Reaching for Resilience:: Developing Empowerment Through Adversity

By Seth J. Schwartz Ph.D.

Do you or someone you know face life challenges? Do you struggle with speech issues, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, or other difficulties? Do you sometimes feel as though your life challenges are getting the best of you? In this book, Dr. Seth Schwartz, who has forged a successful career as a college professor despite his struggles with stuttering, shares the techniques and strategies that have worked for him and for others in managing and overcoming life challenges.

This book covers taking back control of your life, learning how to get rid of the idea that something is wrong with you, dealing with other peoples judgments and expectations, and developing resilience. Dr. Schwartz also suggests ways to view life challenges as gifts and how to set a course for success. Each chapter includes exercises to help readers apply the material to their own lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524531928

Seth J. Schwartz Ph.D.

Seth J. Schwartz is a professor of public health sciences at the University of Miami. He has a doctoral degree in developmental psychology. Despite struggling with a stuttering problem for more than thirty-five years, Dr. Schwartz has taught courses and given talks around the world. He focuses much of his teaching and research on adolescents and young adults. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Pembroke Pines, Florida.

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Copyright © 2016 by Seth J. Schwartz, Ph.D.

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Rev. date: 08/10/2016

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CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1    Why Me?

Chapter 2    There Is Nothing Wrong With You!

Chapter 3    Dealing With Feeling Bad About Your Challenge

Chapter 4    Developing Resilience

Chapter 5    Some Specific Techniques To Try

Chapter 6    Seeing Your Challenge As A Gift

Chapter 7    Keys To Becoming Successful

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

PREFACE

I have faced many life challenges, as I’m sure you have as well. We all have. One of the most important questions about life is not what kind of challenges we will face, but rather what we will do to overcome them.

I know it’s tempting to look at the person across the street from you, or at the desk next to you, or walking on the other sidewalk, and think that she or he has got it all together while you are struggling to make sense of what’s happening in your life. But as you entertain that thought, keep in mind that all you know about this other person is what she or he is choosing to reveal to you.

That other person could be going through a divorce, dealing with a drug or alcohol problem, or nursing a terminally ill relative. But if you only know the person at work or as a casual acquaintance, you would likely not know much about her or his personal life. All you know is what you see in your interactions with and observations of her or him.

William Berry, a spiritually oriented psychotherapist in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, taught me a wonderful expression: we judge other people by their highlight reels, but we judge ourselves by our backstory. You’re with yourself all the time, so you know about all of your highs and lows. You are only with other people—even those you’re closest to—some of the time. You certainly don’t know what is going through their minds or what they’re feeling unless they tell you.

Comparing yourself with other people is always an apples-to-oranges exercise. The comparison is never fair. In scientific research, we use the term confounders to refer to things that make it difficult to compare two groups. In many cases, confounders are characteristics that influence where the two groups are at the beginning of the comparison. One group might be stronger, more advantaged, or more experienced than the other, so the comparison is invalid unless we statistically account for the effects of the confounders. But in real life, of course, we can’t eliminate confounders when we compare ourselves with other people. So the comparison is always invalid.

The only person against whom it’s fair to compare you is yourself. If you are stronger, more advanced, or more experienced than you were before, then you’ve made progress. And it doesn’t matter where you started as long as you’re further along than you were before.

Be patient with yourself and cut yourself some slack. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were you.

In this book, I will lay out many of the life challenges I’ve faced and some of the strategies I’ve come up with to overcome them. I don’t consider myself special or exceptional in any way. I’m just a person who has developed some skills for dealing with adversity. I’m hoping that you will be willing to allow me to share some of those skills with you. I cannot promise that everything I say here will be relevant to your life or that every skill I suggest will be helpful to you. But if even one of the ideas I propose proves valuable in your life, then the book was worth the time you took to read it and worth the time I took to write it.

I hope you will join me in this journey toward healing, toward wholeness, and toward accepting and valuing yourself for who and what you are.

CHAPTER 1

WHY ME?

I am a forty-five-year-old husband, father, and college professor. I’ve held a faculty position at the University of Miami for fifteen years. I have taught classes for almost nineteen years and have given speeches around the world. I regularly lead in-person and videoconference meetings for various research projects I’m involved in. In 2013, I was invited to the Republic of Georgia to serve as an international mentor for a research group there. In 2014, I was selected as an eminent lecturer at a major university, and I traveled there to give a talk about my research. In 2015, when I became president of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood, I gave a presidential address that was attended by two hundred people and watched by hundreds more over the Internet.

And I am a stutterer. I have stuttered since I was nine years old.

How have I done all of what I’ve done while dealing with a speech impediment, you ask? Well, that’s what I am going to cover in this book. And this book is not only about stuttering. It’s about any kind of life obstacle that you might be looking to overcome. The key is learning to be resilient. But first things first. Let’s start with my life as a stutterer.

How I Became a Stutterer

The date was October 3, 1978. Although it has been nearly forty years, I can still remember that day as though it were yesterday. It was one of the most challenging days of my life and quite possibly the beginning of a more than 35-year-long battle with stuttering.

My parents’ marriage was doomed from the start. They were both young and impulsive, and they had already been married and divorced once before then decided to give their marriage a second chance. That’s when I came along. I was supposed to be the child who would save their marriage. But that’s not what happened—not by a long shot.

By the time I was two years old, my parents had split up for good. We had been living in Queens, New York, but my father moved to Manhattan, and my mother moved out to Long Island. Like most children from divorced families, especially back then, I was sent to live with my mother, and I would spend weekends with my father.

My mother was not an easy person to live with. She had a quick temper and didn’t have a lot of patience. If I said something she didn’t like, she would get in my face, so close that I could feel her breath, and scream at the top of her lungs. Hateful words would come hurtling out of her mouth like flying debris out of a tornado. My mother’s motto was Scream First, Think Later. And although the screaming part always happened, the thinking part didn’t.

My father knew, both from his time living with her and from the things I told him, that my mother was abusive. Not long after the divorce, he went to court and tried to get custody of me. The custody battles lasted for years, but that day in the fall of 1978 was the only time I was ever asked to appear in court.

Who do you want to live with? the judge asked me as I sat in the courtroom. I could see my mother sitting on one side of the courtroom with her lawyer and my father sitting on the other side with his lawyer. I could feel their gazes on me like searchlights from a police helicopter looking for a fugitive. If there ever was a list of DON’T EVER DO THIS items for family court judges, asking a child which parent he wants to live with—with both of them sitting there watching—would be at the top.

The following summer, while I was away at camp, I started to stutter. I don’t know exactly what the circumstances were, but one day, my mouth just wouldn’t move. I knew what I wanted to say, but the words would not come out. It felt as though my breath was stuck in my throat and couldn’t get out. The other kids were pointing at me and laughing. I felt as though I had accidentally looked at a medusa and been turned to stone.

The stuttering only got worse over time, to the point where teachers skipped over me when they were asking kids to read aloud in class. I remember one day in seventh grade when my teacher, Mrs. Boye, was asking each student to read from the book Flowers for Algernon. When my turn came, I couldn’t get three words out in a row without getting stuck. The words came out in fits and starts like water out of a broken faucet. Mercifully, after about two minutes, Mrs. Boye told me I had read enough, and she asked the next student to take over.

Being the kid who stutters is like being a magnet for bullies. Kids are cruel and will pick on anyone who is different for any reason. Antibullying campaigns and interventions might be common now, but back in the 1970s and 1980s, you were on your own. The only way to get rid of a bully was to beat him up. And when there were five or six kids all picking on you at the same time, good luck.

I saw any number of speech therapists over the years, most of whom didn’t really help me. The first one who really taught me skills for managing the stutter—and the anxiety that came with it—was John Tetnowski. Tet, as everyone called him, was then the director of the speech pathology clinic at Florida State University and is now a professor of communicative disorders at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Tet taught me how to recognize when a block was approaching, how to speak slowly and deliberately, and how to talk on the phone without freezing up. Later on, Vivian Topp-Klein, director of Ambi-Lingual Speech Pathology Services in South Florida, taught me a number of other techniques and helped me to get a device that really improved my speech. In chapter 5, I will cover specific techniques for managing speech problems, anxiety, negative thoughts, and other obstacles.

But back to my story. It was really hard to ask girls for dates or even call friends’ houses because I was so terrified that I wouldn’t be able to speak properly. My father never understood why I had so much trouble with speech, and he always thought that it was a form of self-handicapping that I could somehow just get rid of with the flip of a switch. Many times he would ask me, Would you just f—— talk? I know he meant well and was just trying to help, but every time he did that, I felt awful about myself.

I listen to a lot of sports talk radio, and many of the shows I listen to take calls. Callers ask the host a question or offer an opinion, and the host answers the question or comments on the caller’s opinion. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve wanted to call one of those shows after a big game—or when I heard someone say something on the air that I really wanted to respond to—but I couldn’t get up the nerve to call. I have listened to sports talk radio for twenty years and have called three times. Had I not had a speech problem, I probably would have been a regular caller.

The Why Me? Question and All about Stuff

You might be wondering whether I ever shook my fist at the heavens and asked, Why me? Why did I have to be the one stuck with this stupid stuttering problem? Why did I have to be the one getting picked on because I couldn’t talk? Why did I have to be the guy who wanted to ask girls out but couldn’t because I was terrified of the phone? Why me? Why me? WHY ME?

It might surprise you that the answer to this question is no. I never asked the Why Me question. It never even occurred to me to ask that question.

My stepmother, Barbara, has a wonderful expression that she taught me: everyone has Stuff. Everyone has some kind of hang-up. Some of us have hang-ups that are more obvious, like speech problems. But we all have our Stuff that we hide in our personal closet, and many of us are ashamed of our Stuff and hope that no one ever finds out about it. The spouse² who can’t stop drinking, even though it’s interfering with her/his work and marriage, has Stuff. The boss who keeps getting angry and yelling at everyone has Stuff. The father who screams at his son for not getting a hit in the Little League baseball game has Stuff. The person who has to have everything in perfect order—or else she will have a panic attack—has Stuff.

The question is not whether you have stuff, but whether you’re willing to look directly at it and deal with it. Asking Why me? about your Stuff assumes that other people don’t also have Stuff. Believe me, I am not trying to minimize the obstacles you have faced in your life. I am actually trying to normalize it. And further, the fact that you are self-conscious about your Stuff doesn’t mean that other people are judging you for it. Chances are that you are your own harshest critic and worst enemy. I know I am.

Other people are too busy dealing with their own Stuff to worry about yours. Always remember that. Most of the time, people spend too much time on their own Stuff to stop and look at yours.

As I will explain in just a minute, one of the fastest ways to get out of the Why Me trap is to stop thinking of yourself as a victim. Hopefully, you never started thinking about yourself that way, but if you have, I strongly encourage you to stop.

Look at it this way: The person whom you make responsible for your Stuff is the only person who can overcome it. If that person is not you, then you’re probably seeing yourself as a victim, and that will get you nowhere.

Let me stop and make an important point. Some people are being victimized. People who are targets of domestic abuse are being victimized. Children who are exploited or mistreated—physically, emotionally, sexually, or otherwise—are being victimized. Elders who are neglected and left to die in nursing homes are being victimized. The points I am making in this chapter are certainly not meant to minimize the horrible ways in which children, domestic-abuse sufferers, and elders are being victimized. The first step in these situations is to stop the active victimization so that the person can start healing. If you are being abused, please know that there are resources that you can discreetly contact so that the abuse can be stopped. Most US states, and many foreign countries, have abuse hotlines that you can contact for help. If you know someone—or know of someone—who is being abused, please have the courage to speak up, notify the appropriate authorities, and make sure the abuse is stopped. If you are abusing someone else, please get the help you need so that you can stop.

So let me return to my original point. People who are being physically or emotionally abused are victims. I am not a victim. I am someone who has a speech disability and who is facing life challenges that many other people don’t face. Maybe I was a victim when I was ten years old and living with an abusive mother, but now that I’m in my forties and married with two daughters, I am certainly not a victim.

Seeing yourself as a victim gets in the way of overcoming the obstacles you’re facing. If the person who is responsible for your obstacles isn’t you, then how can you address those obstacles? So if you’re asking the Why Me question, consider that it might be beneficial for you to stop doing that.

The point is that the answer to the Why Me question doesn’t matter. It isn’t important why you have a debilitating anxiety problem or why you can’t seem to stop drinking or getting into bad relationships. This is where you are now, so you might as well deal with it.

If you do find yourself caught in the Why Me trap, here are some questions that you might want to ask yourself:

1. Is there something that I’m doing that might be at least contributing to the situations that I keep finding myself in?

2. Is there something that I am looking for that is contributing to my being in these situations? For example, am I afraid to make my own decisions, and is that why I keep getting with controlling