Thriving In Hard Times: Reflections From A Clinical Psychologist
GRAHAM FAWCETT’s job is to support people who do difficult jobs, and who are going through a tough time. Here he talks about the role of hope and gratitude when navigating dark times.
At Thrive we like to say that it’s possible to thrive in the midst of pain and difficult circumstances. Why?
Many of our clients work to serve others in difficult, complex and even dangerous circumstances. Though this sometimes can overwhelm people, we know that even when immersed in all this, people can still have a life that feels vibrant and exciting and joyful. But that can only be done from a place of gratitude and hope. So if you do purpose-led work then maintaining gratitude and hope is really helpful, because that’s what puts you in a position to cope and sometimes even win over these circumstances.
And you’ve had a personal experience that can attest to this, haven’t you?
Some years ago, a melanoma that had been fixed by an operation, came back quite aggressively. The doctors were a bit glum about it: they told me that my life expectancy was about three months, unless a series of procedures that they were going to do worked. But the probability that they would work was very low. The good news is that this was almost twenty years ago, so clearly it did work. But for a while there, my life expectancy was very short indeed.
How did you process that at the time?
I found myself with a choice: I could either lie down and wait to die – which was quite tempting – or I could live in hope and think about what I wanted to leave behind. And so there were some practical things that I remember doing: my wife and I planted some vegetable seeds, which could be harvested six to eight months later, in the hope that I may be there to harvest them. I also took the opportunity to write a book which I’d wanted to do for a long time. It’s called ‘Still in the Darkness’, and is about hope in the presence of hopelessness. And I remember writing it with a sense of delight and pleasure – that even if everything went wrong, these things would be left behind.
If you do purpose-led work then you need to work to maintain gratitude and hope.
What would you say to somebody going through a tough time and searching for hope?
I don’t tell them my story. In fact I remember feeling annoyed by people who gave me their ‘good news’ cancer stories and me thinking, ‘well, it’s all right for you –the odds are still against me’. What I encourage them to do is to find hope where they are. Finding little moments of gratitude in each day not only gives our mood a boost, but – crucially – helps our immune system too.
And do you encourage people to do this in your work?
Yes, I like to get people I see to do homework. I’ve just come off a call with a man in an incredibly difficult circumstance in quite an oppressive part of the world. He works 10-15 hours a day at the moment, trying to keep the darkness at bay. I encouraged him at the end of our call not to go straight back to his emails, but just to take thirty seconds to look out of the window and see something outside that’s beautiful, or just go and make a drink and take a breath, before running on to the next thing. In our next session I’ll ask him how it went: inevitably, he’ll come back and say, ‘gosh, that really helped’.
There’s a poem called The Guesthouse that says “Being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness … Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight”. How does that sit with you?
I love poetry. It often gets to the depths of what’s going on in ways that science sometimes can’t. And I love two things about this. ‘He may be clearing you out for some new delight’. This speaks to me of post-traumatic growth. Many people who do survive extraordinarily difficult circumstances go on to find their lives transformed in a positive way. They become more accepting of other people, more attuned to suffering, more empathic, more connected to the world, more concerned with momentary beauty that they come across. All this leads to a quite extraordinary life. And it’s a life that they wouldn’t have had had they not experienced what the poet is talking about.
And what’s the other thing?
That poem also alludes to acceptance of our feelings. Not giving up or giving in, but accepting that sometimes in our lives there will be periods of lamenting, of sadness and of grief. We can accept this process as helpful. And as we go through it, we can begin to find new joy, new ways of thriving, new ways of flourishing in our life. We never forget the dreadful things that happened to us, or might’ve happened to us, but we do move on from them, into a position of strength. But in order to do that, we have to accept the situation that we are in. We have to allow ourselves to sit with that for a period, so that we can move through it into something beyond.
If you or your team is going through a hard time, speak with us, or browse some of the ways we can support you below, such as our training on Thriving In The Midst Of Change.
