Surviving Survival:
The Art and Science of Resilience
By Laurence Gonzales
Paperback – October 14, 2013
W. W. Norton & Company
Paperback, 272 pages
ISBN 978-0393346633
$15.25 paperback; eBook $9.95
Reviewed by Gila Hayes
From the time about 15 years ago that I read Laurence Gonzales’ book Deep Survival, I have been a fan of this author. This month, I read his book Surviving Survival about the psychological aftereffects of a nearly life-ending event. One element of his writing that I have always appreciated is the stories of incredible feats of survival based on that author’s interviews with those involved. This book continued that engaging style, but does not fall short in the instructional component, either.
Toward the end of Surviving Survival, Gonzales observes that his previous book, Deep Survival, told the stories of brief periods in people’s lives in which they “had to muster all their resources to live through a specific, isolated event.” This book, written over a decade later, caused him to view “journeys through survival, like moving through the swell of waves, some towering, some small. There is no resting place. Things are not settled until death. There is only the question of whether we will have the depth and poise, the grace, to sail through the next storm.”
Gonzalez learned from the survivors he wrote about that just holding on to life was not enough. Some were emotionally incapacitated to the extent that they were unable to return to the lives they led before their near-death experience. He profiled a sailor named Debbie who survived five days cast adrift at sea after a boating accident. That work led Gonzalez to “began to wonder what determined who did well after survival and why. I wanted to know what natural systems in our brains could make us respond the way Debbie had and what we could do to get on with our lives. Some people are innately more resilient than others in the wake of catastrophe. But we can also take steps to help ourselves,” he writes.
Gonzales observes, “If the bad news is that most people will experience trauma, the good news is that the majority are able to go on with their lives.” He quotes Richard Tedeschi, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, who found, “that most people return to normal within two years after trauma. James Pennebaker, a social psychologist at the University of Texas,” he continues, “called this fact ‘one of the best-kept secrets in the mental health world.’ But the quality of life during those two years can be drastically different if you employ sound strategies for moving forward,” he adds.
Surviving Survival combines attributed scientific findings like the experts quoted in the foregoing paragraph, interviews, letters, and stories told by survivors themselves, and Gonzales’ own conclusions. The cases studied range from World War II survivors, survivors of current wars, outdoor sports gone wrong, domestic violence survivors, a parent whose child died and others. Men and women of all ages are profiled, as are the experts who study what happens in the brain that makes it so difficult to go on after the physical injuries have healed.
From their experiences he outlines the brain function that helps humans survive deadly dangers, but also that creates extreme anxiety, intrusive memories, and inability to function after a traumatic event. The chapters are too complex to detail in this short review, and, in fact, Surviving Survival consumed most of my reading time during the month of March. It was time well spent.
I was drawn into Gonzales chapters about activities that calmed the survivors’ anxiety attacks and reorganized their view of the world. The many points he makes in the book are too numerous too fully review here, but I was particularly fascinated by his description how repetitive or patterned behaviors, ranging from long walks, to knitting, to learning a new language, gardening, drumming, or rituals helped survivors conquer overwhelming grief, whether for loss of a loved one or the loss of their former selves as a result of the trauma. He suggests that recovery is ongoing, and likely never entirely complete.
A repeating theme throughout Surviving Survival is the value to the recovering victim of helping others. Leon Weliczker Wells, a survivor of the Holocaust exemplifies “one of the primary tasks of the survivor: He made himself useful,” Gonzales writes. The lives of many Nazi concentration camp survivors were “marked by an active compassion for others,” he quotes. He describes not being destroyed by memories of unthinkable evil as “writing over those memories in bolder script.”
People are naturally resilient, Gonzalez concludes, quoting Boston psychiatrist George Vaillant who warns against “immature defenses” including blaming others, passive aggression, dissociation, also known as denial, acting out like drinking, fighting, or compulsive gambling, taking leave of reality by focusing on a fantasy escape, and hypochondriasis as a way to avoid dealing with life.
On the positive side, he identified primary coping mechanisms, including something common to World War II survivors who turned nearly obsessively to hard work – today we might call them workaholics – to forget the terrible memories from the war. Gonzales tells the stories of several survivors from that generation. Other characteristics common to survivors that he profiles include regaining the belief that they control what happens to them, rechanneling their energy and anxiety into calming and healing activities, practicing gratitude, determination, and other behaviors the men and women he studied learned and put to work in their recovery.
Few of us, we hope, will suffer the cataclysmic tragedies the subjects of Surviving Survival did, but trauma from smaller hurts like deaths of loved ones and, as Gonzales terms it, other “blows life can hand out” are also alleviated by the coping mechanisms he writes about. These engage portions of the human brain that solve problems and so help the sufferer to overcome the reactions to trauma. “Planning and doing engender seeking and safety pathways in the brain and can help prevent the anxiety disorders of the rage pathway from overwhelming you,” he urges.