Struggle and Human Growth
Author: Jan Stephen Maizler, LCSW

Let’s define struggle to mean any personal goal achievement accompanied by discomfort and resistance. This leaves out struggles of an interpersonal kind. There are many forms of struggle, 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 you are 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 state into a more evolved, grown, or developed state of being. Positive struggle, in contrast to negative struggle does not involve overcoming pathology. Examples of positive struggle are going to graduate school or writing a book. Positive struggle may still certainly involve overcoming resistance and discomfort.

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

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

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

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”. This can happen when well-meaning parents either do something for a child that they can do for themselves or impede a child’s activities because of their own fears. Both of these situations 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 a relationship. 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 is dangerous, harmful, maybe fatal. People WILL fall, but they get up as well: this is essential 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 by embracing and “working” our chosen and inevitable struggles. We can learn a great deal about 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 means that 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 meet the newly-introduced demand. This involves considerable discomfort, BUT YOUR MUSCLES WILL NOT GROW UNLESS THEY ARE SUBJECTED TO A LIFTING TASK GREATER THAN THEIR CAPACITY. The art form in this process is to keep the weight lifted slightly more than your growing lifting capacity. This implies that optimal growth is a process, not a goal.

Muscles grow in another way: they can be stretched. The age-old discipline of Yoga, and the newer Pilates involve retraining of the muscles into a more flexible arrangement of components that create a body with a much bigger range of motion. The physical discomfort that accompanies this work is often referred to as “sweet pain”, because the discomfort 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 of routine, 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 is self-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 drive to work and return home the same way, but stop to think of how much you are missing and experiencing by not trying alternate paths.!

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

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






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Jan Maizler is a widely read author and therapist with over 100 articles and 7 books published. He can be contacted at www.relationshiphandbook.com.

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