Option B

by Sheryl Sandberg

We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events. After spending decades studying how people deal with setbacks, psychologist Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery: (1) personalization—the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence—the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever. The three P’s play like the flip side of the pop song “Everything Is Awesome”—“everything is awful.” The loop in your head repeats, “It’s my fault this is awful. My whole life is awful. And it’s always going to be awful.”

I stressed that not everything that happens to us happens because of us.

I couldn’t understand when friends didn’t ask me how I was. I felt invisible, as if I were standing in front of them but they couldn’t see me. When someone shows up with a cast, we immediately inquire, “What happened?” If your ankle gets shattered, people ask to hear the story. If your life gets shattered, they don’t.

post-traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities. But Joe wanted to do more than study Tedeschi and Calhoun’s findings; he wanted to live them.

Nietzsche famously described personal strength as “what does not kill me makes me stronger.” Tedeschi and Calhoun have a slightly softer (one could say less Nietzschean) take: “I am more vulnerable than I thought, but much stronger than I ever imagined.” When we face the slings and arrows of life, we are wounded and the scars stay with us. But we can walk away with greater internal resolve.

To build resilience in a loving, long-term relationship, we need to pay attention to the everyday interactions we have with our partners. In a well-known study, 130 newlyweds were invited to spend the day at the “Love Lab,” which resembled a bed-and-breakfast. The psychologists observed the couples interacting “in the wild” and made predictions about which marriages would last. They were able to predict divorce over the next six years with 83 percent accuracy. A key was buried in the couples’ conversations, which often started with bids for attention, affection, support, or laughter. We are making a bid whenever we say things like “Hey, look at that bird!” or “Are we out of butter?” When a partner makes a bid, the other partner has two choices: to turn away or turn toward. Turning away means dismissing or ignoring the bid. Stop talking about birds, I’m watching TV. Turning toward means engaging. Yep, I’ll go get some butter. And some popcorn to go with it. The newlyweds who stayed together over the next six years turned toward each other 86 percent of the time, while couples who got divorced turned toward each other only 33 percent. Most of the couples’ fights weren’t about money or sex but about “failed bids for connection.” Adam’s colleague Jane Dutton defines a resilient relationship as one that has the capacity to carry intense emotions and withstand strain. It’s more than two resilient individuals connecting—resilience becomes a feature of the connection itself.