ELEVEN: The Art of Empathy
âAs the studyâs longtime director George Vaillant put it, âWhereas a warm childhood, like a rich father, tends to inoculate a man against future pain, a bleak childhood is like poverty; it cannot cushion the difficulties of life. Yes, difficulties may sometimes lead to post- traumatic growth, and some menâs lives did improve over time. But there is always a high cost in pain and lost opportunities, and for many men with bleak childhoods the outlook remained bleak until they died, sometimes young and sometimes by their own hands.
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Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parentsâ concerns about childrenâs lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.
If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to
deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to
abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to
perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise
is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is
neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass
is muddy, but is not mud.
TWELVE: How Were You Shaped by Your Sufferings?
âPeople who are permanently damaged by trauma seek to assimilate what happened into their existing models. People who grow try to accommodate what happened in order to create new models. The person who assimilates says, I survived brain cancer and Iâm going to keep on chugging. The person who accommodates says, No, this changes who I
am...Iâm a cancer survivor. This changes how I want to spend my days. The act of
remaking our models involves reconsidering the fundamentals: In what ways is the world
safe and unsafe? Do things sometimes happen to me that I donât deserve? Who am I? What is my place in the world? Whatâs my story? Where do I really want to go? What kind of God allows this to happen?
FIFTEEN: Life Stories
âAs a behavioral psychologist, he was well aware that social connection is the number one source of happiness, success, good health, and much of the sweetness of life. Human beings are social animals who love to communicate with each other. Yet on this commuter train that day, he looked around and it hit him: Nobody was talking to anyone. It was just headphones and screens. And he wondered: Why arenât these people doing the thing that makes them the happiest? He later conducted some experiments in which he induced people to talk with other commuters during their rides downtown. When the ride was over and they arrived at their destination, researchers were there to ask them how much they enjoyed the trip. The comments were overwhelmingly positive.
Those children who had a complicated illness at birth, who had poor experiences with their caretakers, and who suffered abuse were more likely to have mental health problems and to develop learning disabilities. Their childhood experience really mattered.
But Werner also found reasons for hope. One third of all children who had adverse childhoods still managed to develop into attentive, kind, and emotionally well-adjusted adults. These kids overcame their difficult childhoods, and Werner was able to point to some of the reasons.
There were protective factors at work for some children that countered the effects of their difficult childhoods. One of the major sources of protection was the consistent presence of at least one caring adult. Even one person who is concerned, available, and emotionally invested in a childâs well-being can positively affect that childâs development and future relationships. Some of the children who thrived despite adversity seemed particularly able to elicit this kind of caring support.
Here is where Emmy Wernerâs research, our own Harvard Study research, and many other pieces of research from across cultures and populations converge to show that a critical link between childhood experience and positive adult social connections is our ability to process
emotions.
It is from our relationships as childrenâespecially our relationships with our familyâthat we first learn what to expect from others. This is when we begin to develop the emotional habits, so to speak, that will be with us for the rest of our lives. These habits often define the way we connect to others and our ability to engage others in mutually supportive ways.
A crucial point here is that our ability to process emotions is malleable. In fact, managing emotions is one of the things we actually get better at as we grow old. And there is strong evidence that we donât have to wait until late in our lives for this to happen. With the right guidance and some practice, we can learn to be better at managing our feelings at any age.