Light in the Cracks

Some of the best thinkers are seeing light in the cracks, and that current struggles we face could also result in great personal expansion, writes Jessie Collins.

Maintaining any equilibrium, let alone any positive outlook in recent months has been a full-time occupation. Managing the continuing stream of negative, dark constantly fluctuating information has become for many, too much. After months of binging, and then perhaps purging on news channels, opinion, daily updates and infection rates, we are all experiencing what can only be described as a kind of burnout.

Faced with a really difficult ongoing situation over which you have very little control has a cumulative, almost sleeper effect on your wellbeing. Suddenly you are at that point where you can no longer see the shore you have left, and at the same time can’t yet see, touch or feel the point to which you are heading. It is pandemic no-mans-land, that point in a marathon where you just can’t give up but also don’t know how to go on.

Having reached a kind of midway point in our lives, many of us have weathered quite a bit already emotionally. Personal highs and lows, losses and gains, and perhaps losses again, coming through these challenges has perhaps given us a sense of resilience we may have not had in our twenties. Yet this is not an experience that many of us are likely to ever go through again, nor would want to.

And given that much of it is out of our control, we need to find ways of coping, and also perhaps even dare to think that there is something extremely profound going on at the same time.

It is precisely this idea that Yale professor Dr Laurie Santos, who created ‘The Happiness Lab’ podcast has been talking about recently. In January 2018, Santos launched a course, Psychology and the Good Life, which quickly became the most popular class in Yale’s 319-year-history. At the time it was founded in reaction to what Santos saw was widespread mental illness on the college’s campus.

Santos then went on to launch a 10-week online version of the course called The Science of Well-Being. After COVID, this went from half a million online learners to more than 2.6m students, from all over the world. And though the psychology of happiness isn’t Santos’s original field, she has highlighted some really fascinating patterns about the way our brains behave and particularly how they aren’t necessarily designed to make us happy.

More recently, and through a post-COVID prism, Santos has been looking at how even in the midst of such a challenging time, there is an opportunity to glean some real and lasting good from it. One of the areas in particular she talks about is Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG), a theory that explains the possibility of a kind of transformation following trauma. It was developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, in the mid-1990s and it suggests that following real suffering, also real positive growth can come.

Post-Traumatic Growth is not about resilience, however. Where resilience addresses a person's ability to bounce back, PTG is defined more by the hurt or trauma someone really experiences and then comes through, changed. These are often measured in the form of a better appreciation of life, relationships with others, new possibilities in life, personal strength and spiritual change.

In many cases of PTG, people are often glad of their experiences – a concept that is almost impossible to imagine right now. The defining point of PTG is that it is about sitting with the feelings, processing them, embracing them. Then, according to Santos, it is a question of ignoring some of the brains impulses to lurch for the things that don’t actually bring us joy, but masquerade as quick fixes. This she looks at as a kind of brain training, so you more habitually seek the things that bring real meaning.

And some of the ways that we are naturally responding to the current circumstances are already becoming evident. The recent Kinsey Institute study which found that while people were having less sex during lockdown, the sex was better. We all now put a greater value on human touch than ever before, and the sheer preciousness of physical intimacy is something that many of us who have lived through this time will never take for granted again. Nor will we our freedoms. The incredible privilege of getting on a plane, of being packed into a pub, a gig or a theatre, are just some of the things that will always taste differently after this experience.

But our ability to lose so much of our normality and yet to continue on will also be a change-maker. As Santos says: “The hope is, once we get back [to our post-pandemic lives], we’ll really be able to value what matters and really enjoy what we took for granted before.”

Jessie Collins, October 2020.

What say you, dear reader? Leave your thoughts in the comments box below…