Life and Relationships are Challenging - How do I cope?

It is within our relationships—and especially our close relationships— that we find the ingredients of the good life. But getting there isn’t simple. When we look at the people whose lives we tracked across eighty-five years in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, we see that the happiest and healthiest people were those with the best relationships. But when we examine the lowest moments in their lives, a great deal of them also involve relationships.

Divorces, the death of loved ones, challenges with drugs and alcohol that pushed key relationships to the brink . . . many of the hardest times in participants’ lives have been the result of their love for and closeness to other people. It’s one of the great ironies of life—and the subject of millions of songs, films, and great works of literature—that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most. This doesn’t mean that the people who hurt us are malicious, or that we are acting maliciously when we hurt others. Sometimes there is no fault. As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending to.?

This is the conundrum we find ourselves in as human beings, and how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand? As we travel along our individual paths, one of the few things we can be absolutely sure of is that we will face challenges in life and in our relationships that we don’t feel equipped to handle. The lives of two generations of Harvard Study participants broadcast this truth loudly and clearly. It doesn’t matter how wise, how experienced, or how capable we are; we will sometimes feel overmatched. And yet if we are willing to face into these challenges, there is a tremendous amount that can be done. “You can’t stop the waves,” Jon Kabat-Zinn wrote, “but you can learn to surf.”?

Many difficulties in relationships stem from old habits. We develop automatic, reflexive behaviors over the course of our lives that become so intimately woven into our days that we don’t even see them. In some cases, we become used to avoiding certain feelings and turning away, while in other cases we might be so overcome by emotion that we act on our feelings before we realize it.?

The old phrase “knee-jerk reaction” is apt. When a doctor taps our knee in just the right spot, our nerves react and our foot kicks up. No thought or conscious effort is involved. Emotions often seem to affect us in the same way. A great deal of research has shown that once an emotion is elicited, our reactions are almost automatic. Emotional reactions are complex but include what researchers have called an “action tendency”— an urge to behave in a certain way. Fear, for example, includes an urge to escape. Emotions have evolved to enable rapid responses, particularly when we feel threatened. So when humans lived primarily in the wilderness, action tendencies had a strong survival benefit. Now things are less straightforward.?

When I was a medical student, I encountered two cases that put into relief a crucial difference between more adaptive and less adaptive (“knee-jerk”) ways of coping with stress. Both involved women in their late 40s, each of whom had found a lump in her breast. I’ll call them Abigail and Lucia. Abigail’s initial reaction to the lump was to minimize its significance, and to tell no one. It was probably nothing, she decided. It was small, and whatever it was, it wasn’t important. She didn’t want to bother her husband or her two sons, who were away at college and busy with their own lives. After all, she felt fine and had other things to worry about.?

Lucia’s initial reaction was alarm. She told her husband, and after a brief conversation they agreed she should call her doctor and schedule an immediate appointment. Then she called her daughter and let her know what was going on. While she waited for the biopsy results to come back, she did her best to put it out of her mind so that she could get on with her life. She had a career, and other things to deal with. But her daughter called every day and her husband doted on her to the point that she had to ask him for some space.?

Abigail and Lucia were both responding to an incredible stressor in ways that were natural for them. We all do this. Our habitual responses— patterns of both thinking and behaving—that arise when stressful events occur are what psychologists call coping styles. Our coping styles affect the way we deal with every challenge that comes our way, from a minor disagreement to major catastrophe, and a key part of every coping style is how we use our relationships. Do we seek help? Do we accept help? Do we turn inward and face challenges in silence? Whatever coping style we use has an impact on those around us.?

The coping styles of the two women that I encountered in my medical training could not have been more different. Abigail managed her fear by denying the significance of what she had discovered, and in this way she faced away from the difficulty. She did not involve her loved ones and did not take any action. She saw her situation as a potential burden on others. Lucia was also afraid, but she used her fear to face toward the difficulty and to take the actions necessary to preserve her health. She saw her situation as a matter that was larger than herself, something her family should face together. She leaned in to the situation, dealt with it directly, but remained flexible as well, managing the ebb and flow of the other demands of her life.?

It turned out that both of these women had cancer. Abigail never told her family or her doctor what she had found and ignored the lump until she began to feel ill. By then it was too late, and the cancer took her life. Lucia caught the cancer early, went through a long course of treatment, and survived. This is an extreme example, but this contrast in outcomes stuck with me for the clarity of its message: the inability or refusal to face challenges directly and to engage your support network can have enormous consequences.?

It’s often easier to turn away than it is to confront what troubles us. But doing so can have unintended consequences, and the effect of avoidance can be especially pronounced in the place it happens most: our personal relationships. Many studies have shown that when we avoid confronting challenges in a relationship, not only does the problem not go away, but it can get worse. The original problem keeps burrowing down into the relationship and can lead to a variety of other problems.?

This has been clear to psychologists for a long time, but what has been less clear is how this kind of avoidance can affect us over the course of life. Does a tendency to avoid dealing with challenges affect us only in the short term, or are there long-term consequences??

To get a lifetime perspective on this question, we used data from the Harvard Study and asked, What happens over the course of an entire life when a participant tends to face the music (lean in), and what happens when they tend to bury their heads in the sand (avoid)? We found that a tendency to avoid thinking and talking about difficulties in middle age was associated with negative consequences more than thirty years later. Those people whose typical responses were to avoid or ignore difficulties had poorer memory and were less satisfied with their lives in late life than those who tended to face difficulties directly.?

Of course, life is always bringing us new and different challenges. What served you well yesterday might not work today, and different kinds of relationships require different skills. The friendly joking to lighten an argument with your teenage child probably will not work with your neighbor who asks you to curb your dog. During a heated exchange at home, you might take your partner’s hand; at work your boss might not appreciate the same gesture. We need to cultivate a variety of tools and use the right tool for the right challenge.?

One big lesson from research is that there are advantages to being flexible. There are men and women in the Harvard Study who are incredibly strong-willed. They have set ways of responding to challenges, and they stick to them. In some situations, they may find themselves in control, but in others they may be at a loss.?

Each of us has cultivated certain coping strategies through our lives, and they can become set in stone. This kind of “strength” can actually make us more fragile. In an earthquake, the sturdiest, most rigid structures are not the ones that survive. In fact, they might be the first to crumble. Structural science has figured this out, and building codes now require flexibility in tall structures, so that buildings are able to ride the literal wave rolling through the earth. The same with human beings. Being able to flex with changing circumstance is an incredibly powerful skill to learn. It might be the difference between getting through with minor damage and falling apart.??

This is an excerpt from “The Good Life” by Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz

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