SKILL ANALYSIS CASES INVOLVING STRESS MANAGEMENT The Turn of the Tide Not long ago l came to one of those bleak periods chat many of us encounter from time to time, a sudden drastic dip in the graph of iving when everyching goes stafe and flat, energy wanes, enthusiasm dies. The effect on my wook was thightening. Every moming I would clench my foeth and mutter. Today life will take on some of its old meaning You've got to break through this thing. You've got tor" But the barren days went by, and the paralysis grew worse. The time came when 1 knew I had to have help. The man I turned to was a doctor. Not a psychiatrist, just a doctor. He was older than I, and under his surface gruffness lay great wisdom and compassion, "I dont know what's wrong," I toid him miserably, "but I just seem to have come to a dead end. Can you help me? "I don't know," he said slowly. He made a tent of his fingers and gazed at me thoughtfully for a long while. Then, abruptly, he asked, Where were you hapoiest as a chid? "As a child?" I echoed. "Why, at the beach, 1 suppose. We had a summer cottage there. We all loved it" He locked out the window and watched the October leaves sining down. "Are you capable of following instructions for a single day?" "I think so," I said, ready to try anything. "All right. Here's what I want you to do." He told me to drive to the beach alone the following moming, artiving net tater than nine o'clock. I could take some lunch; but I was not to read, wite, Isten to the radio, or talk to anyone. "Ih addition," he said, "Tll gve you a prescription to be taken every three hours," He then tore ofl four prescription blanks, wrole a few words on each, folded them, numbered them, and handed them to me. "Take these at nine, fwelve, three. and sxx2 "Are you serious?" I asked. He gave a short bark of baughter, "You won't think Im joking when you get my billr" The next morning, with litte faith, I drove to the beach. it was lonely, all right. A northeaster was blowing; the sea looked gray and angry. I sat in the car, the whole day stretching emptily belore me. Then I took out the first of the folded slips of paper. On it was writien: LISTEN CAREFULLY. I stared at the two words. "Why. I thought. "the man must be mad." He had nied out music and newscasts and human conversation. What else was there? I raised my head and 1 did listen. There were no sounds but the steady roar of the sea, the creaking cry of a gull, the drone of some aircraft high overhead. Al these sounds were familiar. I got out of the car. A gust of wind stammed the door with a sudden clap of sound "Am I supposed to listen carefully to things like that?' I asked myself. I climbed a dune and looked out over the deserted beach. Here the sea bellowed so loudly that al other sounds were lost. And yet, I thought suddenly, there must be sounds beneath sounds - the soft rasp of drifing sand, the tiny wind-whisperings in the dune grasses - If the istener got close enough to hear them. On an impulse I ducked down and, feeling fairty ridiculous, thrust my head into a clump of sea-oats. Here I made a discovery: If you listen intently, there is a fractional moment in which everything seems to pause, wait. In that instant of stillness, the racing thoughts halt. For a moment, when you truly listen for something outside yourself, you have to silence the clamorous voices within. The mind rests. I went back to the car and slid behind the wheet. LISTEN CAREFULLY. As I listened again to the deep growl of the sea, I found myself thinking about the whte-fanged fury of its storms. I thought of the lessons it had taught us as children. A certain amount of patience: you can't hurry the tides. A great deal of respect the sea does not suffer fools gladiy. An awareness of the vast and mysterious interdependence of things: wind and sde and current, coim and squall and humcane, all combining to determine the paths of the birds above and the fish below. And the cleanness of it all, with every beach swept twice a day by the great broom of the sea. Sitting there, I realized I was thinking of things bigger than myself and there was relief in that. Even so, the moming passed slowly. The habit of hurling myself at a problem was so strong that 1 felt iost without it. Once, when I was wistlully eyeing the car radic. a phrase from Carlyle jumped into my bead: "Silence is the element in which great things fashich themselves." By nocn the wind had polished the clouds out of the sky, and the sea had merry sparkle. I unfolded the second "prescription." And again 1 sat there, haf amused and hal exasperated. Three words this time: TRY PEACHING BACK. Back to what? To the past, obviously. But why, when all my worries concemed the present or the future? 1 ieft the car and starled tramping reflectively along the dunes. The doctor had sent me to the beach because it was a place of happy menories. Maybe that was what I was supposed to reach for: the wealth of happiness that lay hall-forgotten betind me. I decided to experiment: to work on these vague impressions as a painter would, rotouching the colors, strengthening the outines, I would choose speofic indidents and recapture as many detals as possible. I would visualize peopie complete with dress and gestures. I would listen (carefully) for the exact sound of their voices, the echo of their laughter. The tide was going out now, but there was still thunder in the surf. So I chose to go back 20 years to the last fishing trp I made with my younger brother, (He died in the Pacific during Word War II and was buried in the Philippines. I found that if closed my eyes and really tried, I could see him with amazing vividness, even the humor and eagerness in his eyes that tar-off moming In fact, I coud see it all: the ivory scimitar of beach where we were fshing: the eastern sky smeared with sunrise, the great rolers creaming in, stalely and slow. I could feel the backwash swirl warm around my knees, see the sudden arc of my brother's rod as he struck a fish, hear his exaltant yoll. Piece by piece I rebuil ie clear and unchanged under the transparent varnish of time. Then it was gone. I sat up slowly. TRY REACHING BACK. Happy people were usually assured, confident people. If, then, you delberately reached back and touched happiness, might there not be released little flashes of power, tiny sources of strength? This second period of the day went more quichly. As the sun began its long slant down the sky, my mind ranged eagerfy through the past, reliving some episodes, uncovering others that had been completely forgotten. For example, when I was around 13 and my brother 10, Father had promsed to take us to the circus. But at lunch there was a phone call: Some urgent business required his attention downtown. We braced ourselves for disappointment. Then we heard him say, "No, I wont be down, It'll have to wait" When he came back to the table. Mother smiled. "The crous keeps coming back. you know." "I know, said Father. "But childhood doesn't" Across al the years I remembered this and knew trom the sudden glow of warmth that no kindness is ever wasted or ever completely lost. By trree o'clock the tide was out and the sound of the waves was only a thythmic whisper, like a giant breathing. I stayed in my sandy nest, feeling retaxed and contentand a little complacent. The doctor's prescriptions, 1 thought, were easy to tave But I was not prepared for the next one. This time the three words were not a gentle suggestion. They sounded more tike a command. REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES. My first reaction was purely defensive. "There's nothing wrong with my motives." 1 said to myself. 'I want to be successful-who doesn Y? I want to have a certain amount of recognition-but so does everybody. I want more securty than I've got-and why nor?? "Maybe," said a small voice somewhere inside my head, "Those motives arent good enough. Maybe that's the reason the wheels have stopped going around." i picked up a handful of sand and let it stream between my fingers, In the past. whenever my work went well, there had always been something spontaneous about it, something uncontrived, something free. Lately it had been calculated, competent and dead. Why? Because I had been looking past the job itself to the rewarts I hoped it would bring. The work had ceased to be an end in itself, it had been merely a mears to make money, pay bills. The sense of giving somothing, of helping people, of making a contribution, had been lost in a frantic clutch at security. In a flash of certainty, I saw that if one's motives are wrong, nothing can be right. It makes no difference whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a housewife-whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well. This is a law as inexorable as gravity. For a long time I sat there. Far out on the bar I heard the murmur of the surf change to a hollow roar as the tide turned. Behind me the spears of light were almost horizontal. My time at the beach had almost run out, and I felt a grudging admiration for the doctor and the "prescriptions" he had so casually and cunningly devised. I saw, now, that in them was a therapeutic progression that might well be of value to anyone facing any difficulty. LISTEN CAREFULLY: To calm a frantic mind, slow it down, shift the focus from inner problems to outer things. TRY REACHING BACK: Since the human mind can hold but one idea at a time, you blot out present worry when you touch the happiness of the past. REEXAMINE YOUR MOTIVES: This was the hard core of the "treatment," this challenge to reappraise, to bring one's motives into alignment with one's capabilities and conscience. But the mind must be clear and receptive to do this-hence the six hours of quiet that went before. The western sky was a blaze of crimson as I took out the last slip of paper. Six words this time. I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below the high water mark I stopped and read the words again: WRITE YOUR TROUBLES ON THE SAND. I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words on the sand, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand. And the tide was coming in. Scurce: "The Day at the Beach" Copyright by Arthur Gordon, 1959. Reprinted with permission from the January 1960 Reader's Digest, 1. What is effective about these strategies for coping with stress, and why did they work