Over striking decades of astronomical scientific investigations as a world-renowned trauma researcher, George Bonanno, my prolific graduate school adviser, resilience expert, and the tenderest of friends, found that resilience is the predominant response to potential trauma across copious samples worldwide and diverse adversities. He furthermore discovered that it is gleaned again and again from a common factor he defined as a “Flexibility Mindset.”
“Flexibility mindset” and its amplified counterparts are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) -adjacent, a genre of therapy that privileges changing thoughts and behaviors, above and beyond three core beliefs that we collectively grasp, as a society.
A Flexibility Mindset includes three core beliefs that we cooperatively fathom:
- Optimism – a positive mindset for the future; a tendency to privilege the positive. It begets the question: Am I attuned to the presence of things, or their absence?
- Coping self-efficacy – confidence in one’s own abilities to manage and overcome adversity; that is, confidence in one’s capacity to cope with life’s inevitable hurdles.
- Challenge orientation – a tendency to view threats as problems awaiting our solutions; we encode even adversities as opportunities for resilience. How do I overcome this?
In addition to these beliefs, Bonanno identifies necessary behavioral responses he calls the “Flexibility Sequence”:
- Context Sensitivity: Am I accurately evaluating the specific demands of a situation?
- Repertoire: Selecting and executing the most effective coping strategy from one’s internal behavioral toolkit.
- Feedback: Monitoring whether the chosen strategy is working, then modifying or replacing it as necessary.
I had a stunningly wise host father when I studied abroad for three years in Chile, named Mario*. (All names have been changed.) He was trained as an architect, only to be struck head-on by a bus, known as “la micro” in Chile, while driving his tiny car to buy his wife a gift, a collision that savagely left him for dead. Imagine suddenly losing your sight in such a life-threatening accident. His whole career as an architect, a profession that relied heavily on his vision, was precipitously over, a realization he grasped with tremendous trepidation. Heartbreakingly, his wife left him.
Consider how the Flexibility Mindset applies to his story:
- Did Mario favor an optimistic mindset despite this tragic accident?
- Did he have coping self-efficacy or a belief in his capacity to handle an accident like this?
- Did challenge orientation lead him to encode this potential trauma as an opportunity for growth?
Now consider the Flexibility Sequence:
Imagine that Mario tried to drink away the pain of losing his identity as a sighted person, his career, and his wife. Who could blame him if he had?
- Context Sensitivity: Did he experience context sensitivity? Was he accurately perceiving the extraordinary demands of a life-threatening situation? He was indeed overwhelmed by a world turned upside down. Once sighted, he precipitously lost the gift of vision, yet he accurately recognized that his career as an architect was terminated.
- Repertoire: Was he selecting and executing the most effective coping strategies from his behavioral coping toolkit? Drinking probably made him ill after just one attempt, and then the next day, he started anew. “Day became night,” he narrated to me. With his vision gone, he was suddenly on his own as a single man.
- Feedback: Was he monitoring whether the chosen strategy was working and modifying or replacing it as necessary? He replaced the drinking with what he described as an epiphany. He was using a program that teaches blind people to read using a computer, and suddenly the whole world opened up to him, as though black and white had become vibrant hues of color. He could envision the world again, and he no longer engaged in self-pity. He went on to become a professor at the University of Concepción, where he taught the same computer program to blind students.
Mario taught the world the gift of a computer program that helped him navigate blindness during his darkest hour. When the coping strategy of drinking his sorrows away did not work, he tried anew. His life is an example of the “Flexibility Mindset,” the power of the pivot toward something grander. Finding a sense of meaning, he was able to move from depression into a more optimistic worldview. When I met him, he had married for a second time and had a beautiful son, and he was one of the most dedicated fathers I have ever seen. He was, by then, a deeply optimistic person with an astounding sense of humor, favoring a challenge-oriented approach in teaching his blind students the same lessons that had given his identity and vitality a spark.
May his example remind us of the power of the emotional swivel. He is a living, embodied example of the words from the song “Amazing Grace” (by John Newton): “I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.” Though not literally, he found a new way of seeing the world, with purpose, meaning, and hope. His vibrant spirit as a father and husband abounds.