People Who Thrive: Overcoming Hardship and Finding Meaning

By William Carter

Though all people experience varied types and degrees of adversity, an ingrained belief across cultures is that life is meant to be meaningful. When hardship strikes, people search for ways to respond, rebuild, prevail. If it is true that life is meaningful, then hardship, adversity, trauma, grief, wounds, and emotional pain are roadblocks to that end goal. Not insurmountable barriers, but obstacles that can be overcome.

Thriving—overcoming hardship—is a learned experience. People who thrive are intentional. They purposely get to know themselves, build support systems, make effective use of emotions, live within hope, and know what it means to love. Finding meaning, thriving is, in some ways, cloaked in mystery. If people can thrive, indeed are meant to thrive, there must be a pathway to that endpoint.

People Who Thrive provides a research-based model for successfully coping with life's struggles, and simultaneously teaches thinking, communication, and relationship skills to make people vibrant. Life is meant to be meaningful in spite of hardship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543948554

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by William Carter

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54394-854-7

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54394-855-4

Contents

[Introduction]

LIFE CAN BE HARD

[1]

Be Less Defensive about Hardship

[2]

Know Your Personality

[3]

Build Good Relationships

[4]

Adjust and Grow

[5]

Come to Grips with Hurtful People

[6]

Make Positive Use of Negative Emotions

[7]

Discover Great Things about Yourself

[8]

Create a Hopeful View of the Future

[9]

Love Yourself (and Others, Too)

[Introduction]

LIFE CAN BE HARD

Hardship comes in many shapes and sizes. Tough times strike everyone. Everyone. Sometimes it seems that no one understands what it must be like to walk a mile in your shoes. All people struggle to understand hardship, but none of us escapes it. Some give in to it; they collapse. Others fight and hope that someday they will find satisfying responses to unsatisfying circumstances. Some people thrive in spite of hardship. They are not lucky or smart or blessed or anything you and I are not. They work to overcome their circumstances. Truth be told, all people trudge through situations not of their making or choosing: account

Family problems—divorce, an absent loved one, constant arguing.

Emotional abuse or physical abuse, harsh communication.

Problems with parents or siblings or children.

Unwanted sexual experiences.

Bullying by peers, a boss, or even by someone in your family.

Moving to a new neighborhood, town, or state.

The death of someone you love.

Exposure to people who abuse alcohol or drugs.

A lack of close relationships.

Physical, emotional disabilities.

Financial problems.

Work problems, failure, no place of belonging.

People handle hardship differently.

Some fight.

Some give in.

Some freeze.

Some withdraw.

Some act out.

Some run away.

Some turn on themselves.

Some turn on others.

BUT… Some survive…some bounce back…some become leaders…some remake themselves…some do well, really well.

Some people thrive.

Two Examples:

Alexis grew up in a tough world. He never knew his real father, and as a kid didn’t like his mother’s choice of boyfriends. An uncle occasionally took him to ball games or to the park, but he was unreliable. At times Alexis’s mother worked and paid the bills. At other times she was unemployed, and money was scarce. It embarrassed Alexis to admit to his friends that his family relied on food stamps. As a teen, he did well in school, played sports, and his teachers liked him. Things changed, however, when he moved into adulthood. He gravitated toward the wrong crowd, abused drugs, and couldn’t keep a steady job. When his girlfriend told him she might be pregnant, he got scared and left. His reputation plummeted, and so did his conduct. By the time he was 30 years old, Alexis had already been to jail twice, once for theft and once for assault. Alexis’s future looked bleak. The wrong crowd. Financial strains. On probation. Friends and family looked down on him. His ambition was shot. Alexis had been punched by hardship and had no clue how to break a cycle of defeat.

Glo also had a troubled history. Her father was a womanizer who cheated on his wife. Life worsened when Glo’s father started looking to her for affection. At first, he accidentally touched her in ways he shouldn’t. Her initial reaction was to make excuses, to rebuff the horrid notion that he would molest his own daughter. But it kept happening. So she told a friend, and her friend told an adult. Soon her father was gone—and it was all her fault. Early in adulthood she sometimes abused alcohol to soothe confused, depressed emotions. But Glo learned not to define herself by life’s hardships. She worked with a counselor who helped her realize her father’s choices had nothing to do with her. Instead of defining herself as a victim, she became a survivor. She learned to turn lemons into lemonade. Not only did Glo feel good about her response to misfortune, she found a new excitement in living. Now in a good job and mother to two kids, one of her greatest desires is to share her strength with friends in need of a helping hand.

Two adults. Hardships. Both troubled. One flailed his way into self-defeat. The other turned her life in a new direction. Like Alexis and like Glo, you (and every other person on this planet) came into the world as an unlimited bundle of future possibilities. Some of those possibilities were positive, some negative.

Before you learned to walk or talk, you instinctively responded to your family, your culture, and your unique place in this world.

¹As a child you established relationship patterns with your peers and relatives.

During adolescence, you became increasingly aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

By the time you entered adulthood you adopted a method for handling stress—maybe you froze in uncertainty, recoiled from others, threw fits, cried and worried, hid behind emotional walls, or became a people pleaser.

Throughout your life span you have soaked up information about yourself and others. You have experienced stress. You learned from it, for better or worse.

And now you’re trying to make sense of it all.

So, how’s it going? Has your life been perfect or imperfect? Easy or stressful? Up or down? Humdrum or unpredictable? Real or surreal? Peaceful or scary? Good enough or not so hot? Whether or not you were aware, during your youth you became familiar with hardship. You adjusted. Think of it as a natural way of survival.

Mental health professionals who study the role of hardship in adulthood tell us something you probably already know: many people—lots of people—have faced significant adversity. And those who have faced especially tough times (e.g., mistreatment in youth) are at risk for problems in troubled relationships, self-image, behavior problems, depression, substance abuse, and more.¹,²

A Roadmap through Hardship: Eight Suppositions

I work with people from all walks of life. I have yet to find a single person who says, My life is hard, and I plan to do all I can to make matters worse. No, every person I know wants a good life. That’s as it should be. We want life to have meaning.

My aim is to help you find a way to create the life you want to make. I am making eight suppositions about you as follows:

As a child you did not have complete control over what happened. Even as you entered adulthood, unplanned events became part of your world. Someone else was driving the boat. You were along for the ride.

You did what you believed you had to do to push through your circumstances. Some of your decisions were good. Some…not so good.

As you aged you made assumptions about yourself and the people in your world. You have opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. Some of your opinions are dead-on right. Others are not.

You have ideas about how your life can be better, wishes for what your future might hold, and goals for your future. Some are realistic. Some are castles in the sky.

If some of your assumptions are based on the hardships you have faced (and they are), your beliefs trigger you into words, relationships, actions, choices, and emotions that may or may not be in your best interests. You know—arguing, hanging with bad people, breaking rules, unwise decisions, and troubled feelings.

Everything you do is for a reason. And everything you do is done with the intent of making your life better. Think about it. If you scream and throw a fit, maybe you do it so people will take you seriously or to release pent-up frustration. Or if you skip out on your family so you and a friend can get drunk, or if you intentionally cut yourself, or yell at your spouse, or kick the dog, or crawl in a hole and pout—you are doing these things because you want life to be better. Of course, a person can make such a loud statement that valid messages get lost in the shuffle.

You can’t change the hardships you have faced. Magic wands or time machines or wishing wells or genies who grant three wishes do not exist. Reality is what reality is. Yeah, that fact of life sometimes stinks up the place.

Fortunately, some really smart people have studied what it takes to help people overcome hardship. People of all ages can be taught the thinking skills, social skills, relationship skills, behavior controls, and emotional controls needed for success—success in relating to family and friends, success in school or work, success in forming a positive self-image, success in making the future a brighter place to live.³

By the Way—Who Are You?

Before getting into specifics on how you can overcome hardship, consider this very basic question:

Who Are You?

Pretend you are me. You don’t know who you are anymore than I know who you are.

You have a name.

Maybe you have a nickname.

You were born somewhere.

Maybe you’ve lived in a bunch of somewheres.

You are male or female, one or the other.

You are a certain height and weight.

Your skin has color.

Two people conceived you, but only one gave birth to you.

You have a family tree, no matter how exquisite or gnarled its branches.

You are skilled at something.

You are lacking in something.

You believe certain things.

You feel certain emotions.

You have a personality.

You have accomplished something.

You have missed out on something.

You have internal organs.

You breathe in and out, in and out.

Who else and what else are you? Respond to the following questions—and be open with yourself. Openness with self is a key prerequsite to thriving.

When you have a secret, what do you do with it? Tell someone? Tell no one? Tell everyone? Something else?

Suppose you just got out of bed and looked in the mirror. What would you say to yourself?

Do people need to punish you, or do you punish yourself? If people need to punish you, what would you recommend? If you do a good enough job punishing yourself, what do you do? Does it work?

Everyone is afraid of something. What are your fears?

Everyone is proud of something. Of what are you proud?

What does a normal day look like to you?

What does a gloriously perfect day look like to you?

What is the one thing you simply cannot live without? How about the opposite—what is the one thing you would really like to do without?

When you enter a store and a clerk says, May I help you? how do you respond? What does your response say about you?

What’s different about your personality than when you were six years old?

How do you fight? Fisticuffs? Verbal tongue-lashings? Gossip? Silent treatment? Set booby traps? Throw a pity party? Go wild? Clam up? Why do you fight the way you do?

In Chapter 2 we’ll take a longer look at how your personality has been shaped, but I want you to think for a moment about that very important matter right at the very start of this workbook. Now that you know my assumptions and have described yourself a bit, it’s time to start acquiring skills for overcoming hardship.

One promise I’ll make: I’ll do the best I can to help you learn how to thrive. The single promise I ask in return is that you be candid with yourself and those who would like to help you.

[1]

Be Less Defensive

about Hardship

It’s hard to comprehend that every person in every corner of the globe suffers hardship. That means not even one of the seven billion good folk who inhabit this earth lives on Easy Street. Scientists tell us the universe is eons old, but in all those years, the secret to avoiding hardship has yet to be found. From the earliest of times to common times, people have struggled to understand pain and suffering.⁴

But some have discovered the healing power of reinterpreting bad times. These people see things differently.

There’s no need to wonder if hardship might come…it will.

No need to wonder if you might fall…you will.

No need to wonder if darkness follows day…it does.

No need to wonder if good is countered by bad…it is.

No need to wonder if things will be lost…they will.

No need to wonder if up comes down…it does.

What’s a person to do?

Maybe we should think differently about … suffering … expectations … family … success … winning … control … self … getting ahead … staying ahead … overcoming … losing … stress.

Maybe we should think differently about how to respond to the crises of our lives. If it is inevitable that shadows will darken sunlight, cold will temper warmth, and in will go out, we will never find contentment, true meaning, until we shift the way we reflect on stressful life situations.

Case Study 1

Jamal faced plenty of tough times. He and his wife went through a bitter divorce. Their three children split time