered her perception that support would be available for as long as she needed it, a belief which kept her going.
While more than two hundred thousand small businesses in the United States disappeared during the Great Recession, Amanda was able make Brandables one of the top twenty-five promotional distributors in Arizona. Even without the almost-fatal head trauma, this feat baffles the mind.
But what makes Amanda’s story remarkable—indeed a story of supersurvivorship—isn’t the million or so dollars the company has earned since its near bankruptcy. It is what happened within Amanda during both her physical and financial ordeals. Indeed, not all supersurvivors are people who have changed the world. Supersurvival is often much more personal than that. Some people revolutionize their personal lives by seeing the world in new, more meaningful ways. Brandables started out being one thing and became something so much more to Amanda. “I needed to keep my company. Brandables suddenly meant everything to me. It became my identity. It went from being my livelihood to being my life,” she says. Brandables carried on, even as store after store around it closed. Customers continued to come. Amanda and her mother filled orders. Today, Brandables is still run by mother and daughter.
To spend time with Amanda, one would hardly notice the scar above her forehead or the pauses she takes when she is pulling words from her mind. But she is different now, even if the changes aren’t obvious. Since the accident and the loss of many of her former friends, Amanda has needed to rethink the party girl she once was. She spends more time alone. She isn’t as social, and now enjoys being by herself much more than in large crowds. She calls this her newfound sense of quiet.
As soon as Amanda was able, and Jeremy felt he could take care of her, the two moved back in together. Their relationship had faced considerable adversity since Amanda’s injury only weeks after Jeremy proposed marriage. But they had gotten through it. Despite uncertainties and challenges, Jeremy, like Iris, had remained by Amanda’s side. Thirty-five months after the accident on Bartlett Lake, Jeremy and Amanda were married.
Amanda had discovered that, regardless of how many people surrounded her, two people would always be there for her. And believing that someone is by your side—someone who makes you smile, but also someone you know you can count on when you need support—is one of the great secrets to supersurvival.