The Stress Test by Ian Robertson

Author:Ian Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Burning It All Clean?

What was missing was something that can energize people facing adversity in the way that excitement can. I needed to find a ‘fuel’ for Beckett’s ‘going on’ that wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but which nevertheless could help drive people forward to go on through adversity. Anxiety and fear may share adrenaline-arousal symptoms with sex and excitement, but tough times often put these positive emotions in short supply.

I was feeling a bit stuck, to be honest. My own personality does have a strong Pollyanna side to it, a tendency to see the silver lining in every cloud, which I suppose is why I have been so fascinated by stories of people who have been strengthened by adversity. But I know that I can irritate some people with this, particularly when my own life has been so relatively adversity-free. Life, for some, can be very tough, and asking them simply to flip a mental switch from one emotion to another, as if they were carefree students on a swinging bridge, can infuriate them, and rightly so.

I had to go back to the science to try to find an answer, but where to start amidst hundreds of thousands of academic papers? I decided to take two routes. First, I had to start with people who had suffered real trauma; for instance, who had for an awful moment thought they were going to die, and as a result developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And, secondly, I wanted to look again at the positive and negative emotions of the approach and avoidance systems that I discussed in Chapter 3.

It was the awful shuddering, grinding pulsation of the falling helicopter that filled his mind, day and night, for months and years after the accident. And the noise – that tearing, ear-splitting crash of the rotors slicing through the cockpit and his crewmates’ bodies. These feelings, sounds and images ran like a terrible multi-sensory movie in a ghastly, ever-repeating loop in his mind. Not for days, or months, but for years he had sat hunched in his chair in this hospital, a young, fit man whose mind had been taken over by an endlessly relived terror.

I have never seen a case of post-traumatic stress disorder as severe as this, before or since. The unending terror on the young oil worker’s face stayed with me and, because I had worked with relatively few people suffering from PTSD, it focused my mind on fear as the cardinal emotion of trauma.

There are, of course, other symptoms of PTSD: for instance, images of the trauma intruding unbidden into the mind, causing surges of adrenaline and fear, sometimes in waking life, sometimes as nightmares.

People try to avoid reminders of trauma, also. I remember in 1981 assessing a van driver in Scotland who had been parked by the side of the road when a small car, a Hillman Imp, which, unusually, was designed with its petrol tank at the front and engine at the back, crashed into his van right in front of his eyes.

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