Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success

By David B. Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz

Starting where resiliency studies leave off, two psychologists explore the science of remarkable accomplishment in the wake of trauma, revealing the surprising principles that allow people to transform their lives and achieve extraordinary things.

Over four billion people worldwide will survive a trauma during their lives. Some will experience severe post-traumatic stress. Most will eventually recover and return to life as normal. But sometimes, survivors do more than bounce back. Sometimes they bounce forward.

These are the Supersurvivors—individuals who not only rebuild their lives, but also thrive and grow in ways never previously imagined. Beginning where resilience ends, David B. Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz look beyond the tenets of traditional psychology for a deeper understanding of the strength of the human spirit. What they have found flies in the face of conventional wisdom—that positive thinking may hinder more than help; that perceived support can be just as good as the real thing; and that realistic expectations may be a key to great success.

They introduce the humble but powerful notion of grounded hope as the foundation for overcoming trauma. The authors interviewed dozens of men and women whose stories serve as the counterpoint to the latest scientific research. Feldman and Kravetz then brilliantly weave these extraordinary narratives with new science, creating an emotionally compelling and thought-provoking look at what is possible in the face of human tragedy. Supersurvivors will reset our thinking about how we deal with challenges, no matter how big or small.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9780062267870

David B. Feldman

David B. Feldman, PhD, is among the top experts on hope in the field of psychology. An associate professor of counseling psychology at Santa Clara University, he has written for Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, published research in top scientific journals, and lectured around the world. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Book preview

1

To Survive or to Supersurvive

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

—E. E. CUMMINGS, SUPERSURVIVOR

On the spectrum of trauma survivorship, everyone falls somewhere between hiding under a rock and becoming a rock star.

Asha Mevlana lay on a table in a small examination room at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Center in the West Village, New York City, when this first crossed her mind. She was twenty-four years old, dark-haired, and beautiful. The technology industry in 2002 was making young people all over the city rich. She had a great job at a start-up, an apartment in SoHo, and a pearl-shaped problem within her left breast.

Asha had already guessed that it was cancer; the lab technician’s grim look was merely confirmation. The defining moment of her ordeal, however, wasn’t the diagnosis. It wasn’t the biopsy at Sloan Kettering. It also wasn’t the undeniable sensation that her life was spinning out of control as she underwent eight months of chemotherapy. It wasn’t her baldness or her candle-wax pallor, either.

For Asha, the defining moment came after the doctors announced that she was cancer-free and sent her back out into the world. She noticed that something within her had changed. While she’d been facing her mortality, everyone else had gone on blithely living their lives. Her coworkers talked about the crummy New York weather, the long lines at Starbucks, and the finalists on American Idol. The blissfully mundane events of their lives seemed to diminish the most significant and defining experience of hers. Everyone seemed to place value in such inconsequential things, and she found herself yearning for a time when she did as well.

Life as Asha once knew it simply didn’t make sense anymore; it seemed empty. So, she promptly dropped out of it. I’m not a religious person, but I prayed: ‘Just give me a second chance and I’m going to change my life. I’m going to do what I’m passionate about,’ she says.

Asha is not alone.

According to the American Cancer Society, roughly thirteen million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer each year, a number that is projected to double in the next two decades. The journal Neuroimaging Clinics of North America provides a similarly grim outlook, with a startling ten million people worldwide affected every year by traumatic brain injuries. The harsh reality of widespread trauma becomes even more apparent once we combine these numbers with the World Health Organization’s calculation that fifty million people a year survive car wrecks; the United Nations’ finding that one out of every three women will be beaten, raped, or otherwise abused during her lifetime; and the realization that these statistics cover only a small portion of the catastrophes that befall people every day.

It is no coincidence that the seeds of this book took root during a particular point in history, one that could be fairly characterized as traumatic for a lot of people. America’s housing bubble ruptured, global markets plummeted, millions of people lost jobs and homes, the Tohoku earthquake shifted the earth on its axis by more than six inches, and as acts of terrorism spiked, people found themselves grasping for a sense of safety. These days, such events are practically the backdrop of daily life.

Harvard Medical School professor of psychiatry Judith Herman calls trauma the affliction of the powerless. The problem is we’re all powerless against the vicissitudes of fate. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by an overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities, she writes in her book Trauma and Recovery. Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Depending on the particular type of trauma, about a quarter of survivors will fall into posttraumatic stress disorder, a painful and often debilitating condition. Others will experience significant depression or anxiety.

In the midst of all this adversity, it’s tempting to become pessimistic and fall into a kind of fatalistic hopelessness. It’s easy to overlook the amazing potential for resilience in us as human beings. Amazingly, even in midst of trauma, people continue to smile, to love, to celebrate, to create, and to renew. In making this observation, we absolutely do not mean to belittle the impact of traumatic times or the suffering many have endured and continue to endure. Suffering is real, but resilience is also real. It is an incredible and encouraging fact about human nature that, contrary to popular belief, after a period of emotional turmoil, most trauma survivors eventually recover and return to their lives. They bounce back.

And in some cases, they do much more. They bounce forward, and in truly remarkable ways. A significant minority, as a result of the trauma, feel called upon to engage in a wider world, Herman writes. They refocus their energies on a new calling, on a new mission, on a new path, on helping others who have been victimized, on education, on legal reforms, or any number of other big goals. They move beyond mere resilience. They transform the meaning of their personal tragedies by making them the bases for change.

We call these people supersurvivors.

In the aftermath of her cancer diagnosis, Asha paid for improvisational violin lessons. Her teacher took a unique approach with her. She asked me to play how I felt the day I walked into the hospital to get treatments, she explains. She didn’t want me to use any words, just my instrument. It was the first time I felt close to my instrument and was actually able to improvise from my heart. Looking back, I was actually meditating on my instrument. I played the anxiety I felt when they injected the needle into my arm that contained the chemo. I played about trying to be strong for everyone else, even though I was terrified. I learned how to express myself through my instrument.

Before surviving her trauma, Asha had no illusions about making a career out of music. You mean like playing for bar tips? No, it never crossed my mind. I was just way too practical, she remembers. But that pragmatism didn’t survive the chemotherapy. After working hard for many months, she began playing electric violin for a few amateur rock bands. This was a new and invigorating experience for her; she hadn’t hung out with people like this before. All her friends were either investment bankers or corporate suits. Something about this new life clicked. Perhaps it was the unscripted nature that, much like the music itself, was creative and freeing. A couple of months later, when a friend invited her to visit Los Angeles for a weekend, she met a number of local musicians who convinced her she could get paying gigs in California.

Before her cancer Asha believed, like many, that mature adults should settle into a routine life and count their blessings. I wouldn’t have ever told anyone I really wanted to be a rock violinist, she says. Nobody even knew what that was, but it was always in the back of my head. I’d never taken any risks before. Everything I’d ever done had been very calculated. I stuck to things I knew I’d be successful at.

It would be an enormous risk. Asha’s entire universe was on the East Coast. She had no job prospects in Los Angeles, no income, no place to live, and a million reasons to go back to her old life. Plus, although proficient in violin, she was safely an amateur.

Then again, she was twenty-eight years old, one of the youngest survivors of breast cancer she knew, spiritually damaged, and more than a little lost. From this perspective, she had nothing to lose.

So, in 2007 she moved to L.A., tugged by a desire not uncommon to those with the predilection for chasing something bright and shiny and unpredictable. Strolling along the Sunset Strip, a slipstream of bright neon signs fastened to beer-soaked bars and windowless strip clubs, she felt her corporate cubicle fade into pale memory.

In the origin stories of superheroes, something profound, unexpected, and often frightening transforms ordinary lives. A massive discharge of radiation turns a mild-mannered scientist into a hulking green avenger; the murder of another’s parents leads him to don a black mask and dedicate his life to rescuing innocent victims of a maniacal joker. What if these scenarios are closer to reality than we think?

According to nearly two decades of research emerging from institutions as far-flung as the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the University of Warwick, England, the majority of trauma survivors reports some degree of positive change. These individuals may emerge from otherwise awful experiences primed with something like X-ray vision, which allows them to notice value and opportunity where they might never have seen them before. They may develop inner strength from having lived through an experience beyond their worst imaginings. These psychological gains are known as posttraumatic growth.

But even after experiencing such inner growth, most trauma survivors find their outer lives returning to normal. According to research, the majority of posttraumatic growth is internal and private. It’s what psychologists refer to as perceived growth. Survivors report that they’ve changed for the better, and they may feel the benefits of that change, but outwardly their lives don’t look much different from before the trauma. Perceived growth isn’t fake, however. Though the research is mixed, some studies show links between greater perceived growth and lower emotional distress as well as better physical health.

But sometimes people move far beyond both the life-altering negative effects of trauma and the usual outcomes of perceived posttraumatic growth. These people don’t just grow; they revolutionize their lives. They transform and transcend their suffering even while enduring it. These supersurvivors radically deviate from their previous life paths, often transforming the worst thing that’s happened to them into the best.

Asha has a kick-ass Viper electric violin. It’s purple, and the hourglass-shaped belly is cleaved. Instead of the classic configuration of four strings, Asha’s fingerboard is laced with seven. Rachmaninoff would have been puzzled but awed.

One afternoon Asha picked up her violin from a repair shop in downtown Los Angeles. The guy who had made her instrument said he knew Dee Snider, the lead singer of Twisted Sister, who just happened to be trying out electric violinists to join his new tour. Although she thought her chances were slim, Asha auditioned. Two months later, she celebrated her thirtieth birthday on a tour bus with one of the top metal vocalists of all time.

One opportunity led to the next. With startling swiftness, Asha was hired to play alongside Alanis Morissette, and after that, on a U.S. tour with Gnarls Barkley, opening for the Red Hot Chili Peppers in front of thirty thousand people a night. That same year, she performed at the Grammys. Jay Z and Mary J. Blige both tapped her to play. Her reputation on the rise, in 2009 she played regularly for the American Idol band and The Tonight Show.

Working under the nurturing wings of music godparents Linda Perry, Holly Knight, and Mike Chapman, she was now on the brink of mainstream success with her own band, Porcelain, which was newly signed to Universal Music, the same powerhouse label that represented Rihanna and the Black Eyed Peas.

Asha had been in Los Angeles fifteen months. If someone had told her in New York that someday she’d be playing in front of millions of people and signed to a major recording label, she’d have laughed in disbelief. Yet she’d arrived at this place with unusual calm, as though somewhere in the back of her mind she always knew she’d wind up here. It just took surviving a cataclysmic event for her to reassemble the pieces of her life into something that exceeded her wildest dreams.

Asha is one of many people we’ll meet who have dramatically altered their lives after suffering trauma, often discovering hidden parts of themselves or contributing to the world in ways they never thought possible. But these people are not superheroes—at least, no more than any other trauma survivor. In truth, they aren’t even superhuman. Their stories betray their utter humanness—their stumbling and their grasping as they wrestle with the fundamental questions we all face: Who am I? What do I believe in? And most important, how should I live my life? There is a lot we can learn from their often haphazard but beautiful answers to these questions.

To be clear, this is not a book extolling the bright side of tragedy, the silver lining of any cloud, or the so-called power of positive thinking. No trauma is good. Every trauma involves suffering. There is nothing inherently positive or indispensable about atrocities, violence, disasters, or illness.

Given that such events are sometimes unavoidable, it is important to understand the incredible resilience possible for ordinary human beings—an ability to peer into the face of tragedy and somehow emerge fundamentally changed and able to impact the world in previously unimagined ways. Drawing from research in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology, and even business, in this book we explore why and how people transform suffering into personal triumph. Each chapter focuses on a particular principle of change identified by social scientists, including hope, personal control, social support, forgiveness, and spirituality.

But these principles don’t always work the way you’d think. We explore how hope has little to do with positive thinking, and how, despite conventional wisdom, the disorientation and groundlessness experienced by many people after trauma can ultimately be advantageous. We discover why psychologists think that certain delusions can be healthy, why forgiveness is good for one’s physiology as well as for the soul, and why reflecting on death can lead to a better life. From the inspiring stories presented in this book, we might believe that supersurvivors have it good—that their trauma was somehow a stroke of luck. We ask supersurvivors what they think about this supposed good fortune and come to some eye-opening conclusions. Finally, we ask what implications their stories have for the rest of us, regardless of whether we’ve survived a serious trauma or are merely confronting the setbacks and difficulties of everyday life.

The personal struggles and triumphs of survivors inspire fascination. We would be deceiving ourselves if we didn’t acknowledge that some of this fascination is due to the normal voyeuristic tendencies present in all of us. Beyond these base impulses, however, lie more venerable motivations. As all of us grapple with the adversities of our chaotic times, we are increasingly aware of human suffering and the fragility of our own prosperity. We may wonder, What would I do if a crisis were to strike close to home? Supersurvivors provide unexpected answers to this question—their stories offer hope that trauma can lead to growth and transcendence, and that fear of tragedy doesn’t have to cause us to shrink from a full and adventurous life. Their examples can uplift us, nourish our tender emotions, and inspire us to grow, no matter who we are or what we’ve been through.

Asha’s cancer experience was a transformative and meaningful turning point. It afforded her the freedom and motivation to move beyond her previous life and build a new reality for herself. Instead of hampering her, trauma freed her. But stories like Asha’s aren’t typical. While trauma leaves many people suffering, lost, and searching to reclaim their lives, Asha’s experience seems to have provided her with direction.

In this book, we discover why.

2

The Paradox of Positive Thinking

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

—T. S. ELIOT

On a blustery winter morning, Alan Lock stepped out onto the balcony of his tiny hotel room set below the high cliffs of La Gomera, one of Spain’s lush Canary Islands. For days the rain had come down in hard sheets. Today, just beyond the hotel, the ocean was calm, and the air was warm against his skin. Alan rubbed his eyes and squinted sharply against the muted sunlight.

In his late twenties, Alan had a narrow face punctuated with a reserved grin. His hair was the color of wet sand. Around noon that day, his buddy Matt Boreham, a big guy with dark hair and an adventurous streak, examined the weather conditions and announced it was time to go. Alan pulled a pair of shorts over a reedy frame that scarcely reflected his decade’s worth of military training and donned a T-shirt, sun visor, and sunglasses.

Off the marina’s long pier, the ocean was simmering and growing choppy. The stiffening wind was pushing Gemini’s twenty-four-foot white hull up against the dock. The vessel was built to sustain the ocean’s full blunt force, but its large plywood hull and blocky bulkhead made maneuvering the boat tricky. On board, Alan set his bags down in the cramped cargo compartment and took first position in the rowboat’s cockpit, a command center as narrow as a bathtub. As Matt released the nylon tether and tied off the cleat, Alan stiffened his back and tugged with both arms, raking two long oars across the surface of the water. It was the first stride in what would be a three-thousand-mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean.

The goal was to leave La Gomera and row to Barbados. They had enough food for a hundred days. By Alan’s calculations, if the ocean cooperated, they’d be there in fewer than seventy—a good thing, because they were racing hurricane season. Many had attempted, unsuccessfully, to row this route, including Alan’s navigator, Matt. More people had traveled to outer space than paddled across the Atlantic. It was a dangerous course to take with no motor, no sail, just five-by-seven feet of maneuvering space, a compass, a GPS, and gas-powered cooking supplies, and one significant disadvantage that no one in recorded history had dealt with during such a journey: Alan Lock was attempting to become the first registered blind person ever to row one of the world’s oceans.

If you listened to Alan’s fans, you’d think he did it all with the power of positive thinking. It’s the kind of story often burnished with terms such as bravery and inspiration. The New York Times called him remarkable. The Faster Times and the BBC alluded to his extraordinary optimism. In most versions of the story, Alan’s loss of vision in 2003 served only to strengthen his resolve and multiply his natural athletic gifts. Alan’s story seems like a perfect example of what positive thinking in the face of tragedy can help a person achieve.

But Alan has a secret. Spend a few minutes with him and you’ll hear him say things like I always expect the worst and I knew I was doomed. No matter how many people attest to Alan’s remarkable attitude in the face of great adversity, he’ll tell you he’s a pessimist. I’m just not a silver-lining kind of person, he insists.

Conventional wisdom says that positive thinking after a tragedy leads to better outcomes. When the bottom drops out, having a rosy attitude is better than thinking the worst, right? Yet for more than half a century psychologists have debated this facile version of the power of positive thinking.

Those arguing for this perspective assert that positive thinking is nothing less than an antidote to threatening illness and the secret to achieving success in life. Thank mid-twentieth-century Protestant preacher Norman Vincent Peale for this view. His book The Power of Positive Thinking offered a doctrine gilded by an appealing promise: positive thinking can bring about positive realities. This assertion has been a jumping-off point for scores of self-help books extolling positive thinking as the secret to fortune. Some have even asserted that it is the key to cheating death. Self-help books and inspirational leaders have made many claims, including Thoughts equal creation: If these thoughts are attached to powerful emotions (good or bad), that speeds the creation; You attract your dominant thoughts. Those who speak most of illness have illness, those who speak most of prosperity have it; and Positive attitude can even overcome serious diseases like diabetes, arthritis, and heart conditions.

In 2006, David Schweingruber of Iowa State University’s Department of Sociology provided some evidence in support of this theory by following employees of the Enterprise Company, a pseudonym for one of the oldest door-to-door sales outfits in the United States. The Enterprise Company was especially perfect for this task for one reason: for years it made use of something the company called emotional training. Among other practices, the company encouraged its employees to read self-help books, repeat scripted positive phrases, and commit their goals to paper.

Guess what happened? Enterprise employees sold more than thirty million dollars’ worth of products to nearly three hundred thousand customers over the course of a summer—an unbelievably impressive total. The study suggested that a positive attitude works.

But could success really be that simple? These salespeople were a special group of highly motivated achievers who knew what they were getting into when they joined the Enterprise Company. They were naturally drawn to a firm steeped in positive thinking and were prodded by the desire to make money. Perhaps it wasn’t the strategies they employed that led these salespeople to success; perhaps it was just who they were. If positive thinking is really such an easy recipe for success, why do so many businesses fail?

When he joined the Royal Navy, Alan Lock told his recruitment officer, My worst fear in life is being stuck behind a desk. Alan knew as a kid he was going to be a career military man. Starting with the final two years of his secondary education, the Royal Air Force sponsored him to be a navigation officer.

Night watch on the destroyer HMS York failed to employ his extensive training