Human beings are not bacteria

Last night we had Thanksgiving dinner with some of our friends. As I sat down to list out my gratitudes, I realized my gratitudes were made up mainly of "I'm thankful Chris could do the work on my car" or "I'm thankful we weren't evicted at that time." All of them seemed to be dependant on something that had gone wrong.

What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger, right? I'm not so sure. Is it really the trials that make you stronger, or were you strong to begin with and without a worthy opponent?

The reason we think trauma may be transformative is that we see variants of this process around us. Bacteria that are not killed entirely by an antibiotic will mutate and become resistant to it. People who go through the hardship of training tend to improve their performance. But human beings are not bacteria, and good training is not a traumatic event. Now it is true that, in an evolutionary sense, those who survive a calamity are by definition the fittest. But it is not the calamity that made them so. For our minds, however, the leap is short between seeing the strong emerge from a calamity and concluding that they are strong because of the calamity.Our brain is a meaning-making machine, designed to sort vast and varied sensory information into coherent, orderly perception, organized primarily in the form of narrative: this happened, which led to that, which ended up so. When two things happen together, we assume they are meaningfully linked, and then we rush to bind them in a quite unholy cause-and-effect matrimony.

Noam Schpancer, Phd
excerpts from published journal
August 2010, Psychology Today

Soooo, psychological research pretty much squashes the school of hard knocks theory and shows that if you are stronger after hardship it is probably despite, not because of the hardship.

Let me welcome to the conversation my belief that God and my determination are the source of that strength. What if I didn't have either?

We all know people that have crossed our paths that don't seem to have that Umph. They just stagger through life, blinking and unable to thrive. Why are they that way?

Yet another multi-tiered, bullet point to file away in my journal under: Predetermination