Eighteen years ago, on a serene, postcard-perfect day in September, terrorists piloted their planes into the twin towers in downtown Manhattan. Within hours, the seemingly invulnerable steel and concrete structures collapsed as if made of papier-mâché. For those who witnessed the destruction, the reality was surreal, unbelievable, even unimaginable, and yet the smoke, the flames, the screams of people jumping from windows were absolutely real. Other national traumas—President Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent shooting of his alleged killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, viewed by millions on television; the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger that killed all seven crew members onboard, have evoked similar traumatic responses the still vibrate within us, individually and collectively today.

What we do not expect to happen nevertheless does happen, and when it does, we are faced with having to absorb an unforeseen reality for which we are not prepared. Expectations can be smashed in two ways: either something happens that is unanticipated, or something we had counted on fails to materialize. In both situations, we find ourselves bereft and vulnerable in a new way.

How to respond to the unhoped for? Can even tragic situations be a catalyst for growth? We may feel like victims of a cruel fate, but knowing we have a choice in how we respond gives us an opportunity to experience our personal courage.

The scholar and author Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton, has recently written a harrowing account of how she grappled with the unimaginable. Her son, born with a heart defect, died at the age of six from a heart-related lung disease. Within a year, her husband Heinz Pagels, a renowned physicist, was killed in a freak hiking accident at the age of 49. While her son’s death was not unexpected, it was nonetheless a shock. Her husband’s death coming on the heels of her son’s was almost too much to bear. Her book, Why Religion?, takes us on a journey through shattering pain, and yet, it is a consoling guidebook for anyone coping with emotional fragility brought on by life’s randomness.

The author finds wisdom in a variety of religious and spiritual sources—the Bible, the Koran, the sutras, the later Gospel of Thomas, Emily Dickinson,Wallace Stevens. The words of psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, in particular, supply Pagels with an antidote to despair. When our lives turn out different from what we expect, “we have to do,” she writes and then quotes Frankl “‘what life expects of us.’”

And Frankl has more to offer us:

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by life—daily and hourly—Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems, and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Here Frankl shows us how to reframe our expectations by reversing the usual inquiry: don’t ask what expectations you have of life, ask what expectations life has of you?

We all carry around conscious or unconscious assumptions about how the world works. On the most basic level, we assume—we know!— the earth is round not flat, that it is the third planet from the sun, traveling in an elliptical orbit around the sun, rotating on its axis to compose a day. We call this science or fact, but as late as the sixteenth century, scientists were still disputing Polish astronomer and mathematician Mikolaj Kopernik’s (Copernicus’s) discovery that the sun rather than Earth is at the center of our galaxy. Copernicus’s ideas contradicted religious convictions about the nature of God and man current in his time, and though he escaped a tragic ending for his heresy, astronomers who later took up his theories were ridiculed, condemned, or worse, burned at the stake.

This is just one example of how difficult it is for us to relinquish firmly held beliefs and adjust to a new reality on a societal level. James Doty, neurosurgeon, author of Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, and a leading researcher on brain plasticity at Stanford suggests we are wired for cognitive biases that make us respond positively to evidence and statements that support our predetermined, already present attitudes. Collectively, we collude on our view of reality—what is up, what is down; what is solid, what is liquid; what is inert, what is alive— and are hard pressed to give up our “accepted wisdoms” and “the way things are.” And that makes sense. In a universe teeming with vibrations, pulsations, colors and scents, some on spectra beyond our capacity to perceive, it makes perfect sense that we need to construct a version of reality in which we are not overwhelmed by sensory input.

We couldn’t survive without a stable and secure apprehension of our environment. We count on the world having a certain degree of predictability—the Earth turns on its axis; the seasons follow in order; night and day alternate. Our mental and physical developments depend on knowing we are safe. Most children, for instance, assume they will grow up and become adults. Most assume their parents will be around to take care of them until they are ready to fly the coop. When these realities are splintered, fear bursts its container and taints the rest of experience. If this could happen, anything could happen. The mantra for the anxious-at-heart.

The jolt from expectation to experience, from assumption to lived reality, can happen at any age and violently dismantle our stability. How then, do we accept life’s unpredictability without being taken down by worry and anxiety? Alas, there are no five easy steps to follow. It is a delusion to think we can have control over the circumstances of our life. Loss, accidents, difficult health come to all of us. We are vulnerable creatures.

I remember well the sage advice Qigong Master Chunyi Lin gave his students. “Be flexible,” he would tell us. Do not be rigid and inflexible. Do not hold on to fixed beliefs or expectations. “Be like the reed in the wind.”

The image is graphic, and vital. Whatever weather conditions prevail, the supple reed is able to adapt, to accommodate while the seemingly sturdier branches can prove brittle and be broken by the wind.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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A number of years ago, halfway up a forty-foot ranger tower, I discovered my fear of heights. One minute I was busily chatting with one of my daughters as we trudged up the wooden steps. I paused for a breath, looked around, and realized we were high above the treetops. There was nothing between us and the ground but some weathered wooden posts. The next moment I was unable to move. This was my first and thankfully last experience of a being sideswiped by a fear reaction so intense it turned my legs to stone.

Fear is a neurophysiological response to a perceived threat. Fear activates our fight-or-flight response by stimulating the hypothalamus, which directs the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system to prepare our bodies for danger. This can happen suddenly with a surge of stress hormones into our bloodstream, or we can experience a slow drip of anxiety that creeps up on us as dread. We inherited this “survival circuitry” from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Those who developed it were better able to survive having to wrestle a tiger or run from a pack of wolves. During an encounter with fear, blood is shunted from our limbs so it’s more available to our hearts. Our breathing and heart rates accelerate; we sweat or shiver; our stomach “drops” and our vision narrows as our bodies prepare to flee or freeze. As much as we might sometimes like to eradicate this disabling feeling from our lives, fear is part of our survival kit.

Humans are not alone in having this “survival circuitry.” The regions of the brain that tell us to run from a threat are basically the same whether an animal runs on two legs, four legs, or has wings. Anyone who has lived with a pooch has probably seen how a dog communicates fear through body language and species-specific vocalizations. Cringing, whimpering, pacing and licking are typical signs of fear in dogs. Horses rear or bolt when afraid. Their muscles tighten, their breathing grows short. A study done at Purdue University suggests that even fish experience pain consciously and perhaps fear as well.

If the experience of fear is inescapable, how do we work with it? One possible way to overcome fear is to study fear, in ourselves and others, become familiar with it and understand it better. Diving into fear is contrary to our habitual reaction, which is to push away or deny what frightens us, but getting to know our fears might actually soften or even incapacitate them.

One of the best ways I know to understand our struggles with fear is turn to literature and read what others have written about it. Open Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and discover how his harrowing experiences at Auschwitz during World War II led him to develop a form of therapy he called “logotherapy.” Frankl found that how concentration camp prisoners imagined their future affected their ability to survive. Or pick up Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom and read how he drew inspiration from his comrades:

“Time and again, I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea. I have seen men stand up to attacks and torture without breaking, showing a strength and resiliency that defies the imagination. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but I hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Not all of us are called upon to be extraordinary heroes faced with genocide or apartheid. Our fears might seem less dramatic, but fear’s excessive presence in our lives can be a drain on vital energy and an obstacle to happiness. We can probably empathize more closely with today’s many memoirs of people dealing with debilitating fears about their health, finances, or security. Understanding that we are not alone but one of many who struggle with fear helps dissolve the sense of isolation that fear perpetrates. Accepting that fear is part of our lot as sentient beings is essential to our ability to generate hope and faith in our survival.

Judith Lief, a Buddhist teacher of Tibetan meditation asks, “How do we walk the path of fear?” She points out that fear restricts our lives, can imprison us, or be used as a tool of oppression. Acting out of fear, we may cause others harm. Fear can stifle us from voicing our opinion if we fear reprisal. But unlike our fellow creatures, humans have the ability to reflect on our fear, and this gives us the capacity to counter the overwhelming sense of anxiety and the dread that infiltrates modern life. Lief says, “The essential cause of our suffering and anxiety is ignorance of the nature of reality.” The movement toward fearlessness is in accepting whatever is happening in the moment and looking deeply into what is feared. In this way, we can begin to develop self-awareness of the patterns that inflame our fear and self-acceptance of the nature of who we are. The renowned Zen teacher Thich Nhất Hạnh tells us that if we stay in the present moment, we are not worrying about the past, which is gone, nor are we afraid of the future, which does not yet exist.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his book Letters to a Young Poet suggests we might try to love our terrors and the dangers that confront us, which sounds a lot like the Buddha’s advice: to offer ourselves self-compassion when we are struggling with fear. Rilke writes:

“And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Rilke’s last line is worth pondering. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Love and faith in my ability to move forward is what got panic-stricken me down from the ranger tower when my young daughter held out her hand and said, “Just one step at a time, Mom.”

A helpful way to think of fear is as an edge we come to about what we know about ourselves. As fear is the unknown in us, understanding our fear enlarges our perception of ourselves and can be a transformative experience.

Sowing the Seeds of Understanding

As a way of more deeply understanding your fear, please consider trying the following exercises.

1. In a journal, write a letter that begins, “Dear Fear. There is something I never told you . . .” You can write this in a list or as an actual letter. Don’t overthink. Continue to write until you stop.
2. In a journal, write a letter that begins, “Dear X (supply your name). I’ve always wanted to tell you …” This is a letter directly from your fear to you.
3. Draw, paint, sculpt, dance, or write a poem about what you’ve learned about you and your fear.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

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As many of you know, I was recently honored to receive an invitation from Psychology Today to join their impressive roster of bloggers. I’ll be cross-posting here what I blog there, so regular visitors here won’t miss anything. But if you have any comments on my blogs that you think the Psychology Today community would appreciate, do stop by and share your thoughts. Here’s the link. Below is the entry I posted there on April 17, 2016.

A story has haunted me from the moment I read it. It haunts me still. It’s a true story set in a death camp: March 1945, and the German forces are on the run. An inmate tells a young psychiatrist he has had an auspicious dream: a voice promises to answer any question the man asks. The man wants to know when the camp will be liberated. The voice gives him a specific date, March 30.

The night before the prophesied liberation no Allied armies appear, and the man falls ill. The next day he is delirious, and the following day the man dies of a disease his body has resisted throughout his years of imprisonment. In Man’s Search for Meaning, the book in which this story appears, Viktor Frankl writes: “Those who know how close the connection is between the state of mind of a man—his courage and hope, or lack of them—and the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.” Speaking of his comrade, Frankl explains, “His faith in the future and his will to live had become paralyzed and his body fell victim to illness…”

Even as a youngster I knew that terrible things happened to people. I yearned to know how these people survived. This was at a time when Hollywoodized battles from World War II played nightly on the TV, the days of “duck and cover” and Sputnik. Paranoia was in the air.

Nothing would have alerted an outsider to my unconscious data-gathering, (well, maybe the perpetual furrow between my brows), but I was like a lot of kids who seem normal, (that shudder-inducing word that conjures its opposite, abnormal). I can’t say how young I was when I began taking notes on the subtle and not-so-subtle variants of suffering. Decades would pass before I realized that this is the proclivity of the novelist, observer and recorder of human miseries.

I create characters. My characters have a will and destiny of their own. They come from me, but are not me. They are separate entities that dwell in a less egocentric part of my psyche. As such, they often surprise me with their wisdom.

And so, unbeknownst to me while I was writing it, The Conditions of Love, my debut novel, has at its thematic core my childhood inquiry about resilience. How do we survive the afflictions that besiege us? Martin Buber wrote: “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable.” The word embraceable, with its fleshy emotive overtones, reveals something about Buber’s philosophical stance. For him, all life was encounter, a meeting between I and Thou. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware,” he wrote, and I would add, “all journeys offer secret lessons and meaning to be mined after the journey is complete.” This seems to me the heart of hope. Self-awareness requires hindsight, but hope is forward-looking.

Through what I call a writer’s hindsight learning—what the writer doesn’t know she knows while she’s writing the book—I’ve distilled four principles derived from the characters in The Conditions of Love, each of whom has a talent for surviving.

1. Keep your heart open.

Bitterness has a tangy sweetness, as does resentment and revenge. They shine brightly with allure but their pleasures are brief. Keeping one’s heart open sounds treacly, but it’s a kick-ass practice that requires rigorous faith in what is unseen and rich with possibility.

2. Recognize the absurd in your situation.

Even under monstrous circumstances, or dreadful circumstances when mind, body and spirit have begun to wither and love has gone to hell, humor may rise up to break through the armor of fear or despair. In its bleakest, blackest form, humor can be a life-saving way of acting out.

  3. Confide in a friend: animal, mineral, vegetable.

We need the Other. We need some one or some thing to listen and bear witness. We’re pack animals and suffer more in isolation.

4. Trust your creative instincts.

I love that Mern, the mother in my first novel, a single working-class woman raising a daughter in the Fifties, kept herself sane (well, sort of sane), by constantly changing her hairstyle and looks to mimic famous movies stars. Maybe our most outrageous instincts offer the most original boost to our resilience.

Whether we are storytellers or not, the things that obsess, fascinate, and concern us deserve our attention. They are, I believe, clues to our deepest longings that wish to become known. The sorrowful story of the camp prisoner who succumbed to typhus when his dream of liberation proved false could be our story if we lose hope. Hope is the jewel in the crown.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

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