Joy and Meaning-Focused Coping

[Daniel E.]

Coping with Joy
Positively Present blog
December 23, 2009

Today's post was written by Josh Hanagarne, the author of the always inspiring, always informative blog World’s Strongest Librarian. Living with Tourette’s Syndrome, Josh knows a thing or two about coping and I'm so happy that he agreed to be featured on Positively Present writing about what it means to be coping with joy. If you haven't stopped by his site yet, make sure you do after you read this post. You'll enjoy it -- and learn a lot too!

I like to watch trends. Trends trends trends, everywhere I go, including my trips to my own bookshelves. A few years ago, I was looking at my books and began to make some mental notes of the subjects and themes on my shelves. A disturbing trend was emerging. I had one shelf packed with books about coping. Books about how to deal with life. Books about why bad things happen to good people, and how to get over it. Books about the endless struggle. There’s nothing wrong with these books, but I had more of them than I was comfortable with.

Coping
I believe that a moment spent coping is a moment that could be spent living. Coping is about making it through another day. Coping is about survival. These are not always things that we should celebrate. If you are actually fighting for your life, against illness or armed enemies, then sure, take a deep breath and pat yourself on the back for seeing another sunset. But I’m not in either of those situations. I’m trying to be very careful about what I choose to call victories and what I want to celebrate.

My Situation
So far, it’s been insurmountable. Tourette’s Syndrome affects people in two broad ways: they either move involuntarily or make noises involuntarily. Mine range from hitting myself to blinking my eyes too much to screaming to the point of getting hernias. And that, my friend, is why I just want to sit still for a little while. It might not happen this year, or even this decade, but it’s going to happen, because that’s the goal. Why commit to a goal and not achieve it? But back then when I was reading these books about coping, it was much, much worse. It was very hard to enjoy anything that happened on those days. That’s what convinced me that I was looking at things the wrong way.

The Purpose of Life?
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss makes a great observation. I’m paraphrasing here, but the gist is that questions that don’t seem to have answers might just be poorly worded. For instance, saying, “What is the purpose of life?” implies that you and I have the same purpose. How likely is that? My purpose is currently to press 106 lbs over my head with one arm, bend a grade 8 bolt with my hands, and still have time to play with my toddler. Sound familiar? Probably not. Nothing wrong with that, although I do recommend that you start bending some bolts for a thrill. So right there, perhaps a better question is “What is the purpose of my life?” That might not be something you find in a book, because books written for the mainstream must adopt a one-size-fits-all approach. Gurus don’t make money by saying “This book will change one person’s life!” They make money by pointing at you from the cover of the book and saying “I can help everyone!” in a really sassy font. I don’t begrudge them their success, and I’m not saying they can’t or don’t help people. I’m only suggesting that my past reliance on them might have been a symptom of a larger problem.

Can You Cope with Joy?
The purpose of my life is to live with joy. I have found that when I am in coping mode, joy is impossible in my life. I lose the ability to find pleasure in all the small things that make life so satisfying. It is a small thing, but for me, merely thinking about challenges in a different way makes them more bearable. Joy has become the barometer. When things are terrible, I ask myself whether I am able to enjoy anything in my life. If the answer is no, I am in survival mode. This is not the mode I want to be in, unless I am literally fighting to survive. If I find that I am having a hard stretch but there are still things that I can enjoy, then I am living, not coping.

Life is hard. There is no shame in saying so. Pain hurts. There is no weakness implied in feeling the inevitable discomforts that are the cost of living. But if the discomforts persist longer than they should, it is always worth asking why that is. Perhaps nothing I’ve said applies to anyone but me. But much of what I believe has been shaped by those I look up to and the way they deal with their troubles. As much as I like to read, very few books about living well have taught me how to live with joy. Rather, they act as life jackets of distraction that float me to the end of another difficult day. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. But if everyday was merely a search for distraction, I would be concerned about my priorities. Take care of yourself and never stop finding new ways to be happy.

Josh Hanagarne is the twitchy giant behind World's Strongest Librarian, a blog about living with Tourette's Syndrome, kettlebells, book recommendations, buying pants when you're 6'8", old-time strongman training, and much more. Please subscribe to Josh’s RSS Updates to stay in touch.

 

[Daniel E.]

Re: Coping with Joy

Meaning-Focused Coping
by Kathryn Britton
Positive Psychology News Daily
May 15, 2009

“I like company. How about a conversation?”

I was at Weaver Street Market, waiting for a friend who was a little bit late for lunch, and caught sight of an older gentleman sitting at an outdoor table with his white-tipped cane under his seat. Around his neck, he wore a sign that said, “I like company. How about a 5-minute conversation?”

It took a few minutes, but curiosity overcame shyness. I sat down at his table, introduced myself, found out his name was Peter. Then I asked what he liked to talk about. He said, “Oh, just about anything. I have Parkinson’s, and I’m blind. But that doesn’t mean I want to sit around the senior center and talk about constipation and getting old. When I come here, I never know who I’m going to talk to or what about. So far today I’ve talked to a young mother who let me feel the top of her baby’s head, to a graduate student about his research project, to an accountant about how the economic times are affecting his work. And now I’m talking to you … about whatever is on your mind.” Before my lunch date arrived, we talked about resilience, positive emotion, and fortitude.

Stories are more sticky than research studies. But all stories aren’t equally generalizable. I was reminded of this when I read about the law of large numbers in Natalie Angier’s book, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. She claims that winning the lottery twice becomes increasingly likely as the size of a population grows. But you wouldn’t bet your future on winning the lottery twice yourself. One goal of PPND [Positive Psychology News Daily] is to tell stories that make research results sticky for a broad audience. So what does Peter exemplify?

Positive Emotion Plays a Part in Coping
When we think about coping, we normally imagine using certain behaviors to deal with negative events. We mostly imagine ourselves using resilience techniques to dispel a cloud of negative emotion.

There’s a lovely paper by Psychologist Susan Folkman at the University of California, San Francisco arguing that people forget the role that positive emotion plays in coping. Positive emotion helps us sustain coping behaviors, take breathers from distress, and restore our coping energy. For example, Aren’s common sense leads her to defuse distressing news with laughter. Research by Bonanno and Keltner found that bereaved individuals who laughed at least once when talking about the lost relationships tended to have better adjustment.

Folkman describes an update to the stress coping model that she and Lazarus presented in 1984. The original model showed a sequence of activities following an event: Appraisal, Coping, Outcome, Emotion. The model had two pathways from a harmful or threatening event. The first led simply to favorable resolution and positive emotion. The second pathway, led to an unfavorable resolution and distress, with a loop back to the appraisal process labeled negative emotion.

In the revised model, the favorable resolution pathway is the same, but the unfavorable resolution pathway has been extended to include the impacts of positive emotion as people deal with unfavorable outcomes. Positive emotion affects the way people reappraise the event, the energy and the resources they have available for coping, and the meaning they derive from unfavorable outcomes.

Meaning-Focused Coping

Meaning-focused coping is in its essence, appraisal-based coping in which the person draws on his or her beliefs (e.g., religious, spiritual, or beliefs about justice), values (e.g., ‘‘mattering’’), and existential goals (e.g., purpose in life or guiding principles) to motivate and sustain coping and well-being during a difficult time.
— Folkman, 2008
​

Folkman references the findings of more than 25 research papers as she reviews the following kinds of meaning-focused coping:

• Benefit finding, the most commonly reported form of meaning-focused coping, involves seeking the benefits that come out of misfortune, whether they be growth in wisdom, patience, and competence, greater appreciation for life, better sense of what really matters, or stronger social relationships.
• Benefit reminding involves making an intentional effort to recall previously found benefits.
• Adaptive goal processes involve reappraising goals in the light of changed circumstances, giving up goals that no longer work, and substituting new goals that are valuable to the individual. Who knows what Peter’s goals were when he was young and strong? For now, he has substituted 5-minute conversations and learning about interesting strangers. Positive emotions can help people deal with the stress of giving up old goals that no longer work.
• Reordering priorities is a value-based process where aspects of life move up or down the priority ladder. Perhaps a job used to be the highest priority in life. Then a family illness made the welfare of family members move up in priority, the job move down. Sometimes priority reordering involves careful thought, but sometimes it just happens. Reordering priorities can be very stressful, but it can also lead to a renewed sense of purpose. Often it contributes to coping by narrowing focus to those factors that matter most, allowing people to let go of things that are no longer consequential.
• Infusing ordinary events with positive meaning in order to experience positive emotion. A caregiver might think about cleaning up messes as a way of expressing love. I believe Peter finds meaning in simple conversations. Folkman suggests that the desire to feel good takes on critical importance for maintaining mental and physical well-being during difficult times.

People often look back on difficult times as defining events that helped them become more truly themselves. Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation wouldn’t be so without having gone through the crucible of World War II. Folkman’s message is that positive emotions play a strongly adaptive role in times that we think are dominated by negative emotions. Positive emotions lead people to make more positive appraisals of events, maintain energy for coping, and find meaning in stress and suffering.

Tools for Peter’s Outcome
Money worries, job loss, rocky economy, possible pandemics, growing old, concern about aging parents, children who are graduating into an uncertain job market … many of today’s worries are shared widely. How do proponents of positive psychology talk to people experiencing hard times without seeming out of touch? This week, University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson wrote in his blog about translational research, where learning flows not just bench to bedside, but also bedside to bench. He argues that positive psychology, “at least when done well, can teach the rest of psychology how to do translational research.”

I think the answer to my question is that positive psychology proponents can help people translate generalizable results from research into behaviors that affect their own outcomes. Tough times happen, but some people come through them better than others. Once people are aware of the factors that make the difference. including positive emotion and meaning-focused coping, they are in a better position to deal with adversity. Stories of others who have dealt effectively with suffering also help — stories about someone laughing when caring for a dying loved one or reordering priorities to take care of a family member in need or changing goals after losing a job. Peter moving beyond his Parkinson’s and blindness reminds us that people can be very resourceful in adversity.

References
Folkman, S. & Moskovitz, J. T. (2000). Positive affect and the other side of coping. American Psychologist, 55(6), 647-654.
Folkman, S. (2008). The case for positive emotions in the stress process. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 21(1), 3-14.
Angier, N. (2008). The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. Mariner Books.
Bonanno, G. A., & Keltner, D. (1997). Facial expressions of emotion and the course of conjugal bereavement.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106, 126-137.
Brokaw, T. (2005). The Greatest Generation. Random House.
Tennen, H., & Affleck, G. (2002). Benefit-finding and benefit-reminding. In C. R. Snyder, & S. J. Lopez (Eds.),
Handbook of Positive Psychology. pp. 584-597. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kathryn Britton, MAPP '06, ACC, former software engineer, is a coach working with professionals to increase well-being, energy, and meaning (Theano Coaching LLC). She teaches positive workplace concepts at the University of Maryland. Her blog, Positive Psychology Reflections, explores positive psychology applications to everyday life. Full bio. Kathryn writes on the 7th of each month, and her articles are here.

 

[Daniel E.]

Along the same lines as the first article since they are by the same author/librarian:

Coping Is Not The Answer - World's Strongest Librarian

Another Look At Coping - World's Strongest Librarian

OTOH, coping as a positive alternative to feeling stuck or hopeless:

Life's Biggest Challenges | Anxiety and OCD Exposed