It is experienced as a drama, sometimes as a tragedy. The period when it becomes clear: it will not be the same as before. It seems that life is over, and pain and a sense of loss are all that remains for us. And it is almost impossible to believe that in this we are mistaken.
“This spring, literally in just two months, my whole life collapsed,” laments 32-year-old Marina, a successful (still recently) owner of a small travel agency. “My partner and I had to wind down the business, postpone indefinitely the wedding that we planned for the summer. Everything was calculated, built for several years ahead: mortgages, children … I am in despair, I have lost my bearings and just do not understand how to get out of the crisis.
Crisis… We hear this word often, especially now, in the situation of the collapse of the world economy. But it also pops up in other contexts, for example, in connection with lovers (“relationship crisis”) or children (“age-related”). There is also a professional crisis, an identity crisis, and others. But no matter what areas are affected, we are talking about a turning point, a turning point, when we lose the ability to live and understand the world in the old way.
Extreme Experience
“A crisis is always a turning point in the development of a personality that occurs in response to extremely difficult circumstances, death, divorce, marriage, the birth of a child, but the level of this complexity is a purely subjective value,” says psychologist Anna Lebedeva1. – Everyone has a different degree of strength. Those changes that one perceives as a slight turbulence, the other will feel as the ultimate experience of experiencing an encounter with death, with love, with God. This is the state of breaking life into “before” and “after”, when the old ways of understanding the world collapse.”
Such an ordeal causes suffering. But it is in these circumstances that we can reconsider the established picture of the world, relationships with other people and become wiser. Of course, provided that we live this time meaningfully.
Growth point
Crises force us to become different, according to the famous phrase of Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
Anxiety, phobias, loss of control, nervous exhaustion – many are familiar with these signs of distress, a faithful companion of any shock. But severe turning points bring with them the possibility of positive change.
This phenomenon is called post-traumatic personal growth. Experts have been studying it for more than half a century, but the term itself was introduced in the early 1990s by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calone.2.
Working with combatants, they found that traumatic experiences, like an earthquake, shake up their worldview, beliefs, and identity structure. Cognitive processes after trauma can be compared to building a city that lies in ruins.
Having experienced trauma, we are forced to create our reality anew. We are very slowly building ourselves anew: we find new opportunities; feel closeness to other people and great gratitude to them; we are aware of the values of life in general and its spiritual side in particular3.
“The crisis sets the task of learning to speak with one’s own life, to “read” its language,” explains Anna Lebedeva. – You were deprived of your job, and there is nothing to pay for your daughter’s studies at a prestigious institution. This means that the established order requires revision.
Sometimes it is necessary to transfer responsibility to someone who did not have it: does her daughter need her prestigious university? Is it up to his level? If yes, then perhaps she will be able to go on a budget? Is making money really our main value?
The task here is to hear the meaning of the symbols with which the world is in dialogue with us. It’s like how we solve dreams. When the meaning is found (and this will happen sooner or later), our thinking, our understanding of current opportunities will change, and we will be able to take the next step in development.”
Change or save
Months spent under restrictions revealed polar strategies of behavior: while some demonstrated their intellectual and culinary achievements on networks, encouraged friends to attend webinars and upgrade various skills, others tried to collect themselves in parts and reacted with great irritation to calls for self-development. It turns out that not everyone is able to find motivation to move forward?
“You should not confuse development with the absorption of new information, with the number of “eaten” books, movies, yoga lessons or foreign, warns Anna Lebedeva. — Development is a change in the direction of qualitative complication, this process is rather painful. Sometimes, in order to develop, you need to collapse. And only after that build yourself anew.
It is incredibly difficult to part with the past, to change the habitual way of reasoning. After all, in a sense, this is a betrayal of oneself, of another part of oneself, which strives for stability and constancy of the picture of the world. In an era of change, such personal characteristics as resilience and stability are important, thanks to which you can maintain your status quo, your psyche, and your work capacity. Like in a computer game, “saving” before the fight, that is, in the face of novelty and uncertainty, is simply to hold out.
But there are those among us for whom the crisis is quite a suitable environment. It is in conditions of instability and uncertainty that their creative energy is released, new ideas and projects are born. Lev Gumilyov came up with the name “passionaries” for them – these are people who feel their meaning, taste and beat of life especially strongly when there is complete chaos around. Maybe you are one of them? Then the era of change is the time for creative experiments.
Splash of creativity
However, creativity is the property of not only passionaries. The current crisis has once again proved that any obstacle, problem contains potential energy to overcome it, and we are seeing a surge of creative (does not mean perfect) solutions to these problems everywhere: virologists are struggling to develop a vaccine, doctors continue to look for the most effective methods of treatment , governments and businessmen respond to non-standard challenges, teachers, parents, students, and indeed all members of the community do not stop learning new forms of interaction. All this is only a small part of the changes that are happening to us and before our eyes.
“There is no goal until there is an obstacle,” Anna Lebedeva recalls the words of the outstanding Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky. “If we are faced with an obstacle, it means that we have an opportunity to set new goals and find ways to overcome it.”
A crisis is a time when the urgent and the important coincide. In ordinary life, we try to postpone emotionally and intellectually difficult tasks for later, and in extreme conditions we are forced to mobilize all our resources and focus on the most innovative tasks.
Fear energizes us, urging us to respond to a threat by flight or fight, and creativity allows us to sublimate this energy into active actions, protecting us from feelings of helplessness. In addition, an extreme situation liberates, frees from those social norms and conventions that prevent creativity.
During a crisis, there is a feeling that the usual rules do not apply, and the psychological barriers associated with internal prohibitions fade into the background. We allow ourselves to do what we have not allowed before, and, on the contrary, not to act in the way we are used to.
The result of creative overcoming of trauma will sooner or later be noticeable not only in the example of some of our contemporaries. “The effects of post-traumatic growth at the level of society are similar to what happens to a person,” Anna Lebedeva is convinced. “Probably, at the next stage we will see a powerful creative upsurge at the level of culture as a whole.”
The forecast is optimistic. Well, let’s try to contribute to the expected flourishing?
Manage your time
In times of crisis, we are helped by the ability to navigate the time stream.
“A person who is competent in time is aware of the connection between the events of the past, future and present, even if today hurts,” explains psychotherapist Margarita Zhamkochyan. – If we live in the purely present moment and feel only despair, impotence, hopelessness, we thereby cross out the past where we felt good, and put an end to the future, in which we could apply the experience.
In a moment of crisis, it is important to understand that the experience is a feedback that allows us to draw conclusions and learn lessons. A mature person knows: just as new skin appears at the site of a burn, so after any crisis, something new, different will surely come. Suffering doesn’t mean the end of the road.”
1 Anna Lebedeva is a senior researcher at the International Laboratory for Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.
2 Tedeschi R.G., Calhoun L.G. (2004) Posttraumatic growth: conceptual foundations and empirical evidence. Psychol Inq 15(1): 1-18
3 Ibid.