# Experience Point:  Cure Serious Wounds



## Southern Oracle

I haven't lost my dog yet, though I know it's coming -- he's 14 as well -- but I did have a transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke) several weeks ago, and it's been doctors' visits and testing ever since.  I just had a trans-esophageal echo-cardiogram and the good news is, there's no hole in my heart.  Nevertheless I've been contemplating my mortality lately; at 42, I'm too young to leave this world, I feel.  I'm still working through things, and there's more testing to come...but I'm trying to remain positive.  After years of Magic and D&D, I'm starting to look at new games and try them out.  I really enjoy _Android: Netrunner_ and want to play the latest edition of Shadowrun when it comes out, as well as Numenera.  I hope I can convince my gaming group to give them a try as well.


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## Umbran

Rel said:


> That which does not kill us makes us stronger.




I hate to say it, but this is flatly untrue.  There are things in life that hit you, and are done, and afterwards you are, in some sense, stronger, yes.  But more and more I see things around me that are not acute injuries from which one recovers - they are chronic conditions, that change your life for long periods, or forever.  You don't heal - you adapt.  But each time you do that, you don't then gain more ability to adapt - eventually, you have too much burden of adaptation, and you break.  Scars build up over time, and each one limits your abilities, rather than extending them.

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed as diabetic.  He will never "recover" - barring some new miracle of science, he'll be diabetic forever.  And there's no real sense in which he will be stronger for having diabetes, and he never gets to put it behind him.  It is something that will make pretty much everything else in his life more difficult until the day he dies.


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## Dannyalcatraz

We've had a parade of pets over the years.  The end never gets easier.  Our current twosome are 7 and 1.

I'm 45, and both of my folks are still around.  We come from a long-lived lineage: those not laid low by disease lived into their 90s.  But we're all cognizant of our mortality.  We have all kinds of risk factors for this or that; I'm an attorney & my dad is an MD.  We get peeks at The Reaper fairly regularly.

When I was younger, I tried wallowing in sorrow and drinking, and that didn't work for me.  It nearly killed me.  When I get down these days, I recover through my hobbies, my friends, and my family.  MUUUUCH better.


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## Rel

Umbran said:


> I hate to say it, but this is flatly untrue.  There are things in life that hit you, and are done, and afterwards you are, in some sense, stronger, yes.  But more and more I see things around me that are not acute injuries from which one recovers - they are chronic conditions, that change your life for long periods, or forever.  You don't heal - you adapt.  But each time you do that, you don't then gain more ability to adapt - eventually, you have too much burden of adaptation, and you break.  Scars build up over time, and each one limits your abilities, rather than extending them.
> 
> A friend of mine was recently diagnosed as diabetic.  He will never "recover" - barring some new miracle of science, he'll be diabetic forever.  And there's no real sense in which he will be stronger for having diabetes, and he never gets to put it behind him.  It is something that will make pretty much everything else in his life more difficult until the day he dies.




I disagree.  I'm speaking as somebody who was diagnosed as Type 1 Diabetic when I was 21 so that means I've officially been diabetic now for as long as I wasn't.

Has it made me stronger?  Hell yes.

I'm under no illusions that it is extending my life.  I'll probably die a few years sooner than if I was never diabetic.  But it has forced me to become stronger in other ways.  Neverminding the fact that I stick a needle in my stomach several times a day, I'm certainly disciplined in ways that others are not.  I don't eat sugary stuff except on very rare occasion unless I'm suffering from low blood sugar.  I've had to become better about exercise as a result and I'm probably in better physical shape than most of my non-diabetic friends.

But mostly dealing with a chronic disease has given me a glimpse of my mortality from a very young age.  I approach life with gusto, happily squeezing every drop of fun from it, roasting its remains over a crackling fire, cracking the bones and sucking out the marrow.  There are plenty of days I curse this crappy disease.  But it has made me stronger.  No question in my mind.


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## Janx

Rel said:


> I disagree.  I'm speaking as somebody who was diagnosed as Type 1 Diabetic when I was 21 so that means I've officially been diabetic now for as long as I wasn't.
> 
> Has it made me stronger?  Hell yes.




How about we meet in the middle and agree that some things that don't kill you may make you stronger in some ways, but other things that don't kill you may leave you weaker than you were before.

basically, your mileage may vary depending on the nature of the incident, the damage it causes and the person's recovery/adaptation from it.

I got a friend who got to over 300 pounds and was diagnosed with diabetes.  They put him on a diet and some drugs and he's now 220 pounds in SIX months and he is now no longer classified with diabetes.

You can easily say the disease didn't kill him and he got stronger from it.  In fact, for practical purposes, I don't think he suffered in any way that a diabetic worries about during his time in that category.

I think the real world is chock full of people who have suffered cascade failures/problems that most assuredly have not left them stronger than they were before.  I know Rel subscribes to the "avoid negative thinking and negative people" school of thought, but to insist otherwise is to belittle their experience and situation.

Furthermore, I would question the evidence that an catastrophic problem can/does make a person stronger.  It would not be simple to run a side by side comparison of a person with and without the degradation event to see which becomes stronger in the end.

However, Levitz work described in Freakonomics indicates Nature holds more influence on a child's success than Nurturing exposure.  Therefore, a child's initial circumstances (the setback) do not as fully impact his getting stronger, as compared to the genetic combination of his parents in yielding an exceptional child.

Case in point, a child in a bad Chicago school district applies to attend a better school district.  It turns out, that statistically speaking, those children who applied, will excel, regardless of whether they are approved for the better school or remain stuck in the poor school.  This is because they posess greater genetic traits that are appreciative of better education than their non-escape-attempting peers.

As a result, being poor and attending a crappy school as their "setback' did not make them stronger.  They already possessed the inner qualities to excel, as compared to their downtrodden peers.  The statistics say they were just as successful whether they actually got a better start in life or not.

My point, is that while I appreciate folks keeping a positive attitude and finding the good from the bad, taken to an extreme it can be disingenuous and disrespectful to those suffering real hardship that were not blessed with the ability and opportunity to get better.  While there is good value to "surrounding yourself with positive people who don't bring you down with constant negativity", taken to the extreme, you become an elitist who isolates himself from the lesser masses.  There is a trend, that unfortunately bleeds into politics, to blame those who are unable to overcome their problems as their own fault, which denies that their circumstances are a slippery slope that few are able to escape.

So, I ask, that while Rel wants to keep a positive outlook, that we also accept and acknowledge that not everybody gets a positive outcome, regardless of their personal outlook.  Life is not that simple.


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## Ahnehnois

Umbran said:


> I hate to say it, but this is flatly untrue.



As someone who works with military medicine researching the "three P's" (PTSD, post-concussive syndrome, and pain), I can concur that the idea that all adversities are opportunities is untrue and prejudicial towards those who don't recover. Do some people react well to adversity? Yes. Is recovery from illness or injury possible? Often. But many other people who are exposed to physical and/or psychological trauma clearly live poorer lives because of it and never recover.

Trying to understand why people react differently to traumatic events is really one of the frontiers of medicine.



> Has something laid you low lately? How did you recover? What did you accomplish when you came back from it?



To retain this theme while getting back to the thread topic, I have had some very bad things happen to me (including the loss of pets under difficult circumstances and many worse things), and I dealt with it by confronting the issue. I do research on people who have suffered similarly, and plan on treating them someday. I also explore the fallout of traumatic events artistically, particularly through the stories I tell using the rpg medium.

I used to try avoiding pain, and that didn't work. Nor did searching for a magic bullet, a solution that would make certain problems go away. Thus my route now is to embrace negative events and learn from them. Not the easy road.


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## Dannyalcatraz

The opening lines to The Serenity Prayer, I feel, have a great wisdom to them, and resonate with Ahnehnois' last paragraph:



> God grant me the serenity
> to accept the things I cannot change;
> courage to change the things I can;
> and wisdom to know the difference.




If you can't change a negative thing in your life, ask yourself how you can reshape your life in reaction to that negative thing and possibly come out a better person.  Or at least, figuring out how to mitigate its damage in your life.

Look at those words in the light of the life of executed murderess, Karla Faye Tucker.  She paid the ultimate price for her crimes.  However, because of what she did between conviction and execution, she was nearly spared.  She could not change her sentence, but her conversion to Christianity led her to change herself.  A number of other inmates, guards, and even the warden attested to her being _beyond_ a model prisoner.  She didn't just avoid trouble, she helped others turn their lives around.

It IS hard, but it is potentially rewarding to be aware of the difference between things you can and cannot change in your life.  Being able to let go of something can do wonders for your stress levels...and all the things that attach to that.


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## Umbran

Dannyalcatraz said:


> It IS hard, but it is potentially rewarding to be aware of the difference between things you can and cannot change in your life.  Being able to let go of something can do wonders for your stress levels...and all the things that attach to that.




Okay, I hate that phrase... "let it go".

If a big man comes to you, and takes a Louisville Slugger to your knee, such that it bends in directions it was never designed to go, you won't be able to "let it go".  That knee's function will be impaired, period.  You can get surgery and a cast.  Then go to physical therapy.  You may recover, but you are likely to be walking with a cane.  You will get arthritis in that knee.  You're likely to develop a lifelong NSAID habit to deal with the aches, and those pills still won't touch it on those rainy days when it hurts so bad that you don't want to get out of bed.  Your knee is there with you, always.  It cannot be "let go".  You may be able to choose to just accept it, but it is still there.  The guy with teh bad does his job right, and you will never be a distance runner again.

Now, something like emotional abuse of a child, or beating a spouse, or combat PTSD, is like someone taking a Louisville Slugger to the parts of your brain that process emotion.  The issues are *NOT* just a "state of mind" - there's actual physiological changes in what neurochemicals your body produces.  And, like with the knee, you can go to therapy, you can get medications.  And those will help, but your emotions are going to be screwed up.  You cannot choose to "let them go"..  Your brain produces them.  That is it.  You have to deal with them, for life.  You may become functional, but your emotional function will always be impacted.  You will not be emotionally stronger.

People have this dumbass conception that these things are under our conscious control, that you can will them to go away.  You walk up to a person with clinical depression and tell them they just need to "let it go" and you show your profound ignorance of the actual functioning of the mind.  It is right up there with "I know how you feel" for harmful things that can be said to someone suffering such an illness.

We, collectively, like to lump problems into small packages with simple solutions.  Doing so often belittles the actual work required by the people suffering and working to get through.

Sorry, folks, but this is currently a passion of mine.  Yes, there are lots of things that an already-healthy person can get through.  Death of a loved one?  Sure, most of us manage just fine.  But there's things for which that expectation isn't reasonable, or fair.


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## Janx

Umbran said:


> People have this dumbass conception that these things are under our conscious control, that you can will them to go away.  You walk up to a person with clinical depression and tell them they just need to "let it go" and you show your profound ignorance of the actual functioning of the mind.  It is right up there with "I know how you feel" for harmful things that can be said to someone suffering such an illness.




I forget what side of the discussion you were on in my old "are we just moist robots" thread, but this point supports the "yes we are" claim.  There are a lot of things that people do not have actual control over in their brain, that others insist that they do.  If nothing else, a "healthy" brained person is able to overcome the adversity because they do not have a brain that is literally preventing them from succeeding.

Those are poor terms, but the crux is, I am very wary of cure-all catch phrases and that kind of thinking.  Like Umbran, I find that it demonstrates a lack of empathy for the complexity, difficulty and hidden barriers that those who remain stuck in their problems are suffering with.

My wife has a friend with an alphabet soup of diseases that affect her judgement.  She's not dumb, but I can plainly see a chain of activities that I can say "If you stop doing X, Y and Z, things will be better."  However, I have to remind myself that she is disabled, and the very nature of her problem that causes her to make dumb choices makes her incapable of seeing the stupidity of her choices before she makes them.


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## Henry

Not to stir the pot too much, but In my reading of "7 Habits of Highly-Effective People" by Stephen Covey I was introduced to the narrative of Viktor Frankl -- if there was a man who embodied strength in the face of debilitating adversity, both personal and familial, it's him. The hypthetical gent who had his knee shattered and rebuilt can't even compare IMO.

Do I think anyone can do what he did? Hell no. Do I have any illusions that I can do what he did? Almost certainly not -- I'd probably have rolled over and died. I've been very lucky/blessed in this life, all my adversities faced could fit on half of Viktor Frankl's fingernail. Does that make me a failure or not able to live up to a standard? if it does, I'm fine with that -- I accept that the standard's high. Just because I can't meet it doesn't mean I set it lower, personally speaking.

I've had difficulties, but it was through love of family and friends that I made it through; it's just that I understand the sentiment behind both aphorisms "Strength through adversity" and "Let it go."

BTW, Rel, I'm sorry to hear about Onyx! I love that little girl (well, not so little) to death! I regret not asking to stay with you guys last time now.  I hope the rest of your family finds peace with it.

Oh, and speaking of adversity killing you making you a better person, I gave up on Don't Starve because Winter kept kicking my butt.  I'm instead beating zombies to death with lead pipes in Dead Island.


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## Umbran

Henry said:


> I've had difficulties, but it was through love of family and friends that I made it through; it's just that I understand the sentiment behind both aphorisms "Strength through adversity" and "Let it go."




Yah.  It is just... while I myself am blissfully free of these problems, I have friends who have had... PTSD, social anxiety disorder, clinical depression, or chronic pain.  My brother was confined to a wheelchair - smart enough to earn a Master's degree, but nobody would hire him because all they could see is the wheelchair.

And I get to watch these folks crash when someone lightly spits out the aphorisms.  And it has, of late, become so clear to me just how ignorant most people (until fairly recently, myself included) are about the effect of these.  So, again, I apologize to all if I seem too strident about it.  Rel just got really close to a hot-button.  And his notes *do* have value - don't get me wrong.  It is just that in some of the most critical cases, they can be hurtful as well.


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## Dannyalcatraz

Umbran said:


> My brother was confined to a wheelchair - smart enough to earn a Master's degree, but nobody would hire him because all they could see is the wheelchair.




Makes you wish that the slap to the head worked like it does in comedies, huh?  'Cause CLEARLY Stephen Hawking will never amount to anything...


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## Ahnehnois

Henry said:


> Viktor Frankl -- if there was a man who embodied strength in the face of debilitating adversity, both personal and familial, it's him.



Indeed. It's also important to remember that his response to the situation does not invalidate the atrocities that he lived through. And it's important to understand that most of the other people in the same situation did not persevere as well.

Modern medical literature conceptualizes the ability to adapt to stress and adversity as "resilience". Clearly, VF is the extreme example of resilience. Like any desirable trait, it can be cultivated to some extent, but being 100% resilient to everything is not a realistic outcome, and those people who aren't very resilient are not generally at fault for being so.

It is very difficult to recognize and encourage resilience without being implicitly critical of those who are sensitive and easily hurt; I don't have an easy solution to that.


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