8 December 2021
Last week’s blog ended with the outline of salutogenesis, one of the roots of mental hygiene, with the former recapped below:
Salutogenesis has one major premise and three ancillary premises. The major premise is that stress must violate your sense of coherence before it can cause harm. The three ancillary premises define one’s sense of coherence:
What does this mean to the average reader of this blog? I believe the most important issue here is meaning. If coherence (“The quality or state of logical or orderly relationship of parts; consistency; congruity” Morris, 1975, p. 259) is equated with order, then individual meaning-making becomes essential. By making life meaningful, we confer (internal) order.
I am speculating here, but I have wondered if Antonovsky’s sample of Jewish holocaust survivors bears more scrutiny. What I’m thinking is that they were part of the Jewish population that had survived and thrived. How many of those people believed in G-d? Bear with me.
If you have a deep faith in G-d, believing that you are one of the creatures wanted on this planet at this time, does that not change your sense of comprehensibility? I think it does. I think deep faith lets you accept that there is a guiding hand orchestrating orderly, if difficult to rationalize, events. I hope to be able to investigate this and report back but, regardless, there’s a lesson here.
If you are a more typical post-Holocaust human being, you are confused, alienated, and searching for meaning in a world (apparently) gone mad. What the Stoics (and some related theories in psychology e.g., REBT, CBT, Existential therapy) recommend is radical acceptance.
I will re/turn to Epictetus for guidance on this matter. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP, a wonderful resource) goes into the Greek root of acceptance finally concluding that to practice radical acceptance is to assent, “...to approve, agree, or go along with.” When we assent, or radically accept, we are saying, “Yes, this is how it is.” The “it” is the reality of your life on earth. Which does not have to mean you like it.
There is a sense in which psychotherapy simply helps people to look at their lives differently. By changing the way they see their lives, they get closer to dealing with life as it is, rather than as they want it to be, and sometimes insist it must be. Most people I have known will say that life invariably prevails over our wishes. Those souls who fail to accept life as it is, must alter themselves to accommodate both life and their distorted perceptions. It is a choice.
That alteration changes behaviour, emotions, thoughts, and actions. That alteration changes peoples lives. We can’t order religious faith from Amazon, but we can slowly, gradually, and progressively practice radical acceptance. Take one step today: look for something that really bothers you and say to yourself. That bothersome obstacle exists. It has its own nature, far beyond my control. I don’t like it, but I accept that it is, that it exists, and that it is part of my world.
Per Maté (2018) et al., the three conditions of addiction are the susceptible organism, an addictive behaviour, and stress/trauma. Forget the addictive behaviour for a moment. Per Antonovsky, above, can the stress/trauma arrive (or be increased) through reluctance to accept, comprehend, or manage things as they are? Probably. And that’s where we’ll leave this: reluctance to accept life—as it is—hampers your well-spirited comprehension of a meaningful life.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
References
Epictetus, Assent. (2021, December 1). https://iep.utm.edu/epictetu/#SSH4eiii
Maté, G. (2018). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Vintage Canada.
Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.
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