In his study of the Enterprise Company, Schweingruber touched on this point. “The responsibility for achieving success is placed on individuals,” he notes in his report. “Enterprise student dealers are taught that they are responsible for their own success. If they are failing to achieve a certain level of sales, it is assumed that they have not committed to Enterprise thinking and/or are not carrying out prescribed work routines.”
So, the supporters of positive thinking get to have it their way no matter what. If people succeed at work, thrive in life, or survive an illness, those supporters can say, “See! It was the positive thinking that did it.” But if people don’t succeed, don’t thrive, or, for the very unfortunate ones, don’t survive, supporters of positive thinking can say, “They just didn’t think positively enough. If they had, everything would have been okay.” Or, even worse, “It was their own doubts and negative thinking that caused their misfortune.”
This is perhaps the most significant danger of a simplistic view of positive thinking. To accept that positive thinking is critical to one’s success, you’d have to accept the unfortunate implication that people who aren’t able to think as positively will tend to fail. That would pass blame onto people who may just be unfortunate or unlucky victims of fate.
The tenacity of this persistent belief probably affects cancer victims more harshly than it does most groups. When Barbara Ehrenreich, the prominent author and columnist, was diagnosed with breast cancer, she combed the Web, books, and magazines for sources of support. She expected to find somewhat saccharine philosophizing about the meaning of life with cancer. But she was surprised to find endless repetitions of statements such as “You caused your cancer and you can cure it!” As she wrote in her book Bright-Sided, the more she searched, “the greater my sense of isolation grew . . . I didn’t mind dying, but the idea I should do so while clutching a teddy bear and with a sweet little smile on my face—well, no amount of philosophy had prepared me for that.”
Of course, it might be worth clutching a teddy bear if the scientific research really shows that this cures cancer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Much of this research goes something like this: A group of patients are recruited for a study about how the mind affects cancer. Half of them participate in psychotherapy or a support group to help them think positively, and half of them don’t. Then the research team patiently waits, noting who dies and who doesn’t. Generally, these studies find little or no difference in mortality between the two groups. Depending on the specific type of cancer, about half the people who develop the disease will die; it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether they’ve been coached in positive thinking.
Proponents of the power of positive thinking quickly counter these criticisms by observing that some studies provide evidence that cancer support groups strengthen patients’ immune systems. This is true, and it would be a promising finding if it weren’t for one thing: A stronger immune system doesn’t seem to be very useful for fighting cancer. In some cases, it might even be a bad thing, because some tumors enlist the immune system to accelerate growth. Again, psychologist James Coyne, this time joined by his colleagues Howard Tennen and Adelita Ranchor, scrutinized the research that claimed to demonstrate a connection between attending therapy groups and slowing cancer progression. In their 2010 Annals of Behavioral Medicine article, they lament, “We examined how unsubstantiated and even implausible the causal links are that are claimed between changes in the measures of immune functioning used in these studies and progression and outcome of cancer. Yet, these claims are directly marketed to cancer patients in press releases from investigators . . . despite careful analysis showing that the interventions are ineffective in affecting recurrence or survival.”
This doesn’t mean that interventions like these do nothing. Even given these discouraging results, patients still appear to reap substantial emotional benefit. Probably the most trumpeted psychological intervention for people with cancer is supportive-expressive therapy, developed by Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine. As with the other cancer groups we’ve discussed, the research is far from clear about whether this intervention increases survival. What is much clearer, however, is that group members benefit through improved mood, decreased anxiety, fewer symptoms of traumatic stress, and even reduced perceptions of physical pain. But here’s perhaps the most interesting fact about supportive-expressive therapy: it isn’t focused merely on increasing positive thinking. Instead, therapists encourage patients to experience and express their thoughts and feelings, whatever those may be. In his book Living Beyond Limits, Spiegel bears witness to the harrowing conversations that often occur among women with advanced metastatic breast cancer in these groups—conversations about the loss of breasts, the loss of hair, the loss of functioning, and even the loss of life. Although you might think that this experience would be disturbing to the women, Dr. Spiegel observed the exact opposite. Speaking frankly and openly about these difficult topics often makes them less scary.
To avoid them would be simply to deny the reality staring one in the face.
“I don’t know what will happen with my eyesight in the future,” Alan says he acknowledged after many months of struggle. “I hope my vision won’t get worse, but if it does, I want to do everything I can before it’s gone.” As for his dream of a life in the Royal Navy, he would be dishonest with himself if he didn’t admit that it was over. By rejecting simplistic positive thinking, he was truly facing up to the situation. “I know what I can’t do now that my eyesight is gone,” he said to himself. “So, now I’m going to figure out what I can do.”
That’s when he came up with the idea to commission a rowboat and paddle from Spain to Barbados. “People thought I was nuts. But this was my life now, and I wanted to do something that stretched me mentally and physically. I was shooting for a watershed moment.”
Ironically, it seems that giving up on some dreams—generally not regarded as an act of positive thinking—opened him up to new ones.
At Concordia University, psychologist Carsten Wrosch has spent more than a decade investigating the finer points of giving up. “The notion that persistence is essential for success is deeply embedded within American culture,” he writes with coauthor Gregory Miller in the journal Psychological Science. But there are times, they argue, when doggedly pursuing a goal may hurt more than it helps. “Specifically, when people find themselves in situations in which they are unlikely to realize a goal, the most adaptive response may be to disengage from it. By withdrawing from a goal that is unattainable, a person can avoid repeated failure experiences and their consequences for mind and body.”
That’s not merely their opinion. Dozens of studies show that giving up can sometimes be better than persisting. In just one of these studies, Wrosch and his colleagues Jutta Heckhausen and William Fleeson wanted to know how women dealt with a very significant and potentially devastating goal blockage: being unable to have biological children. The goal of having children naturally becomes stymied for all women, of course, sometime between the ages of forty and sixty. This can be a particularly difficult pill to swallow for those who wish they had beaten the deadline. As women without children approach the age of forty, many increase their efforts to become pregnant both through natural as well as medical means. So these researchers administered a battery of questionnaires to 139 women either just before or after the age of forty. They asked whether these women still wanted children and, if so, whether they were actively trying to get pregnant. Most of the women under forty said that one of their major life goals was to have children, and they reported putting a lot of effort into it. The picture changed sharply when the researchers examined the answers of the post-forty-year-old women; only a small minority of them still had a goal to have children. Presumably, realizing that they were most likely past the age at which this goal would be achievable, they had given up trying. This might sound sad. After all, nobody likes the idea of giving up on important goals. But h
ere’s why it’s not as sad as it seems: the post-age-forty women who lessened the amount of effort invested in the goal of having children felt less depressed than those who continued to invest effort in it. In other words, giving up was associated with better mental health.
Similar beneficial effects of giving up, technically referred to as goal disengagement, have been found for other groups of people as well. It isn’t clear exactly why disengagement appears to be beneficial. One possibility is that giving up on some goals frees people to pursue other, previously overlooked ones. There are only so many hours in a day. It makes sense that spending this time on goals that are actually possible given our capabilities and limitations is a better recipe for happiness than yearning for impossible dreams. This doesn’t mean lowering one’s standards. It simply means beginning the goal pursuit process from where we actually are rather than deluding ourselves or denying the reality of our situation. That’s hard to do when we insist on thinking only positive thoughts.
Thankfully for Alan, blindness does not affect the physical ability to row. The hardest part of his adventure, in fact, was getting around the boat without bumping into sharp corners or burning himself on the electric stove. Still, there was the very real, very immediate danger of taking a misstep and tumbling overboard, sightless, into the vast expanse below. Even for experienced and fully sighted sailors, the sea is a demanding creature, far from stolid, whose loveliness is entirely fickle.
Alternating between rowing and sleeping, Alan was up two hours before sunrise every day, barreling seawater off the deck, gobbling up energy bars, and checking the oversize GPS for any drift during the night. During his stretch of ten or eleven hours rowing, he listened to music on his iPod while briny-sweet marine water sloshed against the boat and the winds whistled across the hull. At night, the boat drifted on the flat pan of the dark ocean. While Alan couldn’t see the stars, he sensed the constellations overhead and filled in the gaps with his mind’s eye.
“It was incredibly peaceful, but I was kind of ready for the shit to hit the fan,” he says. “You have to be prepared for the worst. The watertight seals could go, which meant we’d take on more water. I was ready for a situation where the boat would be hit by something, or a catastrophic failure of equipment, a bad storm where the boat broke apart, and the worst thing of course: that Matt and I may not survive.”
Once again, Alan’s thoughts proved realistic. During their fourth evening at sea the ocean turned rough, sending cold water breaching the hull as dark gray swells pummeled the boat. Icy eastern winds pushed the vessel backward toward the tip of Africa, causing Alan and Matt to lose several days’ worth of advancement. One by one, the seals broke. Ocean water leaked into the galley, shorting some of the electrical equipment and spoiling their food supplies.
“Like I said,” Alan remembers, “it wasn’t like I didn’t see this coming.”
When we look at Alan Lock’s story of supersurvival alongside that of Maarten van der Weijden, we can see that popular culture’s view of positive versus negative thinking fails us. These men embody something more pessimistic than positive thinking yet more realistic than pessimism. Perhaps we can call it true hope or, even better, grounded hope, an approach to life involving building one’s choices on a firm understanding of reality. Each started out with a goal that governed his life. Then trauma obstructed that path and set him on another. What makes both their stories of survival special is their ability to stop thinking positively and start thinking realistically, to avoid the comforting fiction that “everything will be fine,” and instead bravely to ask, “What now?”
It wasn’t as though Alan aspired to be the first blind person to build a rocket ship and fly solo to the moon. That would have been as unrealistic as believing that positive thinking could bring back his eyesight. While traversing three thousand miles of ocean is an outrageous goal, it was something Alan could feasibly do given his talents, drive, and remaining physical abilities. His condition did not impede him. Plus, he took precautions. He considered the real risks and ultimately confronted many of those challenges along the journey. He also confronted the reality of his limitations.
No one is saying that having a good attitude is bad, but the trouble with attributing favorable outcomes to positive thinking is that this can lead to magical thinking and even denial. Believing that an impossible goal such as regaining his eyesight was possible led Alan to misery and frustration. Giving up on that unattainable goal was a prerequisite for true positive thinking—the kind that led him to genuine personal growth. And therein lies the paradox. Giving up is sometimes the only way to move forward. Truly accepting the consequences of a trauma with realistic thinking rather than delusional positive thinking can open people up to true hope—something that enables setting and achieving goals that ultimately can improve one’s life.
Let’s apply this idea to Maarten. When he was a kid, the people around him told him, uncritically, that he was a world champion swimmer in the making. When he noticed his times were lackluster, he felt that he just wasn’t thinking positively enough. All he had to do to win was think good thoughts, and anything was possible. People told him the same thing when he was diagnosed with leukemia, despite the fact that the best science and medical information indicated otherwise. Trying to maintain such positive thinking in the face of obvious contradictory evidence led Maarten to feel exasperated. He knew that if he didn’t look reality in the face and admit that the situation was brutally not in his favor, he would not have a basis for deciding how to make things better. Much later, he applied this approach to swimming by opting for a realistic view of his capabilities, admitting that many swimmers were naturally more gifted, and setting realistic goals to work around his athletic shortcomings.
And he won the gold—after which he promptly retired from racing. “A lot of Olympic champions go on to compete for many years, but I saw what it would take to maintain that level of commitment. I was training in an altitude tent fifteen hours a day and swimming seven hours a day. If I was honest with myself, that was a reality I no longer wanted. I’d met that goal of becoming a world champion, and it was time to find new goals.”
Maarten has since written a book, Better, about the myth of positive thinking, that to date has sold close to sixty thousand copies. He also became a manager at Unilever, a large European food and toiletries company. “I noticed that being a hero was not a good atmosphere to accomplish something. When everyone tells you you’re so good, you can’t improve. Now I talk about laundry products and toothpaste, something I came in knowing nothing about. My hero status disappeared. I set my sight on a new goal, to be the best salesperson I could.”
Not surprisingly, Maarten doesn’t repeat any scripted positive phrases to boost his sales.
On April 5, 2008, Alan Lock and Matt Boreham reached Barbados in their tiny rowboat exactly eighty-five days, three hours, and twenty minutes after leaving La Gomera to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the watertight seals were worn out. Saltwater had obliterated their reserve of energy bars, nuts, tea, freeze-dried apples, and custards. The portable speakers had fizzled with static and eventually broken altogether. Blisters bloomed on Alan’s hands from months of rowing. A constant thrum of pain ratcheted the tightness in his calves. Topping it off, they had run out of chocolate.
They returned to England where Guinness World Records informed Alan that he was the first blind person ever to row any of the world’s oceans. This was great news, but Alan hadn’t set out to break any records. He was just searching for his watershed moment.
We say that actions are successful when they bring us closer to achieving our goals and unsuccessful when they move us further away from them. We set course to achieve these goals, then muster the will to continue reaching for them. And occasionally we’re forced to relinquish one of them. This was true of Alan Lock, who bravely abandoned his past dream, however romantic, of a life of adventure in the Royal Navy, pinned entirely on the return of his vision, and who, in so
doing, discovered something new and achievable. While we can’t discount the challenges inherent in leaving one path for another, especially when prompted by nothing less than tremendous adversity, it’s human nature to strive for what is important to us, just as it was the ocean’s nature to tempt Alan to do so.
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The Truth of Illusion
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
—MARK TWAIN
The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.
—SOCRATES
Casey Pieretti’s right leg has been blown off roughly thirty times since he became a supersurvivor.
“There was a leg break in Universal Soldier and another one in Priest,” says Casey. “In The Dead Undead, I got my leg shot off by a fifty-caliber gun. In Gamer, a rocket-propelled grenade.” With lazy exuberance, Casey breezes through the rest of his sizzle reel from the comfort of his Santa Barbara home, recounting his many wounding triumphs. He’s good-looking and confident on-screen, with a lean, athletic build; short dark hair smoothly brushed forward; and a bold, charismatic smile. You might not immediately recognize him, but odds are you remember one of his mutilations.
In The Ghost Whisperer, he broke his leg at the knee. In The Shield, a pit bull shredded it. Jennifer Garner shot it through with a spear gun in Alias. A giant bug even snapped it off completely in Starship Troopers. When he’s not being attacked by vicious dogs and alien insects, he’s stunt-driving, rigging huge aerobatics, staging complex fight scenes, and coordinating action sequences. Stunt performers, particularly the good ones, are willing to do it all, risking their lives in the process.
Supersurvivors Page 3