It Would Be a Pity to Waste a Good Crisis

It Would Be a Pity to Waste a Good Crisis

A young mother I know called me the other day in great distress. Through her tears I learned that she felt humiliated in front of her son’s teachers and the other mothers at a preschool Mother’s Day function when her son acted more rambunctiously than his sedate classmates. While the other 2-year-olds sat quietly around a table with their mothers, her son jumped up from the table and hopped around exuberantly, flailing his arms. His mother was mortified. While she knew, on one level, that her son is a wonderful boy—sweet, sensitive, and curious—she saw his behavior as a reflection of her inadequacy as a mother and as a human being. She rushed out of the assembly early, overwhelmed with shame. She felt so badly that she is considering sending her child to another school next year.

Human beings, as Freud and the Buddha knew, share an evolutionarily-useful design flaw: we move toward pleasure (I’d add familiarity) and try to avoid pain (unfamiliarity). Because of what Freud called the pleasure-pain syndrome, we can persevere when our goals are thwarted, work hard to maintain close friendships, and burn ourselves less frequently.

But when crisis strikes—for example, when we feel caught in the grip of disturbing feelings like this mother experienced—our habitual response is to tighten, shut down and turn away, or blame the outside world. And that closes us off to feedback—what the situation might teach us—and to the potential opportunity for insight, growth, and transformation hidden in the crisis.

In a 1959 speech John F. Kennedy said: “When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.” Business consultants and motivational speakers eventually appropriated this trope. Despite the tenuous validity of this translation of the Chinese character—Chinese philologist Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania calls it a “widespread misperception”—the notion that crisis entails challenge and opportunity is worth pondering because it speaks to something important in human experience, namely the potential psychological benefit of what we strive to avoid.

As I suggest in my book, The Art of Flourishing, times of duress provide the best opportunity for growth because old ways of being are breaking down and not working. When the young mother was shamed at her son’s school, she was no longer able to bury her own massive doubts from childhood about her value. Normally such vulnerable areas of our personalities are fiercely protected—so we avoid pain—but doing so makes us more resistant to transformation. When everything is going well in our lives we tend to cling to and keep doing whatever has worked to preserve our safety and esteem. But during times of crisis, not only are we less defended, but our psychological conditioning is closer to the surface, and more amenable to change. One of my meditation teachers, Shinzen Young, encourages his students to contact him when in crisis—even if it is in the middle of the night—because he knows that it is the ripest time for change.

I spoke to the young mother the day after the incident at her son’s school. She was less agitated and unnerved, although not yet capable of seeing clearly the deeper meaning of what happened. She was still looking outwardly and blaming her son and the other adults for making her feel badly, rather than peering inwardly at what was triggered in her by the situation. Parents can be highly competitive with, and judgmental towards, other parents—it’s quite possible that she received icy stares from the other mothers when her son got up from the table. If she seems receptive, I may say to her that vital personal healing is possible if she can use the crisis as an opportunity to look inside and learn more about her own feelings. Such curiosity about what in our past makes us feel the way we do, can be a potent means of understanding and healing our own unresolved conflicts.

The next time you are undergoing a crisis, take some slow, deep breaths, and, like Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey, tie yourself to the mast, and resist the siren song of shutting down, so that you don’t waste a good opportunity.