The Art of Survivor and the Reality of Courage

"When The Going gets tough, the tough get going."

This phrase came about as a motivational technique to entice athletes to overcome the hardship of competition.  It is meant to encourage those athletes to push aside discomfort and struggle and keep going blindly through.  Forget your feelings, bite on a piece of leather and push through the pain all in the name of winning.  It begs the question is this really winning?  To be trained to perform without being mindful of the human capacity to feel emotion?  If the tough get going where exactly are they going?  Where do the weak go?

This week the newest of the survivor episodes dropped.  In the first week we see clearly a man who is struggling with the group dynamic.  Believing that he is an underdog, he hits a breaking point after the first challenge.  The host questions why he is emotional and, with lips quivering in an attempt to hide  emotions, he tries to explain his feelings.  This is quickly downplayed as a weakness by the host who basically tells him that Survivor is for the Tough, the weak shouldn't play.  From my couch, as I watch him struggle to feel his emotions publicly,  I am hit with an intense gut reaction.  Is this something that I want to bear silent witness to?  Do I really believe in the idea that "only the Strong survive"?  It sounds like a slogan that old Anastasia would have hanging in her office.

If you have been following my story you already know that I spent 50 years triumphantly selling myself as the strongest in the room.  Hell I was the winner of the category for "going".  I got up and went so hard each time life threw "tough" in my direction that I was a force to be reckoned with.  I will say that again for the people in the back row; I was a force to be reckoned with.  I took no prisoners, I minimized those who stood in my way, I made sure you got off my bus if you didn't agree with me.  Did I get stuff done, sure but it came with a cost. 

First and foremost it cost me my ability to feel true empathy for those around me.  It is so important to be able to sit with someone and understand the emotions that they are feeling. I simply didn't have time because the train to "go" might leave at anytime if the going got tough enough.  I had to be ready for the next tragedy that a single mom with three small children would have to endure.  Those around me, including my children, had to be able to "pull up their big girl panties" and carry on despite how they were feeling.  In those days that was the only way I could see us surviving during tough times.  The emotional damage of disregarding feelings haunts me to this day.

When we live in this world where we always have to be ready and on guard, we begin to categorize things.  Things are either black or white, good or bad, with or against us.  Life becomes kill or be killed and that is perhaps the worst part of the "The Tough get going" regime.  Armies around the world have been employing this strategy for centuries.  To make a great warrior one first has to break the human down emotionally so intensely that the only two options remaining are kill or be killed.  This in turn makes them deadly to the enemy which in turn wins the war.  Small are the resources gained when compared to the war created in that soldier's mind.  Still don't believe me?  Just ask any veteran  how hard it is to acclimate back into mainstream society when your mind has been trained to kill or be killed.

Now let's compare that to a person who has suffered complex trauma.  Someone who has experienced multiple events that have broken them down emotionally.  When faced with a trigger often their mind defaults to "kill or be killed".  Here is a common example that I have recently witnessed.  You are driving along on a busy freeway as a passenger in the vehicle.  You are watching the scenery and enjoying a coffee when another car joins your lane.  The driver of your vehicle goes into a rage and launches into a dangerous hot pursuit of that vehicle.  The pursuit gains speed and ends when your car is close enough for your driver to scream at the other driver.  Was that a trauma response?  Absolutely the blind rage was a trauma response to being cut off.   How can I be sure of that?  I can see that rage in high definition because I used to live my life in that "kill or be kill" trauma response zone.  Blind rage was the most comfortable emotion for me and it was fueled by the triggers that scratched each of my unhealed trauma wounds.  Now when I see someone in that zone I have endless empathy for the internal war that exists for them.  After all blind rage is called "blind" for a reason; the trauma survivor can't recognize their role in it.  They are fully aware that they are raging but the blame is quickly deferred to whatever caused  the trigger.  It becomes far easier to blame then to take responsibility to heal our trauma wounds and the trigger-rage-blame cycle repeats endlessly until we break it.

In the life that I lead now, after doing the work to break those cycles, I can clearly see how the true warriors manage when the going gets tough.  When life gets tough true warriors lean in to listen to their triggers and practice being vulnerable during the worst part of the storm.  They aren't afraid to feel, show or discuss emotions regardless of the consequences.  The ability to stop and feel your emotions in the moment is courage in it's purest form.  

So once again I ask when the going gets tough where do the weak go?  I don't think that they go anywhere.  They sit, they feel and they grow forward because there are more options than we were once taught.  When the "going gets tough" there are a multitude of diverse options that exist for us to choose. 

Those people are no longer "weak" because we no longer need to be seen as "tough" or "weak".  Those are terms used to reinforce this binary categorization of people.  Interesting how the process of categorizing people when the "going gets tough" seems like trauma response.  Did I just find a trauma response cycle within a trauma response cycle?  Is that why I have such a adverse reaction to team building exercises that reinforce the "tough get going" theory? 

Just like that I understand the trigger that caused me to see the game of Survivor for what it is.  In a perfect world people would be free to express emotion when the "going gets tough" and the slogan for Survivor would read, "Recognize, Regulate and Repeat".  The idea of courage would take on a new meaning and everyone would earn a million dollars for holding space for others without judgement.  Print that on a bluff and let it play out in households every Wednesday night and then check the stats.  I predict an overall drop in suicide, drug addictions and road rage.  How's that for dismantling just one of the structures that reinforces what happens when the "Going gets Tough".  Now on to the whole grade 7 gym class rope climbing/body shaming nightmare.  Who's with me?