PSYCHOSCAPES: Tales of Resilience:

Psychological resilience is that rare quality that enables some survivors to prosper after devastating trauma or misfortune, millstones that would sink most people.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, is a living example of such resilience, the details of which he shared during their recent convention: “A Black man, from South Carolina, raised by a single mother — that was me.” But despite a dreadful childhood: “When our power was cut off, when there was nothing in the fridge, when we lost our home to a con man, I never lost hope.”^⁠1

Despite the obstacles, he always had the ability to reach out fearlessly, defying all the odds. For instance, as a teenager, he reached out to Congressman James Clyburn, somehow persuading him to attend Jaime’s induction into the National Honor Society, thereby forging what would become a lifelong friendship. When he got accepted at Yale but had no money to attend, he had the gumption to reach out so convincingly to a member of his church the individual not only gave him the money he needed but also a summer internship.

Harrison’s story vividly reminded me of Gail Sheehy, a writer of my generation and the author of the best-selling book Passages, which traced how we all go through “somewhat predictable, somewhat manageable phases and points of crisis” in our lives. One typical stage is emotional turmoil at midlife.

When on an assignment to write about Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s genocidal reign, Sheehy was facing her own midlife crisis: the last thing she expected to find was a daughter. But that’s what happened when she forged an instant attachment with an eleven-year-old refugee named Mohm, who had suffered immensely during the genocide: she had survived by eating roots in the jungle after witnessing the slaughter of her grandparents, her parents, and every one of her siblings.

But like Harrison, Mohm was bold and spunky, a testament to the power of the human spirit to prevail against unimaginable odds. When Sheehy visited a refugee camp, most of the children retreated to the shadows, wearing blank expressions. But she spotted one little girl who had “hungry eyes, darting behind bamboo fences… following me like a deer through the forest.”^⁠2

Soon after, when that little girl was introduced to Sheehy, they bonded instantly. At the end of their brief encounter, the girl asked Sheehy to take her with her to a free country. In essence, Mohm adopted Sheehy, not the other way around.

Of course, Sheehy’s best seller was not just about adopting a daughter. It was about the stages everyone goes through in the course of their lives, which can’t be done in a vacuum. Inevitably, she was talking about her generation, which also happens to be mine. Sheehy was able to resolve her own midlife turmoil by taking dramatic action. In her case, she learned to attend to the needs of others by adopting Mohm.

I would like to close by switching the topic from individual psychology to society as a whole. When we widen the lens in this way, we see our country, like a person, has also moved through stages since its birth. Looking at it this way, we can explain the extreme polarization we face today as a result of collective anomie at midlife. No longer are we a brash young country pumped up with testosterone like an out-of-control gang of adolescent boys primed to dominate and plunder. Like Gail Sheehy, we are now searching for a sense of community and ways to better take care of each other.

Sheehy wrote that “the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never imagined at a younger age,’’^⁠3 During my own midlife turmoil, I was able to cartwheel back to graduate school and become a psychotherapist specializing in helping folks with PTSD.

And, just in time for our presidential election this year, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have cartwheeled onto the scene to lead us toward a more gentle, kind, and hopeful future.

xxx

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