Struggle and Human Growthby Jan Stephen Maizler, LCSW

Let’s define struggle to mean any personal goal achievement accompanied by discomfortand resistance. This leaves out struggles of an interpersonal kind. There are many forms ofstruggle, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s divide struggle into negative, positive, inevitable,and chosen.

Negative struggle is goal achievement to eliminate a deficit state. This occurs when youare attempting to get back to the norm, such as mastering a life-limiting phobia.

Positive struggle is goal achievement that involves transformation from your steady stateinto a more evolved, grown, or developed state of being. Positive struggle, in contrast tonegative struggle does not involve overcoming pathology. Examples of positive struggleare going to graduate school or writing a book. Positive struggle may still certainlyinvolve overcoming resistance and discomfort.

Inevitable struggle deals with the necessary losses and attendant discomfort that areconditions of your life in this world. As your mother struggled to birth you, you struggledto adjust to a new and less comforting world. During your life, you will struggle withsadness and loss when your friends, parents, or partners die or go elsewhere. Thesestruggles are an automatic condition of your life.

Chosen struggles are the product of personal choice and are not automatic conditions oflife. Simple examples of chosen struggles are climbing a mountain, going to graduateschool, or becoming a body builder.

The basis of this article is that personal struggle as it has been defined has benefit, andconversely, the avoidance of struggle is often harmful. It may be helpful to you to considerthe following ideas regarding your relationship to the active or potential struggles in yourlife.

1.Struggle should be embraced, not avoided.
2.The basis of all addictive behavior is the avoidance of struggle.
3.The discomfort that accompanies struggle may be neither harmful nor lasting.
4.Discomfort is often an automatic aspect of the growth process.
5.No one can struggle for you
6.You cannot struggle for another person, although they may certainly want you to.
7.Struggle is often a normal part of life.
8.Avoidance of struggle often results in low self esteem and personal atrophy.
9.Embracing struggle can result in increased self esteem and personal growth.
8.Evolution as well as collective and individual development embody struggle itself.

Regarding individual development, some people start life off “ on the wrong foot”. Thiscan happen when well-meaning parents either do something for a child that they can do forthemselves or impede a child’s activities because of their own fears. Both of thesesituations diminish the necessary struggle that the child must engage in to grow,experience mastery, and learn that the world around them and their efforts have arelationship. A sad but effective example of this is parents who excessively hover over,and worry over their toddler-child. The child might even come to believe that falling isdangerous, harmful, maybe fatal. People WILL fall, but they get up as well: this isessential learning for children and for adults with that kind of child “inside them.”

THE GOOD NEWS

We all have the innate capability to grow “new selves” at any point in our life cycle byembracing and “working” our chosen and inevitable struggles. We can learn a great dealabout this capacity from the discipline of body building. Those people that choose to“grow” their muscles are aware of a phenomenon called the “training effect.” This meansthat when our muscles are systematically and repeatedly subjected to a lifting (resistance/struggle) effort greater than their capacity, they will grow to adapt to and meetthe newly-introduced demand. This involves considerable discomfort, BUT YOURMUSCLES WILL NOT GROW UNLESS THEY ARE SUBJECTED TO A LIFTINGTASK GREATER THAN THEIR CAPACITY. The art form in this process is to keep theweight lifted slightly more than your growing lifting capacity. This implies that optimalgrowth is a process, not a goal.

Muscles grow in another way: they can be stretched. The age-old discipline of Yoga, andthe newer Pilates involve retraining of the muscles into a more flexible arrangement ofcomponents that create a body with a much bigger range of motion. The physicaldiscomfort that accompanies this work is often referred to as “sweet pain”, because thediscomfort is a sign of growth that is occurring.

THE PARADOX OF COMFORT
Although comfort feels good, it plays little if any role in your growth. Take the concept ofroutine, for example. Routine means an established way of doing things that is repeated,because it has proved effective and/or useful. Routine feeds on itself because comfort isself-reinforcing. The paradox of comfortable routine is that although it has proven useful,it will eventually severely limit the scope of how you experience the world. You may driveto work and return home the same way, but stop to think of how much you are missingand experiencing by not trying alternate paths.!

GET STARTED NOW!
You can change your life right now by embracing struggle and discomfort. Start bymaking your decisions based on how you can best grow and evolve. Spend less timebasing your decisions and choices on their comfortability.

Jan Maizler MSW, LCSW, is a widely-read veteran therapist/author.This is an excerptfrom his newest book, “The Blessings of Struggle.” You can read more and/or contact Janat www.transformationhandbook.com, or www.relationshiphandbook.com.


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