Adaptation to an Ever Changing Environment

We all have developed skills in life which help us adapt and cope, in order to fit with our environment. We have a knowledge base which we have developed over the years, we depend on this knowledge base to understand the world, and we live in. Children are the prime examples of what human nature is really all about. Thinking processes have been developed over time starting as a young child. For example, a young child who is familiar with a dog has to take in and understand the difference between a dog and a horse. The child’s first response might be a horse is a big dog. The child must go through a process of adapting to a new concept of the horse and blend and coordinate old physical and mental structures into a new concept which is the concept of a horse. The child eventually understands the difference between a dog and a horse. This change in the thinking process, devises and modifies old patterns and thought processes into new ones.

Thinking process must and should change as we mature and grow in life. We can become too accustomed to interacting in the world in one set way. For example, thinking that everyone is honest and that we should be able to trust everyone serves a purpose when we are children. However, as we grow older we must realize that not everyone is honest. In reality we can be dealing with some very dishonest people in our lives. Perhaps not being able to adapt could be the root cause of my current level of frustration and anxiety at this time. We do not understand the world and we then feel alienated by the world. However, conflict or anxiety would be resolved when a person starts being able to distinguish between honest and dishonest people. The next step would be to recognize that a concept that served us at another time in my life is no longer working.

The point to all this is, that learning and growing in life is our human nature. As adults we tend to forget that we are supposed to always be growing and evolving, thus, forging a new identity as we grow older. Perhaps the stress that I’m currently experiencing is actually my inability to incorporate new information into an old way of coping and dealing with a new reality







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Stress the Driving Force Behind Resilience

Stress can be caused by our inability to adapt to change. However, there is no way to avoid change in our lives. In reality we have to keep adjusting or re-aligning our lives to the ever changing events in our lives. For example, a death of a loved one, divorce, or any other traumatic event can cause extreme stress in a person’s life. Misunderstandings, hurt feelings and hidden resentments are also an inevitable part of life. It’s how we deal with the stress that is important. There is no perfection in life. All there really is, is a process of being attuned to our situation in life, to misattunement, learning to negotiate a relational breach, or traumatic event, to reattunement, learning, and growing from an experience, consequently, trusting again.

Working through stress and repairing breaches of trust, is a form of re-negotiating with myself and how I interact with my environment. When a person works on stress in their lives the effort produces an expansion of knowledge, consequently, it also builds resilience and fosters empowerment. This re-attunes or re-aligns a person’s understanding to the stressful event. This is reminiscent of the earliest attunement between mother and child. I’ll leave the last part for my next blog. LOL. !






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Boundary Violations and Social Support

Every part of our self has boundaries, to the cells in our bodies to our relationships with other people. For example somebody wants to borrow our car. However this person has a history of being irresponsible in the past. We don’t want to loan him the car however, we have a hard time saying no so we loan the car out. Simply saying “No I’m sorry I don’t feel comfortable loaning out my car”. This is a boundary.

When we are physically abused, sexually traumatized or exposed to horrific events that don’t make sense to us, many of our boundaries are shattered. It's  like a spear that tears a hole in our boundary. Consequently, we can erect barriers that are so rigid they are like a brick wall that no one can get in. Consequently, we end up alienated, isolated and alone. This is an extreme that leads us to being violated and intruded upon, to being alone, this we not produce any peace or freedom in that person’s life. We end up alone and miseable.

Regardless, we have to find ways to heal those boundary violations. What we can do after people have been exposed to trauma. We can do a lot. In fact what we are finding is that social support seems to be a major protective factor. When we have been violated by other people especially by people we were supposed to trust we have a tendency to stop allowing all people into our life. When we start trusting other people this is a sign that we are beginning to heal from our boundary violation or trauma. Consequently, the more people can generate social support after they have been exposed to trauma, whether it is troops coming back from war, rape victims after the awful event has taken place, hurricane survivors, tsunami survivors, or earthquake survivors in Japan, etc., the more social support, the greater the likelihood that they will heal from trauma and rebuild the boundary violations that occurred in the past.




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